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Jeb Bush 2012 posted:is there any rpg out there where traps contribute to rather than detract from the game
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Sep 9, 2017 19:37
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Jeb Bush 2012 posted:is there any rpg out there where traps contribute to rather than detract from the game I would also like to know the answer to this because people keep asking me to add traps to Strike! and I'm still unsure of how to do that well. As much as I love the answer "when someone rolls a twist on a roll, you can narrate that as a trap going off," I don't think that will be satisfying for the people who have been requesting traps.
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Sep 9, 2017 19:49
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Jimbozig posted:I would also like to know the answer to this because people keep asking me to add traps to Strike! and I'm still unsure of how to do that well. As much as I love the answer "when someone rolls a twist on a roll, you can narrate that as a trap going off," I don't think that will be satisfying for the people who have been requesting traps. This is literally the only way I can imagine it done well, tbh.
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Sep 9, 2017 19:58
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What about in combat traps? I liked them on games like FFTA2 so you could do stuff like setting them on the map. Meikyuu Kingdom had a good trap-layer class.
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Sep 9, 2017 20:06
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I like the idea of traps being a micro board game, like a sliding puzzle or mancala or something, but then you get into the issue of whether a player's real-world knowledge should impact the narrative, like if I'm really lovely at puzzles but I'm playing a tomb-trotting archaeologist who solves three sphinx riddles before breakfast every morning.
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Sep 9, 2017 20:10
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Splicer posted:Torchbearer usually treats traps as one of the fail states of a botched roll. Search some barrels -> fail the roll -> you find a *rolls* helmet but *checks encounter table, decides "skeleton patrol" has come up too much* you realise too late that one of the barrels is set to trigger a dart trap Split the difference, the helmet is on a skeleton who was hiding in the barrel, as skeletons are wont to do.
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Sep 9, 2017 20:19
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I would say Mouse Guard is a little too obtuse and abstract, but if you have a GM that knows it well they can probably simplify it well enough for kids. It's just not quite as straightforward as your usual "do a thing, roll some dice" RPG.
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Sep 9, 2017 20:22
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Alien Rope Burn posted:I would say Mouse Guard is a little too obtuse and abstract, but if you have a GM that knows it well they can probably simplify it well enough for kids. It's just not quite as straightforward as your usual "do a thing, roll some dice" RPG. The Pip System (which powers explicitly kid-friendly games like Mermaid Adventures) is basically Mouse Guard without most of the ways to mess with a roll.
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Sep 9, 2017 21:18
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Halloween Jack posted:I'm sure there were and are people enjoying that kind of play, but it was never a majority. More often people essentially run AD&D as Basic with a race/class split and treating half the book as optional add-ons. It wasn't even a mysterious portal, it was just a darkness spell in a door with a pit trap beyond. He was kind of expecting people to take any precautions at all, like tie themselves together or cast fly or something. But person after person just walked into the darkness and fell to their death.
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Sep 9, 2017 21:20
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Glazius posted:It wasn't even a mysterious portal, it was just a darkness spell in a door with a pit trap beyond. He was kind of expecting people to take any precautions at all, like tie themselves together or cast fly or something. But person after person just walked into the darkness and fell to their death. That's a dick move, especially for any one after the first - you'd have heard a scream and a crump, surely.
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Sep 9, 2017 21:30
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fool_of_sound posted:This is literally the only way I can imagine it done well, tbh. I say "kind of good" because Torchbearer doesn't actually work like this, because it's a game about pixelbitching. So if you say "I tap every flagstone in the corridor" that counts as a "good idea" and doesn't actually take a roll or cost time. Except when it does. It's an infuriatingly vague and kind of contradictory part of the rules. Also rolling to avoid the trap you just triggered also eats time, on top of the consequences if you fail. But if this paragraph wasn't here it'd be really good. Anyway the point of all this is traps are good when they introduce choices, specifically choosing between different character resources to expend. Traps are bad when one of the choices is "Everybody's patience". Splicer fucked around with this message at 21:48 on Sep 9, 2017 |
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Sep 9, 2017 21:42
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Splicer posted:What's weird to me is that wandering monster tables were a thing, so time pressure was a baked-in aspect of the game. Having a ticking timer which accelerated every time you looked hard seems like an obvious progression. Do you trust to the dice or do you take 10 and add a tick to the timer or do you take 20 and pretty much guarantee a patrol of skeletons to the face? Yeah, but people have always loved to take a single aspect of the D&D, declare that it only appeals to that guy, you know the one, and remove it without thinking about how it affects anything else. Wandering monsters were often one of the earlier things removed when people start doing that, because they can be unfair bullshit and also they're a pain in the arse to DM. Tracking time/light/buffs/etc is complicated and boring, so that usually goes early too. Nobody pixelbitches in an AD&D game where it takes a 10-minute turn to search a 10'x10' area while your buffs run out, your light runs out, and there's wandering monsters every 4-5 turns. If you do it in AD&D it's a shitload of bullshit book keeping that nobody wants to do so it gets removed. Remove the time pressure and change nothing else and of course everyone starts taking their time with everything. e: Ignoring time tracking and then making every trap and trick super hidden and deadly is really dumb and bad, but I guess that's what usually happened. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 22:31 on Sep 9, 2017 |
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Sep 9, 2017 22:15
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Cease to Hope posted:It's a piece ubiquitous fantasy artist Michael Whelan originally made for the cover of an Alan Dean Foster paperback. I assume it was commissioned by Del Rey/Random House. Ahhh, that makes sense, thanks! I know Palladium had repurposed unreleased fantasy art for Rifts, but I wasn't sure if SJ Games had done so for GURPS. Glazius posted:The Pip System (which powers explicitly kid-friendly games like Mermaid Adventures) is basically Mouse Guard without most of the ways to mess with a roll. I don't know Pip, but I was just thinking about how Mouse Guard is designed explicitly around four players and has the whole thing where you huddle and work out your actions and then kind of present them as a group instead of just "take turns, declare stuff". And then you have stuff like GM Turns vs. Player Turns and the general meta-design that MG leans into. That's what I was thinking of.
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Sep 9, 2017 22:37
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Cease to Hope posted:It's a piece ubiquitous fantasy artist Michael Whelan originally made for the cover of an Alan Dean Foster paperback. I assume it was commissioned by Del Rey/Random House. For context, the aliens in the story depicted had basically put humanity into house arrest for being too violent and dangerous. They had come back to Earth centuries later after another violent race popped up and they couldn't deal with them. However, humans had basically solved their warfare problem long ago and were very peaceful, greeting the aliens with ice cream. I won't spoil the ending, but now you know why the aliens are eating ice cream at someone's dining room table.
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Sep 10, 2017 06:21
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Splicer posted:The other way Torchbearer handles traps is... kind of good? Every time the players make a roll it advances time, which is bad (it eats up your light sources, advances you down the condition track etc). So if the players hit an hallway empty hallway and say "we search it for traps", that advances time. Just walking down the hallway does not (and if there is a trap you each get to roll to avoid it anyway). However, if you have an applicable instinct, like "I always poke every goddamned cobblestone I see", then you can roll for trap picking in every cobblestone area for free because you're weird like that. Same for "I listen at every door I open" or whatever. So if you, as a player, really want to player mastery your way around paving stone trap triggers you're either paying for it in food and torches or paying for it with character aspects. It's up to the DM to decide if something is a good idea or not. "I poke all the cobblestones." doesn't sound like a good idea to me unless the fiction itself justifies that, like the characters finding a clue about the upcoming passage being trapped. That being said, you can always have "I check for traps when i lead the pack" as an instinct on a character and always be able to roll for free on trap checking as long as you're leading the party.
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Sep 10, 2017 06:57
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hyphz posted:The problem is that leads straight to the "action abstraction" arguments. If there's a pressure plate poking it with a stick should find it. Poking everywhere in front of me with a stick, hard, should preemptively find that. So if I roll low on Perception did my character not think to do that, although the player did? I mean, the obvious dungeon-crawl solution is that rolling poorly means you take more time to accomplish the task, because time is one of the critical resources in classical dungeon crawls. This resolves that argument and also allows for meaningful choices- do you continue ahead without sweeping for traps? If you find traps, do you take the time to disarm them or eat up the damage (obviously this requires the players to be told what the damage range is for the traps they uncover!)? If you find treasures that aren't raw cash, do you take the time to appraise them, or do you risk hauling back fake gems and worthless paintings? Of course, the reason time is a resource is because of stuff like wandering monsters and the difficulty of finding a safe place to bed down, which means keeping these threats of attrition.
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Sep 10, 2017 14:15
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I have a new blog post out on refactoring old-school D&D's attack matrices so that they're more in line with how people how actually used wargaming Combat Results Tables over the years.
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Sep 10, 2017 14:19
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I'm Hoping someone here can tell me where to look for something for paranoia . I think after my troubleshooters are forced to complete brain surgery I would like to have them try something easier, I've read a couple of stories about a house sitting mission, I think its in one of the official books does anyone know if that's the case and if so which book should I track down?
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Sep 10, 2017 16:12
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Splicer posted:The other way Torchbearer handles traps is... kind of good? Every time the players make a roll it advances time, which is bad (it eats up your light sources, advances you down the condition track etc). So if the players hit an hallway empty hallway and say "we search it for traps", that advances time. Just walking down the hallway does not (and if there is a trap you each get to roll to avoid it anyway). However, if you have an applicable instinct, like "I always poke every goddamned cobblestone I see", then you can roll for trap picking in every cobblestone area for free because you're weird like that. Same for "I listen at every door I open" or whatever. So if you, as a player, really want to player mastery your way around paving stone trap triggers you're either paying for it in food and torches or paying for it with character aspects. "what is a good idea" is kind of left up to the DM, so the extent to which obsessively tap-checking every flagstone is a good idea is the extent to which the DM wants it to be. So, probably not for very long, unless the DM is planning to have a bunch of giant bats jump everybody while they're all fearfully probing the dungeon floor.
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Sep 10, 2017 16:27
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Shrieking Muppet posted:I'm Hoping someone here can tell me where to look for something for paranoia . I think after my troubleshooters are forced to complete brain surgery I would like to have them try something easier, I've read a couple of stories about a house sitting mission, I think its in one of the official books does anyone know if that's the case and if so which book should I track down?
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Sep 10, 2017 17:24
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Hostile V posted:I'm not entirely familiar with that scenario but I wish you sincere luck in trying to track down the book it might be in. Mongoose pulled pretty much every legal PDF down after they announced the Kickstarter reboot and I will absolutely say do not buy the new edition at all. Your best bet, for real, would be to sit down and come up with a rough outline of the scenario yourself. You've got a good jumping-off point, and unfortunately in the past I've kind of been a little bit burned on the official missions, so whatever ideas you have might possibly be better than the official product recommendations. I just buy used books off eBay, some of them are as cheap as $10
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Sep 10, 2017 19:10
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Shrieking Muppet posted:I'm Hoping someone here can tell me where to look for something for paranoia . I think after my troubleshooters are forced to complete brain surgery I would like to have them try something easier, I've read a couple of stories about a house sitting mission, I think its in one of the official books does anyone know if that's the case and if so which book should I track down? This was possibly the mission in White Dwarf 89, Do Troubleshooters Dream of Electric Sheep. It's a hosejob like just about every Paranoia published adventure, but I like it. Don't forget to issue and emphasise the bulky, ridiculous open-on-scream-parachutes, and keep checking whether the PCs are wearing them for the entire adventure. Fake chekov's guns are great.
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Sep 10, 2017 23:21
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Yawgmoth posted:You didn't press it hard enough, or in the right spot, or from the right angle, or whatever the gently caress. The problem is that having a million and one contingencies and SOPs and if-then statements ends up tacitly avoiding the whole "playing the game" element of playing the game. It wraps right back into the proper response from both sides being "have an at least semi-mature conversation like a group of adults about game expectations and enjoyable styles of play" rather than having the PCs running dungeon_crawl_tunnel.bat and the DM returning exception37.exe in some mutant tabletop recreation of Progress Quest. I rage quit a session nick in high school where my intelligence got drained below the threshold for using psionics and the DM ruled the clerics in the temple we were in wouldn't restore it because I didn't use the right terminology. gently caress people like that
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Sep 11, 2017 05:51
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After an experience this weekend, I just want to find a good friend that lives nearby, and buy them a copy of my housekey and a squirt bottle. Then, I can give them instructions in the case that they hear I'm trying an Exalted game. They'll be directed in advance to rush over immediately and spray me with water, shouting, "NO! BAD!" If I inform them I just want to try some aspect of the combat system, they also have instructions as to where they can find the garden hose. I feel like it's the only way I'll ever learn. 
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Sep 11, 2017 18:44
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Glazius posted:It wasn't even a mysterious portal, it was just a darkness spell in a door with a pit trap beyond. He was kind of expecting people to take any precautions at all, like tie themselves together or cast fly or something. But person after person just walked into the darkness and fell to their death. Uh, no, wasn't that the Sphere of Annihilation in that doorway? Where you touch it and instantly die, no save? Tying a rope around yourself for that does nothing. Alien Rope Burn posted:After an experience this weekend, I just want to find a good friend that lives nearby, and buy them a copy of my housekey and a squirt bottle. Then, I can give them instructions in the case that they hear I'm trying an Exalted game. They'll be directed in advance to rush over immediately and spray me with water, shouting, "NO! BAD!" If I inform them I just want to try some aspect of the combat system, they also have instructions as to where they can find the garden hose. Aside from how much homework making/upkeeping a character takes, Ex3 was pretty OK, though?
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Sep 11, 2017 19:29
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Blasphemeral posted:Aside from how much homework making/upkeeping a character takes, Ex3 was pretty OK, though? For a player, sure. For the ST, hooooly poo poo. Never have I done so much prep for a game, even for Ex1 / Ex2 - at least for those you have supplements to work from, and don't have to homebrew Every Goddamn Thing. I like Ex3 despite its warts, but the burden of prep is onerous in the extreme even for someone with a decade of running prior versions of the game under their belt.
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Sep 11, 2017 19:39
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Blasphemeral posted:Aside from how much homework making/upkeeping a character takes, Ex3 was pretty OK, though? Natural language = unstated rules = heated rules arguments = bad time. It's just dumb rules stuff so the details aren't interesting, it was just rather unpleasant.
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Sep 11, 2017 19:44
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hey plutonis, i went to the PTU forums on a whim last night and saw that they intended on making a 2.0 rather than patching the existing game anymore, but that this was posted back in january and i didnt see any updates. do you have any Insider Knowledge on when thatd be
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Sep 11, 2017 19:45
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Alien Rope Burn posted:After an experience this weekend, I just want to find a good friend that lives nearby, and buy them a copy of my housekey and a squirt bottle. Then, I can give them instructions in the case that they hear I'm trying an Exalted game. They'll be directed in advance to rush over immediately and spray me with water, shouting, "NO! BAD!" If I inform them I just want to try some aspect of the combat system, they also have instructions as to where they can find the garden hose.
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Sep 11, 2017 19:47
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Countblanc posted:hey plutonis, i went to the PTU forums on a whim last night and saw that they intended on making a 2.0 rather than patching the existing game anymore, but that this was posted back in january and i didnt see any updates. do you have any Insider Knowledge on when thatd be I have an Alpha playtest for a game that is incoming, will hit you with it once I am at my PC.
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Sep 11, 2017 20:09
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Kestral posted:For a player, sure. For the ST, hooooly poo poo. Never have I done so much prep for a game, even for Ex1 / Ex2 - at least for those you have supplements to work from, and don't have to homebrew Every Goddamn Thing. I like Ex3 despite its warts, but the burden of prep is onerous in the extreme even for someone with a decade of running prior versions of the game under their belt. Oh yeah I felt loving miserable statting poo poo and GMing compared to playing for sure
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Sep 11, 2017 20:10
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Blasphemeral posted:Uh, no, wasn't that the Sphere of Annihilation in that doorway? Where you touch it and instantly die, no save? Tying a rope around yourself for that does nothing. Nope, just regular darkness.
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Sep 11, 2017 21:31
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Ok, minor rant time. Mr GM. I understand that you think Pathfinder should be played tactically and that the villains should try all they can to win. But setting up a "climactic encounter" where the campaign villain just teleports away, to set up another "climactic encounter" next time, is just ridiculous. Basically, everything comes down to that Dimensional Anchor attack roll, and if it fails then whoopee, we have to play out a fight that might last the best part of a session to achieve nothing. Ditto if it gets dispelled later on, of course..
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Sep 11, 2017 23:41
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hyphz posted:Ok, minor rant time. Pathfinder has a much better system for this. Tell your GM to check out the Nemesis rules from Ultimate Intrigue.
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Sep 12, 2017 00:53
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How are the Nemesis rules any different from " GM gives the villain an uninterruptable cut scene to introduce a complication, then the players can act"? Also: Arivia posted:Pathfinder has a much better system for this. is always a goddamn lie.
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Sep 12, 2017 01:56
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If your table considers "uninterruptable cutscene that allows for an antagonist to persist rather than be nuked from orbit on the first encounter" to be genre-appropriate and something they're interested in having, there's no problem. It's still a game mechanic, just one that doesn't involve dice.
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Sep 12, 2017 03:36
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If you eat the first villain for breakfast make the next one an upgraded henchmen who is far more successful and evil but still loves their former boss. Like Toecutter from Mad Max after the Night Rider died
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Sep 12, 2017 03:39
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Kestral posted:If your table considers "uninterruptable cutscene that allows for an antagonist to persist rather than be nuked from orbit on the first encounter" to be genre-appropriate and something they're interested in having, there's no problem. It's still a game mechanic, just one that doesn't involve dice. The cut scene thing was how I read Paizo's Nemesis rules; hyphz's rant (I think?) is about needing to counter the villain's GM-crafted spell list and magic bullshit, or else the party is doomed to fight an endless and pointless amount of boss battles unless the counter is successful and doesn't get removed halfway through. Am I close?
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Sep 12, 2017 04:02
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Cascade Jones posted:How are the Nemesis rules any different from " GM gives the villain an uninterruptable cut scene to introduce a complication, then the players can act"? I mean, the system in question can be better without being good
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Sep 12, 2017 04:03
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01011001 posted:I mean, the system in question can be better without being good Pathfinder set out to fix issues in 3.x while "maintaining compatibility"; this deluded Pathfinder players into believing 3.x was not only fixable, but fixable while never questioning or changing the core conceits of the game. Those conceits (caster supremacy; bonus inflation; rules bloat to cover any player actions) are quicksand to game design. It's impossible to build on top of them without having the entire structure sink further down into the muck. So, no; it can't be better because there's no decent structure to build an improvement on. The best Pathfinder rules system is "lol play something else". For some I know that's not an option; grieve for them.
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Sep 12, 2017 04:15
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