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First thing is working out if it's an IC or an OC problem. From what you've said, it seems IC - the player isn't doing anything wrong, and he might have designed the character to deliberately take the party across 'the line' and explore what happens. On the other hand, if the rest of the group is against it, it's worth checking that he understands where the line is, and if you all have the same ideas on where the game is going. Can we replace the thread with 'talk to them' in massive red font yet?
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Sep 15, 2014 00:49
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TheSpookyDanger posted:Talk to the person and explain the issues. Yeah, just talk to him like an adult human being and say you want to play a different kind of game.
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Sep 15, 2014 00:49
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Is it bad form to teach players mechanics that you plan on being almost certainly obsolete later in the game? Specifically, I'm considering putting together a PbP game of the OSR sci-fi game Stars Without Numbers. Now in the core books, starship travel is simple: you only spend fuel when you use the FTL drive and it takes a flat amount of time to reach pretty much anywhere in the solar system (modified by how fast you're going). The problem is that my notes start the characters out in a system that hasn't rediscovered the FTL drive yet; one of the supplements has rules for ships in those types of systems but they involved spending fuel points to accelerate, to flip around and decelerate, to do x and y, and furthermore travel in a solar system is cut into range bands. Now, I don't think the pre-FTL ship mechanics are too hard for the players or anything like that, it just feels weird to me that I will be teaching them these slightly more granular mechanics and then later saying "these new ships don't use the old mechanics for fuel or range, it's actually super simple." Am I overthinking this since ultimately the players will be able to handle it anyways? Any thoughts are welcome!
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Sep 16, 2014 01:42
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KirbyJ posted:Is it bad form to teach players mechanics that you plan on being almost certainly obsolete later in the game? I think they'll be fine. If anything they'll love being able to drop the more complex mechanics in favor of simplifying it in-game.
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Sep 16, 2014 01:44
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chitoryu12 posted:I think they'll be fine. If anything they'll love being able to drop the more complex mechanics in favor of simplifying it in-game. If you play it right, they'll see it (rightly) as a massive power boost and game-changer. Make getting that FTL drive something special.
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Sep 16, 2014 02:01
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I'm running a 13th age wild west game, and I'm planning out a possible train robbery scenario, where bandits are attacking from outside the train and I thought it'd be neat to give a one-time ability to one of the bandits of throwing a stick of dynamite. Their normal ranged attack is +7 vs. AC - 6 damage. The new ability I'm working on is: R: Dynamite (1/battle Escalation is 2): +7 vs. AC - 12 damage, and all nearby target. Target may make a dex check. 15+ takes 1/2 damage. Nat 18+ throw back (make an attack roll). Second target don't get any saves. Does this make sense, is it too swingy? Does this make the character 2nd level instead of 1st? Pointlessly weak, because most likely will only hit 1 and do normal damage anyway? (Though I guess pointlessly weak is better than overly strong). I'm definitely only going to give this to one enemy out of the group, so there won't be a ton of dynamite flying! :P
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Sep 16, 2014 22:35
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Use natural saves and 16+s.
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Sep 16, 2014 23:50
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Also you should add an environmental effect to initiative for the train; roll a die whenever it comes around to see if some dramatic train thing happens and have players react appropriately using backgrounds or whatever enter a tunnel low hanging trees shifting tracks bridge etc If the robbers/posse have an ambush/patrol set up ahead you could base that off escalation or a certain round number And/or if you want to be less abstract you could map out the tracks and have the train advance each round Jackard fucked around with this message at 00:21 on Sep 17, 2014 |
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Sep 17, 2014 00:10
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Maybe make it so if they gently caress up the dynamite thing they can wreck the train - forcing them to make a dramatic leap while the train careens off a bridge / cliff / whatever into a river or whatnot.
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Sep 17, 2014 00:45
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Golden Bee posted:Use natural saves and 16+s. I'm not sure what you mean by natural saves. Jackard posted:Also you should add an environmental effect to initiative for the train; roll a die whenever it comes around to see if some dramatic train thing happens and have players react appropriately using backgrounds or whatever I really like this idea, if the bandits actually get onto the train. Espeiclaly if one of the PCs descides to climb on top of the train. VanSandman posted:Maybe make it so if they gently caress up the dynamite thing they can wreck the train - forcing them to make a dramatic leap while the train careens off a bridge / cliff / whatever into a river or whatnot. Well, I don't want anything quite so dramatic, just something to give as little more "flavor" to the encounter.
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Sep 17, 2014 01:05
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I suggest every explosion bumps the Explode-alation Die, which is a D4 that sits next to the Escalation Die and functions nearly identically. Except: - It only goes up on explosions - everybody benefits from it
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Sep 17, 2014 02:02
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Whoops I totally thought this was the 13th Age thread Well, that idea should be feasible no matter what system. Exploder Die is great too.
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Sep 17, 2014 02:54
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I like to play a lot of nWoD, and get a kick out of making the setting a city that actually exists. Does anyone know good online resources for histories of American cities? Or on the culture of specfic cities?
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Sep 21, 2014 18:54
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Anyone know a good mechanic for a combat encounter where an enemy splits in two upon being hit, and keeps splitting further, until there's an overwhelming army (at which point some sort of win condition would come in)? I want to have my players meet the Sorcerer's Apprentice. Technically D&D 4E, but I'll take approaches from other systems.
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Sep 21, 2014 20:05
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My copy of the Monster Vault is still in storage, but I think one of the oozes does a splitting gimmick. Ochre Jelly? 13th Age's Ochre Jelly is the splitting one, but it can only split once.
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Sep 21, 2014 20:31
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Upon reflection what I really need is a good win condition. I can think of loads of ways to handle it but if there was something tried and true out there, that'd be great. My ideas so far are: - no HP tracking, enemy simply splits on every hit until the nth generation - remaining HP get redistributed with every split - no real HP tracking but on each hit the enemy splits, split creatures have half the HP, death occurs when damage done in one hit > HP - regular enemies, saving throw or similar on death where failure = die and success = split - the saving throw thing but with every generation there's a penalty
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Sep 21, 2014 20:47
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Start with a huge creature, splits into two large creatures when bloodied, splits into four minions when killed. It's probably going to be a kind of long encounter though. And shouldn't be just the one.
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Sep 21, 2014 22:38
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If you have an elite that splits into two standards when bloodied, which each split into four minions when bloodied, then you're effectively using half an elite, half of two standards, and eight minions; since an elite is worth twice as many xp as a standard and a standard four times as many do as a minion, that comes to two elites' worth of xp. The difficulty you'll find is that the encounter won't come to much of a climax; it ends with the PCs mopping up a bunch of minions which isn't that exciting. A better solution might just be to have a solo which keeps on spawning minions as it takes damage.
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Sep 21, 2014 23:07
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Do it backwards. Start with a mob of minions, and each time one is killed, it goes dormant until another one of the same "evolution" dies, at which point they join and upgrade. Then the combat ramps up in difficulty, as well the pace quickening as the fight proceeds. As long as you start with a power of 2 (2, 4, 8, 16, etc) everything'll join up into one mega monster.
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Sep 22, 2014 00:13
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Going to be running an introductory adventure for that Numenera system in a few days, and I asked in the appropriate thread but...well, it's not super lively. Any advice for running it? In fact, it's been a long, long time since I've run a pre-built adventure, so advice for doing that would also be appreciated - ways I should prepare beyond reading and re-reading it, things I should do while playing, things to look out for when running a new system, etc.
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Sep 22, 2014 03:33
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thespaceinvader posted:Start with a huge creature, splits into two large creatures when bloodied, splits into four minions when killed. If you keep the defences more or less the same, and you calculate the the total "encounter HP" correctly starting from a solo, it should last the same amount of time as a solo fight. In fact, it should be quicker, as the more the creature splits, the more vulnerable it becomes to area attacks. Whybird posted:The difficulty you'll find is that the encounter won't come to much of a climax; it ends with the PCs mopping up a bunch of minions which isn't that exciting. A better solution might just be to have a solo which keeps on spawning minions as it takes damage. That sounds like a good idea, will definitely try it at some point.
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Sep 22, 2014 09:44
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 It's like impossible for me to set a mood in the game I'm running, but I'm not gonna try to do anything about it. I've read enough of this thread to pretty much know that this is just the way my group manifests the elusive "fun having". Any time I start to go into any kind of prepared exposition, I get the player character equivalent of "spamming the B button to make the text go faster".I think they enjoy the part of the game that's, "see how the GM reacts to our decisions and weird schemes", but it's super hard for me to get a read on whether they care at all about the plot. Like, they're super happy to engage with the situation I give them as kind of a puzzle to crack, but they don't give a flying gently caress about why it's happening or what the stakes are in the fiction. I can think of worse gaming situations, but it's kind of frustrating to deal with as a GM, when I start to go into exposition mode and everybody immediately launches into a 10-minute tangent before I finish like the third sentence. It's really difficult to establish a worthwhile antagonist if, despite all the hosed up things they keep learning about him, they still don't actually care about what he's capable of doing. I dunno. I'm mostly just venting here. I wonder if I should just change the style of the game to more of a "kick in the door" sort of thing, since nobody really seems to follow the investigation-type hooks I throw out there.
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Sep 22, 2014 17:48
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deadly_pudding posted:
If you are willing to do "kick in the door" or they are willing to do investigation, then cool -- do the thing everybody is on board with!. You have to talk about it, though, and if you don't want the campaign they want and they don't want yours, you can either quit now gracefully or in a huff later.
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Sep 22, 2014 18:13
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homullus posted:If you are willing to do "kick in the door" or they are willing to do investigation, then cool -- do the thing everybody is on board with!. You have to talk about it, though, and if you don't want the campaign they want and they don't want yours, you can either quit now gracefully or in a huff later. Yeah, I'm willing to adapt. It's just hard to get a read on the situation. They really like following the breadcrumbs and Getting The Thing, but they usually don't end up actually caring what The Thing is, or why they decided to get it. I can't tell if it's just because the narrative doesn't largely matter to them across the board and they just want to roll some dice, or if my particular narrative just happens to be super uninteresting 
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Sep 22, 2014 18:25
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deadly_pudding posted:Yeah, I'm willing to adapt. It's just hard to get a read on the situation. They really like following the breadcrumbs and Getting The Thing, but they usually don't end up actually caring what The Thing is, or why they decided to get it. I can't tell if it's just because the narrative doesn't largely matter to them across the board and they just want to roll some dice, or if my particular narrative just happens to be super uninteresting The quickest way to find the answer to that question is to ask them.
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Sep 22, 2014 18:31
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deadly_pudding posted:Yeah, I'm willing to adapt. It's just hard to get a read on the situation. They really like following the breadcrumbs and Getting The Thing, but they usually don't end up actually caring what The Thing is, or why they decided to get it. I can't tell if it's just because the narrative doesn't largely matter to them across the board and they just want to roll some dice, or if my particular narrative just happens to be super uninteresting Do what I (plan to) do and just throw Saturday Morning Cartoon Villains at them. They visit a village, which is harassed by a group of bandits. Their leader is an rear end in a top hat, that's his entire motivation. Later they are targeted by an assassin. They killed the assassin's boyfriend, that's her entire motivation. Make the villains interesting not by having an intricate backstory, but by being as flamboyant as possible. The bandit leader has a mechanical right arm! The Assassin is half devil and her head is perpetually on fire! That's perfectly ok if you ask me. TRPG players, especially new ones, already spend most of their cognitive capacity dealling with things like base attack bonuses and grappling rules and goblin HP and other poo poo that has nothing to do with the story, and even lifting their heads out of the books the first and foremost thing they are going to care about is their character. Having the villains be just a foil for their characters to defeat and feel awesome is fine, they need no more depth than that. Having the macguffin be just a navigation mark for the plot is equally fine. It's not about them preferring "kick in the door" gameplay to whatever literary masterpiece you prepared for them, it's about making the plot easy enough to explain to a person who is currently doing his math homework while playing with an action figure at the same time.
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Sep 22, 2014 19:04
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Run Saturday morning cartoons, then dangle plot threads that tweak the clichés (is the baddy really the baddie! if the goodie actually a baddie!) and see if they bite. If they do you can develop it further, otherwise you can let it drop.
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Sep 22, 2014 23:16
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deadly_pudding posted:
Well one, ask your group about it, not some goons who don't know your friends. With that done, I'd suggest adopting an "action movie" kind of atmosphere for the game. Your BBEG can be the vilest dick in the world still, and then your players can have fun and be cool when they boot in the door to his lair and start wasting dudes. At least that sounds like what they'd be down for.
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Sep 23, 2014 04:26
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Nostalgia4ColdWar fucked around with this message at 01:27 on Mar 31, 2017 |
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Sep 23, 2014 22:06
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50 Foot Ant posted:This is pretty much the best way to do it. Pretty much the mode I'm shifting into lol. It's a FATE campaign, which is why I was trying to get the group to take some narrative reigns in the first place, but I think I've got it into a pretty good position for tonal shift. The next session is gonna be pretty action-y and a bit of a dungeon crawl, and will provide a good jumping-off point for whenever the party decides to try and attack the villain's base of operations. Unfortunately, they're already pretty hosed up from the last few conflicts, because the dice have been mean and my players are super stingy with their Fate Tokens. I'm gonna ask the group if they want to re-frame the current Scenario to end when they solve or escape their current predicament in order to knock off a lot of their standing Consequences, and then we can hash out how they want to go from there. Anyway, I'm feeling more optimistic about the situation than I was before. I still wish one of them would read the FATE SRD 
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Sep 24, 2014 16:35
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Nostalgia4ColdWar fucked around with this message at 01:26 on Mar 31, 2017 |
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Sep 25, 2014 01:38
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50 Foot Ant posted:
This sounds like a hell of a Dungeon World campaign.
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Sep 25, 2014 03:46
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I'm too cheap for miniatures, but I figure what I could do instead is print out some character illustrations and mount them on cardstock. Are there any resources I can draw on for doing this, such as for the pictures themselves and how large the "counters" should be?
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Sep 26, 2014 10:23
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Before you stick with "I'm too cheap for minis" I'll just say that my local gaming shop has a bargain bin of minis that are like $1-$3 each. Maybe you have something similar by you? I don't know about resources for illustrations specifically. When I did something similar, though, I tried making DIY standups using wine corks cut in half. Worked out alright. Rotten Cookies fucked around with this message at 11:03 on Sep 26, 2014 |
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Sep 26, 2014 10:59
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My only advice is that if you don't want to shell out money for "real" miniatures, you should at least try to be as consistent as possible with your solution. Having a battlefield consisting of three cardboard adventurers on plastic stands, 10 goblins represented by coins, an iphone for a horse and an actual miniature for Greg's character because it was the only one who could capture the nuance of Torg the Barbarian, it will end up very jarring. Back in college, we used coins for minis, which ended up costing as little as a penny.
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Sep 26, 2014 11:13
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I bring a little lunchbox with me to every gaming session which contains:
The cardboard squares are all labeled with letters, and have an arrow on one side to indicate facing. I use those for all my miniatures needs. Players can supply their own mini for their character if they want.
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Sep 26, 2014 11:35
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I'll look into it, but I'm not in the States, so we have like one gaming shop here for the entire city and everything's rather expensive. Apparently people also use things like army man figures, Lego minifigs (this seems promising if I can get them cheap), and even the odd die to represent positioning, so I guess I have options. Definitely going to make/buy enough to fill out a party + all the monsters to keep things consistent.
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Sep 26, 2014 14:18
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gradenko_2000 posted:I'm too cheap for miniatures, but I figure what I could do instead is print out some character illustrations and mount them on cardstock. Are there any resources I can draw on for doing this, such as for the pictures themselves and how large the "counters" should be? http://blog.maragnus.com/post/44298806692/dm-tokens I ignored the bit about cork/glue and bought adhesive printer paper instead. Will upload photos later.
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Sep 26, 2014 15:14
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Also, before committing to any physical solution, have you tried any software that can emulate a tabletop? I started our campaign playing on a physical table with handmade tokens (bad ones), but when we tried Maptool on a whim, the players loved it. Now we switched to Masterplan, and I don't think we are going back to physical tokens any time soon.
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Sep 26, 2014 15:18
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Rexides posted:Also, before committing to any physical solution, have you tried any software that can emulate a tabletop? I started our campaign playing on a physical table with handmade tokens (bad ones), but when we tried Maptool on a whim, the players loved it. Now we switched to Masterplan, and I don't think we are going back to physical tokens any time soon. There are for face-to-face games, and not all of us have laptops, that's why I'm looking at physical objects. Jackard posted:If you have a lot of time and are willing to spend 20-30 dollars, follow this guide to make tokens that you can combine with magnets and a magnetic dry-erase board. This is interesting, thanks!
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Sep 26, 2014 15:34
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