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Leraika posted:Well, it looks like it's all resolved itself in the end, so there's that. I still say you should've just started killing people.
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Jan 10, 2018 04:37
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Those .45 caliber depleted uranium bullets to kill druggies aren't buying themselves, gradenko.
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Jan 10, 2018 04:43
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Sion posted:So, on the subject of literally fuckin' anything else how's everyone's week shaping up? I'm back at work tomorrow oh no Ran Dread on Sunday for my indie RPG group. Invited my sister who has never played an RPG before and she had a blast! Won't stop talking about it. The Jenga tower is just the perfect device for horror and suspense.
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Jan 10, 2018 05:08
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gradenko_2000 posted:To be fair, there's a smidgen of a real issue with what hyphz is describing with his Shadowrun story. Wow, that really sucks dude. I wish I could help but I don't know anything about that country set of tax laws, only America's.
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Jan 10, 2018 05:12
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Covok posted:Wow, that really sucks dude. I wish I could help but I don't know anything about that country set of tax laws, only America's. Thanks. And, to be clear, it's not like I'm gonna starve or anything (COUNTBLANC I WILL THROW IN BUCKS FOR GOFUNDME) - it's sort of a bougie thing to be worried about in the grand scheme of things, it just sucks that it's not like I'm getting universal healthcare out of seeing my taxes go up, right?
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Jan 10, 2018 05:16
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Ugh, best of luck to the both of you.
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Jan 10, 2018 05:21
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Hope things work out. I should look into that myself, I can only tell that my income tax is just a tiny margin smaller.
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Jan 10, 2018 05:52
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gradenko_2000 posted:To be fair, there's a smidgen of a real issue with what hyphz is describing with his Shadowrun story. It 's definitely the mark of a less than stellar designed game for sure but i think it shouldn't be too hard for a gm to look at a character sheet and go "hey your character is a bit too specialized tone the x skill down a few points and round them out a bit"
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Jan 10, 2018 06:11
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Elfgames posted:It 's definitely the mark of a less than stellar designed game for sure but i think it shouldn't be too hard for a gm to look at a character sheet and go "hey your character is a bit too specialized tone the x skill down a few points and round them out a bit" I think what is most frustrating about something like shadowrun is the general lack of guidance of when a number high enough to be the best as many rpgs never have a point you can reach where you are too good to ever need to increase it, especially at character creation.
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Jan 10, 2018 06:40
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gradenko_2000 posted:Thanks. And, to be clear, it's not like I'm gonna starve or anything (COUNTBLANC I WILL THROW IN BUCKS FOR GOFUNDME) - it's sort of a bougie thing to be worried about in the grand scheme of things, it just sucks that it's not like I'm getting universal healthcare out of seeing my taxes go up, right? I appreciate the offer, but I don't really feel comfortable taking money from e-strangers (though I don't begrudge those who do). Especially since I do feel pretty strongly about nailing those interviews, but it's been so long since I've been able to get reliable work that it's hard to be truly optimistic I did play A Hat in Time this last week and really loved it though and might take up speedrunning because of it, it looks like you can reliably get <90 minutes with basic routing (and down to 60 with practice) in any% which is about the ideal run time for me Countblanc fucked around with this message at 06:57 on Jan 10, 2018 |
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Jan 10, 2018 06:50
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Countblanc posted:I appreciate the offer, but I don't really feel comfortable taking money from e-strangers just become friends, blammo
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Jan 10, 2018 08:02
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kingcom posted:I think what is most frustrating about something like shadowrun is the general lack of guidance of when a number high enough to be the best as many rpgs never have a point you can reach where you are too good to ever need to increase it, especially at character creation. To compare and contrast, GURPS tells the GM that they might want to cap stats/skills at somewhere between 16 to 20 to prevent impossible-to-hit/impossible-to-miss scenarios, as well as introduces explicit rules that will cause very high skills to only count as something like 16 or 18 regardless of how the actual number is in certain situations.
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Jan 10, 2018 08:07
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grassy gnoll posted:I get your intent and and have verified that it ain't me, but how would I know what my desk smells like when I'm not at my desk? You're getting into some weird, pee-scented ontological territory there. As someone with a philosophy degree, I regret to inform you that all ontological territory is weird and pee-scented.
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Jan 10, 2018 09:46
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Antivehicular posted:I'm not even sure Godbound would work, because the core problem is that the things I loved about Exalted (beyond the general "it was huge in my college scene, you had to be there" stuff) were the weird setting bits, particularly Jenna Moran's work on the line, and where that took me in terms of chargen and imagination -- but that was mostly in a really low-power direction. I could definitely run the "my ideal Exalted game" stuff for him, but given that one of my ideas for that sort of thing is a police procedural game set in a modern-tech city populated by Demon-blooded, it's probably not going to be the actual game as published, you know?
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Jan 10, 2018 10:05
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grassy gnoll posted:This is the same dude who took fifteen minutes of resettting to get through the Tanker in MGS2 one year. He sounds really bad at doing speedruns.
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Jan 10, 2018 11:41
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Sion posted:So, on the subject of literally fuckin' anything else how's everyone's week shaping up? I'm back at work tomorrow oh no Been weirdly productive for a couple of weeks now, using reminders and checklists rather than my memory for task management. Doesn't have any of the other markers of a hypomanic episode, so I'm not sure of the cause. I'm cooking more and my flat's less messy, and as a result I'm feeling... what's that emotion, the one that makes people bare their teeth and make weird barking noises, but that doesn't involve punching people? That one. Rehearsing this week for a gig, so I hope I can get someone else to write the notes in my Sunday night game because after eight and a half hours drumming over the week, my hands are going to be hosed. Hopefully it's going to be the last session of our L5R beta game. Hopefully both because there's bits of the system I hate with a passion, and because we've been playing this game weekly for a year now and I need a break from fantasy samurai for a bit.
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Jan 10, 2018 11:58
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luckily there exists a better shadowrun. sometimes i think it sticks too close to the original game, but overall its way better .
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Jan 10, 2018 12:07
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Splicer posted:There's a game called Mutant City Blues you might like to check out. I have MCB and it's great. I just need to get other people to play it with me, but isn't that always the problem?
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Jan 10, 2018 12:40
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Serf posted:luckily there exists a better shadowrun. sometimes i think it sticks too close to the original game, but overall its way better . no no no, this is actually terrible and reads like written by someone who hates shadowrun
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Jan 10, 2018 15:15
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Elfgames posted:It 's definitely the mark of a less than stellar designed game for sure but i think it shouldn't be too hard for a gm to look at a character sheet and go "hey your character is a bit too specialized tone the x skill down a few points and round them out a bit" Oddly that wasn’t the problem. I should clarify we were playing SR 4e. In 4e, all extra successes on a shot carry over to damage, rather than the number being limited by the gun you’re using as in 5e. That makes combat really deadly, and initiative really important. So the problem was that I was trying to do the whole fiction based ad-lib thing but I couldn’t because of this character. He obviously wanted to play a bad rear end gun fighter but I couldn’t let him, because any threat that could be defeated with a gun would either be over in 30 seconds or so, or beat his initiative and blast the whole party. Any that couldn’t he’d just be twiddling his thumbs. And anyway what’s action cyberpunk fiction without a cool gunfight or two? (Yes I know original style cyber wasn’t based on that.) The same thing came up a bunch of times. I set up a meeting between two gangs in a warehouse that was intended to be a neat set piece but the players just blocked the entrances and sieged it. The players committed a bunch of crimes but any time Lone Star showed up they just surrendered instantly (because they had no problem with actual atrocities that could be justified as scum-on-scum but didn’t want to touch “innocent” cops), so I had to have them mysteriously never show up or campaign over. So yea, fiction driven ad-lib rubs me the wrong way. Also I had a friend be bereaved and a bunch of work plans go haywire within the last week so I probably wasn’t in the best mood when I posted that stuff. Sorry.
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Jan 10, 2018 16:16
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hyphz posted:So the problem was that I was trying to do the whole fiction based ad-lib thing but I couldn’t because of this character. He obviously wanted to play a bad rear end gun fighter but I couldn’t let him, because any threat that could be defeated with a gun would either be over in 30 seconds or so, or beat his initiative and blast the whole party. Any that couldn’t he’d just be twiddling his thumbs. And anyway what’s action cyberpunk fiction without a cool gunfight or two? (Yes I know original style cyber wasn’t based on that.) Like I said, I don't think the problem is with "the fiction-based adlib thing" so much as the idiosyncrasy of Shadowrun allowing that player to create a character that's so good at shooting that he either trivialized every possible combat encounter, or made the combat encounter lethal to the entire rest of the party. There's a bunch of ways around it (not the least of which is playing a different game), but I don't think writing off the adlibbing style is part of it. Like, it's absolutely possible in D&D 3e and 5e to have a character go all-in on AC and have them be very difficult to hit by monsters, and then have that turn into a serious problem because too many monsters are only AC-attacking melee dudes.
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Jan 10, 2018 16:23
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Antivehicular posted:I have MCB and it's great. I just need to get other people to play it with me, but isn't that always the problem?
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Jan 10, 2018 16:29
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I also played Shadowrun 4e, and had the exact same issues as some of the ones you are describing. My original character idea was this fast-talking gun merchant. But one of the other characters was a PhysAd and we had a mage and a rigger. The PhysAd basically overtook me in terms of social skills so it was literally worse for the party to use me, the original face, over him. There was nothing I could really do about it either, the skill and magic stuff that the PhysAd had were way better than anything I could get as a cyber-augmented human. This drove me to just dump all of my XPs into guns and I managed to convince the GM to give me even more skills in firing a specific gun, and then I also got wired reflexes, which made me a death machine because at least then I could do something meaningful. Unfortunately, the mage that we had basically made combat trivial against anyone else (just send a bunch of spirits into a warehouse to kill everyone), so even my combat skills were useless at that point. Points to take away from the above: - Shadowrun (especially 4e) is a badly thought out, badly implemented and badly balanced system. Combat is 100% reliant on getting multiple turns in a single round and doing devastating alpha strike damage so that enemies can't fire back at you. - It's extremely easy for inexperienced Shadowrun GMs to let the game/players get out of hand because there are so many different exploitable loopholes within the rules/equipment/skills etc, so the only way that you can make the system work as a whole is to severely restrict what your players can do and remove the options that break the game over on its knee. This issue is pretty much re-iterating the first issue. So the issue that you had in Shadowrun was entirely due to how lovely the system is and how easy it is to exploit. The problem with Shadowrun is that if you attempt to run it fiction-based, it doesn't work because the game uses old design practices. Your line of reasoning is that, because running fiction-first in Shadowrun didn't work, other games like BitD are just as easy and open to exploitation as Shadowrun. But that's not the case: Shadowrun is just a badly made system that just doesn't work unless you spend a lot of time fixing the issues with the system (which, to be honest, is not the job of a GM). The issue isn't with "fiction driven ad-lib" as you call it, because Shadowrun isn't a system that can work using "fiction driven ad-lib", because it's basically busted from the ground up. Shadowrun is a very old-school D&D-style combat system with minimal integration of rules with theme, unlike PbtA/BitD.
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Jan 10, 2018 16:41
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The fiction ad-lib thing was more triggered by the sea monster encounter in Star Wars. The problem I had is that without a gamist subgame to delegate to a la DnD combat, following the fiction seemed to rob the game of tension because the GM is not the only one familiar with fiction and the players can all see exactly where it is leading.
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Jan 10, 2018 16:44
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hyphz posted:The fiction ad-lib thing was more triggered by the sea monster encounter in Star Wars. The problem I had is that without a gamist subgame to delegate to a la DnD combat, following the fiction seemed to rob the game of tension because the GM is not the only one familiar with fiction and the players can all see exactly where it is leading. so what you're saying is that you need a codified system to fall back on in every situation so that it can tell you what to do? assuming you wanted to use the big sea monster as anything other than set dressing (which is totally cool and fine), you could absolutely keep a clock, ticking it down each time the players have a bad roll, and then when it ticks down, the monster manages to breach the hull and now you're dealing with a race against another clock (BitD, p. 16 danger clock -> racing clock) and since clocks are usually exposed to the players, even if the danger never comes to pass, the players at least know the danger was there. it creates tension
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Jan 10, 2018 16:53
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Star Wars FFG also has a lot of issues, and the one SWFFG pre-made scenario I ran was so bad and rail-roady that we also TPKed several times and our GM had to bail us out and then cut the ending short because it relied on loads of "well you passed this roll but actually because I have to follow the scenario, bad things happen instead". FFG makes pretty bad pre-mades and, overall, pre-mades are railroady and make it difficult to let the fiction build itself because you can't stray off the railroads or otherwise it's difficult to return to the preset scenarios unless you are a very experienced GM, and by that stage you might as well run your own, more creative scenarios. Again, the issue is that SWFFG uses old design methodology that makes it difficult to impossible to run a game that allows the players to follow the fiction/do things that are outside the confines of the rules/fight things that are not statted up. PtbA and BitD don't have these issues, because they are built ground-up with being able to deal with this sort of problems. The issues that you have were caused by imperfectly crafted systems that are simply bad at trying to evoke the sort of mechanisms that PtbA/other more narrative-driven games have. I would honestly just recommend you play a PtbA and see how it goes, but I know it can be difficult to get past the mindset that games like D&D/Shadowrun/SWFFG create, because that's the acknowledged and mainstream view of how an RPG should play/feel/act, which is why a lot of people that try narrative-driven games bounce off them, especially after decades of playing D&D, because they attempt to use methodology that was taught them by years of playing D&D into a game that just doesn't work that way.
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Jan 10, 2018 16:56
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Let me give an example of how, if there was an hypothetical SW PtbA (which uses rules similar to the ones used by Masks), the scenario with the leviathan would be handled: - SWFFG: The GM would need to start looking at the rulebook to see if there are stats for the creature, then see if there are any rules for fighting underwater, then if they can't find anything, check splats, and if there truly isn't anything that would fit the stats of the leviathan, make them up wholesale, which might take 10-20 minutes, boring the players. In the end, the GM just tells the players that they can't fight the leviathan. - Hypothetical SW PbtA: The GM tells the group that a leviathan suddenly breaks into the room, then turns to them and asks "What do you do?". One player says that they use their blaster to attack the beast. The GM tells the player to roll on "Attack a threat directly" move, and maybe tells them that they have a -1 to the roll because of the water filling the room. Player rolls, on 6 or below, bad stuff happens and the GM makes a hard move, on 7-9, the player succeeds at a cost, and on 10+ they succeed really well. Meanwhile, another player says that they try to evacuate people, and the GM tells her to roll on the "Defend the Innocent" move etc etc. There's still tension, because your characters could fail (and then people could die/other people could die), but you don't have to look up stats/pre-plan for something, because PbtA can cater for any imaginable scenario ever, due to the way that the game is constructed, and the mechanisms of PbtA (at least, for the better ones, there are a load of PbtA which are dogshit because they don't understand how PbtAs are meant to be created mechanically) allow for the above situations seamlessly.
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Jan 10, 2018 17:11
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DigitalRaven posted:Been weirdly productive for a couple of weeks now, using reminders and checklists rather than my memory for task management. Doesn't have any of the other markers of a hypomanic episode, so I'm not sure of the cause. I'm cooking more and my flat's less messy, and as a result I'm feeling... what's that emotion, the one that makes people bare their teeth and make weird barking noises, but that doesn't involve punching people? That one. What issues did you have with the L5R beta, btw? I've been looking at it, but it's hard for me to get over WEIRD FFG DICE BUY A NEW SET OR THE APP.
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Jan 10, 2018 17:49
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Leraika posted:What issues did you have with the L5R beta, btw? For FFGSW there were web pages which were like 10x better than the app, I’m sure there will be for L5R too.
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Jan 10, 2018 17:54
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FFGSW is basically space Shadowrun with funny dice, gear porn and rocket tag combat included. About the only thing it's missing is multiple initiative passes, but instead the winning move is multi-attacks (so basically the same thing).
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Jan 10, 2018 18:04
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hyphz posted:The fiction ad-lib thing was more triggered by the sea monster encounter in Star Wars. The problem I had is that without a gamist subgame to delegate to a la DnD combat, following the fiction seemed to rob the game of tension because the GM is not the only one familiar with fiction and the players can all see exactly where it is leading.
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Jan 10, 2018 18:08
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ImpactVector posted:FFGSW is basically space Shadowrun with funny dice, gear porn and rocket tag combat included. I'll never understand the inclusion of the insane amount of gear in FFGSW. Gear basically never matters in any way in the movies, is it just to sell more splatbooks?
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Jan 10, 2018 18:09
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Jimmeeee posted:I'll never understand the inclusion of the insane amount of gear in FFGSW. Gear basically never matters in any way in the movies, is it just to sell more splatbooks? cynically, i'd say yes, they're just motivated by wanting to have material to put in more books even more cynically i'd say its a sympton of the brain rot that pervades so many popular rpgs
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Jan 10, 2018 18:11
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http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/The_Essential_Guide_to_Weapons_and_Technology
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Jan 10, 2018 18:12
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Splicer posted:Could you post the name if the adventure because I really want to talk about this fish but I want to fact check first. I wouldn't be able to get it before Saturday, other than that the series of adventures we went through in the campaign was: FaD sample FaD GM screen sample AoR sample Onslaught at Arda 1 Chronicles of the Gatekeeper But there was another similar case way back in Over The Edge, where I ran It Waits. That has the players searching through three locations to find an item (a clue to some intelligent rats I think) and as soon as I described that to the player, he immediately said ".. and it'll be in the last one we look in." That was what it actually said in the book, so I decided to break predictability by sticking it in the second one, but that means they missed one of the environments (although it's a pretty dreadful adventure, one of the three encounters is basically "the PCs see two gangs fight in a weird way then leave") In a similar one when someone else ran Curse of Strahd for a similar group, there's a cutscene in which the players are going through a graveyard and a bolt of lightning illuminates a corpse hanging from a tree and it's one of the PCs. The player just looked on and said "well, my character would probably think that was terrifying, but for me, it's just meh and cliche" I guess that's the big issue.. that 90% of railroading, or "Romeroading" (where the PCs are free to choose their actions but the ultimate destination of their actions is predetermined, as in All Roads Lead To Rome) is done in the name of making the game fit fictional standard. "Following the fiction" potentially means that the players will know that whatever they achieve will fit into fiction standards, and since the players know those, they seem to be able to make things a bit predictable and dull, and potentially neutralise mechanics. "Only just escaping" is the horror trope, if we know we're following that fiction, why bother drinking the healing potion? There'll just be more dangers until you're into the "only just" state again, but you don't have to worry about dying either because the fiction is "only just escaping", not "getting killed".
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Jan 10, 2018 18:28
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hyphz posted:I guess that's the big issue.. that 90% of railroading, or "Romeroading" (where the PCs are free to choose their actions but the ultimate destination of their actions is predetermined, as in All Roads Lead To Rome) is done in the name of making the game fit fictional standard. "Following the fiction" potentially means that the players will know that whatever they achieve will fit into fiction standards, and since the players know those, they seem to be able to make things a bit predictable and dull, and potentially neutralise mechanics. "Only just escaping" is the horror trope, if we know we're following that fiction, why bother drinking the healing potion? There'll just be more dangers until you're into the "only just" state again, but you don't have to worry about dying either because the fiction is "only just escaping", not "getting killed". except when it absolutely is "getting killed" because that is what the fiction would dictate and the gm and player agree on that
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Jan 10, 2018 18:31
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hyphz, I think you are misunderstanding what "following the fiction" means in the context of narrative games. Following the fiction in the context of narrative games doesn't mean that you march in lockstep with the tropes of a particular genre. It means that that consequences of actions follow the fiction that was previously defined within a previous session that the players and the GM were playing, and that the actions that unfold make sense in terms of both what happened before and what the actors in the scene are and the situation that it is involved. It's just a short hand for "do what makes sense considering the setting and the previous actions of the players". You are misunderstanding what people mean by the term, and I'm not the first person in this thread to point this out. "Following the Fiction" reminders are helpful in narrative games because narrative games don't attempt to provide 'rules as physics' models of the entire world in which the game takes place (which, in my opinion, is impossible anyway).
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Jan 10, 2018 18:37
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I want to play Hyphz’s nightmare game. A theoretical game where the fiction doesn’t follow. Some sort of surrealist masterpiece, where I try to attack the goblin and flowers sprout up everywhere, and the goblin wasn’t even actually there.
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Jan 10, 2018 19:02
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DalaranJ posted:I want to play Hyphz’s nightmare game. A theoretical game where the fiction doesn’t follow. Some sort of surrealist masterpiece, where I try to attack the goblin and flowers sprout up everywhere, and the goblin wasn’t even actually there. David Lynch presents D&D
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Jan 10, 2018 19:03
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DalaranJ posted:I want to play Hyphz’s nightmare game. A theoretical game where the fiction doesn’t follow. Some sort of surrealist masterpiece, where I try to attack the goblin and flowers sprout up everywhere, and the goblin wasn’t even actually there.
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Jan 10, 2018 19:18
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