|
ProfessorCirno posted: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. Can you post a link? I really want to read this.
|
#
?
Dec 15, 2014 13:14
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 26, 2024 09:25 |
|
|
ProfessorCirno posted: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.
|
|
#
?
Dec 15, 2014 13:29
|
|
|
This talk of LPs and simulatonist/gamist stuff is making me wonder if you could run one of the more gamified games like Illbleed. Like, absolutely everything revolves around game mechanics, but played in a really surreal manner. Like, some ancient wizard, the last hero from a more chaotic time, builds a
|
|
#
?
Dec 15, 2014 15:45
|
|
|
At least in my experience simulationist games are less the problem than the sort of no fun spergs they attract. Sorta similar to the really bad drama school kids that flock to story games and the super racist people that seem to love Legend of the Five Rings.
|
|
#
?
Dec 15, 2014 16:01
|
|
|
ProfessorCirno posted: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.
|
|
#
?
Dec 15, 2014 16:04
|
|
|
Did their sessions consist of the DM and players staring at each other from across the table until the pizza man arrived?
|
|
#
?
Dec 15, 2014 16:09
|
|
|
That's how I normally play D&D
|
|
#
?
Dec 15, 2014 16:13
|
|
|
FMguru posted:There was a guy quoted in a previous grognards.txt whose long-running D&D campaign was so simulation-minded that it was literally impossible for adventurers to do anything because if there was anything to do, someone (probably higher level) would have already done it. Like, your party will never hear of a haunted tomb full of treasure outside of town because the likelihood of you being the first to hear about it were roughly zero, so some other party of adventurers would have already cleaned it out by the time you got there, and so on. Being the first group of people to be handed a map by a grizzled old man in a tavern was an obviously unrealistic dramatic contrivance, and the DM was having none of that. It was literally a world without plot hooks. Was this the mustard mafia guy? Because gently caress that story, the GM is so terrible at it (GMing).
|
|
#
?
Dec 15, 2014 16:18
|
|
|
PresidentBeard posted:Did their sessions consist of the DM and players staring at each other from across the table until the pizza man arrived? It was like someone took that old criticism of Forgotten Realms - that canonically, there shouldn't be anything significant for the players to do, because if something was significant one of the super-NPCs (Elminster, etc.) would have taken care of it already - and built a whole campaign around that.
|
|
#
?
Dec 15, 2014 16:21
|
|
|
The super-NPCs solve everything, then get old and open a lethal theme park of their adventures. Because the age of heroes is over and young people these days are wimps. 
|
|
#
?
Dec 15, 2014 16:40
|
|
|
For some reason I feel like a game based around commodity trading and over analyzing charts is the height of roleplaying according to a majority of grognards.
|
|
#
?
Dec 15, 2014 16:41
|
|
|
NachtSieger posted:Was this the mustard mafia guy? Because gently caress that story, the GM is so terrible at it (GMing). Man that guy was awesome. The idea of having to go through painstaking lengths just to open up a plot, it'd be like a show pilot with an hour long cold open.
|
|
#
?
Dec 15, 2014 16:52
|
|
|
RocknRollaAyatollah posted:For some reason I feel like a game based around commodity trading and over analyzing charts is the height of roleplaying according to a majority of grognards. Hey now, Traveller is a lot of fun with the right group.
|
|
#
?
Dec 15, 2014 17:33
|
|
|
FMguru posted:"you guys are ambitious would-be criminals just arrived in a city where powerful mafias have already divided up all the territory and rackets and don't like outsiders, what do you do?" Grand Theft Greyhawk
|
|
#
?
Dec 15, 2014 17:36
|
|
|
BatteredFeltFedora posted:Hey now, Traveller is a lot of fun with the right group. Yeah, but the fun part of Traveller trading is when your speculative trade goods turn out to be worthless at your destination and oh gently caress the ship's mortgage payment is due basically now and where are we gonna get that loving money from!?
|
|
#
?
Dec 15, 2014 17:36
|
|
|
FMguru posted:There was a guy quoted in a previous grognards.txt whose long-running D&D campaign was so simulation-minded that it was literally impossible for adventurers to do anything because if there was anything to do, someone (probably higher level) would have already done it. Like, your party will never hear of a haunted tomb full of treasure outside of town because the likelihood of you being the first to hear about it were roughly zero, so some other party of adventurers would have already cleaned it out by the time you got there, and so on. Being the first group of people to be handed a map by a grizzled old man in a tavern was an obviously unrealistic dramatic contrivance, and the DM was having none of that. It was literally a world without plot hooks. FMguru posted:IIRC the players had to bust their rear end to find (or created) a profitable yet unfilled niche to exploit (why, yes, the DM also built insanely detailed and "realistic" trade and currency tables) and work to hold onto it. It was less a game of heroic monsterbashing adventure and more a game of "you guys are ambitious would-be criminals just arrived in a city where powerful mafias have already divided up all the territory and rackets and don't like outsiders, what do you do?". I think the answer was the party got involved in hijacking and reselling shipments of kegs of mustard seed. Which I guess could be fun if you wanted to play Dope Wars 1100AD and not Dungeons & Dragons, but man what a weird way to play. I can't help but wonder what the players must have been like if they wound up in other people's games. Did they revel in their freedom, or were they upset that they had stuff to do?
|
|
#
?
Dec 15, 2014 17:40
|
|
|
AlphaDog posted:Can you post a link? I really want to read this. Done The best part of it is that it all stems from "Hey, this expensive and powerful and useful item that the PCs want - shouldn't it really screw over the PCs without them realizing it?" The bright side is that most of the thread (though depressingly not all) reacts with "why on earth are you screwing over the PCs for no reason?" and when the answer is "verisimiitude!" they respond in turn with "that's dumb."
|
|
#
?
Dec 15, 2014 17:54
|
|
|
Galaga Galaxian posted:Yeah, but the fun part of Traveller trading is when your speculative trade goods turn out to be worthless at your destination and oh gently caress the ship's mortgage payment is due basically now and where are we gonna get that loving money from!? That's how you know it's the right group.
|
|
#
?
Dec 15, 2014 18:04
|
|
|
BatteredFeltFedora posted:Hey now, Traveller is a lot of fun with the right group. A broken clock is only right two times a day. EDIT: I'd like to imagine all grognards own a copy of the film Trading Places. RocknRollaAyatollah fucked around with this message at 18:13 on Dec 15, 2014 |
|
#
?
Dec 15, 2014 18:09
|
|
|
We do it's a part of membership inspection.
|
|
#
?
Dec 15, 2014 18:17
|
|
|
The other thing about the Traveller trade tables (and fuel costs and maintenance rules etc.) is that they're specifically designed to make free-trading a shoestring operation with enough randomness that they essentially require the PCs to do PC-like things in order to stay solvent. Similarly, the world creation tables are biased towards creating a mixture of strange worlds with an incongruous collection of tech levels, government types, and physical forms and not a reasoned, ordered, sensible stellar polity.
|
|
#
?
Dec 15, 2014 18:22
|
|
|
FMguru posted:The other thing about the Traveller trade tables (and fuel costs and maintenance rules etc.) is that they're specifically designed to make free-trading a shoestring operation with enough randomness that they essentially require the PCs to do PC-like things in order to stay solvent. Similarly, the world creation tables are biased towards creating a mixture of strange worlds with an incongruous collection of tech levels, government types, and physical forms and not a reasoned, ordered, sensible stellar polity. And half the fun of those weird worlds is figuring out how they got that way. The Third Imperium setting is designed to justify this sort of weirdness, which I always appreciated. It's also why I like the Traveller character generation system, potential death and all - you get the framework, then you get to figure out the story to hang on it. Often lifepath generation throws you a curve and inspires creativity is backstory and roleplaying. Depends on the game, though.
|
|
#
?
Dec 15, 2014 18:28
|
|
|
FMguru posted:"you guys are ambitious would-be criminals just arrived in a city where powerful mafias have already divided up all the territory and rackets and don't like outsiders, what do you do?". No lie, that's a really good campaign concept in the right hands.
|
|
#
?
Dec 15, 2014 18:42
|
|
|
Ratpick posted:The bolded one is where the PCs realize the entire adventure was just the setup to a terrible dad joke. The PCs reach the villain's stronghold. "We're here to defeat you!" "Welcome, Here to Defeat You, I'm Garland the Destroyer!"
|
|
#
?
Dec 15, 2014 18:44
|
|
|
Doodmons posted:No lie, that's a really good campaign concept in the right hands. In the right hands with a proactive group of players, absolutely, The kind of GM who says "all the plot hooks have been occupied by NPCs better than you" is not the right hands.
|
|
#
?
Dec 15, 2014 18:46
|
|
|
Galaga Galaxian posted:Yeah, but the fun part of Traveller trading is when your speculative trade goods turn out to be worthless at your destination and oh gently caress the ship's mortgage payment is due basically now and where are we gonna get that loving money from!? Yea trade games can be fun, but the major fun comes from poo poo like 'ha you believed that space elf who told you these fruits were exotic luxuries? Dude these grow all over in this section of space you got space scammed' and then oh poo poo how are we gonna get our money now. It feels like the platonic grog ideal of games is just comparing spreadsheets.
|
|
#
?
Dec 15, 2014 18:48
|
|
|
Doodmons posted:No lie, that's a really good campaign concept in the right hands. FMguru fucked around with this message at 18:53 on Dec 15, 2014 |
|
#
?
Dec 15, 2014 18:48
|
|
|
Waffleman_ posted:The PCs reach the villain's stronghold. "I, Dad-form Garland, will knock-knock you all down!"
|
|
#
?
Dec 15, 2014 19:01
|
|
|
Sounds like the Ron Paul RPG.
|
|
#
?
Dec 15, 2014 19:07
|
|
|
Lynx Winters posted:In the right hands with a proactive group of players, absolutely, The kind of GM who says "all the plot hooks have been occupied by NPCs better than you" is not the right hands. Though to be honest there is a great deal of fun to be had undermining and playing around a bad GM, who is too oblivious or socially stunted to call you on it.
|
|
#
?
Dec 15, 2014 19:07
|
|
|
FMguru posted:There was a guy quoted in a previous grognards.txt whose long-running D&D campaign was so simulation-minded that it was literally impossible for adventurers to do anything because if there was anything to do, someone (probably higher level) would have already done it. Like, your party will never hear of a haunted tomb full of treasure outside of town because the likelihood of you being the first to hear about it were roughly zero, so some other party of adventurers would have already cleaned it out by the time you got there, and so on. Being the first group of people to be handed a map by a grizzled old man in a tavern was an obviously unrealistic dramatic contrivance, and the DM was having none of that. It was literally a world without plot hooks. I had a GM in Werewolf: The Forsaken of all things that was really into that poo poo. We lost out on a few ''quests'' because we didn't act fast enough. No matter that we were like 3 players and there were roughly 9 different plot lines happening at the same time. We had a huge loving monster living underground in our area that was going to be awakened if we didn't stop it, there was a crazed werewolf hiding in the woods ready to kill us, the locals wanted to drive us out of town, a neighbor pack was considering going to war with us for our turf and god knows what else. Then a hiker went missing and since we didn't have time to look for him (we were busy dying to the huge gently caress off worm) and my character ended up in the ICU for a couple of months, the situation escalated and a bunch of people died. Turns out the hiker had been infected by some evil spirits and just spread that poo poo around the town, resulting in a huge death count. I'M SO SORRY IMAGINARY HIKER, WE SHOULD HAVE LOOKED FOR YOU. poo poo, is there a name for when a GM treats his NPCs like real people and his players as NPCs? Because I have stories about that.
|
|
#
?
Dec 15, 2014 19:21
|
|
|
ravenkult posted:poo poo, is there a name for when a GM treats his NPCs like real people and his players as NPCs? Because I have stories about that. Terrible storytelling. I don't think there really is a good name for that. I had a similar experience in a Werewolf the Forsaken larp and the ST still ran things on rails even though there were only 3-4 regular players. We were pretty much playing tabletop and he still kept on acting like there were 20 regular players in his game.
|
|
#
?
Dec 15, 2014 20:52
|
|
|
I had a GM who was devilishly clever at playing tactical chess with us but more importantly had this giant gameworld and a massive history and culture laid out. When we started the game he gave us a choice of several time periods to play in, each slightly before/during major world events. We the PCs could influence them and change things from the 'canon' history, but that history was always ticking away in the background of what we were doing. It meant that time spent traveling or healing mattered, because you couldn't just lollygag around the countryside until you were higher level or stumbled over the right clue. It was also a 'hard' campaign where money and support were scarce and many setting elements were variously aligned against us. We knew this would be the case going in. This was probably one of the only fun adversarial GM games I've ever been in, but while the GM was very much playing against us and trying to kill us and all that, he was playing by his own rules for his creation. He also liked it when we tried to be clever versus just doing what the rules specified (ie "attack things") and talking to enemy factions was usually an option. All of those things would annoy me if handled poorly. Tabletop campaigns don't generally trigger my completionist habits the way computer games might so the time limit (which we never actually knew exactly, just that it was there) added tension rather than being an inevitable ticker down to us failing, the adversarial tactics were fun but not the GM trying to show himself as our superior, and the detailed world had pieces that interacted with each other in the background and this showed up in the game itself--it was part of the mystery we were solving. There were in fact valid IC reasons why the larger players in the setting weren't looking at what we were looking at and why they had other things to worry about. Which is to say it was a pretty good game, though alas in a heavily-houseruled 3E. I wouldn't want to play that way all the time, but it was fun for that campaign.
|
|
#
?
Dec 15, 2014 21:01
|
|
|
My pet peeve in that Werewolf game was how the GM just gave the benefit of the doubt (for lack of a better word) to every NPC he had created. Like we'd be low on everything, from weapons or ammo to magical ''juice'' to fuel our powers (I've already forgotten the terms for this in Werewolf) and we'd have to fight 2 vs 6 and they'd have military grade equipment and be fully charged, never wounded, never caught by surprise. Meanwhile our team was half dead, carried pistols (we couldn't buy anything better because of REALISM). poo poo sucked. fake edit: In the same game I tried to Intimidate an 80 year old priest and even on a sucess, it wasn't enough for the GM. When I tried to grab his throat to scare him, the old man did some Krav Maga poo poo and reversed the hold. Turns out the GM thought the priest would have at least 2 dots in Brawl. 
|
|
#
?
Dec 15, 2014 23:10
|
|
|
I don't necessarily think that there's anything wrong with the idea of a GM tossing a handful of threats and challenges into the air and letting the ones that the players can't/don't focus on develop into further complications down the line. I mean, there's a difference between hardcore simulationist sperg "my campaign setting NEVER SLEEPS, now please hold while I roll a million dice to determine how these various events play out" and "there are three pressing dangers, you have enough time to handle two." I would say that this is a case where it comes down to execution rather than it being a sign of bad GMing period.
|
|
#
?
Dec 15, 2014 23:12
|
|
|
A lot of those hardcore simulationist gamers probably don't have Asperger's, but rather a boner for making a living, breathing campaign by doing things all the wrong way. Not to mention the overall nerd obsession with "realism" which is a misuse of the phrase "consistent." Using "sperg" as a pejorative towards them is a bad idea people shouldn't do. Libertad! fucked around with this message at 23:17 on Dec 15, 2014 |
|
#
?
Dec 15, 2014 23:13
|
|
|
Kai Tave posted:I don't necessarily think that there's anything wrong with the idea of a GM tossing a handful of threats and challenges into the air and letting the ones that the players can't/don't focus on develop into further complications down the line. I mean, there's a difference between hardcore simulationist sperg "my campaign setting NEVER SLEEPS, now please hold while I roll a million dice to determine how these various events play out" and "there are three pressing dangers, you have enough time to handle two." I would say that this is a case where it comes down to execution rather than it being a sign of bad GMing period. I kinda agree. In my case we were severely penalized for that stuff. Imagine your GM basically tells you ''Yeah because of your inaction, you're totally responsible for the deaths of 10 kids and 50 other people. Yep, all your fault.'' Might be a fluke I guess, the same GM took my young, promising Paladin in a D&D campaign and threw him (and the rest of the party) in prison for 20 years, having him emerge as an old paraplegic man and wanting to continue the campaign. Is there a ''lovely GMs'' thread?
|
|
#
?
Dec 15, 2014 23:17
|
|
|
ravenkult posted:Might be a fluke I guess, the same GM took my young, promising Paladin in a D&D campaign and threw him (and the rest of the party) in prison for 20 years, having him emerge as an old paraplegic man and wanting to continue the campaign. sounds like the american justice system to me  check out the cat piss thread
|
|
#
?
Dec 15, 2014 23:19
|
|
|
ravenkult posted:I kinda agree. In my case we were severely penalized for that stuff. Imagine your GM basically tells you ''Yeah because of your inaction, you're totally responsible for the deaths of 10 kids and 50 other people. Yep, all your fault.'' Yeah, in this case it sounds like your GM basically wanted to use it as an excuse to rub your nose in inescapable failure instead of using it as a way to generate further plot hooks/challenges for you to deal with. It's definitely not a concept that necessarily works for all games or groups, and there's nothing wrong with keeping things squarely focused on the PCs and whatever lies in their immediate sphere of influence only.
|
|
#
?
Dec 15, 2014 23:23
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 26, 2024 09:25 |
|
|
Mormon Star Wars posted: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. Also everyone would love a Bad Gamemasters thread, but I imagine most of those stories go on the Notable Gaming Experiences thread.
|
|
#
?
Dec 15, 2014 23:51
|
|
