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It all depends(to me) on what you're playing. 4th/3rd edition D&D: I don't want you sitting around for an hour rerolling because I crit with a crossbow. So I try to cut out ways to kill PCs with bland, random encounters. Nobilis: Your average starting character can teleport, dissipate into bats, turn into pure fire, or run roughly as fast as a hurricane. If someone dies they probably had more than a few chances to get out. Dungeon World/2nd Edition D&D: Rolling is fast enough in most of my groups that you're out for maybe 10 minutes. Goblins will murder the poo poo out of you. Paranoia: I'm taking a GM's break to just murder the party 8 times. No Out of Character rule in play, when you sneezed Friend Computer forcibly overdosed you on cough meds. Monsterhearts: There's combat in this game?
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Feb 25, 2014 04:57
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Your Monsterhearts games don't have player death?
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Feb 25, 2014 05:59
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The answer to "how should I approach character death" is simple - the Rule of Cool. If a character dies in this moment, ask yourself, would that be cool? Would it lend dramatic heft to my narrative? Would it inspire the rest of the party to avenge their fallen comrade? Would there be interesting plot hooks you can work in to the story regarding the dead PC and their replacement? Would the players enjoy themselves, the dismay of losing a character notwithstanding? Go ahead and kill that fucker. Basically the rule of thumb I use is to imagine how, in several months' time, the player will tell the story of his character's death to his friends. If it's the kind of death that will lead to him telling a great story about how his guy went out like a champ, then sure, kill him. If it's the kind of death that will lead to him telling a sad story about how he got hosed by the dice and died a stupid, pointless death, fudge the roll and keep him breathing.
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Feb 25, 2014 06:08
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I was running a game once where there was a fight with some undead where if you were killed by that undead, you'd come back as one in just a few rounds. I don't remember the exact type, doesn't really matter. The party was somewhat low level for the encounter (it was supposed to be nasty) but they were handling it. However, the barbarian got himself in a pinch, and only survived the little solo fight he had worked himself into by virtue of his rage HP bonus, which he would lose once the rage wore off. The fight ended with everyone still standing but really low on resources. The party knew what would happen to people who were killed by the thingies. They also knew that in about 30 seconds, the barbarian was going to come off his rush and lose a bunch of hit points and drop. And they ALSO knew that if they had to face another thingie, it'd probably cost them dearly. Nobody was sure if he'd become one of them in that case. So they had a choice: let him drop and possibly become a thingie and kill more of them, or kill him now while he was still standing so that he'd only be a corpse. 
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Feb 25, 2014 06:33
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Whybird posted:I agree with this, but I think the solution rather than fudging dice is to skip all encounters you're not okay with players dying during. If a fight is not central enough to your plot that players wouldn't get a glorious death, then it's not important enough to keep in. I mean, five lovely skeletons rising up in a room full of bones as a "surprise!"-type roadblock in a place with no treasure, sure, skip that and maybe replace it with a minor trap or come up with something interesting happens that covers the EXP deficit, but I'd totally call Rule of Cool on some unimportant encounters. Maybe it's influence from where I learned to host under the aforementioned GM, but I play super softball. I usually run it as "death means you lose out on a little bit of EXP or treasure or something" to keep the guise of a threat there so my players don't just jump into poo poo because they know I pass out free "You have encountered the avatar of the Demigod of Chillaxing and he'll give you a True Resurrection for free if you run and get the GM another brew from the fridge" like candy on Halloween, but barring maybe being marginally behind their fellow players, yeah, I'd never visit permadeath upon anyone unless it was part of the player's own designs. You do something stupid in battle or get exceptionally unlucky, yeah, you're gonna bite it, but it's more of a thing for everyone at the table to laugh at or maybe add a little tension to a battle and then you get rezzed straight away.
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Feb 25, 2014 06:36
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Under the vegetable posted:Your Monsterhearts games don't have player death? To be honest not yet. I've only run it a few nights but so the players like the conniving rear end in a top hat aspect. This weekend a new player is coming and says she likes playing as The Chosen with that "has a bigass arsenal" move so that'll probably change.
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Feb 25, 2014 06:59
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Razorwired posted:Monsterhearts: There's combat in this game? It's hard to die die, since you can go darkest self, and if you take 4 harm THEN, you can lose all your strings. So you have to take 12 harm to die for real. (Of course, bring in a Zombie and you'll get Claire Bennet syndrome, where the player finds excuses to die and come back to life every session.)
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Feb 26, 2014 09:10
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So uh, Wikipedia says Monsterhearts has a lot of rules "for sex and queer content." What is the DC for the fort save to avoid blindness from goblin cum in Monsterhearts? Because I don't like the Pathfinder rules on goblin cum. Since my players are all fluffers for an elf porn company, they deal with a lot of goblin cum. So I'm thinking about changing systems. Alright, I'm kidding, but I'm kind of serious about the next question. Is Monsterhearts like a Twilight-esque paranormal romance game or something? If so, or if not, what's the appeal? I don't get it. My point on sexual themes in rpgs earlier was this. Since sex is never a player goal, and playing out our kink fantasies by having phone-sex conversations across the table from our buddies isn't our idea of a good time, treating sex or sexual themes if they happen to come up like a big no-no seems counterproductive. We're all adults, and none of us want to play soggy biscuit with the d12. God Of Paradise fucked around with this message at 11:23 on Feb 26, 2014 |
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Feb 26, 2014 10:56
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I think Monsterhearts actually started as a joke where people tried to make Twilight the RPG, but then they started taking it seriously and wanted to make a PnP that deals with sexuality and teenage romance in a non-terrible way. Basically an anti-Twilight. Or an anti-FATAL, if you will. It's not my cup of tea, but I think it has its place. I could see it being used as a teaching aid, for example.
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Feb 26, 2014 11:15
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As an American I believe the only acceptable fantasy friends can share is the fantasy of killing one another in spectacular fashion. I'm here to play war not house. God Of Paradise fucked around with this message at 11:18 on Feb 26, 2014 |
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Feb 26, 2014 11:16
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Monsterhearts is all about creating a sexy teenage supernatural TV show on CW, basically. Not a beer and pretzels type of game by any means, but I do admire that by design, the most terrifying class in the game is Bella Swan.
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Feb 26, 2014 14:38
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God Of Paradise posted:As an American I believe the only acceptable fantasy friends can share is the fantasy of killing one another in spectacular fashion. I died twice last monsterhearts I played, why can't I do both?
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Feb 26, 2014 20:37
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God Of Paradise posted:Alright, I'm kidding, but I'm kind of serious about the next question. Is Monsterhearts like a Twilight-esque paranormal romance game or something? I'd call it more of a "drama" game than a "romance" game (for romance games see Shoot the Moon, Kagematsu, Love in a Time of Seith, and others), but yeah, basically. You can call it "Buffy-esque" or "Skins-esque" if that makes it clearer. quote:If so, or if not, what's the appeal? I don't get it. Are you asking why people like supernatural teen dramas? That's a pretty broad topic. It's fine if you aren't a fan of them, but clearly many people are, and have been long before Twilight. e: If you're asking "why have explicit rules regarding sex in a supernatural teen drama game," it's because in that kind of story, about budding agency and struggles with self-control, the decision to flirt or kiss or hurt someone should be extremely meaningful, and the way to achieve that is by having system consequences, aka rules. It's based on Apocalypse World, which already has moves for sex, but teens is more fragile. Dungeon World doesn't have sex moves because it's not actually that meaningful when dungeon heroes have sex. It's a more of a character quirk. Doc Hawkins fucked around with this message at 22:22 on Feb 26, 2014 |
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Feb 26, 2014 22:10
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God Of Paradise posted:My point on sexual themes in rpgs earlier was this. Since sex is never a player goal, and playing out our kink fantasies by having phone-sex conversations across the table from our buddies isn't our idea of a good time, treating sex or sexual themes if they happen to come up like a big no-no seems counterproductive. We're all adults, and none of us want to play soggy biscuit with the d12. But at least now the d12 has a purpose
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Feb 27, 2014 02:32
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Dookie-In-The-Pants posted:But at least now the d12 has a purpose My barbarian resents this!
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Feb 27, 2014 03:12
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First Bass posted:My barbarian resents this! I hope he's wielding a greataxe!
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Feb 27, 2014 03:55
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God Of Paradise posted:So uh, Wikipedia says Monsterhearts has a lot of rules "for sex and queer content." I didn't actually like the teen paranormal romance genre until I read then played Monsterhearts. It's that good an analysis of the genre. And yes, it did start out as a Twilight joke-game before Joe Macaldando realised he was onto something very good. Sex you don't normally play out (although my biggest criticism is that that game needs more warnings) - it's just that when characters in teen dramas have sex there are consequences. As there are in genre. I'd try [url=http://www.flamesrising.com/monsterhearts-rpg-review/]this review[/i] for how it works - then have a look at the copy. And seriously, it should be used as a teaching aid - it's that good at what it does. Whether there's violence depends a lot on the skins (hell, yes with the Werewolf and the Chosen - most other skins tend to find that Lashing Out is a bad plan although there are ghouls who die every session just because they can). That said player death might be taking things a little far.
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Feb 27, 2014 04:37
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Okay, working on a setting, and I need a system to run it in. It involves godlike beings at war with dark powers that have it in for humanity. Here's the premise:quote:You and your friends were primordial, godlike entities who came to Earth aeons ago to fight dark powers that threatened the burgeoning life of this young world. You won, but there was a terrible cost. One of your friends was drawn into a deep, unwaking slumber, another cast into the void, and others scattered across the cosmos. You yourself became a shadow of your former power, eventually using your shapeshifting to hide on the fringes of humanity, occasionally helping them to better themselves, and further civilization. So, yeah. You're playing as the Great Old Ones. But the Cthulhu Mythos was a smear job. You're actually there to protect humanity. I'm thinking that their powers are somewhat overstated (for the sake of making them all the more horrifying), but still in line with what was described. So Shub Niggurath can spawn her "children" to help her, Nyarlathotep can change his shape, and Yog Sothoth has great knowledge and power over doors. Cthulhu is probably very large, but not "oh god, get a steamship and ram him" big. So, godlike, but humanity can still be a threat. The Dark Powers are probably the Elder Gods. Combat will be both direct, and through proxies. The players will have to convince mortals to serve them, either by convincing them that they aren't evil after all, or else play up the mythos and try for the doomsday cultists. What would be a good system for this?
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Feb 27, 2014 09:34
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JackMann posted:Okay, working on a setting, and I need a system to run it in. It involves godlike beings at war with dark powers that have it in for humanity. Here's the premise: Nobilis? Fate? Something superhero (I'd suggest Marvel Heroic Roleplaying)?
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Feb 27, 2014 11:56
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JackMann posted:Okay, working on a setting, and I need a system to run it in. It involves godlike beings at war with dark powers that have it in for humanity. Here's the premise: You're definitely going to want to take a look at Nobilis.
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Feb 27, 2014 11:58
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Okay, I reworked my approach and asked the group a couple questions to see what they wanted out of a system. I mentioned Fate. They said that while they were enjoying the Iron Kingdoms, they felt my mind was set into "Wargame" mode and they were at a severe disadvantage because of my system mastery when it came to combat, and getting into that mindset would take a lot of time. They also told me they want to roll different dice sizes, not just d6, and that they would enjoy other systems that used D&D as a base, as long as they were kinda crunchy. So yes, I'll try 13th Age now.  Thanks a lot for the help here.
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Feb 27, 2014 13:20
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JackMann posted:Okay, working on a setting, and I need a system to run it in. It involves godlike beings at war with dark powers that have it in for humanity. Here's the premise: Going to raise another hand for FATE. I think that system will be well suited for making the types of characters I imagine you'll make. Also, stupidly awesome idea!
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Feb 27, 2014 18:07
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SafetyTrain posted:Going to raise another hand for FATE. I think that system will be well suited for making the types of characters I imagine you'll make. Also, stupidly awesome idea! Yeah, this sounds like something where the more "Storygame" you make it, the better off you'll be. Nobilis is made specifically for "everybody is Gods" games, but it's also kinda... intense? I do appreciate the weird elegance of its diceless, resource-based system, though. FATE is probably up your alley if you and your group still like to let the Dice decide their fate, and its conflict-resolution mechanics as specific or nonspecific as you need it to be for any given scene.
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Feb 27, 2014 19:28
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I'm pretty sure this has been discussed before, but the thread is over 140 pages and there isn't any links to a discussion of it in the op so I'll (potentially) re-ask it: how do you deal with player death in your games? How do you avoid the player becoming bored after his character is gone? What would you say is the best way to reintroduce them to the campaign? How do you tend to deal with resurrection mechanics? I'm curious because this is something that I've never really had to deal with in my games...somehow.
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Feb 27, 2014 23:12
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Really depends on the game, to my mind - if you're playing Gonzo-Crawl: The Munchkining, just re-roll and the ex-PC's good twin arrives ('what, she didn't tell you she was the evil twin?'), but if you're in the depths of a super-intense story-driven immersathon it'd probably be better to ask the player to make a new character appropriate to the story (and wait for a semi-natural introduction). If the second was the case, my personal response (assuming it happened mid-session) would be to offer them the NPC bit-parts (or maybe an existing henchman, etc) to keep them entertained, and make sure to write next session's plot so that New-PC would be introduced. e: To clarify, I wouldn't leave any player out longer than 'the rest of the session' at most - players are always more important than PC's, and any reasonable group should accept a certain level of 'A promising mercenary, you say? Why, they look just the ticket!' to get a player back into the next session. If they won't, it's time to have one of those OC chats where you explain the birds and the bees. petrol blue fucked around with this message at 23:23 on Feb 27, 2014 |
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Feb 27, 2014 23:18
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Literally discussed this page and the previous. The easiest way to deal with this is to ask the players, and the one whose character died specifically, "So do you want to keep your dead character and revive him somehow, take over a minor NPC or something, or roll up an entirely new character?" If he picks the former, it's easy to give the remaining ones some sort of sidequest to revive him and make the player play on with the ghost of his deceased character until they do so, or something else. Basically make sure they're OK with it, and if they're not, give them a way to revive the character, and if they are, let them create a new one. Whatever you do, make sure they have something to do, someone to play as, as a replacement. edit: Also these characters can be introduced even in a forced way. Maybe another party was adventuring this tomb and you stumble upon one who got separated from the rest. Maybe you just find a mercenary looking for work in a tavern. Maybe you rescue a prisoner. Who knows? Things are handwaved pretty easily if it means getting your player back into the game, unless you're playing with the most unfun group ever. Deltasquid fucked around with this message at 23:24 on Feb 27, 2014 |
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Feb 27, 2014 23:21
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Covok posted:I'm pretty sure this has been discussed before, but the thread is over 140 pages and there isn't any links to a discussion of it in the op so I'll (potentially) re-ask it: how do you deal with player death in your games? How do you avoid the player becoming bored after his character is gone? What would you say is the best way to reintroduce them to the campaign? How do you tend to deal with resurrection mechanics? If the player dies in a finalizing way in the story, discuss whether or not they are cool with permanent death, and let them die and roll another character. If they die in a combat that is just like any other combat, or they die in an epic way, but aren't willing to give up their character, go by the book. If they cleric raises them, they raise them. If they shell out for an expensive resurrection, let them pay and be resurrected. It depends on what you're playing, but you can do really creative poo poo to spark new missions and adventures for your party in player death. The most commonly played rpg, Dungeons and Dragons, has the beauty of the planes and the demi-planes. It's an almost infinite playground of after-death. When a character dies, and you can use it as a hook for the party to get them back, do it. In my campaign's plot, I have the players working for the Dark Powers. They are adventuring across different prime world's and planes to return an evil god to Ravenloft. To force them into the job, whenever they die, they are sent to a realm in Ravenloft, because the demi-plane of dread owns their souls until they complete the campaign's mission. So the other players then have to torment and defeat a darklord to regain their fallen companion, upon doing this, their horrible horrible bosses, the dark powers will give them some more pertinent knowledge to assist them in their end-goal. In other campaign's you can use plot hooks like your thief is in hell. You will have to go to hell and pull him out of the plane. Or your barbarian is in Asgard. Odin cuts a deal with the party where he will give you back the player character if you all agree to remove whatever foul power is causing the tree of life to look sickly. You were in Sigil and you signed a Dustman or Blood-war contract. You will have to sneak into the mortuary and steal the body so it can be raised, or you'll have to go to a bar and play a demon in a game of wits to win back your player's soul. There are a lot of possibilities to turn player death into a little module.
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Feb 28, 2014 04:33
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Gonna check out Nobilis. If that doesn't work, I'll see about hacking FATE to suit. Thanks for the suggestions, guys. Anything that allows me to make H.P. Lovecraft a villain is a good thing, in my view.
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Feb 28, 2014 06:51
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Is there a good way to represent 3D space combat? I'm working on Rogue Trader right now, but it applies to any scifi game with spaceship combat. I've been fooling around with hex mapping, and 2D hexes work well for up to three ships; three points define a plane, after all. But what if I get ambitious enough to want to handle more ships? Is cramming them all into the same plane the best compromise? Do I separate out battles into focusing on three ships, with more in the background that I throw in when one of the ships drops out of the fight? But that runs into problems if the PCs control more than one ship. What I've got right now is to stick the PC's ship in the center of my 2D hex grid, and manuver other ships around them, like a radar display. Velocity can be with arrows pointing to which hex the ships are going to end up in next turn. I think the current distance limit for encounters is supposed to be about twenty hexes in any direction. I'm not sure if what the best way to represent the PC's ship's motion is, though. Arrows from their ship pointing to where they're going to end up, or add the effects of their motion to every other ship's arrows. I'm not even sure how to depict a 3D encounter in 2D, both in terms of what to draw and what geometric shape to use for each cell. A hexagonal prism is probably the simplest polyhedron to use, but I'm trying to figure out if there's a more effective shape. Poking around on wikipedia, the Kelvin Conjecture was that a bitruncated cubic honeycomb (made up of truncated octahedra, which has some hexagonal faces) was most efficient for filling space, but I don't know how good it would be for representing space ships in three dimensions. I'm pretty sure the sane solution is to just abstract things, but I'm  trying to figure out what a good 3D representation is.
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Mar 3, 2014 17:19
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I bring you word from my many wasted hours of youth trying to design air combat RPGs because I loved air combat games and movies: 3d movement in an RPG without incredible abstraction is just not going to work out well. Just...just abstract it.
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Mar 3, 2014 17:37
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I guess one way to do it is by making it so the position on the board represents distance relative to each other, rather than direction. So for example, 4 ships in a square formation simply means that each ship is further from the one at the other side of the square, than from the two other ships, without them actually flying in a square formation. I think that's how astronomers map 3D planes, anyway? Other than that, just uh, just pretend space is an ocean.
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Mar 3, 2014 17:45
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If you look up miniature flight stands, you can find some decent acrylic stands to lift pieces up off a flat hex map. It's not really going to give you 3d space battles, but it might add enough of a 3rd dimension to keep things a bit more interesting.
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Mar 3, 2014 18:16
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I use a post-it or something to keep track of a character/vehicle's height in relation to the ground, or otherwise some imaginary "0" plane.
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Mar 3, 2014 18:24
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"Two" and "none" are pretty common choices, but Agon and Mecha have cool combat systems that model one dimension of distance, yet still present interesting tactical choices. Does any new fun becomes possible when adding a third? I've also seen RPGs-I-would-call-successful which ask players to multiply and divide, but please, don't ask them to do matrix multiplication. We have video cards for that nowadays.
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Mar 3, 2014 18:27
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Doc Hawkins posted:"Two" and "none" are pretty common choices, but Agon and Mecha have cool combat systems that model one dimension of distance, yet still present interesting tactical choices. Does any new fun becomes possible when adding a third? That 1-dimensional idea is actually really good. What is the distance between you and your target/attacker, are there any sources of cover/concealment, how evasive are they moving? Your decisions at that point boil down to "attack from your current position", "try to find a better attacking position", "try to find a better defending position". It would work really well in a system kind of like FATE, where the battlefield is divided up into arbitrary "areas", rather than using scaled tactical movement.
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Mar 3, 2014 19:19
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Diaspora, which runs on the FATE engine, does space combat in 1D. I thought it was pretty fun, though the rest of my group hated it -- then again, I am far more into crunch than they are.
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Mar 3, 2014 21:30
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To expand on what Whybird said (I was GMing that campaign): Dispora takes the view that you can't model 3d at a games table. Given that, why bother modelling 2d? It represents each ship on a line ranging from -x(3 or 5, can't recall) to +x. Zero is an idealistic 'same bearing, same speed, same location', with those factors becoming further apart with each step - so two ships on +3 might have the same speed, but be on other sides of the system, or might be (at this moment) next to each other, but on wildly different headings. It works as a rules system / minigame. My main problem was that it works by bolting a new ruleset on top of the fate rules which are designed to be as simple as possible, and that its rules are very seperate. Whybird likes a lot of crunch in his games, and it does that well, but I felt that it left the other players (and me as the GM) struggling to learn a rarely-used rule system that had only a nominal connection to the main one. If you want a load of crunch for space combat, you're probably best off getting hold of a space combat game and bolting it on to your basic system, or handwaving it with skill rolls - the diaspora system seemed to have the worst of both worlds to me. I was looking at maybe bastardising the Bulldogs system before the campaign ended, though it likely suffers from similar problems (just on the storygame end of the spectrum). e: I should add, to be fair, that I'm massively biased towards rules-light systems, and that most of our group don't deal well with complex rules. I prefer 'OK, sounds fair, roll the bones with a plus-whatever' to working out specifics. petrol blue fucked around with this message at 22:22 on Mar 3, 2014 |
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Mar 3, 2014 22:18
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Or you could break out five laptops and play a round of [url= http://www.artemis.eochu.com/ ]Artemis[/url] in GM mode. 
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Mar 4, 2014 08:47
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For my last game, I prepared an OP video for the session. Basically some really generic epic music (To Glory from Two Steps From Hell), the D&D logo with a little zoom animation, and some panning shots over the PC's portraits with their names. Took me less than half an hour to put together on Windows Movie Maker and I can reuse it for all future sessions, and the players loved it.
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Mar 4, 2014 16:14
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Aww, c'mon, you can't tell us that and not link it! That sounds epic.
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Mar 4, 2014 16:56
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