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does anyone present not think pathfinder is bad though
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Sep 12, 2017 04:16
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Having read this section on Ultimate Intrigue, the impression I got was that that giving the villain that kind of "out" to just teleport away must also come with giving the players A. a way to track them down afterwards, and B. a disadvantage to the villain for having blown their contingency.
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Sep 12, 2017 04:22
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Cease to Hope posted:does anyone present not think pathfinder is bad though I have no opinion on pathfinder.
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Sep 12, 2017 04:24
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It's sillier than that. It's the end of an Adventure Path campaign that's run for months and is set up as the climactic encounter in the module. But because the main villain has Teleport, according to the GM they would always use it if they could, so it becomes the Campaign That Will Not Die.
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Sep 12, 2017 09:59
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Honestly, I'd write that off as a win. An enemy that felt he had to run from the PCs at the height of his power isn't going to go looking for them, or give them reason to go looking for him. Narrative problem solved, if the PC's are the usual Pathfinder murder hobos.
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Sep 12, 2017 10:12
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ProfessorCirno posted:Keep in mind as well that a good amount of that boiled down to Gygax not wanting to say "look don't do that." Those both sound fine in moderation and I thought telling the players "no" was bad.
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Sep 12, 2017 10:46
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super sweet best pal posted:Those both sound fine in moderation and I thought telling the players "no" was bad. Telling a player "you can't do that" isn't great GMing, but saying it as part of an adult conversation with the player about expectations for the game is way better than saying it via passive-aggressive IC bullshit, especially since the latter approach just creates an arms race of ridiculous behavior. After all, killing a PC with an ear seeker isn't actually changing the circumstances that made the players assume the PCs have to listen at every door; if they still think that's the expectation, they're just going to have to come up with another layer of preparation, because now they feel they have to listen at doors and keep bugs out of their ears in the process. If the goal of your game is this sort of elaborate tactical dungeoneering/Fantasy loving Vietnam "prepare elaborately or die messily" action, that's totally cool and have fun, but if the GM's goal is to discourage the PCs from this sort of time-wasting bullshit, they've actually just made it worse.
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Sep 12, 2017 11:26
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Didn't some edition of D&D have an item specifically for the purpose of defeating ear seekers? Something with mesh on the end?
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Sep 12, 2017 11:29
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AlphaDog posted:I would get really pissed off at a DM who pitched a "heroes save the world in an epic saga of adventure" game and then included ear seekers or rot grubs with no warning in the third session. But it used to be an expected, standard, part of the game, and it still works as long as everyone's expectations are in line. "Maybe Gary's daughter will have sex with you" is more an expected part of the game that rot grubs.
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Sep 12, 2017 14:48
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Halloween Jack posted:It really wasn't, though. Not everyone learned to play D&D from a salty old wargamer; plenty saw a comic book ad and bought a boxed set. D&D absolutely sold itself as a heroic fantasy adventure game. The fact that Gygax & Co felt the need to repeatedly yell about Munchkins and Monty Haul DMs screwing up the game tells me that the way early D&D was actually played wasn't anything like the austere earn-you-fun high-lethality murderhobo vietnam that Gygax envisioned and so many OSRies fetishize.
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Sep 12, 2017 15:19
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FMguru posted:The fact that Gygax & Co felt the need to repeatedly yell about Munchkins and Monty Haul DMs screwing up the game tells me that the way early D&D was actually played wasn't anything like the austere earn-you-fun high-lethality murderhobo vietnam that Gygax envisioned and so many OSRies fetishize. Not that the books did anything to support learning that style, but that's another conversation.
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Sep 12, 2017 15:27
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Yeah, there was this whole expectation that you'd bring the same character to games run by different people, so if Bob started giving out a ton of stuff and easy XP, when you went to Alice's game next week you'd overwhelm her stuff that wasn't built for people who'd been to Bob's House of discount holy avengers or whatever. I started gaming at the tail end of this being a thing, and eventually people would just bring folders of characters and ask the GM if it was okay for their game level first, which seems like a sane approach if you're going to assume total portability. And is probably what eventually led to just people just making characters for a specific campaign. Gygax -also- railed against 'killer GMs' which, uh...I don't want to consider what the dude who suggested 'have random bolts of blue lightning hit people for being dumb' would consider a killer GM.
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Sep 12, 2017 15:29
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I know that was Gygax's vision for the game, and his design impulse, but how many people actually played it that way? For every person group observing the write of Gygax and making sure their characters stayed in the lane, powerlevel-wise, there were probably a dozen just opening their red box and having fun and blasting purple worms with twin wands of fireballs. I don't deny that scrappy, grinding, high-lethality murderhobo-ism is a legitimate way to play the game, or that it was Gygax's expressed idea of how the game was played. I just bristle when I hear people say that was just The Way We All Played It Back In The Day, because it absolutely wasn't.
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Sep 12, 2017 15:43
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unseenlibrarian posted:Gygax -also- railed against 'killer GMs' which, uh...I don't want to consider what the dude who suggested 'have random bolts of blue lightning hit people for being dumb' would consider a killer GM. I couldn't figure out a way to work the wolf-in-sheep's-clothing in there, but...dare you enter my magical realm?
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Sep 12, 2017 15:53
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Like I said, I started gaming while people were doing it mostly like that with people porting characters from one game to another and one GM might do random bullshit traps that drop you naked into a dungeon and another might give you a sword that uses a backgammon doubling cube as its damage die.
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Sep 12, 2017 15:59
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For the kind of game D&D was, and where it came from, the portability made perfect sense. You're just delving to try to beat the dungeon, so of course you want to bring that character to other tables to try to accumulate as much as possible. It isn't until you get to story focused play that it goes completely out the window. If Bob the Fighter has a stake in saving the Kingdom of Otherlandia, and that's the focus of the game, it doesn't make sense to pull him out and use him elsewhere.
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Sep 12, 2017 16:07
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Reminder that Gygax also hated the very concept of having any sort of story beyond "there is a Bad Thing in Location Mountain, go kill it!" and thought having a reasonable chance to actually hit and hurt the thing you were fighting was "too video-gamey" so really if you were looking for good RPG advice at all Gary was the last person you wanted to talk to.
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Sep 12, 2017 16:11
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There was this one moment where I was dicking around with OD&D monster and treasure generation tables to fill out a dungeon I had sketched, and the very last treasure hoard I rolled ended up yielding a Staff of Wizardry, which would have been an incredible haul for a party to get at level 1 at the end of their very first dungeon. I would have wanted to see what would have happened had I played that out.
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Sep 12, 2017 16:11
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Yawgmoth posted:Reminder that Gygax also hated the very concept of having any sort of story beyond "there is a Bad Thing in Location Mountain, go kill it!" and thought having a reasonable chance to actually hit and hurt the thing you were fighting was "too video-gamey" so really if you were looking for good RPG advice at all Gary was the last person you wanted to talk to.   Someone should do them for FATAL & Friends.
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Sep 12, 2017 17:21
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gently caress, I have both of them in a box somewhere. I also have The Devil's Web.
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Sep 12, 2017 17:28
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Halloween Jack posted:gently caress, I have both of them in a box somewhere. e: also, you now have an assignment for F&F.
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Sep 12, 2017 17:31
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FMguru posted:Tell me more of your full set of Gord the Rogue novels.
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Sep 12, 2017 17:35
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FMguru posted:I know that was Gygax's vision for the game, and his design impulse, but how many people actually played it that way? That's part of why the OSR bugs me, especially the kill-em-all mindset side of things: that wasn't "how we played back in the day" because there wasn't a universal "that's how we played back in the day".
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Sep 12, 2017 17:50
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Red box did have the "there's a banquet table but if you touch anything you get sprayed with mold spores" room. But that's ok, the door won't open to anyone below level 2.
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Sep 12, 2017 17:58
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Evil Mastermind posted:That's part of why the OSR bugs me, especially the kill-em-all mindset side of things: that wasn't "how we played back in the day" because there wasn't a universal "that's how we played back in the day". There's this 2003 essay from Ron Edwards that talks about this exact thing, that we can't know what "playing D&D" was like, because it was an intensely personal experience across individual playing groups for a game that was, arguably, a lot more "free form" than most fans of the era might be willing to admit. I especially liked the part where he said that a lot of the early supplements, like Arms Law and Arduin and Dragon magazines and Judge's Guild, were ultimately just documentations of things that people had already put in in their own games.
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Sep 12, 2017 18:01
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Evil Mastermind posted:That's part of why the OSR bugs me, especially the kill-em-all mindset side of things: that wasn't "how we played back in the day" because there wasn't a universal "that's how we played back in the day".
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Sep 12, 2017 18:06
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That was one of the interesting things about later editions of Tunnels and Trolls to me- they actually did some research with the playerbase and noted stuff like "So the folks in Phoenix do this and this and that's pretty cool", scattering it through the text.
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Sep 12, 2017 18:12
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FMguru posted:He actually wrote multiple books of (generic, systemless) DM advice: FMguru posted:Tell me more of your full set of Gord the Rogue novels.  (Sea of Death is actually not so bad; it's a nice, pulp-y, action novel where you can almost hear the dice rolling in the background. The later books get progressively more gonzo, to the point where Gord and his bard friend are killing demons in the thousands - the bard with sweet guitar licks, and Gord shooting lasers from his sword. I am not making this up.)
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Sep 12, 2017 19:25
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That sounds like some weeabo fightan magic.
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Sep 12, 2017 19:59
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Yawgmoth posted:Reminder that Gygax also hated the very concept of having any sort of story beyond "there is a Bad Thing in Location Mountain, go kill it!" and thought having a reasonable chance to actually hit and hurt the thing you were fighting was "too video-gamey" so really if you were looking for good RPG advice at all Gary was the last person you wanted to talk to. Not to mention he wasn't fond of any PC type except Human Fighters, and only included any other options because of pressure from his players Halloween Jack posted:I only have the first one Same, although I do have several of the series that came after the first two Gord novels that followed that Wolf Shaman guy(and get pretty Magical Realm over the course of them)
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Sep 12, 2017 20:11
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It's slightly important to note that the AD&D book and the various advice and whatever isn't how Gygax himself played - it's how he assumed others did. Gygax himself was not exactly the strictest DM out there and quite the opposite was more generous with treasure and letting player bullshit through then his own book stated you should be.
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Sep 12, 2017 20:12
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LongDarkNight posted:That sounds like some weeabo fightan magic. Drizzt ain't got nothin on Gord.
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Sep 12, 2017 20:13
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 New blogpost for The Next Project is now up.Mostly just pulling back the curtain on how skills should be approached, from the DM side; this is largely "understood" for a lot of experienced gamers, but I figured it was worthwhile to formalize this sort of understanding of how the rules/mechanics should be used -- expect to see this appear almost-verbatim in the next iteration of the rules text.
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Sep 13, 2017 00:14
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P.d0t posted:
Is really good
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Sep 13, 2017 00:36
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https://twitter.com/KorenShadmi/status/906541771039133697
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Sep 13, 2017 01:15
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80s anime aesthetic ftw
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Sep 13, 2017 01:19
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Plutonis posted:80s anime aesthetic ftw
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Sep 13, 2017 02:09
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That looks so much better than the crap art in the original version.
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Sep 13, 2017 02:11
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gradenko_2000 posted:There's this 2003 essay from Ron Edwards that talks about this exact thing, that we can't know what "playing D&D" was like, because it was an intensely personal experience across individual playing groups for a game that was, arguably, a lot more "free form" than most fans of the era might be willing to admit. From what I remember, that's pretty true. I mean, the first campaign I ever played was set in Dragonlance's Krynn, using AD&D2e with the weapon mastery and proficiency rules out of the Rules Cyclopedia and some other house rule stuff.
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Sep 13, 2017 04:14
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There will eternally be a part of me cackling over TSR dropping the Japan market for D&D more or less forever because they were overly paranoid and lawsuit happy.
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Sep 13, 2017 04:36
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