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Tuxedo Catfish
Mar 17, 2007

You've got guts! Come to my village, I'll buy you lunch.

Subjunctive posted:

It’s not a negative, Gloomhaven looks great. What’s the fun in being the DM if you don’t ever get to make any decisions, though?

It's in running the monsters, for sure -- which is to say, just a different kind of decision.

I would love to play a game that's structured over a long multi-session campaign, like D&D is, but where rule-adjudication is handled collectively (or maybe rotates from person to person so somebody has final say, but only in the case of a conflict) and the "GM" is just the monster / evil overlord player -- the idea being that you plot evil plots, manage dungeons and strongholds and so on, and the players raid them. It might still require a certain heel-like logic -- maybe you're expected to lose in the long run -- but the rules should be tight enough that you doing your utmost to win is channeled into a more interesting challenge for the hero players to overcome.

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Serf
May 5, 2011


Tuxedo Catfish posted:

It's in running the monsters, for sure -- which is to say, just a different kind of decision.

I would love to play a game that's structured over a long multi-session campaign, like D&D is, but where rule-adjudication is handled collectively (or maybe rotates from person to person so somebody has final say, but only in the case of a conflict) and the "GM" is just the monster / evil overlord player -- the idea being that you plot evil plots, manage dungeons and strongholds and so on, and the players raid them. It might still require a certain heel-like logic -- maybe you're expected to lose in the long run -- but the rules should be tight enough that you doing your utmost to win is channeled into a more interesting challenge for the hero players to overcome.

this is fellowship

Tuxedo Catfish
Mar 17, 2007

You've got guts! Come to my village, I'll buy you lunch.

Serf posted:

this is fellowship

I know! I signed up for a Fellowship game a while back but it was incredibly popular and my character concept honestly wasn't all that great, so I didn't make the cut.

Covok
May 27, 2013

Yet where is that woman now? Tell me, in what heave does she reside? None of them. Because no God bothered to listen or care. If that is what you think it means to be a God, then you and all your teachings are welcome to do as that poor women did. And vanish from these realms forever.

Tuxedo Catfish posted:

I know! I signed up for a Fellowship game a while back but it was incredibly popular and my character concept honestly wasn't all that great, so I didn't make the cut.

The worst thing about great Indie Games is no one ever runs them so getting into a game become super high pressure and if you don't get in you probably never get to play. What I'm saying is, I know that feel, bro. Ask me about Tenra Bansho Zero.

hyphz
Aug 5, 2003

Number 1 Nerd Tear Farmer 2022.

Keep it up, champ.

Also you're a skeleton warrior now. Kree.
Unlockable Ben

Covok posted:

The worst thing about great Indie Games is no one ever runs them so getting into a game become super high pressure and if you don't get in you probably never get to play. What I'm saying is, I know that feel, bro. Ask me about Tenra Bansho Zero.

Hey, the worst thing is I can never face running them because they all have the same problem I'm running into here :(

BTW, there's no GM playing the monsters in Gloomhaven, they have fixed AI and any remaining decisions are made by the players (who are completely allowed to go easy on themselves). It's pretty good, but it's not really that satisfying for RP style play, the cards make player actions feel a bit out of control and the story breaks easily if the players fail missions ("hey again guys! we're just.. uh.. doing this ritual again!").

Xiahou Dun
Jul 16, 2009

We shall dive down through black abysses... and in that lair of the Deep Ones we shall dwell amidst wonder and glory forever.



That's basically what Descent was trying to be (but messed up.)

Not that that's wrong, that sounds dope as hell, but you are stretching the definition of RPG when you purposely minimize the RP. D&D already isn't great for scratching that itch, even my beloved 4e, and everything else is gonna be even worse. So honestly and seriously good luck and tell me if you find anything.

God I miss 4e encounter math where I could be as tactically devious as I wanted as a DM and it still worked out.

thefakenews
Oct 20, 2012

hyphz posted:

Hey, the worst thing is I can never face running them because they all have the same problem I'm running into here :(

Out of interest, what is it that you think makes these games "great", or that you think you are missing out on? It seems like, if you keep having the same problem with them, they aren't going to give you the experience that you want, and so aren't actually all that great for your purposes.

gradenko_2000
Oct 5, 2010

HELL SERPENT
Lipstick Apathy

Tuxedo Catfish posted:

It's in running the monsters, for sure -- which is to say, just a different kind of decision.

I would love to play a game that's structured over a long multi-session campaign, like D&D is, but where rule-adjudication is handled collectively (or maybe rotates from person to person so somebody has final say, but only in the case of a conflict) and the "GM" is just the monster / evil overlord player -- the idea being that you plot evil plots, manage dungeons and strongholds and so on, and the players raid them. It might still require a certain heel-like logic -- maybe you're expected to lose in the long run -- but the rules should be tight enough that you doing your utmost to win is channeled into a more interesting challenge for the hero players to overcome.

Part of the reason why D&D, at least in its 3e and 4e incarnations, had such fleshed-out rules for "everything", up to and including how to build a dungeon, was so that you could "trust the process" and let the DMG largely make content for you without having to inject your own subjectivity into it.

I could go to donjon right now, have it generate a dungeon for me, and play a game "by-the-book" where all I'm doing is controlling the monsters while everyone collectively enforces the rules and have a fairly entertaining "boardgame"-type experience.

I've mentioned this before, but this goes back to Mike Mearls suggesting that what if Organized Play sessions didn't come with a pre-assigned DM, that whoever showed up at the table could do it. Setting aside that Mearls only wants this because he's a lazy fucker that wants to cut even more effort out of Organized Play, it could work if the game were "procedural" enough, both on the content-generation side and the rules-execution side that the "DM" can always refer to the book to check what to do next.

And for all their flaws, 3e and 4e were closer to that ideal than anything other version of the game.

gradenko_2000 fucked around with this message at 03:07 on Jan 8, 2018

Wrestlepig
Feb 25, 2011

my mum says im cool

Toilet Rascal
hyphz, just run a game and see how it goes, that'll show you how it works way better than the explanations here

Tuxedo Catfish
Mar 17, 2007

You've got guts! Come to my village, I'll buy you lunch.

gradenko_2000 posted:

I've mentioned this before, but this goes back to Mike Mearls suggesting that what if Organized Play sessions didn't come with a pre-assigned DM, that whoever showed up at the table could do it. Setting aside that Mearls only wants this because he's a lazy fucker that wants to cut even more effort out of Organized Play, it could work if the game were "procedural" enough, both on the content-generation side and the rules-execution side that the "DM" can always refer to the book to check what to do next.

And for all their flaws, 3e and 4e were closer to that ideal than anything other version of the game.

Yeah I see the potential for that in D&D, it's just messy because sometimes the all-encompassing, bounded rules are there in order to make "trust the process" tick, and sometimes they're there simply to make D&D a better simulator of a fantasy world, even the completely irrelevant bits.

I'm also interested in different kinds of "silos" than the one D&D has, where combat is special (and procedural/antagonistic) and everything else is narrative and relatively freeform; I'd love to see more games where the special and fully-bounded part is something other than fighting, but still has that puzzle-like complexity and is competitive or cooperative-against-AI or whatever.

Nuns with Guns
Jul 23, 2010

It's fine.
Don't worry about it.

hyphz posted:

Hey, the worst thing is I can never face running them because they all have the same problem I'm running into here :(

You've had the exact same argument with people in these threads over PbtA at least three times now, and each time it's come down to you barely understanding the rules, a deeply uncharitable reading of the bits you have read, and a frankly sociopathic assumption of Player/GM interactions in a game of collaborative storytelling. Maybe stick to games you're more comfortable with because there's clearly some part of the abstraction here you can't comprehend?

Subjunctive
Sep 12, 2006

✨sparkle and shine✨

Tuxedo Catfish posted:

It's in running the monsters, for sure -- which is to say, just a different kind of decision.

OK, but why is it OK for the GM to employ judgment as to the combat behaviour of the monsters, when they could use that to tip the balance of combat? Isn’t that sort of ability to put a finger on the scale exactly the thing the marathon-running player doesn’t want?

Tuxedo Catfish
Mar 17, 2007

You've got guts! Come to my village, I'll buy you lunch.

Subjunctive posted:

OK, but why is it OK for the GM to employ judgment as to the combat behaviour of the monsters, when they could use that to tip the balance of combat? Isn’t that sort of ability to put a finger on the scale exactly the thing the marathon-running player doesn’t want?

If that judgment is sandbagging, then yes. The goal of all of this is to make it so the GM doesn't have to sandbag, though, and rather can go exactly the opposite way and make it the best possible challenge they can offer -- without crossing over into something that's impossible. This is a risk, but it's a risk that's worth taking because human beings are still much more devious than predefined AI, at least for games that haven't been comprehensively studied and solved.

Nuns with Guns
Jul 23, 2010

It's fine.
Don't worry about it.
Since this all started because of the example score presented in Blades in the Dark, why don't we look at that while we're here. Keep in mind that you roll a fistful of d6s in BitD, with the highest number being your final success. 1-3 is a failure, 4-5 is a mixed success, 6 is a full success. The GM designates how well-positioned a character is for the roll: controlled, risky (default), or desperate. The ratio of successes doesn't change, just the weight of the consequences on a failed/mixed success roll.

















The Dimmer Sisters are a tier 2 gang, which the players say is on their level, so this score is meant to be a group of experienced players running a gang they've already established and run some heists with. They're going up against a fairly equal opponent. Both the players and GM flesh out the setting with details as they go along, and where possible they use those details to their advantage/disadvantage. There's give and take, and you can also see how the clocks are implemented in play throughout the heist to hit key escalation/resolution points. If the characters hadn't hit the critical success that allowed them to discover the location of the object they wanted, there are plenty of openings to insert further clues to its whereabouts without a room-by-room tear-down of the area (which also wouldn't be very in the tone with professional thieving, really). The after-thoughts even admit this critical roll significantly shortened the score.

Nuns with Guns fucked around with this message at 03:46 on Jan 8, 2018

Xiahou Dun
Jul 16, 2009

We shall dive down through black abysses... and in that lair of the Deep Ones we shall dwell amidst wonder and glory forever.



Yeah but, you know, reading is hard.

Nuns with Guns
Jul 23, 2010

It's fine.
Don't worry about it.
tl;dr the PCs were after a glowing, humming artifact that a bunch of witches were gathered around in the middle of a ritual. If they flubbed that roll against the helpful spirit, they would have had to kill the other spirit, but otherwise there were definitely other easy ways to figure out where their target was.

Oh the free SRD for Blades in the Dark is also live, if anyone wanted to look at the rules: https://bladesinthedark.com/

DalaranJ
Apr 15, 2008

Yosuke will now die for you.
I'm looking at maybe running Drama System coming up. Does anyone have any recommendations to make the procedural resolution less insane?

Jimbozig
Sep 30, 2003

I like sharing and ice cream and animals.

rumble in the bunghole posted:

I've run two sessions. I can say it's unlikely that there's no gain for the players as a team, but the main consequence for failures is increased Heat, pissing off more people, taking way more stress and not being able to nick the silverware on the way. With a team of 4 it's unlikely that they'll run out of resources on a single heist. Characters are really powerful if they team up and push themselves. You might see someone get really hosed up, maybe get arrested or killed, but outright failure is going to be rare, unless the players decide something absurdly ambitious. BITD is really oriented towards personal and future consequences, although I can't say about later on in the campaign when they go up against the setting's big hitters.

Yeah, I had this impression but wanted to check. I am very familiar with Apocalypse World and not so familiar with BitD - I've read it, but that certainly doesn't make me an authority.

With that caveat, here is what I think is going on:

In a game like D&D, hit points and spells and so on are resources that the players expend in the furtherance of their goals. These resources that the players spend also represent resources that the characters are spending, but only loosely. And if the players run out, then they may not achieve their goal. They may get a TPK or they may just have to go back to town to resupply and try again later.

In *World games (at least the ones I'm familiar with), this dynamic is totally reversed. Stress, coin, ticks, etc. are all there first and foremost to represent things that the characters have and that the characters spend in furtherance of their goal. They are there so that when the players achieve their goal, they can point to these things and say "my character paid for this. It cost him/her something." They are not resources that the players spend in furtherance of their goals. Why? Because they effectively can never run out - for the reasons we have been discussing. Oh sure, there is nothing in the rules to say that they can never run out. In fact, there are rules about what happens when they run out. But they don't. Nobody in this thread chimed in to tell me about the heists they played in or ran in BitD where the players went home empty-handed because they ran out of resources, and I expect that this would be the same no matter where I asked. It doesn't happen because it's not intended to happen. Even the situation hyphz was asking about - not that the players have run out of resources, but simply that they were in real danger of running out of resources - that doesn't happen either. The players will achieve their goal whether or not they elect to expend resources and regardless of how many resources they lost to bad dice. The resources are there to allow players to choose what thing their character loses. Do they lose something from pool A or pool B? Do they come out hurt, upset, with a bad reputation, or having lost an item they valued? The game is set up so that they will lose something on the way to achieving their goal, and the player gets some say in choosing what they lose while the dice and GM also get some say. Then, having lost those things, the players get to play out recovery and dealing with the fallout - one player has to go to the doctor while the other needs a new pair of fancy steampunk goggles or whatever, while another tries to patch up a damaged relationship. So the game uses these pools to give structure to the downtime and guide the fiction.

These newer types of resource pools are fictional in a way that old school D&D resource pools were not. When you cast your last spell, you were out of drat spells and the dragon may just eat you for that mistake. Those resources were in a sense more real. In the weird mushy in-between world of the conversation that lies between the players and the fiction, they were on the players' side. These new resource pools are firmly on the characters' side. But for all their unreality, they are very important. They help support the game's pacing and structure like I said above, and they also act to support players who would balk at the idea of playing totally freeform. In cops and robbers, "yeah, I got shot, but then I got back up and shot you anyway because my cop is so tough and gritty" feels like cheating; in an RPG, "yeah, I got shot, and I marked off this damage on my sheet, but then I got back up and shot you anyway because my cop has the tough and gritty perks" feels like playing the game.

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib
Blades In The Dark very specifically has rules for what happens when your character accumulates too many wounds and consequences over time and by default the assumption isn't that every character is going to make it through a life of crime unscathed and/or alive to the end of a campaign. Once again, this is stuff that's actually in the text as opposed to whatever's being argued here which seems to be based on assumptions and manufactured premises. Stress in BITD isn't some endless bottomless resource that you can always spend that exists to give you the illusion of cost or whatever, this is kind of a silly way of framing things.

gradenko_2000
Oct 5, 2010

HELL SERPENT
Lipstick Apathy

Okay, let's nip this right in the bud: Dungeon World and Blades in the Dark still have resource management mechanics.

Dungeon World characters have hit points, and one of the moves that a GM can do is to say that they got hit/hurt, and subsequently lose HP.

Dungeon World casters have spell memorization, and one of the consequences of rolling a Miss on a spell is to forget it such that you can't use it again.

Blades in the Dark has Stress and Trauma mechanics. You can take Stress to gain an extra die during rolls, but you only have so many Stress boxes that you can tick, and the difficulty of rolls is calibrated such that it's difficult-if-not-impossible to run a heist without ever being in a situation where you'd want to leverage it.

Covok
May 27, 2013

Yet where is that woman now? Tell me, in what heave does she reside? None of them. Because no God bothered to listen or care. If that is what you think it means to be a God, then you and all your teachings are welcome to do as that poor women did. And vanish from these realms forever.

Jimbozig, both of those games have resource mechanic. I don't want to come off as rude, but you made a game that claimed to be inspired by powered by the Apocalypse. It wasn't its main inspiration, but it was one according to your ludography. This just seems off.

xiw
Sep 25, 2011

i wake up at night
night action madness nightmares
maybe i am scum

Cpig Haiku contest 2020 winner
Not many DW or BITD games end up with the PCs running out of resources and failing, but I assert neither do most D&D games. Like I've been running and playing D&D since 1985 and I've seen maybe two TPKs, discounting gimmick one-off games where we were throwing PCs into a random encounter grinder etc.

The dirty secret of RPG tactical combat that all the mechanics are designed to misdirect away from is that 99% of the time the PCs win.

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib

gradenko_2000 posted:

Blades in the Dark has Stress and Trauma mechanics. You can take Stress to gain an extra die during rolls, but you only have so many Stress boxes that you can tick, and the difficulty of rolls is calibrated such that it's difficult-if-not-impossible to run a heist without ever being in a situation where you'd want to leverage it.

More pertinently in the case of Blades in the Dark, Stress is what you use to soak up consequences you'd rather not take. Basically what happens, and I'm kind of simplifying here, is that if your scoundrel gets stabbed and would suffer a consequence as a result of that you get to make a roll which tells you how much Stress you need to no-sell it. Stress doesn't replenish automatically between heists though, and in fact you have to spend downtime actions, resources, and rolls in order to clear it. If you mark your last Stress box, then you suffer from a Trauma which does reset your Stress but also brings your character one step closer to "retirement" of which you don't get to just handwave it away, four Traumas and your character is done, finito. Maybe they don't die but they can't continue play, which means if they cash out and retire it's probably not to a life of luxury and excess.

gradenko_2000
Oct 5, 2010

HELL SERPENT
Lipstick Apathy

xiw posted:

Not many DW or BITD games end up with the PCs running out of resources and failing, but I assert neither do most D&D games. Like I've been running and playing D&D since 1985 and I've seen maybe two TPKs, discounting gimmick one-off games where we were throwing PCs into a random encounter grinder etc.

The dirty secret of RPG tactical combat that all the mechanics are designed to misdirect away from is that 99% of the time the PCs win.

I don't disagree, though that's probably as much a function of practical considerations (i.e. groups don't want to play through that many combats) than the fault of the rules.

Kai Tave posted:

More pertinently in the case of Blades in the Dark, Stress is what you use to soak up consequences you'd rather not take. Basically what happens, and I'm kind of simplifying here, is that if your scoundrel gets stabbed and would suffer a consequence as a result of that you get to make a roll which tells you how much Stress you need to no-sell it.

Thanks. I only played a single (extremely cool and fun) game of BITD when it was early in its playtests, so I was sure I wasn't capturing the whole nuance of it correctly, but I was also sure that Stress is absolutely a thing that exists as a resource that one can run out of.

gradenko_2000 fucked around with this message at 09:03 on Jan 8, 2018

senrath
Nov 4, 2009

Look Professor, a destruct switch!


I see a lot more deaths and TPKs in organized play because of the random nature of grouping and an inability of the GM to adjust encounters to fit the group.

Andrast
Apr 21, 2010


My first few years of playing D&D definitely had player deaths and occasional TPKs as the norm, not rare occurrences

Countblanc
Apr 20, 2005

Help a hero out!
Player deaths are incredibly rare in my 4e experience, but in my ongoing game we regularly get to extended rests completely exhausted of daily powers, half of us out of healing surges, and without any action points left. The only actual death was reverted by an Epic Destiny, though there have been 2-3 very, very close shaves. But mostly it's powers/surges/etc.

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib

gradenko_2000 posted:

Thanks. I only played a single (extremely cool and fun) game of BITD when it was early in its playtests, so I was sure I wasn't capturing the whole nuance of it correctly, but I was also sure that Stress is absolutely a thing that exists as a resource that one can run out of.

The example roll the book gives is of someone getting stabbed and needing to spend 4 Stress to avoid the consequence thereof. It's worth noting that BITD characters have 9 Stress, period, so it's quite possible that if you take a lot of real risky moves and/or roll like poo poo you can very easily blow through a good chunk of your Stress in a given heist. Stress also gets spent as a resource for group actions. You can assist another player by taking a stress to add +1d to their roll, but you might wind up sharing in the consequences if things go south. You can also choose to lead the group in an action which is BITDs way of saying "okay let's not make each player roll Stealth to sneak past the guards," where you elect one player in the crew to lead the particular action, everybody rolls, and the single best action rolled is chosen as the result for everyone...but for each roll that comes up a failure, the leader of the task takes a Stress.

So how do you recover Stress? By indulging your character's vice as a downtime action. Bear in mind that A). you only get to make two official downtime actions between jobs, or only one when your crew is at war, and the list of actions includes things like training, recovering from harm, reducing the heat you've accrued, and working on long-term projects, so by choosing to regain spent Stress you're sacrificing your ability to focus on other stuff, and B). regaining Stress is based on a die roll which means it's entirely possible that you can wind up regaining less Stress than you would have liked and have to go into the next job with accrued stress still on your tab, so to speak.

Wrestlepig
Feb 25, 2011

my mum says im cool

Toilet Rascal
You have accumulating traumas so there’s effectively more, although it’s definitely not something you want to get deep into.

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib

rumble in the bunghole posted:

You have accumulating traumas so there’s effectively more, although it’s definitely not something you want to get deep into.

Right, hitting your limit and getting a Trauma does refresh your Stress but it's also basically one tick down on the timer to your character being forced out of the game for good. And yes, BITD does say that you don't have to die once you hit that limit, you can insist that your character lives through everything if you feel that strongly enough, but four Traumas means that character is done for, do not pass go, no exceptions.

I mean, it's fair to say that BITD does give you some leeway in how precisely your character deals with consequences, you can always opt to not take Stress and simply deal with it, though this can inflict harm upon you that requires other means and methods of removing. Unless you simply have the luckiest dice in the world it seems inevitable that characters in Blades will eventually get ground down by the thieving lifestyle which is basically the point, you can't go around doing crimes forever.

gradenko_2000
Oct 5, 2010

HELL SERPENT
Lipstick Apathy
I think it also bears noting that even in more open-ended PBTA games, the "hardness" of Hard Moves isn't something that you can keep putting off forever.

Like, you can't Zeno's Paradox the orc's axe such that it only ever asymptotically gets closer and closer to the player's neck every time they fail a roll: at some point, the axe connects, and hurt is inflicted. Even if you don't use an explicit HP system, if the stakes are such that the player is going to get injured or even killed, and they Miss appropriately, them's the stakes.

Kai Tave posted:

it seems inevitable that characters in Blades will eventually get ground down by the thieving lifestyle which is basically the point, you can't go around doing crimes forever.

My upcoming BITD hack, White-Collar Speculators on Wall Street, will be challenging this design.

Wrestlepig
Feb 25, 2011

my mum says im cool

Toilet Rascal
Fortunately there’s a retirement mechanic that dictates a major aspect of your character’s ending, which ties into the game’s resource systems.

Alien Rope Burn
Dec 5, 2004

I wanna be a saikyo HERO!

DalaranJ posted:

I'm looking at maybe running Drama System coming up. Does anyone have any recommendations to make the procedural resolution less insane?

Depends on what you find insane about it, I suppose. It's a bit obtuse but extremely lightweight in play.

Splicer
Oct 16, 2006

from hell's heart I cast at thee
🧙🐀🧹🌙🪄🐸
What I'm getting here is that some of us find the perception of impartiality a useful tool. This is not to say that improvisation or explicitly rule of cooling things is verboten, but the pretence is they're explicit case by case exceptions by an otherwise impartial adjudicator. This helps the players and GM maintain their suspension of disbelief and other such things so they can get on with having fun playing the game

What I'm also getting is that some of us find the openness of "we're all making poo poo up what's an interesting thing to make up" freeing and fun due to a bunch of other psychology words I can't be arsed thinking about so they can get on with having fun with the game.

Those of us fortunate enough to be in the galaxy brain intersection of these two groups :smug: (or at least get the appeal of both intellectually if not personally) understand that both can be equally fun, assuming as always that everyone involved is on board with and the systems are designed around the pros and cons of each approach. You don't have to like both, but if you get where the appeal of each comes from it only makes both more fun.

Splicer fucked around with this message at 12:40 on Jan 8, 2018

Serf
May 5, 2011


Also, in Blades, when you take a trauma, you're out of the heist. You don't die or anything, but you can no longer continue contributing to the operation. If the whole team traumas out of the heist, then you effectively lose and don't get anything (aside from stuff like XP from desperate action rolls or pursuing your drives). I've seen it happen in an AP before, and it ended with the PCs captured and being forced to run another heist immediately to bust out, so you can lose, and there are consequences for using up your resources/getting lovely rolls.

xiw
Sep 25, 2011

i wake up at night
night action madness nightmares
maybe i am scum

Cpig Haiku contest 2020 winner
I always encourage people to carefully read AW's GM instructions when wrestling with the issue of producing the illusion we're talking about here - it's quite thoughtful and the GM stuff is very targetted at techniques for making the world FEEL real, even when you haven't considered the relative MPG and sand traction of the spiked dune buggies vs-a-vs your war rig.

gradenko_2000
Oct 5, 2010

HELL SERPENT
Lipstick Apathy

Splicer posted:

What I'm getting here is that some of us find the perception of impartiality a useful or possibly indispensable tool. This is not to say that improvisation or explicitly rule of cooling things is verboten, but the pretence is they're explicit case by case exceptions by an otherwise impartial adjudicator. This helps the players and GM maintain their suspension of disbelief and other such things so they can get on with having fun playing the game

What I'm also getting is that some of us find the openness of "we're all making poo poo up what's an interesting thing to make up" freeing and fun due to a bunch of other psychology words I can't be arsed thinking about.

I don't know exactly why, but your post made me think about today's session, where the party had just finished a very difficult fight with a sorceress that had a lot of very painful debuff spells. All of us were seriously hurt, two people were knocked out, and all of us had already recovered from at least one knockout.

We were talking about the correct order of healing spells to cast to get everyone hale and hearty from untangling the mix of diseases, level drain, ability score damage, and raw HP, and after like 5 minutes of discussion, the Gnoll Warblade pipes up with "while you're trying to puzzle that out, I'm still on the floor bleeding"

We eventually handwaved it all away because ultimately we were going to take a Long Rest which meant that it didn't really matter how efficiently we spent all the spell slots, but I thought it was kind of nice that we were all invested enough in the moment that for a while we were trying to figure it out anyway.

thefakenews
Oct 20, 2012

Serf posted:

Also, in Blades, when you take a trauma, you're out of the heist. You don't die or anything, but you can no longer continue contributing to the operation. If the whole team traumas out of the heist, then you effectively lose and don't get anything (aside from stuff like XP from desperate action rolls or pursuing your drives). I've seen it happen in an AP before, and it ended with the PCs captured and being forced to run another heist immediately to bust out, so you can lose, and there are consequences for using up your resources/getting lovely rolls.

I had cause to think about this in a session I ran a couple of days ago. The rules actually say you are dropped out of the current conflict. I think that, depending on the nature of the heist, it might be possible that you can come back during the heist if the 'conflict' is new. I have been thinking about this because the crew are Hawkers, so their heists are potentially a much longer term thing than a robbery or raid type heist.

If everyone "traumas out" that is still pretty certain to end the heist though.

Nuns with Guns
Jul 23, 2010

It's fine.
Don't worry about it.
Blades seems to expect that every player will swap in a new character once the stress and traumas get to be too much. This could be a temporary change while the other character takes a physical/brain break to recover for a few heists, or maybe they do get ground down and die or have too many traumas to be reliable anymore. Unlike AW or a lot of related PBtA games, you can double up on playbooks in BitD.

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hyphz
Aug 5, 2003

Number 1 Nerd Tear Farmer 2022.

Keep it up, champ.

Also you're a skeleton warrior now. Kree.
Unlockable Ben

Nuns with Guns posted:

You've had the exact same argument with people in these threads over PbtA at least three times now, and each time it's come down to you barely understanding the rules, a deeply uncharitable reading of the bits you have read, and a frankly sociopathic assumption of Player/GM interactions in a game of collaborative storytelling. Maybe stick to games you're more comfortable with because there's clearly some part of the abstraction here you can't comprehend?

Well, if I’m getting in people’s nerves to the extent that they’re keeping count then I’ll shut up about it!

But dammit, I’m tired of the 5e/Pathfinder treadmill as much as the next RPgoon. But so many other games drop the ball on premades so that they become the entrenched default. And in many cases they _could_, which is what’s so annoying. I mean, maybe BitD is a special case because of the nature of the system but it’s a general principle.

It’s not just PbtA either. I mean I ran FFG Star Wars for a while and that has a premade with a scene where the PCs are exploring a giant wrecked spaceship underwater to recover something, and there’s a sea leviathan poking around at it. And it sounds cool but there’s no map and the leviathan has no stats or actions other than “if the PCs actually try to fight this thing they lose”. And so hey let’s have them find a few empty rooms so it feels big and let’s do the dramatic escalation thing where they see a shadow and then it goes by in a window and then there’s a bang and then after they’ve explored an area it creates a breach in the hull but obviously it will never actually matter and I’m just sitting feeling like a bad stage magician because I can see all the wires. And the players know that too and are playing along but just kind of bemused because they know they’re finding the thing and getting out and nothing they do really changes anything. And yes I can have them roll but it’s all made up and any damage they take from a bad roll would have no meaning to it other than bad luck and me being mean. The fiction sounds cool but an Ewok with a stick would be more exciting for the players because at least it is statted and has some independent system engagement.

I focus a bit on BitD because I love the idea so much, but where BitD goes Fellowship follows, and indirectly so does Strike in non combat scenes.

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