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Kai Tave posted:That person deserves to go to book jail where all they get to read is Ready Player One for ten years straight. Yeah right, Ready Player One is a real book that exists and is being made into the movie. If that can be successful, literally anything can. I can poo poo into a sandwich and play an improv game about how its actually not poo poo and its going to form a more reasonable and engaging narrative than Ready Player One. It is a physical embodiment of that AB3 statement being loving wrong.
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Jan 9, 2018 02:24
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Also I'm reasonably confident saying that the expectations of the average RPG group are tuned such that the average GM's output is nonetheless considered enjoyable, nobody I have ever known has gone into an RPG expecting the GM to bust out some award winning literary masterpiece and if I ever did know anyone like that I would assume they had some hardcore brain problems.
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Jan 9, 2018 02:28
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Also I'm pretty sure that quote in context was talking about the probably-imaginary shitlords the author was gaming with, not a general message of 'never try to write anything, anyone ever.'
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Jan 9, 2018 02:29
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Read in it's most forgiving possible light, it's an exhortation to put your own work out there, a backhanded declaration that good work is made better when it is made available to everyone else.
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Jan 9, 2018 02:36
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hyphz posted:I had to think about this but unfortunately, the answer turns out to be "because caster supremacy". Unless that vault's owned or made by a 20th level wizard there's a way in. (And I don't like caster supremacy, but it seems relevant here.) Ok, pretend I asked this question about D20 Modern, or Savage Worlds or GURPS. quote:Mmm. I can understand time passing if the players are waiting for the solar eclipse or something like that, but using a "time passes" skip over when the players are in what could be a fascinating and unusual environment would seem a bit disappointing to me as a player at least. Ok, that's a fair preference, but Blades does abstract the passing of time into a single roll (in some cases). Making a prowl roll to explore a location and advance the exploration clock abstracts the act of wandering around looking for what you want into ticks on the clock. The GM tells you if you found what you were looking for, but they don't detail every room you looked in unsuccessfully. Edit: also, the PCs in Blades are professional criminals. Criminals stealing from an occupied location with security don't usually poke their head into every room they find. They work out where they want to get to and try to get there as directly and quickly as possible. They aren't dungeon crawling the house. thefakenews fucked around with this message at 02:51 on Jan 9, 2018 |
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Jan 9, 2018 02:37
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hyphz posted:Possible that those things would exist, sure. Plausible that a ghost bound by experts could be subverted by a bunch of random footpads? Much trickier to argue. Plausible that they would then find the valuable thing they were looking for, in the huge mansion, in 2 minutes flat? Ummm. the players are not random footpads. this is one of the basic assumptions of the game. the pcs are competent and exceptional operators, capable of things that most people aren't. they have the skills necessary to attain their goals, and stress allows them to stave off bad poo poo until they can make it to the end. in the example from the book, one of the characters is a whisper, and is used to dealing with ghosts. they also take a devil's bargain. even with that, examples are given for how things could have gone wrong. their exceptional level of success is tied to the critical example that we then follow. and in the end they don't walk away unscathed. one has taken level 3 harm, the other two have taken not-insignificant stress and used up items from their load as well. it is a good example of the characters making a quick raid on their rival faction and pulling off a pretty simple score because of it
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Jan 9, 2018 02:47
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Kai Tave posted:Also I'm reasonably confident saying that the expectations of the average RPG group are tuned such that the average GM's output is nonetheless considered enjoyable, nobody I have ever known has gone into an RPG expecting the GM to bust out some award winning literary masterpiece and if I ever did know anyone like that I would assume they had some hardcore brain problems. Hell, Wild Cards is literally a bunch of people writing fanfiction and game novelizations about their superhero RPG characters, was professionally published, and includes buggery-powered zombie interrogation. edit: to be clear, the character fucks the corpse in the rear end to reanimate it so he can ask it questions. No, I'm not joking.
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Jan 9, 2018 02:48
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"Oh hey, 3 full pages of undead posts. Surely hyphz and Literally Everyone Else have stopped talking past each other like anything is ever going to be accomplished!" -me, a loving moron edit: I meant unread posts but I think the typo is on the mark
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Jan 9, 2018 03:09
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This is some Mustard Seed Trading RPG level poo poo.
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Jan 9, 2018 03:34
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hyphz posted:No. I tend to lose a lot of confidence at the old statement from the Ab3 rants - "think about the worst book ever published; it's better than the best thing you ever wrote.." Wrong, because the best thing I ever wrote ended up being a published book that's far from the worst. Checkmate 
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Jan 9, 2018 03:40
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So I was bored and went to look up the context of said quote! It's literally an rear end in a top hat poo poo-talking the narrator for getting rejection notices. (Ab3 later went on to publish at least one book trilogy and also was a co-writer with CJ Carella on the Unisystem game Gorilla Warfare, basically AFMBE but for Apepocalypses.) It is in no way meant to be a life lesson that you should loving take to heart.
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Jan 9, 2018 03:44
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hyphz posted:No. I tend to lose a lot of confidence at the old statement from the Ab3 rants - "think about the worst book ever published; it's better than the best thing you ever wrote.." I don't know from Ab3, but I'm pretty sure the original saying is something like "the worst thing ever written is better than the best story you've ever had in your head". Which is a calculated offensive statement, designed to motivate you to prove yourself, to put in the work to actualize your ideas. This "Ab3" statement is nonsensical and basically the complete opposite, and I'm sorry it had such a profound effect on you. You should make something that's all your own, it'll give you a new perspective on this stuff. Leraika posted:SO GUYS I misread that as "if I was a fan of Katamari" for a second, and that would be an awesome RPG. Roll to...roll!
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Jan 9, 2018 03:47
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Plutonis posted:But of course there isn't a 4E tactical videogame because Hasbro/WOTC is full of Please be respectful on something awful dot com
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Jan 9, 2018 04:39
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Otherkinsey Scale posted:I don't know from Ab3, but I'm pretty sure the original saying is something like "the worst thing ever written is better than the best story you've ever had in your head". Which is a calculated offensive statement, designed to motivate you to prove yourself, to put in the work to actualize your ideas. First, you coat a d100 in glue...
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Jan 9, 2018 04:50
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Ettin posted:Please be respectful on something awful dot com I hate them almost as much as I hate Konami and those companies who sell lead tainted baby formula
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Jan 9, 2018 04:53
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In fairness to Plutonis, which is possibly the first time those words have ever been written in that order before, the people working at WotC right now are super dumb.
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Jan 9, 2018 05:04
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Also bear in mind Atari had the D&D rights at the time and opted to nearly ignore 4th edition. WotC's end for software had a pretty dark reason why it fell apart as well. WotC was absolutely hosed in many ways by how the D&D video game rights got shuffled around, and the missed opportunities are a bit mind-boggling. They were trying to develop a fantasy MMO before World of Warcraft cornered the market, but they could never recover the rights and the project fell apart in its infancy.
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Jan 9, 2018 05:26
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Hot take: Neverwinter is good
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Jan 9, 2018 05:37
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In any case, the D&D 4e team absolutely wanted a videogame, they wanted better online tools, because they were given a mission of making D&D into a Hasbro "core brand" by increasing its profit margin... a task that was effectively impossible while Atari held onto the video game rights (and, to a lesser extent, the fact that Sweetpea Entertainment held on to the movie rights).
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Jan 9, 2018 05:44
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gradenko_2000 posted:Hot take: Neverwinter is good yeah that's a pretty hot take
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Jan 9, 2018 05:47
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By the way, hyphz, I just reread that whole like 7(!) page thing and you sound like a loving crazy person. Have you tried reading the loving rules?!?!?!?!?!
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Jan 9, 2018 05:54
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Plutonis posted:Blades in the Dark is good but PBTA sucks so even if his reason is baffling and psychotic he's on the right track blades in the dark isnt pbta tho
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Jan 9, 2018 06:11
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gradenko_2000 posted:Hot take: Neverwinter is good unless it's changed radically since the last time i played it, no it isn't
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Jan 9, 2018 06:22
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Xiahou Dun posted:By the way, hyphz, I just reread that whole like 7(!) page thing and you sound like a loving crazy person. Seriously, he admitted that he's terrified of ever-not-running a prefab adventure because of ancient catpiss stories from RPGnet, and then he wondered why a completely GM/Player-directed game with no practical or intended way to support a full campaign module is beyond his comprehension. Nuns with Guns fucked around with this message at 06:43 on Jan 9, 2018 |
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Jan 9, 2018 06:39
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It’s like a Russian nesting doll of crazy. Just. Read. The. God drat. Rules. They wrote it! It’s there!
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Jan 9, 2018 06:50
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This discussion served a good and useful purpose of reminding me how good my usual players are for not treating Bad Stuff happening to their characters as Bad Stuff happening to themselves.
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Jan 9, 2018 07:34
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fyi Hyphz the fiction doesn't have to be an infodump made in advance. Most stories aren't like that. Hell, most modules aren't like that. If during session 1 you establish that there are poisonous snakes inside the vault, and during session 3 somebody gets lost, it's perfectly viable to throw snakes at them, or poison, or w/e. That was established in the fiction. Or hell, as soon as something new and unexpected happens, it becomes part of the established fiction. The only thing that rule does is remind you that things need to be coherent to some degree. Like if you establish that these are venomous snakes and they bite a character, you need to raise the issue of venom somehow. Maybe they discover they're immune (raises new questions like "how?" or "why?") but more likely they'll have to deal with the poison somehow. If somebody says elves exist and nobody objects, bam, it can flow from the fiction that elves show up somewhere along the campaign. etc. Think about every movie you've watched or any book you've read. Does the author give you an infodump early on the story with every relevant fictional piece of information? Or does the fiction evolve along with the viewer's discovery of it, scene by scene? The good thing about pbta games is that anyone has influence on what goes on in the scene, not just the director/GM. They get to fill in or add details, or introduce elements they think are interesting.
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Jan 9, 2018 12:46
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Foglet posted:This discussion served a good and useful purpose of reminding me how good my usual players are for not treating Bad Stuff happening to their characters as Bad Stuff happening to themselves. It's served the purpose of reminding me how much I like Blades in the Dark and how seething I am that I don't have the time to play it.
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Jan 9, 2018 12:56
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Nuns with Guns posted:me earlier today: you know, maybe I was a bit harsh saying that guy's understanding of player/GM interactions is sociopathic and implying he has fundamental problems understanding non-toxic behavior in RPGs 
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Jan 9, 2018 14:48
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Plutonis posted:and those companies who sell lead tainted baby formula It was all your parents could afford.
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Jan 9, 2018 15:02
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LongDarkNight posted:It was all your parents could afford. 
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Jan 9, 2018 15:05
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hyphz posted:No. I tend to lose a lot of confidence at the old statement from the Ab3 rants - "think about the worst book ever published; it's better than the best thing you ever wrote.." Yikes.
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Jan 9, 2018 15:05
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I'm gonna step in here not to re-iterate what has been said before (ie the whole discussion regarding what to do with failure etc) but to bring forward an anecdote of what can happen when a game is crafted in a specific way and the expectations of the players and the GM (which, in this case, was me) can break apart a PbtA game in which the mechanical structure of the game isn't up to par. I GMed a game of Night Witches, which is a PtbA set in WWII, with players being part of an all-women night bombing squadron (a setting which is actually based on a real-life squadron). The book is meant to evoke themes of women trying to survive in a world that is both trying to kill them, and also where a male-dominated world is trying to keep them down. At the start of the game this was largely true: I was bringing forward conflicts and issues for the characters, and the players were succeeding in some cases and failing in others. Unfortunately, as time progressed and the characters gained advancements, it was quickly becoming clear that the bonuses that they had accrued meant that any social interaction for those characters was favourable for them. This was a deliberate choice for the character, but basically created issues because the themes of grinding oppression and ever present death were not present. There is a system for the character to die, and the system tries to draw you towards it, but I think it breaks down if the characters don't actually want their players to get killed. And having a rotating cast of NPCs getting killed/wounded does not drive the mechanisms of a game which expects PCs to get killed as part of the story that it is attempting to tell. This disconnect between what I thought the game was trying to do, and the sort of story that I was trying to portray, and the fact that the players wanted a different kind of story meant that eventually things came to a head when I basically ran out of interesting decisions to do, because due to how good the characters were at dealing with issues, there wasn't a challenge for them anymore, and during one session I just kind of broke down because I didn't really know how to progress the game anymore in a way that would be interesting for both me and the players. The final nail in the coffin was really that I (and also, I feel, the game itself) wanted a gloomy negative story and the players, understandably, wanted only a "winning against adversity" story. After a few months I GMed Masks which is a much better implementation of PbtA, because the motivations of both the GM and the player does not have such a dichotomy. Under the basis of trying to recreate Teen Titans-style hijinks, players can be free to explore that as they wish, and decide on their own path, rather than being constrained by the system to conform to a particular storyline. Also purely in terms of mechanisms/numbers, Masks is far superior and understands that character Moves are reactive, not something that you have to regularly schedule like in Night Witches with its absolutely awful "Bombing mission" system.
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Jan 9, 2018 15:07
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LongDarkNight posted:It was all your parents could afford. I'm bigly on mental stability. Whatever. I'm not doing the Trump impression joke anymore!
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Jan 9, 2018 15:18
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unseenlibrarian posted:So I was bored and went to look up the context of said quote! I didn’t make that clear. It was an rear end in a top hat character in the story, but Ab3 wrote that story, so he was really saying that to himself. And I’m sure he had felt that at some point because doing anything creative can turn out like that. I meant that I shared the feeling he apparently had about himself, not that I took the story as a life lesson. About “reading the rules”, though, they tend to dodge around the issue. For example, the rules to Fellowship have an entry on “make a cut that follows” which I think has an explicit reference to Trollman (“just because you can show signs of an approaching threat anytime doesn’t mean that bears show up whenever the players fail a roll”). But that joke kind of falls down because it makes the rule a straw man, there is nothing to say you couldn’t use the same cut every time if you made it fit in a more sensible way. And there’s pretty likely going to always be some way to make “deal damage” fit - but that has a codified effect in the rules, whereas “show signs..” doesn’t. So how often you pick it will have a notable effect. Same with “being a fan..” in that book; it has the rider “make them earn it” in the text, but no clue what the price should be.
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Jan 9, 2018 16:15
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I'm not sure how many times people can say "failure is fun/rewarding/can lead to interesting situations" before the entire conversation just becomes a series of circular arguments and nitpicky discussions of semantics.
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Jan 9, 2018 16:23
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hyphz posted:I didn’t make that clear. It was an rear end in a top hat character in the story, but Ab3 wrote that story, so he was really saying that to himself. And I’m sure he had felt that at some point because doing anything creative can turn out like that. I meant that I shared the feeling he apparently had about himself, not that I took the story as a life lesson. if you've ever consumed any form of fictional media, you should have an instinctive grasp of what sort of price comes with earning goals. to use another example from the wire mcnulty (and later freamon) conspire to keep their department paid and afloat amid their failure to arrest marlo stanfield. to do this, mcnulty invents a serial killer by tampering with crime scene evidence, faking phone calls and lying to his coworkers. this helps them run a side operation that closes in on marlo and eventually brings in the evidence to take him down, but when he admits his deception to greggs she loses all respect for him and eventually reveals his plan to lieutenant daniels. as a result, both mcnulty and freamon are forced into retirement because they are told that they will be shuffled into dead-end jobs and they choose to quit the force instead. essentially, mcnulty gets what he wants: keeps his department running and brings in marlo, but the cost of this action is that he loses his job, which is what defines him as a person. at the end, his victory is personally fulfilling, but now it means he has to find a way to carry on in life without his job. this is basically how all good fiction works. you want the characters to succeed, but those successes come at a cost. in blades, those costs are most easily represented as traumas
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Jan 9, 2018 16:29
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I think a misunderstanding is how many people treat RPGs as a game (and when I reference a game here I mean in the strictest possible way) which is what hyphz is doing, and how many people are treating RPGs as stories. I don't mean to bring this up in a "lol storygames aren't really games what idiots you are for playing them" btw and I really don't want the whole stupid "what is/isn't an RPG" argument to pop up. Basically the roots of D&D as a wargame mean that an interpretation of the game is one in which you could explicitly win and lose. The win condition in this case is that you get out of whatever dungeon with whatever loot you have, and that your entire party doesn't die. Stuff like Tomb of Horrors exemplify this. This way of playing RPGs lies extremely within the "game" side of the spectrum, where characters are interchangeable, are lost easily and replaced easily. Within this example, the win/loss conditions of your character are tied with the win/loss conditions of you, yourself, as the player. On the other end of the spectrum, are "non-games" like PbtA where there isn't a loss/win condition. In PbtA, a player does not have an explicit win/loss condition, although his character still has a win/loss condition. Depending on the player, he might be more interested in making sure that his character achieves his win condition, but this isn't a primary reason why the player plays a PtbA, with more importance given to how the story unfolds and what kind of issues that his character is presented with. This can lead to games where the players of your characters are doing everything wrong, not succeeding at anything they aspire to, and still making an interesting story of how their downfall unfurled, and still provide enjoyment to players. So, since the aim is to create an interesting story, players and GM alike will collaborate in order to make the story interesting, even if this is a negative outcome for the characters involved. It's this disconnect between players/characters (which isn't present when defining RPGs as a game) that makes this possible. You might have noticed, however, that the current state of mainstream RPGs (D&D and PF) doesn't fit either description. They aren't treated as a game, because characters aren't expendable and the game isn't just about getting through a dungeon alive, but the characters still have personal arcs that they go through that ideally don't just end up with them being dead in a dungeon because they couldn't face X+1 number of goblins. So what you get is a strange gelling of game and non-game elements that doesn't really work in conjunction with each other. It's difficult to reconcile the fact that in the current version of D&D, character and player win/loss conditions coincide, yet there is still a drive to create a story: although this does halfheartedly work in social situations, it dramatically falls down during combat scenarios, where due to mechanical constraints, the game more or less forces you to kill characters as a loss condition. 4e actually pulled back the curtain on this facet of RPGs, which I do find hilarious. What some storygames attempt to do is create combat scenarios in games that don't explicitly have a loss condition, and I guess this is confusing to people that have been used to playing stuff like D&D, because before the only situation in which this occurred was social situations (you fail a social encounter and you get captured, a fight starts, you run away, people hate you etc etc etc). I think this is where the disconnect is: storygames treat every single situation experienced by the players like a D&D social encounter.
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Jan 9, 2018 16:57
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Tekopo posted:I'm not sure how many times people can say "failure is fun/rewarding/can lead to interesting situations" before the entire conversation just becomes a series of circular arguments and nitpicky discussions of semantics. I don't mind that. What I mind is the implication that when the players meet a goblin, they have their PCs throw down their swords and fight it hand to hand with one hand tied behind their back because "we want the game to be a challenge so we'll make it one, and anyway if we failed it might be interesting". It's the same as the Shadowrun guy that ended up with me saying "when you spent hours making your character shoot everyone, why complain that it worked?" Pretty much everyone I've asked for help on this from has said that was a wrong and ridiculous thing to say, but it just seems to be exactly what the rules of shared narrative games are encouraging. Hey, player, you want there to be a challenge and it could be interesting if you fail, so why not just lower those stats a few points? And I've met very few players who would find this fun. All the players I want to know want to at least feel that the challenge is being imposed on them, ideally by the environment of the game world rather than by the GM, but the latter could work as a push. If the player has to take action to create their own challenge, it bleeds through into the fiction and they feel that any challenge their PC did face was just the result of self-handicapping, and gives a very unsatisfying feel. I mean, maybe fans of these games don't think that way, but in that case I reserve the right to feel sad that there isn't a cool Dishonored meets The Dark Project game that will work for players without that mindset.
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Jan 9, 2018 16:58
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hyphz posted:I don't mind that. What I mind is the implication that when the players meet a goblin, they have their PCs throw down their swords and fight it hand to hand with one hand tied behind their back because "we want the game to be a challenge so we'll make it one, and anyway if we failed it might be interesting". No one has said this, what the gently caress is wrong with you, you absolute dipshit.
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Jan 9, 2018 17:01
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