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Serf posted:Would you say it does it well? I've never used Gumshoe, just curious as to opinions of people who have. It does it pretty well given that it's not really designed as a combat-first game. If you want the combat to be front and center, the investigation philosophy from Gumshoe is more easily ported to something like Savage Worlds or whatever than it is to put more robust combat in Gumshoe.
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Jul 16, 2015 02:15
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Countblanc posted:Presumably he was punished, by going to prison as mandated by the state And that should continue the rest of his life in various forms. This guy wasn't in this case though, he did 3 months? in baby jail.
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Jul 16, 2015 02:17
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goodness posted:And that should continue the rest of his life in various forms. And he got to finish out his school year or whatever. It's disgusting.
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Jul 16, 2015 02:21
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Perhaps we can stop discussing whether DCI should consider "convicted felon" to be a protected category against which it is verboten to discriminate And resume discussion of elfgames. Specifically, I'd like to talk about how game and setting designers can construct things to make it more likely the PCs will need to broker a difficult peace between King Ulfbright and the orc tribes instead of taking a commission from King Ulfbright to slay the orc tribes. A good first start is to strip "Always Chaotic Evil" and such language, but I think there's more to be done than that; most elfgame RPGs have more pagecount devoted to waging war than waging peace.
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Jul 16, 2015 02:24
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goodness posted:And that should continue the rest of his life in various forms. I don't think a rapist should be jailed alongside babies, fursonally.
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Jul 16, 2015 02:24
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TheLovablePlutonis posted:I don't think a rapist should be jailed alongside babies, fursonally. 
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Jul 16, 2015 02:25
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TheLovablePlutonis posted:I don't think a rapist should be jailed alongside babies, fursonally. I'm just gonna say it, we shouldn't be jailing babies at all.
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Jul 16, 2015 02:28
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Rand Brittain posted:No, but the attitude behind it is "it's okay to treat this guy as subhuman garbage for the rest of his life." If he wanted to be treated nicely maybe he should have refrained from raping anyone. Just a shot in the dark here.
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Jul 16, 2015 02:37
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Tatum Girlparts posted:I'm just gonna say it, we shouldn't be jailing babies at all. Babies are assholes though.
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Jul 16, 2015 02:49
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Slimnoid posted:Babies are assholes though. Kakyoin had the right idea.
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Jul 16, 2015 02:55
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Potsticker posted:Kakyoin had the right idea.
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Jul 16, 2015 03:01
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Pensive Magic Player got banned from MtG tournaments despite the wonderful things he did on behalf of all humanity, and I've made peace with that injustice. I'm certainly not going to lose sleep over a convicted rapist not being able to play elf poker, even if I'm generally on the side of not treating ex-cons like subhuman garbage. It's a matter of keeping things in perspective, I guess.
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Jul 16, 2015 03:18
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inklesspen posted:Specifically, I'd like to talk about how game and setting designers can construct things to make it more likely the PCs will need to broker a difficult peace between King Ulfbright and the orc tribes instead of taking a commission from King Ulfbright to slay the orc tribes. A good first start is to strip "Always Chaotic Evil" and such language, but I think there's more to be done than that; most elfgame RPGs have more pagecount devoted to waging war than waging peace. I think that if we had a social interaction system that was as robust as the combat in most RPGs we'd be on the right track. I'm usually a rules-light kinda guy, but I'd love to see a conversation/social "combat" system that was really detailed. More than just "beat this skill check to make them like you" type stuff. Unrelated: Also, ostracism seems like a pretty good punishment for a convicted sex offender. I fail to see why anyone would think sex offenders have any right to be included in our hobbies.
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Jul 16, 2015 03:19
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Serf posted:I think that if we had a social interaction system that was as robust as the combat in most RPGs we'd be on the right track. I'm usually a rules-light kinda guy, but I'd love to see a conversation/social "combat" system that was really detailed. More than just "beat this skill check to make them like you" type stuff. I like some of the ideas in nWoD 2's social system, where you have to "open Doors" based on how, uh, I guess willful or disinclined the target is, and it's more or less difficult based on how you come off at the beginning. I think with some more work it would be really great. There's also the Weapons of the Gods/Legends of the Wulin system, though it's definitely not as complex and full of hooks as the combat system.
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Jul 16, 2015 03:32
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IMHO, rape should be made illegal. Who's with me?
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Jul 16, 2015 03:33
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inklesspen posted:And resume discussion of elfgames. Do you want no fighting at all or just no treating orcs as the bad guys just because they're orcs?
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Jul 16, 2015 03:39
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inklesspen posted:Perhaps we can stop discussing whether DCI should consider "convicted felon" to be a protected category against which it is verboten to discriminate Go write an article complaining there's too much fighting on Witcher 3.
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Jul 16, 2015 03:41
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Plague of Hats posted:I like some of the ideas in nWoD 2's social system, where you have to "open Doors" based on how, uh, I guess willful or disinclined the target is, and it's more or less difficult based on how you come off at the beginning. I think with some more work it would be really great. There's also the Weapons of the Gods/Legends of the Wulin system, though it's definitely not as complex and full of hooks as the combat system. This got me thinking, and there's a game where the entire method of moving the story forward is through turn-based "battles" using words: Last Word. While it's probably way too detailed to model in a tabletop game, I've played it for about 2 hours and once you got the hang of it the conversation system became pretty fun. I imagine something like that. You could have a rock-paper-scissors type setup where certain "moves" are countered by other "moves" and force you into using moves that will be easily countered. Or maybe a few zones that represent the stages of the conversation, where making different moves will push your opponent into other areas, and either you score points each time or the goal is to get them into a certain zone. Like maybe your goal is to piss off your rival and you have to use aggressive moves to push them into the "furious" zone which is your win condition. I'm just spitballing here, and in practice this could end up even more convoluted than the combat system. Though you could just reskin the combat system in most games and use that I guess.
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Jul 16, 2015 03:54
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Davin Valkri posted:Do you want no fighting at all or just no treating orcs as the bad guys just because they're orcs? The latter. Definitely there will be fighting: an adventure is not as much fun without people who have villainous intent whom you can defeat, or dangerous beasts to fight off. And perhaps the dragon must be slain because he will not stop raiding the village? But I would like to make violence not be the only tool in the adventurer's repertoire and to break your standard elfgamer out of the "kill the goblins because they are goblins" rut.
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Jul 16, 2015 04:11
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inklesspen posted:The latter. Definitely there will be fighting: an adventure is not as much fun without people who have villainous intent whom you can defeat, or dangerous beasts to fight off. And perhaps the dragon must be slain because he will not stop raiding the village? But I would like to make violence not be the only tool in the adventurer's repertoire and to break your standard elfgamer out of the "kill the goblins because they are goblins" rut. A lot of this is going to have to do with the portrayal of the monstrous societies in question. Nobody's really going to try negotiating with the rampaging Orc horde over the next hill, but if it's an actual Orc city with laws and government things are different. To make PCs treat their enemies like people the setting has to do it first.
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Jul 16, 2015 05:00
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Swagger Dagger posted:A lot of this is going to have to do with the portrayal of the monstrous societies in question. Nobody's really going to try negotiating with the rampaging Orc horde over the next hill, but if it's an actual Orc city with laws and government things are different. I don't think people have to live in a city with buildings and walls and jails for them to be people. It's actually been a lot of really ugly moments in history where one people decided that another people didn't really count because they were savages or didn't have a nation or etc etc etc. There has to be a way to tell people "gently caress off with that elf racism" without making everyone live in cities like the English do.
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Jul 16, 2015 05:07
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inklesspen posted:Perhaps we can stop discussing whether DCI should consider "convicted felon" to be a protected category against which it is verboten to discriminate 1) Don't use the setting to play D&D or any of the thousand systems that are trying to be D&D
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Jul 16, 2015 05:16
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Assuming that's not an option (it's never a serious option, is it?), consider why they're orcs at all if the concept of what an orc is has been neutered such that you would consider brokering peace with them a reasonable solution.
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Jul 16, 2015 05:22
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inklesspen posted:The latter. Definitely there will be fighting: an adventure is not as much fun without people who have villainous intent whom you can defeat, or dangerous beasts to fight off. And perhaps the dragon must be slain because he will not stop raiding the village? But I would like to make violence not be the only tool in the adventurer's repertoire and to break your standard elfgamer out of the "kill the goblins because they are goblins" rut. Just have the reasons for fighting be fairly well known instead of secret. "The orcs are invading" is one thing, "The orcs are invading for [actual reason that players would understand as a 'real conflict']" is another. Even if you write "Orcs aren't always or mostly chaotic evil," you've got to show that through understandable motivation.
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Jul 16, 2015 05:25
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01011001 posted:1) Don't use the setting to play D&D or any of the thousand systems that are trying to be D&D Bwuuuuuuhhh??? Nani Soreeee???!? What in the seven hells?! The TTRPG that evolved from a tactical wargame is more mechanically based on brutally and insanelly hacking people and monsters to death with swords and magic than diplomacy????
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Jul 16, 2015 05:27
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inklesspen posted:Perhaps we can stop discussing whether DCI should consider "convicted felon" to be a protected category against which it is verboten to discriminate I think that good motivations for everyone involved really help make a game more interesting. Like, not even really complex hidden backstories or anything--just basic kind of universal desires that naturally go at odds with each other but that can potentially be resolved in a way that makes everyone happy. The king wants the land because there's a super promising mine on it, the orcs want it because they've lived there for a long time. People used to get along, but a minor problem between the miners and the orcs turned into some huge bloodshed, and now everything's just super tense. Left unchecked, it'll turn into violence, and odds are decent that it will do so even with PC involvement, but there are conceivably paths to non-violent resolution. You don't really need to give much detail to anything beforehand, because as soon as the PCs get there they'll probably end up setting the general mood for the conflict's path with their actions anyway.
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Jul 16, 2015 05:28
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TheLovablePlutonis posted:Bwuuuuuuhhh??? Nani Soreeee???!? What in the seven hells?! The TTRPG that evolved from a tactical wargame is more mechanically based on brutally and insanelly hacking people and monsters to death with swords and magic than diplomacy???? I think you'll find that the d20 system is suited to every manner of playstyle, friend - and, with its revolutionary free license, every manner of lifestyle.
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Jul 16, 2015 05:33
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inklesspen posted:Specifically, I'd like to talk about how game and setting designers can construct things to make it more likely the PCs will need to broker a difficult peace between King Ulfbright and the orc tribes instead of taking a commission from King Ulfbright to slay the orc tribes. A good first start is to strip "Always Chaotic Evil" and such language, but I think there's more to be done than that; most elfgame RPGs have more pagecount devoted to waging war than waging peace. If it's a combat-focused game such as D&D and the likes, the out-of-combat interaction portion really boils down to setting up who, where, what and when the party engages in a fight. It begins with the GM not describing the conflict as a irretrievable mess, and with King Ulfbright giving a directive to find a way to end the war, instead of killin' dem Orcs yo. And the root of the conflict and/or what the Orcs want as part of the truce has to be structured in a way such that the players will have to fight something else. Even if the Orcs are willing to engage in diplomacy straight-up without a fetch quest for a McGuffin, at the 11th hour the party still has to deal with a General Chang figure, that sort of thing. inklesspen posted:I don't think people have to live in a city with buildings and walls and jails for them to be people. I think what he meant was not necessarily that you have to depict the Orcs as living in cities, but just that if the Orcs aren't immediately and overtly hostile right off the bat, then the players are going to want to try to talk to them, if not the Orcs outright trying to call for negotiations or a truce to begin with.
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Jul 16, 2015 05:36
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"Always evil" races exist to give murderhobos something easy to kill. The fact that they are often described as either savages or slave-holding tyrannies is to show to the players that it's okay to cut them down to the hundreads; the fact that this is similar to the tactics used by imperialist nations to justify colonizing other civilizations adds to the unpleasantness. Of course, like you mentioned, this isn't strictly necessary, but from the point of view of the average D&D GM coming up with a serious reason for conflict is needless extra work, especially when all of his manuals encourage him to keep othering the "non-civilized" races and watch as his players cut them down for XP.
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Jul 16, 2015 08:30
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Swagger Dagger posted:A lot of this is going to have to do with the portrayal of the monstrous societies in question. Nobody's really going to try negotiating with the rampaging Orc horde over the next hill, but if it's an actual Orc city with laws and government things are different. That assumption extends to the rampaging mindless undead, in the face of the rampaging mindless undead attacking civilians, while on a divinely mandated mission to end the threat of the rampaging mindless undead.
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Jul 16, 2015 09:27
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My Lovely Horse posted:On the other hand I have players that automatically assume every vaguely humanoid creature has a society and laws and government and probably a very good reason for burning that village to the ground that the king would understand if he only knew. Honestly that sounds like a quality problem to have. e: throw them a curve ball and give a non-humanoid group of monsters a civilization, see if they start checking if gelatinous cubes are willing to cooperate. paradoxGentleman fucked around with this message at 09:33 on Jul 16, 2015 |
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Jul 16, 2015 09:30
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While I sympathize with the anti-murderhobo sentiment and support any attempt to subvert this, so many games are built around that paradigm that if you want to have a game that isn't about murderhobos it's something you need to tip your players off to ahead of time. I can't count how many times I've tried and failed to utilize diplomacy in a game (usually D&D or something like it) only for the GM to railroad it into a combat encounter because by god that's what I prepared and that's what we're doing. Within reason, of course. Undead are probably a pretty safe fallback if you and your players really want a murderhobo-style campaign, IMO.
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Jul 16, 2015 09:43
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One time one of them ran a game where there really was a city of (intelligent) undead somewhere and they did have laws and government. We knocked on the door and they said "no outsiders, sod off" and we were like "fair enough, sorry to bother" and turned around to go broker a peace between the city and the goblins in the nearby mine. I mean that was cool and all (if anticlimactic) but if you run things that way D&D has waaay to many different humanoids to really keep it up. Plus occasionally you might actually want to engage with the combat system and if you take away the humanoids there's not a lot left. Although honestly, even if you fight orcs and hobgoblins all the time, it's more interesting if there's a reason why they're there and why they're hostile. At the very least, if you know that reason, you know what obstacles there would be for a party who still wants to negotiate and broker peace. Once I used Elves as the "evil" race. Perfectly civilized society, it's just they generally considered creatures from outside to be prey, at best potential pets. "Your Highness, maybe we can help each other." - "Hmm, possibly. Do you do any tricks?"
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Jul 16, 2015 09:49
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Elves as evil dickbags is practically tradition by this point. You'd probably have an easier time listing games in which elves aren't some combination of insufferable, arrogant, racist, and/or murderously xenophobic.
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Jul 16, 2015 09:53
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Are there any settings where dwarves are evil, for example? I am pretty sure there is no such thing as an evil halfling.
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Jul 16, 2015 09:57
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Reene posted:While I sympathize with the anti-murderhobo sentiment and support any attempt to subvert this, so many games are built around that paradigm that if you want to have a game that isn't about murderhobos it's something you need to tip your players off to ahead of time. I can't count how many times I've tried and failed to utilize diplomacy in a game (usually D&D or something like it) only for the GM to railroad it into a combat encounter because by god that's what I prepared and that's what we're doing. Maybe this is just me, but I don't really consider murderhobo-ism to be "we use violence to solve all our quests" so much as "we use violence against anything and everything, such against shopkeepers to take their stuff, because as long as we win fights against the town guard we should be okay" I mean, it's D&D - if you can't kill your way to the objective personally, and you can't skill your way to the objective, you find someone with the right skill for it, he's gonna ask you to commit violence in exchange for his services, and everyone moves forward. The creative part is setting up a campaign such that instead of the players killing a faction as soon as they encounter them, they get to pick which factions they want to kill. You're still doing a combat encounter, by god, but you're shuffling around the context and the circumstances. What if the players WANT to parlay with the Mongol Horde? Fine, but that means they need to kill the Hungarian footsoldiers instead.
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Jul 16, 2015 10:00
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paradoxGentleman posted:Are there any settings where dwarves are evil, for example? Or maybe hardcore cultural oppressors and expansionists by way of economic pressure. "Why would we trade with you, if you aren't even willing to pay tribute to Moradin? You have plenty of room for a temple, simply tear down your old one. What's that? Then you will do your own mining from now on? Surely not in the mountains of our forefathers, though!" quote:I am pretty sure there is no such thing as an evil halfling.
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Jul 16, 2015 10:16
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paradoxGentleman posted:Are there any settings where dwarves are evil, for example? Glorantha Dwarves are the only ones I can think of
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Jul 16, 2015 10:27
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Kai Tave posted:Elves as evil dickbags is practically tradition by this point. You'd probably have an easier time listing games in which elves aren't some combination of insufferable, arrogant, racist, and/or murderously xenophobic. Discworld Elves would make a fantastic antagonist.
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Jul 16, 2015 10:28
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It's pretty easy if you want antagonistic orcs who have the potential to be reasoned with to just bash them into being post-TOS klingons or brutalized by oppressive rulers or gods or even just make the small contingent of orcs the players are facing jerks. You don't have to run some awkward deconstruction.paradoxGentleman posted:I am pretty sure there is no such thing as an evil halfling. Dark Sun's cannibalistic halflings are pretty horrible. Also, kender 
Lightning Lord fucked around with this message at 10:58 on Jul 16, 2015 |
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Jul 16, 2015 10:55
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