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homullus posted:Make sure lots of characters have secrets they're keeping, most of which are not related to the actual mystery, but provides reason for them to lie to/mislead/avoid investigators. That's very in-genre, but might piss the players off if they spend ages chasing their tails while the plot happens around them. Actually, that's a point:what's the plan if they want to spend an hour interrogating the waiter who legit saw nothing? I'd recommend having a few "suddenly, mobsters" encounters pre-genned. Ideally with wide-mouthed mooks who love to sneer that 'the boss don't like people who ask too many questions', etc.
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Mar 4, 2015 00:09
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homullus posted:Make sure lots of characters have secrets they're keeping, most of which are not related to the actual mystery, but provides reason for them to lie to/mislead/avoid investigators. Have a plot that proceeds with or without the players -- like fronts in Apocalypse World-y games -- possibly more than one. For example, there could be a killer on the loose who coincidentally murdered somebody implicated in a larger conspiracy. Some of the clues and revelations will be related to a string of murders, some will point to the high level of the conspiracy, but connecting the two will bedevil the PCs because there is no connection other than that one murder. Ideally, though, both the murderer and the shadowy conspiracy are moved to rash actions by the PCs' investigations. It leaves you all sorts of room for an innocent man to end up on Death Row, or a femme fatale to be killed in a case of mistaken identity, powerful allies to lose their positions due to erroneous suspicions, or whatever. I'm not trying to be mean but have you ever run a mystery game? This is so far off from my experience that I can't imagine it working. Even in the most clear cut mystery without any GM intervention at all, the PCs will invent their own outlandish theories; they will trust the wrong person and mistrust the right one; they will miss or misinterpret "obvious" clues. What you have proposed will, in my opinion, end up as a series of disconnected, disjointed scenes where events inexplicably occur around the PCs and they have no idea why - in other words, a universe in chaos - until the denouement, where you finally provide some context to the random poo poo that happened. Here's what to do: Make a basic mystery with a series of clues (the spine) Hang a bunch of color off of it (the ribs), just sketches of characters and motivations. There's no independent plot, it only advances in front of the players Be ready to completely change the case to something better if the players come up with a theory/motivation you like Remember that KNOWING someone is lying and PROVING it are two different things This has served me well for many years
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Mar 4, 2015 00:18
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Yeah important parts of the genre: the killer is among the first people the protagonists meet everyone is lying but only one person is lying about committing the murder protagonists hit rock bottom before figuring out the mystery
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Mar 4, 2015 00:25
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For a mystery game, I'm always fond of placing a few hidden clues and items around to lead the players. Classic examples like the secret diary, a keepsake locket, a certain type of perfume, someone's personal snuffbox, etc. etc.
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Mar 4, 2015 01:47
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The biggest asset you can have in a mystery-centric game is a group of players who'll talk through their theories at the table, so that you can adjust on the fly to ensure that you can plan for the inevitable "we are convinced that the wrong guy was actually the killer and now we will prove it no matter what the evidence shows" derail.
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Mar 4, 2015 04:55
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:I'm not trying to be mean but have you ever run a mystery game? This is so far off from my experience that I can't imagine it working. Even in the most clear cut mystery without any GM intervention at all, the PCs will invent their own outlandish theories; they will trust the wrong person and mistrust the right one; they will miss or misinterpret "obvious" clues. What you have proposed will, in my opinion, end up as a series of disconnected, disjointed scenes where events inexplicably occur around the PCs and they have no idea why - in other words, a universe in chaos - until the denouement, where you finally provide some context to the random poo poo that happened. No, I don't think you're being mean. I have run GUMSHOE games. I think there's a difference between mystery-centered and noir games, though, and what I was putting forth was the latter rather than the former. In both cases, you give them clues to (or let the things they latch onto become the clues to) advance the story. If the goal of the game is "solve the mystery and be declared heroes for unraveling the knot," what I described is terrible and... well, not unsolvable, but as you say, near certain to leave at least some events unexplained until the end, when somebody's already been poisoned/gut-shot/fit with a cement overcoat. The stated desire was "very noir" and "interesting characters before they self-destruct,", though, right? Not The Secret of the Haunted Mansion.
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Mar 4, 2015 15:04
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homullus posted:The stated desire was "very noir" and "interesting characters before they self-destruct,", though, right? Not The Secret of the Haunted Mansion. Right but I don't think what you've suggested is going to produce Noir outcomes either. There's just too much information that's not player-facing and so it's going to seem random. The thing about Noir is that the protagonist is allowed to think that he's seen and done it all, that he has it under control, and then the situation spirals out of control/is not what it seems to be. It's going to be very difficult to have the PCs sucked into the orbit of a self-destructing NPC. Most players are naturally risk-averse and slightly sociopathic in-character so unlike a real Noir, the PCs aren't going to be horny and stupid enough to follow Judie The Dame's advice to steal the envelope and give it to her. If I were going to do a Noir I would have the characters do a short standard straightforward mystery. Afterwards, Buron Fitts, District Attorney for the County of Los Angeles contacts them and reveals that they have in fact been duped and running errands for a mob boss and he's going to prosecute them unless they do a few favors for him...now you have leverage and counter-leverage. Maybe someone can help them out, or has something on Fitts? Squeeze the players mercilessly. This is going to be tough. I've never run a true Noir mystery that worked. They always collapse because PCs, when placed under the pressure of your average Noir protag, bail the gently caress out.
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Mar 4, 2015 18:16
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:PCs, when placed under the pressure of your average Noir protag, bail the gently caress out. This is true. The kind of pressure that a character realistically faces to put themselves in a noir situation in the first place, such as crushing amounts of debt to the kind of person who will loving kill you if you don't get their money, doesn't quite fully translate from the character to the player. Players will gamble on the GM playing along with their oddball schemes, and instead of pursuing a dangerous case will instead spend their 2 weeks until deadline trying to skip town or preparing an elaborate death trap for whatever mob enforcer is coming for them. Thinking from that perspective, you might consider a middle of the road approach in which solving the case will also solve their problem. Maybe one of the PCs is suspect #1 for this murder according to some suspicious circumstances regarding the time and place of the murder, and cracking the case will clear their name.
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Mar 4, 2015 19:16
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deadly_pudding posted:Thinking from that perspective, you might consider a middle of the road approach in which solving the case will also solve their problem. Maybe one of the PCs is suspect #1 for this murder according to some suspicious circumstances regarding the time and place of the murder, and cracking the case will clear their name. And they still need a reason to not just try to skip town or fake their death or whatever. Players have a nasty tendency to do exactly what the GM doesn't want them to do, sometimes purely to spite them.
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Mar 4, 2015 21:07
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Maybe hold something of theirs hostage? So like instead of trying to clear their own name they might be trying to clear a friend's name?
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Mar 4, 2015 21:22
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:
I think that would be an acceptable outcome, though. The Noir protagonist sometimes DOES try to bail out; it never, ever works, at least not exactly as intended ("Yay, we made it! Hey . . . where's Oksana?").
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Mar 4, 2015 22:13
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So, I'm running a short series of Fantasy Flight Star Wars sessions as part of a gaming gimmick me and my group is putting together. I've already had a really good climatic session where the players encounter the main villain and did something suitably insane. How should I handle the falling action I have time to do? Further Detail: So the party, Fate Fortune, was assembled by a Hutt crime lord to venture to a ghost ship that mysteriously disappeared 40 years prior to the campaign start. The Hutt provided Fate's Fortune with a map to the starship, the Titan, which had gone missing during the Empire. The party arrived on the ship, to find around 80,000 people on the 5km ship still alive. Also on the ship were 100,000 'zombies,' an Imperial experiment to test a gas. They snuck their way into the bridge, where the slicer was able to get the entire ship to work with a series of rolls. The ship was undamaged, as the Emperor's Hand conducting the experiment had full control of the ship and just shut things off. The party stole the Titan after taking control and jury-rigging the command bridge to work with the party size. They manage to get the ship to Imperial Remnant and the Remnant has let them claim the ship as salvage. What are some things they could run into as they are settling in to their new ship?
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Mar 5, 2015 00:05
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Kai Tave posted:Yes, yes you can. We did it all the time, in pretty much every game we played. That's what I'm telling you, that this is an opinion born of dysfunctional game groups. It is not in fact the stone cold truth and if this is what you've come to believe then I'm genuinely sorry but you've been playing with lovely groups, not "the default." You've put up with bad gaming and then decided that that's how all gaming has to be. Like, I'm not trying to be patronizing here, but the situations were reversed...if you were a player talking about how lovely railroading GMs with their terrible DMPCs or sandbox games full of nothing except tedious table-rolling to see what monsters you encounter, would you be going "well I guess this is just what being a player in an RPG is about" or would you be going "man, this guy sucks?" So I was reading the Next Thread and I read this conversation (quoting a snippet of it here) and I got to thinking. I've been running a 13th Age game for a while now, maybe since like November? I've been enjoying it I think, but despite my players telling me they've been having fun, I'm worried that they really aren;t and are just being nice, you know? What Kai tave is talking about here seems like a very odd experience to me, where, apparently, all the players are super interested in world building and put in a lot of effort into the game and suchlike. I have a pretty hard time trying to get the people I play with to do stuff like "read the actual book" and "come up with a motivation for your character that isn't just pickpocketing random civilians". Every time I've tried to encourage them to build or flesh out a setting or to be collaborative in any way with the game they just don't, I try to advise them to try this kind of thing but it's honestly a huge pain to even get them to even be proactive and take initiative rather than just sit blandly staring at the wall when not in immediate mortal peril. In my gaming buddies circle, I had two people who were really creative and proactive (Doug and Amir), but they had to leave because of real life issues, and since then I'm not sure that the players are getting everything out of it that I want them to. If I try to do actual, fun roleplaying stuff, mysteries and adventure, interacting with NPCs and stuff, I get the distinct impression, from one or two people especially, that they are just kind of "putting up with" that aspect of the game until we get to the killin', and then when we get to the actual combat, any time that we are not on someone's turn, the iPhones immediately come out and zero attention is paid to what is going on. I've asked the people in my group a few times if they aren't enjoying themselves, if there are things they like or dislike about what I'm doing and such, but the most I ever get is just a "I had fun, it's good." Am I just being paranoid here? Have I just read this post and, since it conformed to my own hopes about what we could get out of gaming, I've just took it at its word when, in fact, how my game is is how it usually is? Where I'm the one who DMs because no one else can be bothered to DM on any kind of regular basis and I'm the only one who knows any game outside of D&D? Is it actually completely fine that one girl plays the exact same character every game and just tries to pickpocket random civilians all the time instead of actually adventuring? Am I expecting too much and the players are having fun and everything is fine? I'm kind of enjoying myself, but I don't think I will finish the campaign if this is all everyone wants from the game, without just becoming burnt out on running encounters with increasingly bigger numbers and making a bunch of stuff for everyone to do and then just being sad each week when they aren't interested in it. It doesn't help that getting everyone to turn up is kind of a struggle. Aside from Amir, who said that because of school he couldn't make it for the foreseeable future, we haven't had everyone show up and participate in a game since just before Christmas. I think it is just that I'm not a great DM maybe and they don't want to say for whatever reason. But again, I also play in a Star Wars d6 game with two of the people who play in my 13th Age game (Stu and Andrew) and me, the DM and Doug, who was in my old 4e game, are the only ones who seem invested a lot of the time. Stu and Andrew seem similarly distracted and disinterested occasionally while still professing to be having a blast, so maybe they are just getting something different out of it than I am and I should stop complaining. I think Andrew of them, who is fairly new is just picking up bad habits from some of the other players, since he can get really into character and really started getting into Dungeon World, following Amir's lead the one time I could get everyone to try it. This was probably just a big rant, but I've been stewing on this kind of since Saturday when the Star Wars DM and I got drunk and talke about gaming for a while, since we're so cool and popular, and I think I needed to get this off my chest, and where better than a semi-anonymous internet message board.
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Mar 5, 2015 00:23
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Prison Warden posted:So I was reading the Next Thread and I read this conversation (quoting a snippet of it here) and I got to thinking. I believe Kai Tave's experience is not the typical one. Kai Tave believes your experience and my experiences are not the typical ones. I don't think they're all quite as far as yours is on the solipsism scale, but I really do think it is more common for players to approach campaigns as grouped single-player, not-collaborative experiences. I think that is in the process of changing as there are both more ways to find good groups and more games that explicitly support or even require collaboration.
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Mar 5, 2015 00:30
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Anyone know where I can buy a bunch of figurines for battles and stuff? Maybe little cards to piece together battlemaps?
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Mar 5, 2015 00:32
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Turtlicious posted:Anyone know where I can buy a bunch of figurines for battles and stuff? Maybe little cards to piece together battlemaps?
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Mar 5, 2015 00:39
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Prison Warden posted:...the iPhones immediately come out and zero attention is paid to what is going on...one girl plays the exact same character every game and just tries to pickpocket random civilians all the time ...getting everyone to turn up is kind of a struggle. The part I bolded is the part I knew I was going to be reading right after I started scanning your post. See, the problem here is that you have absolutely unengaged players and this is their "default fun". This is surprisingly common, so common that I've talked about it before, years ago, in this very thread. So I'm going to let Younger Me say a few things at this point about it, since none of this has really changed: Megaman's Jockstrap posted:The reality is, every campaign has players that are not going to be engaged with the game at various times. When this happens, one of the first symptoms is absenteeism. Reason 1 of why people disengage from the game is because they aren't having fun. Reason 2 is usually player attitude; they consider RPG time to be "default" fun, which is to say the player has the following attitude: I will play if I can't find anything better to do. A couple more thoughts: 1) The Thief That Fucks with NPCs is actually The Player that Passive-Aggressively Fucks with the GM if you haven't figured that out. Here's what you do with that: tell them to knock it off, you and the other players are bored by it, and if they don't, kick them out. 2) No phones. If that kills the game, GOOD. They didn't want to be there, you were nothing more than background noise. Since you don't care about the campaign, and they don't care about the campaign enough to be honest with you, this is probably the end of the line. So now is your chance to practice some mediation skills and see if you can't sink one at the buzzer and turn this around. Edit: one last thing, you sound like a perfectly average GM with a bunch of poo poo players, so don't worry about that. Megaman's Jockstrap fucked around with this message at 01:36 on Mar 5, 2015 |
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Mar 5, 2015 00:55
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"So, I'm getting the impression y'all aren't too into this, wanna try something different, or is there anything we can change up? Also, fucks sake, put the drat phones away, it's pretty much saying that you find us boring when you pull them out. If you're bored, say so, and we'll work something out. Also, Dave, take a shower dude."
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Mar 5, 2015 01:38
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Everblight posted:The Pathfinder Battle Boxes have heavy (200pt+) cardstock punchout pieces with plastic standees that are FANTASTIC value. Does anyone know of similar stuff for cyberpunk?
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Mar 5, 2015 03:35
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I ask the players for feedback and reviews from time to time, and I like to run my games in 'seasons' with a discreet beginning, middle, and end. I try to judge when/what those points are based on the group. Sometimes my players prefer that I plan the arc; sometimes, they prefer to have an input on the direction a game is taking. All said I like to make a 'season' about 10 games or so. At the end of each season I give the players an option to renew or not, with some input for the next season ("I didn't like all the combat", for instance, might be an example of feedback). I find the presumption of the neverending game which strings week to week with no ending in sight except "when we get sick of it" tends to lead to ennui.
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Mar 5, 2015 05:40
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Mendrian posted:I find the presumption of the neverending game which strings week to week with no ending in sight except "when we get sick of it" tends to lead to ennui. A thousand times this. Hell, you can still play consecutive seasons in the same game with the same characters, but giving the players and plot a chance to periodically breathe outside of the expected chronology of a weekly game is... necessary. It's also a great way to focus your storytelling and push poo poo faster and harder for your players.
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Mar 5, 2015 06:23
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Prison Warden posted:Words about players... Yeah, I kind have a similar situation. Some of the people I play with are pretty good about playing characters and story elements. A couple of them I play with though; I think they have been skinner boxed to hell with PC games like diablo, marvel, and titan quest that they want the pen & paper games to be like that as well. They treat it like a PC game. Min/max characters, talk about meta gaming on whether to fight something..things of that nature. I just recently started playing as a player in a buddies campaign with them, who fleshed out a world, history, characters, but seems to have been ruined by the couple of the players going "we should fight that bear doing nothing because we need XP." and "what if the DM wants us to be lvl 2 at this point and so expects us to fight these things, so lets fight them." It becomes less of a what do we need to do for the story?, what would my character do? and more what gets us xp and items? . It doesn't help one guy runs campaigns of seeing how the players can break the game, seriously-- had an entire D&D 3/3.5 session that consistent nothing but using an unlimited amount of money/time to make any number of magical items to use on characters with no limitations outside of the limitations the rule books presented. I tried running a campaign the complete opposite, doing a no magic campaign with 2e, but that devolved into arguing about why the rogue was lvl 3 and them as fighters were only lvl 2 and how do we get better equipment if there is no magic. I'm not really sure what to do with players like this. vvvv- no, they've been playing pen/paper for at least 15 years, probably longer. I think in the past 10 they have become more like adventurer hobos-- homeless, riding the rails of the plot, killing and looting everything in sight. Jimbosaurus fucked around with this message at 07:17 on Mar 5, 2015 |
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Mar 5, 2015 07:03
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Find new ones, or talk to them. Try playing with a less crunch-focused system, something like Dungeon World, that might help. If they've not played a lot of ttrpgs, they might just be taking cues from the books, which are pretty much all about combat and equipment.
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Mar 5, 2015 07:09
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karmicknight posted:What are some things they could run into as they are settling in to their new ship? The Remnant let them keep the ship so long as they agree to serve as privateers. Time to go preying on shipping and raiding ports.
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Mar 5, 2015 09:19
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karmicknight posted:So, I'm running a short series of Fantasy Flight Star Wars sessions as part of a gaming gimmick me and my group is putting together. I've already had a really good climatic session where the players encounter the main villain and did something suitably insane. How should I handle the falling action I have time to do? Well, that Hutt's probably pretty irked that the party walked off with the starship he sent them to find, for one. Besides that, a 40 year old 5km long starship has got to be dripping with plot hooks: *The son of the guy who led the design team on the ship's engines and power relays came across evidence that his Dad cut some corners, and offers his help upgrading the systems to proper spec (whether or not he's legit is, of course, yet to be determined). *Some of those 'zombies' who were subjected to the gas turn out to have been high-value Rebel prisoners, back when there was still a Rebellion; their family members and friends, many of whom are now important personages in the Republic, want their bodies returned (bonus points if the PCs vaporized those particular 'zombies' on their way to the bridge). *A rumor starts floating around that somewhere in a cargo locker is a Valuable Item of Some Sort (insert your favorite MacGuffin here), which the PCs are entitled to if they can find it; how many cargo lockers can there be, right? *There's a crazed Rebel Intelligence officer hiding in the ducts of the ship who refuses to believe that the war is over, and has the PCs pegged as Imperial agents so he's creeping through the walls making their lives miserable by putting chemicals in their food to make them nauseous and stealing their creature comforts and short-sheeting their beds and stuff, all the while transmitting regular reports on the PCs' activities to a Rebellion listening post that has been inactive for twenty years. *The Imperial Remnant officials who okayed the salvage claim have a few favors to ask, "just to make sure the paperwork goes through okay, surely you understand." *None of the droids on the ship have had their memories wiped in 40 years, so they're probably all acting more than a little bit nutty right now. *Some of the gas that the Emperor's Hand was testing is still around in a canister in a cargo hold, and lots of people want it. *Most of the guns don't work, which means they're going to have a bitch of a time defending this massive juggernaut of a ship from a couple of pirates in rinky-dink frigates - and there are always pirates in rinky-dink frigates. (EDIT: and if you think the Imperials are particularly interested in helping the PCs put a suitable amount of guns on the ship - which would by definition make it a threat to any sizable task force or even a smaller fleet - you've got another think comin', pal) *There are contingency programs in place in the ship's main computer put into place by the Emperor or his Hand that start triggering, doing things like 'setting course for the Corellia System and charging the main guns' or 'flying into a nearby sun to prevent those blasted Rebels from stealing this mighty vessel.' *The Emperor's Hand, in defiance of his orders, kept a journal. The PCs find it. What secrets might they uncover? *Kuat Drive Yards (or whoever), who built the drat thing in the first place, have a legal claim to the ship, saying that it can't be salvage as it was never authorized for spaceflight in the first place (or whatever). The PCs can easily beat the case in court, they have clear salvage rights, but KDY can throw hordes of lawyers at them; if they want to keep the ship and they don't want to wait a decade for the case to run its course, they'll need to get a lawyer or three of their own. *The Emperor's Hand was in possession of a lightsaber, which was lost somewhere on the ship; it had once belonged to a famed Jedi Master. Some Jedi show up; they want that lightsaber back, whether they get it the easy way or the hard way. The hard way involves a lot of holes cut in bulkheads and possibly PCs. *Those 80,000 survivors are going to need to go somewhere. The Imperial Remnant has no real interest in resettling them; as far as they're concerned, all those people are the PC's concern. And after decades of 'hide from zombies' as their only real lifestyle choice, none of those people are particularly useful to the PCs. *The Titan was suspected stolen by the Rebellion back in the day; various automated defense systems throughout the Remnant still have it on their 'shoot on sight' list. And so on, and so forth. As someone whose slicer character has stolen a lot of ships they probably weren't supposed to have access to, believe me when I tell you there's no shortage of interesting stories to be told moving forward. DivineCoffeeBinge fucked around with this message at 10:40 on Mar 5, 2015 |
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Mar 5, 2015 10:36
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Also, exactly what happened to the zombies? I doubt the PCs just shot and stabbed 100,000 of them. With a 40 km starship with the population of a city, there's inevitably more than enough zombies hidden around the place to pose regular trouble. Maybe they need to hire "exterminators" of a sort to clean it out? Likewise, what if a few refugees hide out on the ship after the majority of the 80,000 are dropped off wherever they need to go? You could also combine these two quests, where the post-dropoff extermination of the zombies will involve sterilizing and killing everything aboard the ship and the PCs suddenly find innocent people hidden in the nooks and crannies that they need to rescue.
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Mar 5, 2015 15:03
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The group start to uncover more and more evidence of what the survivors had to do to keep themselves going. I'm thinking mad max on a ship. (Two sith enter, one sith leave!)
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Mar 5, 2015 16:39
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Cross postin' from the SHadowrun threadTurtlicious posted:Alright, just doing a sanity check and want to know how much I should plan ahead of time. This is Shadowrun under sixth world.
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Mar 8, 2015 06:57
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So Ares have a high-profile prisoner and ask their subsidiary, Knight Errant, to help with security. Of course a direct assault against Ares would be suicide; it's literally trying to rob a gun store. The runners will need some way to reduce Ares' superior firepower.... which is why before they try the extraction, they have to pull a run on Crystal Optics. Crystal Optics is an Ares subsidiary that does software/cyberware; the runners find out that Knight Errant's smartguns are all running the latest release of CO software. If they can hit CO, ruin the smartgun software, and force that to upload as a "patch" to KE just before they try to get the prisoner, it'll gently caress up the Knights' shooting and give the runners a big advantage. They find an inside man to get them access to the place, but while the runners are trying to work out a deal with him the Yakuza show up to take his hand. He's a frequent visitor to one of their bunraku parlors and he owes them a massive debt. Desperate, he turns to the runners for help: he'll get them access to the Ares facility if they can help him clear his debt to the Yakuza. So the Yakuza have a job for the runners to do... For some reason magical security is real tight around this prisoner. Before the runners can make the extraction they have to break into an armory on another floor of the facility to steal a canister of FAB, an astrally-present bacteria that feeds on magical energy. If they use the FAB around the prisoner's magical security it will help keep spirits and whatnot off of the runners while they break out the prisoner. When they finally break out this prisoner Ares has put so much protection on, they make a terrible discovery: it's a very powerful insect shaman. They can let him go and finish the job, but that means endangering the entire city. How they play it could set the tone for the next part of the campaign.
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Mar 8, 2015 19:59
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Everything Counts posted:So Ares have a high-profile prisoner and ask their subsidiary, Knight Errant, to help with security. Of course a direct assault against Ares would be suicide; it's literally trying to rob a gun store. The runners will need some way to reduce Ares' superior firepower.... which is why before they try the extraction, they have to pull a run on Crystal Optics. Crystal Optics is an Ares subsidiary that does software/cyberware; the runners find out that Knight Errant's smartguns are all running the latest release of CO software. If they can hit CO, ruin the smartgun software, and force that to upload as a "patch" to KE just before they try to get the prisoner, it'll gently caress up the Knights' shooting and give the runners a big advantage. I love this.
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Mar 9, 2015 02:45
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I am trying to put together a fantasy setting without Tolkien's trappings or imperialistic connotations; it is even harder than it sounds like. I have some decent ideas for a couple of civilizations, but should I develop those better or focus on the more generic features of the setting?
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Mar 9, 2015 15:51
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That entirely depends on what you mean by 'generic' features and how big a scope the campaign will have. Like, will most of it take place in one city or will the players be traveling the world?
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Mar 9, 2015 16:38
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Get your players together. Give them that pitch, and a blank bit of paper, and make a world together. That way the players will be as invested in it as you are, and they won't be put off by having to learn history. Not to mention that multiple people will have better ideas than just one, and you can bounce ideas off each other.
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Mar 9, 2015 16:48
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At some point in this thread, someone suggested world-building with the group through a few rounds of Microscope, which seems like a great idea that I haven't been able to try yet.
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Mar 9, 2015 16:49
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Well, I don't exactly have a group waiting with bated breath for a setting right now: I was thinking of putting it together and use it at a later date. I have been trying to make sure to have different kinds of adventures available to cover a variety of tastes for this very reason. By "generic" I mean features of the world at large, like how magic works and what kind of weather can be found where. Doing that first will help me get a general idea of the world, but I am afraid of locking myself out of other ideas if I decide this in advance. The idea of creating a world as a group is very interesting, especially through Microscope. If nothing else a different opinion is always useful.
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Mar 9, 2015 17:32
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petrol blue posted:Get your players together. Give them that pitch, and a blank bit of paper, and make a world together. That way the players will be as invested in it as you are, and they won't be put off by having to learn history. Not to mention that multiple people will have better ideas than just one, and you can bounce ideas off each other. This is a terrible idea unless your players are also DM's. I've gone through this like three times with the Diaspora system, and way too many players had their own ideas for individual story things in isolation, and no one wanted to tie or relate anything together; only myself and the other regular DM came up with any material that built upon each other's ideas and linked them together in any meaningful way. Basically don't do this if you are playing with lazy players or anyone under 30. Unless you like the idea of Naruto-world and pokemans. EDIT: and it's a lot harder to DM a game when you hate the content of the world, but don't want to remove it because it might offend the creating player. It is much better to just create a world, and if other people like it they stick with it or are drawn to it to begin with. CountingWizard fucked around with this message at 17:37 on Mar 9, 2015 |
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Mar 9, 2015 17:33
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Those lucky players, having a wise imaginitive shepherd to steer them towards the proper sort of fun. 
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Mar 9, 2015 17:59
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CountingWizard posted:Unless you like the idea of Naruto-world and pokemans Pokemans would fuckin rule  I optioned a pokemon-world Oregon Trail campaign to my group a few years ago, but we all decided I wasn't ambitious enough to stat out that many things. Might be viable in a more storygame kind of system, though.
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Mar 9, 2015 18:05
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CountingWizard posted:This is a terrible idea unless your players are also DM's. I've gone through this like three times with the Diaspora system, and way too many players had their own ideas for individual story things in isolation, and no one wanted to tie or relate anything together; only myself and the other regular DM came up with any material that built upon each other's ideas and linked them together in any meaningful way. Basically don't do this if you are playing with lazy players or anyone under 30. Unless you like the idea of Naruto-world and pokemans. You are the worst.
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Mar 9, 2015 18:05
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| # ? May 9, 2024 09:04 |
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deadly_pudding posted:pokemon-world Oregon Trail Everyone used dysentery! It's super effective!
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Mar 9, 2015 18:13
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