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Why yes, it turns out that boring poo poo is less boring if you put in the time and effort to make it interesting. If only we could go back in time and deliver this message to the D&D writers of yore, and maybe warn them about 9/11 while we're there.
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Dec 15, 2014 00:07
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The Plane of Salt could have a lot of fun and cool ideas. Sadly, it didn't. Once again: it is the failure of simulationist design. The idea of using the game to create a setting and nothing else. So you have this Plane of Salt, and then you ask "well what do you DO with it?" and the game designer just calmly points out that hey, it sure does exist, huh? I'm reminded of a guy elsewhere who really hated Eberron because it was too focused on giving him plot hooks. It had too many mysteries! Too many fine details left unsaid! How am I supposed to get into the world as a DM if I don't know what caused the Mourning? How am I supposed to run a game if all I have to give players is adventure?
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Dec 15, 2014 01:15
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ProfessorCirno posted:I'm reminded of a guy elsewhere who really hated Eberron because it was too focused on giving him plot hooks. It had too many mysteries! Too many fine details left unsaid! How am I supposed to get into the world as a DM if I don't know what caused the Mourning? How am I supposed to run a game if all I have to give players is adventure? That sounds like Gaming Den thinkin'.
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Dec 15, 2014 01:27
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There is such a thing as being too gameable, though. If a world looks too constructed for player characters it's going to feel fake. (The obvious example I'd use is the character splats from those White Wolf games where the character splats were most vestigial—there for the sake of character creation and nothing else.)
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Dec 15, 2014 01:40
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AlphaDog posted:I'm not sure why D&D specifically is prone to this kind of thing, but games I run or play in do consistently lean toward silly rather than serious, regardless of the original intent. Also, right now I'm thinking a big failing of D&D-style heartbreakers (including D&D itself) is that the combat part of the game works really hard to disconnect itself from the discussion that makes up the meat of playing role-playing games. There's all these extra rules on who gets to talk when and say what and how many charges you've got left and can I use Ability X to even do this and ~phhhbbtttt~. You basically have to switch between two different dialects - hell, whole languages - of talking RPG to solve the cool puzzle-boss while staying in-character. Apocalypse World is pretty cool because it makes up its own weird cant of RPG and insists on talking about everything in the game in that weirdspeak. I should play more and grog less. 
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Dec 15, 2014 02:05
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Rand Brittain posted:There is such a thing as being too gameable, though. If a world looks too constructed for player characters it's going to feel fake. (The obvious example I'd use is the character splats from those White Wolf games where the character splats were most vestigial—there for the sake of character creation and nothing else.) It turns out that someone's masturbatory attempt at creating a "real, verisimilitudinous" setting feels fake too, because no game writer that fancies himself Tolkien is actually Tolkien and so all these settings full of extraneous details like the Quasi-Elemental Plane of Salt just wind up like those character backstories from that one guy, you know the one, who wrote like 15 pages detailing his character's life story down to the history of each individual scar and pimple, literally none of which ever came up in the six sessions you played before Bob got bored and decided he'd rather run something else. Stacking a bunch of dumb, pointless poo poo into your setting doesn't make it feel any more "real" no matter how much die-hard simulationists rail against making things "too gameable," it just feels like someone crammed a bunch of stuff together because that's how you make settings, right? Just layer on the fake places and fake names and meandering backstory with a trowel until you hit critical mass. This all reminds me of the ongoing LP of Killzone, a bad and boring game that through the power of hype managed to inexplicably spawn an entire franchise. I played Killzone years and years ago and I never even realized until the LPer brought it up that the people who made Killzone penned this elaborate backstory for the game, an entire historical timeline chronicling everything from the near-present day future to the point at which the game itself begins, all of which was hosted on a now-defunct website for people to peruse. And literally none of it matters at all. Not a single loving part of this sprawling historical saga they penned to set the stage for their epic tale of the generic white guy army versus anime space Nazis ever comes up in the game. It's all completely and utterly pointless. It doesn't get referenced, it doesn't impact the story, it never informs gameplay, nothing. I'm willing to bet I'm not the only person who played Killzone and never even knew about this stuff either, and even if Killzone's myriad technical flaws were somehow obviated and it turned into a smooth and tightly polished game it would still be nothing but a generic, soulless shootman if ever there was one with a completely pointless, tacked-on backstory trailing behind it like toilet paper stuck to its shoe.
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Dec 15, 2014 02:16
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AlphaDog posted:I'm not sure why D&D specifically is prone to this kind of thing, but games I run or play in do consistently lean toward silly rather than serious, regardless of the original intent. D&D is and always basically has been a fairly silly game. In the end, it is basically a pulp action game where you mow through enemies while cracking one liners with your friends in order to get a treasure. It's Nathan Drake with swords. And that's ignoring all the intentional silliness built into the game from the start. The vaunted "grim gritty deadliness" that grogs desperately try to staple to D&D frankly only makes it worse, because then you care even less about your chess piece because, it turns out, when death is cheap and easy, so is just remaking your character. Or you reach high enough level that you care even less and just cast a raise dead spell.
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Dec 15, 2014 02:24
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Kai Tave posted:It turns out that someone's masturbatory attempt at creating a "real, verisimilitudinous" setting feels fake too, because no game writer that fancies himself Tolkien is actually Tolkien and so all these settings full of extraneous details like the Quasi-Elemental Plane of Salt just wind up like those character backstories from that one guy, you know the one, who wrote like 15 pages detailing his character's life story down to the history of each individual scar and pimple, literally none of which ever came up in the six sessions you played before Bob got bored and decided he'd rather run something else. Stacking a bunch of dumb, pointless poo poo into your setting doesn't make it feel any more "real" no matter how much die-hard simulationists rail against making things "too gameable," it just feels like someone crammed a bunch of stuff together because that's how you make settings, right? Just layer on the fake places and fake names and meandering backstory with a trowel until you hit critical mass. Kai Tave this is a picture of two tradgames critics who were turned into a pillar of salt much like LOT (a noted anti-gygaxian), for disparaging God's Own quasi-elemental planes. 
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Dec 15, 2014 02:26
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Libertad! posted:Is there any particular reason why my thread title's different? Have a Christmas, Libertad.
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Dec 15, 2014 02:27
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Mormon Star Wars posted:Kai Tave this is a picture of two tradgames critics who were turned into a pillar of salt much like LOT (a noted anti-gygaxian), for disparaging God's Own quasi-elemental planes. They look like LARPers so good riddance.
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Dec 15, 2014 02:29
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Kai Tave posted:It turns out that someone's masturbatory attempt at creating a "real, verisimilitudinous" setting feels fake too, because no game writer that fancies himself Tolkien is actually Tolkien and so all these settings full of extraneous details like the Quasi-Elemental Plane of Salt just wind up like those character backstories from that one guy, you know the one, who wrote like 15 pages detailing his character's life story down to the history of each individual scar and pimple, literally none of which ever came up in the six sessions you played before Bob got bored and decided he'd rather run something else. Stacking a bunch of dumb, pointless poo poo into your setting doesn't make it feel any more "real" no matter how much die-hard simulationists rail against making things "too gameable," it just feels like someone crammed a bunch of stuff together because that's how you make settings, right? Just layer on the fake places and fake names and meandering backstory with a trowel until you hit critical mass. This is why Killzone 2 is the strongest out of all the games because it uses Killzone as the setup mythos and it boils down to get Space Hitler. I agree with everything you're saying by the way because I played 1-3 and did my time with that series.
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Dec 15, 2014 02:42
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Kai Tave posted:It turns out that someone's masturbatory attempt at creating a "real, verisimilitudinous" setting feels fake too, because no game writer that fancies himself Tolkien is actually Tolkien and so all these settings full of extraneous details like the Quasi-Elemental Plane of Salt just wind up like those character backstories from that one guy, you know the one, who wrote like 15 pages detailing his character's life story down to the history of each individual scar and pimple, literally none of which ever came up in the six sessions you played before Bob got bored and decided he'd rather run something else. Stacking a bunch of dumb, pointless poo poo into your setting doesn't make it feel any more "real" no matter how much die-hard simulationists rail against making things "too gameable," it just feels like someone crammed a bunch of stuff together because that's how you make settings, right? Just layer on the fake places and fake names and meandering backstory with a trowel until you hit critical mass. "There is a magical dimension where salt monsters come from that will generally kill people if they go there" is not a sprawling pseudo-Tolkienesque detail at all, though. I guess it all boils down to whether or not you feel every detail of a published setting has to be immediately 100% gameable out of the box without any touching from the GM or players. I mean it's the loving Plane of Salt, it's not that big of a deal, and I get that it represents Gygaxian naturalism to you because it springs from the interactions between energy and all that, but it really feels like railing against old design for the sake of railing against old design. Who has ever been hosed over by the elemental planes? I don't mean looked at the section of Manual of the Planes or Planescape that detailed it and yawned, I mean who has had their gaming totally upended by it in the same manner as Forgotten Realms canon? I'm not even against not using it, or versions of D&D cosmology that don't have it. I'm just finding it odd that people are acting like it's this inexcusable design flaw, and that people are so salty about it.
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Dec 15, 2014 02:48
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Kai Tave posted:They look like LARPers so good riddance. "Sir," he said, "talk about the Shadowfell as much as you like. You seem to me colder than a lump of stone; but I am willing to believe that you may at some time have loved a Shadar-Kai, or a Shade, or a Vampire. When you were a baby, I suppose you loved the Domains of Dread. Talk about the shadowfell, then, till the world is sick of the word. But don't you talk about Quasi-Elemental Plane of Salt. Don't you dare to say one word, white or black, about it. The Quasi-Elemental Plane of Salt is, as far as you are concerned, a horrible mystery. Keep clear of it, keep silent upon it, as you would upon an abomination. It is a thing that has made men slay and torture each other; and you will never know why. It is a thing that has made men do evil that good might come; and you will never understand the evil, let alone the good. The Quasi-Elemental Plane of Salt is a thing that could only make you vomit, till you are other than you are. I would not justify it to you even if I could. Hate it, in God's name, as Kai Tave does, who is a man. It is a monstrous thing, for which men die. And if you will stand here and talk about salt for another ten minutes it is very probable that you will see a man die for it."
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Dec 15, 2014 02:48
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RocknRollaAyatollah posted:This is why Killzone 2 is the strongest out of all the games because it uses Killzone as the setup mythos and it boils down to get Space Hitler. I agree with everything you're saying by the way because I played 1-3 and did my time with that series. What's funny is that Halo did the same thing...there was this whole complex backstory and history that never made it into the game itself, much of which never even made it into any game, so unless you read the website and the novels and the promotional comics and whatever the hell else you'd never know, for example, the Master Chief was originally a kidnapped child turned child soldier put through unethical super-soldier experiments designed to give the oppressive Earth government a tool to use against rebellious colonists, but then suddenly aliens show up and gosh, wouldn't you know we have all these super-soldiers lying around, guess that sure was a stroke of good luck! Does any of this have any bearing on the game whatsoever? Sure doesn't! At least when Homeworld gave you the equivalent of an RPG sourcebook for a manual it was to make losing Kharak feel like more of a punch in the gut after you'd read about this robust civilization that had now been reduced to half a million cryo-capsules aboard a ramshackle spaceship.
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Dec 15, 2014 02:52
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Destiny was supposed to do the same thing but all of that was allegedly canned, along with the plot of the game, when it launched. There are some files on the enemies and locations you can read on Bungie's website but it still doesn't save that game's story or lack thereof.
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Dec 15, 2014 02:54
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Lightning Lord posted:"There is a magical dimension where salt monsters come from that will generally kill people if they go there" is not a sprawling pseudo-Tolkienesque detail at all, though. I guess it all boils down to whether or not you feel every detail of a published setting has to be immediately 100% gameable out of the box without any touching from the GM or players. I mean it's the loving Plane of Salt, it's not that big of a deal, and I get that it represents Gygaxian naturalism to you because it springs from the interactions between energy and all that, but it really feels like railing against old design for the sake of railing against old design. Who has ever been hosed over by the elemental planes? I don't mean looked at the section of Manual of the Planes or Planescape that detailed it and yawned, I mean who has had their gaming totally upended by it in the same manner as Forgotten Realms canon? I'm not even against not using it, or versions of D&D cosmology that don't have it. I'm just finding it odd that people are acting like it's this inexcusable design flaw, and that people are so salty about it. If it's boring and pointless, if the best thing that can be said about it is "well it's inoffensive," then why are you, the writer, wasting wordcount on it instead of something, anything more interesting? Of course anything can be made interesting through your own judicious effort but at that point you've just approached the Oberoni Fallacy from the fiction side of things instead of the mechanics side. If it could be made more interesting then why didn't the writers themselves actually do that in the first place? And if it's ultimately not that important than why do so many people hold it and things like it up as examples of how worldbuilding should be instead of something that's "too gameable?"
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Dec 15, 2014 03:06
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Siivola posted:Beyond a certain threshold, ultraviolence is inherently funny.
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Dec 15, 2014 03:12
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The thing that shits me about the plane of Salt (or Ash, or Dust, or whatever) is that in the Planescape DM's book there's about 5 times as much page space devoted to each of those than to any given layer of Baator, and most of them still don't manage to tell you anything you couldn't figure out from "a plane of salt exists". e: There's one that has a super evocative image in it, I forget which, but it's got the crumbling Last Fortress of Whoever projecting out into the plane of vacuum (or the negative plane?) from the previous plane. I feel like each of the semi-demi-hemi-elemental planes could have been described in the format of a single sentence that mentions a cool feature, inhabitant, or aspect. Like the bit earlier about the mer-mummies swimming through the memory of water. Or something like "The very oldest and best dwarven forges on various worlds are actually portals to the plane of Magma, that's why they're guarded with the arrow-slits facing inward". Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 03:23 on Dec 15, 2014 |
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Dec 15, 2014 03:15
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Evil Mastermind posted:That sounds like Gaming Den thinkin'. No no no, the Gaming Den argues that before the adventure for the PCs takes place the GM rolls attacks, skill checks, and saving throws for his NPCs before the adventure starts. So if that evil sorcerer rolls a Natural 1 on his casting roll in his plot to kidnap the princess and gets killed by the city guard, then the adventure doesn't happen. Yes, I legitimately saw this argued there once. ANYWAY In regards to magic planes and campaign backstory, you should treat things like a Saturday Morning Cartoon special: you bake up a new plot between weeks, toss it down, it has always existed in the game. Hey, you never heard about this Forlorn Path of evil magic poo poo of a forgotten civilization, but now you find it while traveling the Elemental Plane of Earth. Or maybe your PCs don't travel to the Elemental planes, and the Forlorn Path instead shows up in the Underdark or something. I find it easy to not add to my game world until said things come up, like a Bioware Codex entry. Only until the PCs hear about it or interact with it does it go onto the list. Libertad! fucked around with this message at 03:33 on Dec 15, 2014 |
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Dec 15, 2014 03:26
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Libertad! posted:No no no, the Gaming Den argues that before the adventure for the PCs takes place the GM rolls attacks, skill checks, and saving throws for his NPCs before the adventure starts.
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Dec 15, 2014 04:22
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AmiYumi posted:One of the Pathfinder adventure paths has this; whatever the bad guy's plan was, it centered around casting a spell from a scroll with a Use Magic Device check (or something, I don't remember the details). If you were thinking "how loving groggy a GM would you have to be to actually make that roll straight", well, it's written right there into the "villain tactics" section what to do when your bad guy stands up, makes his "JUST AS PLANNED" speech, then nothing happens and he awkwardly shuffles out of the room, never to be seen again. Making the villain much less competent than they imagine themselves to be sounds like a nice way to put a bit of levity into the game. Although they should probably still get beaten down at the end, and that should probably be something decided instead of rolled by random chance.
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Dec 15, 2014 04:28
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When the party reaches Section Q, roll d100 on table 10-3 to determine the sort of resolution that the adventure will have. Table 10-3 01-07: Deus Ex Machina 08-13: Dramatic Irony 14-20: Comic Irony 21-30: Anticlimax 31-38: Morality Play 39-46: Musical Number 47-54: Dadist Surrealism 55-65: Pie Fight 66-72: Greek Tragedy 73-81: Sudden Plot Twist 82-90: Cliffhanger 91-00: CAUGHT IN TIME LOOP: Return to Section A and replay adventure from the beginning.
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Dec 15, 2014 05:03
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Kai Tave posted:When the party reaches Section Q, roll d100 on table 10-3 to determine the sort of resolution that the adventure will have. A preview of 100 Awful Tables to Make Your Games Seriously the Worst.
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Dec 15, 2014 05:06
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Kai Tave posted:When the party reaches Section Q, roll d100 on table 10-3 to determine the sort of resolution that the adventure will have. I want to say this table exists in Ars Magica as part of their random story generator for adventures in Arcadia, where everything you do is part of a story that the faeries try to mold around you.
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Dec 15, 2014 05:06
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Plague of Hats posted:A preview of 100 Awful Tables to Make Your Games Seriously the Worst. Coming soon to Lee's Lists.
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Dec 15, 2014 05:08
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Dec 15, 2014 05:13
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Well never mind then.
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Dec 15, 2014 05:27
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Honestly, using that list of dramatic situations to come up with ideas is great. But using it as a random table seems pretty poo poo, yep. Put down the dice and just pick the most interesting situation. On the other hand, the first one for story elements is cool to use as a random table, I think. There's a wounded crone in the Green Weasel Inn. She tells you of the Slayer of Mirrors that lies abandoned in the stormy desert where the invisible owl lives. Sounds like a perfectly D&D-esque quest to me! Edit: and just re-roll the crap. A passionate gaming piece isn't ringing any bells, but a dying gaming piece? Now there's something I can hang a quest on. A too-rich-for-his-own-good motherfucker needs you to go get medicine for his sick meeples. Along the way you find out that they are fully sentient and enslaved. But he's offering you so much money... Jimbozig fucked around with this message at 06:04 on Dec 15, 2014 |
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Dec 15, 2014 05:59
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There is always an element of aid in Big Tables of Random Plot Events, but all too often they're a really restrictive, weird, lazy list. Or they were. I'm mostly thinking of Rolemaster's GM products with 1-100 tables for goddamn everything, so you have "87. The prince of an allied kingdom has fallen ill." and then "88. The princess of an allied kingdom has fallen ill." Like, gently caress, just don't make the table if you're going to do that. Meanwhile, while there are some hiccoughs here or there, I love the Holdfast Creation tables from Iron Edda.
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Dec 15, 2014 06:03
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Kai Tave posted:What's funny is that Halo did the same thing...there was this whole complex backstory and history that never made it into the game itself, much of which never even made it into any game, so unless you read the website and the novels and the promotional comics and whatever the hell else you'd never know, for example, the Master Chief was originally a kidnapped child turned child soldier put through unethical super-soldier experiments designed to give the oppressive Earth government a tool to use against rebellious colonists, but then suddenly aliens show up and gosh, wouldn't you know we have all these super-soldiers lying around, guess that sure was a stroke of good luck! Does any of this have any bearing on the game whatsoever? Sure doesn't! What's funny, is that I legit liked the Halo backstory novels more than the games themselves. But I have a weakness for milscifi.
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Dec 15, 2014 06:10
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Jimbozig posted:Honestly, using that list of dramatic situations to come up with ideas is great. But using it as a random table seems pretty poo poo, yep. Put down the dice and just pick the most interesting situation. It always bears repeating: there's nothing wrong with using random roll tables and such for inspiration. It's when they start dictating things that's the problem.
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Dec 15, 2014 06:13
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Error 404 posted:What's funny, is that I legit liked the Halo backstory novels more than the games themselves. My love for Halo began and ended with Eric S Nylund penning the books. Some drat good stuff those were. On the topic of Planescape... the very IDEA of planescape to me was always genius. Infinite planes each with an overriding theme where "Weird and Esoteric poo poo" happens. The actual written stuff on them was never as good as our group just slamming Spelljammer into the middle of it, and making a big sprawling adventure based out of a city that has portals to every plane. "Where we going today? The plane of shadow? Better bring a torch!" "But you cant get there from a portal!" "To the SHIP!" To that end i think the problem with these source books is too many people take what is there and keep it at that, instead of using them as they should be used. Sources of inspiration for your own take on things.
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Dec 15, 2014 06:47
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Error 404 posted:What's funny, is that I legit liked the Halo backstory novels more than the games themselves. Well one of the big feathers of the Halo franchise was Bungie's ability to successfully spin it into things like novels that a ton of people bought and read, including people with no interest in playing the games. Surprisingly it turns out that having a whole bunch of bullshit backstory that's only useful for reading on the toilet actually comes in handy when you decide to package it up for that exact purpose. I mean, none of it ever really mattered to the games until they decided to make Halo: Reach and even then only tangentially, but at least they recognized that all that stuff was better served as literal books if they weren't going to bother doing anything else with it.
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Dec 15, 2014 06:51
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For a second there I thought Karen Traviss wrote a lot more Halo novels but she only wrote three. Gears of War was the series she was given way more influence on, not that it mattered. Halo really dodged a bullet there though.
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Dec 15, 2014 07:00
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Parent of loaf.
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Dec 15, 2014 07:32
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I found a William Gibson interview that has a relevant section re: Gameable content:William Gibson posted:I remember these guys turned up from RPG company after Neuromancer came out – they wanted to make a game. They set me down and questioned me about the world. They asked me where the food in the Sprawl comes from. I said I don't know. I don't even know what they eat. A lot of krill and poo poo. They looked at each other and said it's not gamable. That was the end of it. Just think, we could have had a Neuromancer RPG if only the designers had been able to come up with a quasi-element plane of krill and poo poo.
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Dec 15, 2014 07:39
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AmiYumi posted:One of the Pathfinder adventure paths has this; whatever the bad guy's plan was, it centered around casting a spell from a scroll with a Use Magic Device check (or something, I don't remember the details). If you were thinking "how loving groggy a GM would you have to be to actually make that roll straight", well, it's written right there into the "villain tactics" section what to do when your bad guy stands up, makes his "JUST AS PLANNED" speech, then nothing happens and he awkwardly shuffles out of the room, never to be seen again. Which adventure path was this?
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Dec 15, 2014 07:40
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Kai Tave posted:When the party reaches Section Q, roll d100 on table 10-3 to determine the sort of resolution that the adventure will have. The bolded one is where the PCs realize the entire adventure was just the setup to a terrible dad joke.
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Dec 15, 2014 09:46
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Meanwhile on the note of simulationism, over in the Shadowrun forums, someone is getting sad that their need to make the proper immersive world has excluded PCs existing, and has yet to realize what the actual flaw here is. Simulationism is the idea that the best game is the one you can never play. It is the death of actual gaming.
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Dec 15, 2014 11:06
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ProfessorCirno posted:It is the death of actual gaming. It's the absence of gaming. It's gaming without gaming. Sounds kinda zen, perhaps us mere mortal gamers haven't reached a sufficient level of enlightenment to fully comprehend the sublime majesty of simulationism.
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Dec 15, 2014 12:31
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