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hyphz posted:It's more that if you take "X player is not able to contribute, because of the system" as a GM problem rather than a player problem, then by definition all bad rules become the GM's problem because they are held responsible for everything. Letting every ruleset problem turn into a GM problem can easily lead to the GM having a bunch more work and less fun* at every RPG session. From there, it's not hard to jump to the opinion that the GM should have extra authority over the game, because they are getting hosed extra hard by the system. Soon, the whole group agrees that the GM deserves tyrannical power over the game session as a reward for spending hour after hour trying to fix all the bullshit in the ruleset. *Unless the GM wants to be an unpaid game designer, AND is easily satisfied with terrible rules. Even good game designers usually don't get everything right the first time. golden bubble fucked around with this message at 00:53 on Apr 23, 2018 |
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Apr 23, 2018 00:51
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Subjunctive posted:SotDL has a *lot* of (humanely priced) content. I’d be surprised if it was much less than 5e has. It absolutely has more content than 5e. Like by a wide margin.
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Apr 23, 2018 00:51
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golden bubble posted:Letting every ruleset problem turn into a GM problem can easily lead to the GM having a bunch more work and less fun* at every RPG session. From there, it's not hard to jump to the opinion that the GM should have extra authority over the game, because they are getting hosed extra hard by the system. Soon, the whole group agrees that the GM deserves tyrannical power over the game session as a reward for spending hour after hour trying to fix all the bullshit in the ruleset. Exactly. But then what encourages the players to want to learn a new system rather than playing 5e/PF with an overworked and/or tyrannical GM?
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Apr 23, 2018 01:59
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hyphz posted:Exactly. But then what encourages the players to want to learn a new system rather than playing 5e/PF with an overworked and/or tyrannical GM? There's more to life than chicken nuggets.
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Apr 23, 2018 02:13
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It helps if you play with people who genuinely give a poo poo. These players who just roll some dice, begrudgingly, between stretches of looking at their phones can gently caress right off, basically. Also: my former gaming circle was composed entirely of people who had run at least one game if not several. That helps too.
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Apr 23, 2018 02:18
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Also, caster power level in 3.5 is explicity a GM problem because it gives the players the capacity to effortlessly destroy NPCs that take too drat long to put together in the first place.
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Apr 23, 2018 04:40
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I think the bigger rules problem with 5e in terms of attracting and keeping GMs is that the rules do a crappy job of supporting GMs in making their own material. Making your own monsters and NPCs is such a pain. The guidance for creating cool items is minimal. Lacking the tools to make a good map, GMs have to fall back on theater of the mind, and then you're under a lot of invisible pressure to take responsibility for every mismatch between how you were visualizing the field of battle and how the player is. (E.g. if a player's cool plan doesn't make sense with how you pictured it, do you just let them do it? If not, does that make you a jerk? But then if you allow it, are you subtly penalizing the players who actually pay close attention to you by rewarding the players who ignore parts of your description?) It's a lot to put on a GM. There is also the cultural aspect. The culture of D&D is that being a DM is hard work and that only special people are cut out for it and those who can deserve fawning praise and a whole day of the year to celebrate them. The culture of indie games is that anyone can do it, just get some friends together and go for it! Is it any wonder that D&D seems to suffer from a lack of GMs relative to other games?
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Apr 23, 2018 05:19
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Jimbozig posted:I think the bigger rules problem with 5e in terms of attracting and keeping GMs is that the rules do a crappy job of supporting GMs in making their own material. Making your own monsters and NPCs is such a pain. The guidance for creating cool items is minimal. Lacking the tools to make a good map, GMs have to fall back on theater of the mind, and then you're under a lot of invisible pressure to take responsibility for every mismatch between how you were visualizing the field of battle and how the player is. (E.g. if a player's cool plan doesn't make sense with how you pictured it, do you just let them do it? If not, does that make you a jerk? But then if you allow it, are you subtly penalizing the players who actually pay close attention to you by rewarding the players who ignore parts of your description?) As someone running a D&D along with other stuff, it is far more work than any other game by a huge degree.
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Apr 23, 2018 05:56
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Sounds like it's terrible for keeping players involved too.
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Apr 23, 2018 07:39
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Sounds like it's terrible for keeping players involved too. The only edition of DND where I saw people actually engaged constantly was 4th edition since everyone generally had something to do. The fight lengths though...
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Apr 23, 2018 07:50
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Reaction abilities being everywhere help keep your brain on, although that goes away in the second hour
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Apr 23, 2018 08:32
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The players want to play 5e or 3.x for the same reasons that everyone 10 years ago wanted iPhones for their smart phones. Telling someone you want to run something else makes you the guy trying to tell your friends to switch to Android. It doesn't matter how right you are, you're going against the ubiquitous brand and that comes with a whole bunch of baggage. Except in this analogy you can't even use your own Android because iPhones can only talk to iPhones.
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Apr 23, 2018 10:50
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It might honestly be easier to get them to try something totally different for the novelty value than what they see as an unnecessarily different version of what they already know.
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Apr 23, 2018 10:54
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Ghost Leviathan posted:It might honestly be easier to get them to try something totally different for the novelty value than what they see as an unnecessarily different version of what they already know. Yeah. Instead of trying to get them to switch to Dungeon World from Pathfinder, suggest Delta Green.
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Apr 23, 2018 11:07
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Ghost Leviathan posted:It might honestly be easier to get them to try something totally different for the novelty value than what they see as an unnecessarily different version of what they already know. Splicer fucked around with this message at 11:45 on Apr 23, 2018 |
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Apr 23, 2018 11:42
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counterspin posted:Also, caster power level in 3.5 is explicity a GM problem because it gives the players the capacity to effortlessly destroy NPCs that take too drat long to put together in the first place.  Why yes, I am a nerd with large spans of time to kill at work, how did you know?
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Apr 23, 2018 14:12
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 New blogpost is up for Let Thrones BewareToday's topic: Core Mechanic - The Challenge This week I'm writing about the Challenge, which is the universal mechanic powering Let Thrones Beware; it's used in both non-combat and combat situations, although there are some slight differences to each application. I'm also mixing up the format of this post a bit today. Rather than just write about what I think is interesting, I've gone to the community and asked what sort of things people want to hear about. I'll start with just the basics, and then move on to the community content portion in the second half of the post. Core Mechanic - The Challenge
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Apr 23, 2018 14:35
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I'm lucky that most of the people I play with now had never roleplayed before playing in my games. None of them had any built-in D&D knowledge or preferences or anything like that, so we just started with Dungeon World. A couple of them were pretty aware of TTRPG and so wanted to try D&D, but both of them run their own 5e games now, which means I don't have to The closest thing to D&D I've run for this group has been 13th Age. So far their favorites have been Strike! and Fragged Empire--they like grid combat, turns out. Unfortunately for me, Fragged can kind of be a bear to GM (detailed NPC stat blocks for non-minion enemies plus all damage being stat damage = lots of on-the-fly math) but at least it has a cool setting. I haven't even started with spaceship combat yet, but Fragged Empire actually tries to include relative velocity, the gravity of nearby objects, and the difficulty if changing your velocity in space so I'm sure that'll be... fun. Harrow fucked around with this message at 15:11 on Apr 23, 2018 |
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Apr 23, 2018 15:08
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Covok posted:It was really just a joke about the last point. I often joke that Luke Crane has a crippling fear of money and success. You say that, but now he's working for Kickstarter as their Head of Games. I'd say he's enjoying both at the moment.
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Apr 23, 2018 17:49
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Apr 23, 2018 19:49
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It's weird that we live in a completely atomized cyberpunk hellworld where I've never had a conversation with my neighbours, but I know all the major life details of the person driving the car in front of me.
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Apr 23, 2018 19:57
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Has anyone played Spire? I remember the KS looking interesting but I couldn't justify backing it then, and I'm wondering if it's worth grabbing now.
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Apr 23, 2018 21:25
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Lemon-Lime posted:Has anyone played Spire? I remember the KS looking interesting but I couldn't justify backing it then, and I'm wondering if it's worth grabbing now. I playtested it and it was pretty fun, though a lot of the enjoyment came from the setting and Grant GMing it. The system's reasonably interesting, in that mainly it's about how much stress you take to one of a number of different tracks to succeed, and it seems like it grapples pretty well with the tension of righteous rebellion vs atrocity, but I'd have to play the final version to see if I'd actually recommend it.
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Apr 23, 2018 22:22
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I havn't played the Spire but I did back it. My capsule impression based on reading it: Pros: -The setting is nicely evocative, a weird, grungy, medium-low-ish fantasy setting. Magic items are rare. Magic isn't exactly rare per se, a number of the character class options have access to various flavors of divine and occult magic, but it's less fireballs and teleporting and more summoning swarms of crows, stuffing small gods into your knife and armor, and webbing someone up into a coccoon for a week to heal their injuries. There are guns, ironclad ships, and the abandoned remains of an attempt at creating a train network throughout the Spire that has since mutated into a weird otherworld due to its proximity to a hole in reality that lies at the city's foundations. Character classes include vigilantes, revolutionaries, carousing dockside knights, charnel-priests with hyena companions, priests of commerce, and drow midwives who are one part healer and one-part avatar of the drow goddess Ishkrah with the power to turn yourself into a freaky drow/spider hybrid. All the classes have cool stuff to do without any blatant signs of imbalance or favoritism, it's not really a system that lends itself to caster supremacy. The premise of the game is a nice change of pace from your typical mercenaries-and-murderhobos fantasy game in that your ultimate goal is overthrowing the high elf government and reclaiming your ancestral city, so if you ever wanted to break out the cold iron guillotines then this is the game for you. Cons: -The weakness of the game in my opinion is that for a game about plotting revolution and instigating change throughout the city there aren't really any rules for that sort of "company scale" action. Everything is done on the personal level. Characters gain advancements by making changes to the city, with bigger changes granting larger rewards, but the guidelines for what constitutes a minor, moderate, or major change to the city are practically nonexistent. Not everything has to be mechanically represented, no, but for a game whose primary focus is on changing things in an oppressed city, to not even give a list of examples is a pretty big shortcoming. It doesn't have to be something as extensive as Reign's company rules or Weapons of the Gods' Great Game, but even something in the vein of Blades in the Dark's clocks would have been nice to provide a firmer grounding to the gameplay loop of missions and plots to change the city piece by piece.
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Apr 24, 2018 00:39
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I'm about 17 pages into Blades in the Dark and holy poo poo, this game is cool. Makes me wanna try playing Bloodborne again. It's quite a lot of take in at once, though, and there's a lot of it 
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Apr 24, 2018 03:39
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I've been running Marvel Heroic Roleplaying by Margret Weiss for quite some time. After playing it for so long, the conflict system started to get really, really boring. To liven things up, I decided to try and expand on the combat system and add some more dials and knobs and make it more tactical to add more to the experience. I understand this would not be for everyone and a lot of people will dislike it. If you like Marvel Heroic Roleplaying and have some time, can you give it a look and provide your thoughts. You can find it here.
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Apr 24, 2018 04:48
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Pollyanna posted:I'm about 17 pages into Blades in the Dark and holy poo poo, this game is cool. Makes me wanna try playing Bloodborne again. It's quite a lot of take in at once, though, and there's a lot of it BitD is one of the best games you could have right now. I'd recommend just rounding up some people and jumping in with it -- there's a lot going on in the book, yes, but a) you don't have to hold it all in your head at once and b) the game runs just fine if all you remember is the most basic bits of the system.
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Apr 24, 2018 09:28
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Covok posted:I've been running Marvel Heroic Roleplaying by Margret Weiss for quite some time. After playing it for so long, the conflict system started to get really, really boring. Link's messed up, I think you accidentally posted the rules for D&D instead.
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Apr 24, 2018 13:38
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chitoryu12 posted:Halifax Valentine's Day mass murder plot woman sentenced
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Apr 24, 2018 13:49
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i think the girls having a tumblr fanboying the columbine killers is a bigger red flag
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Apr 24, 2018 13:50
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Fuego Fish posted:Link's messed up, I think you accidentally posted the rules for D&D instead. It took me a second to get that joke. I mean like a little half second, but I'm still ashamed by the delay.
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Apr 24, 2018 13:53
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I just like the idea of repeatedly insisting on playing a Nazi ghost no matter what the setting. "Thank you, great heroes! Grenda, the gentle giant. Greenbow, whose sharpness of wit is matched only be the sharpness of her blade. And of course, the intangible Herr Gotterdamerung, butcher of Oslo. Three cheers for all!"
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Apr 24, 2018 13:57
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4e can actually mechanically support that via the Revenant race in Heroes of Shadow Well, the ghost part, anyway
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Apr 24, 2018 14:06
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Alright, thanks. I think I might grab it, based on that - it sounds interesting enough to drop $22.
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Apr 24, 2018 14:08
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Is Spire based on a graphic novel?
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Apr 24, 2018 14:09
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golden bubble posted:Even good game designers usually don't get everything right the first time. Lord knows I'm not planning to, and all I'm working on is a PbtA hack based on
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Apr 24, 2018 14:23
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Halloween Jack posted:Is Spire based on a graphic novel? You'd think so, but no. Apparently they were unaware of the graphic novel until after the kickstarter started.
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Apr 24, 2018 14:37
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Splicer posted:I just like the idea of repeatedly insisting on playing a Nazi ghost no matter what the setting.
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Apr 24, 2018 14:51
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Covok posted:It took me a second to get that joke. I mean like a little half second, but I'm still ashamed by the delay. Who's joking?
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Apr 24, 2018 15:01
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Plutonis posted:i think the girls having a tumblr fanboying the columbine killers is a bigger red flag You say that like they don't go hand in hand.
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Apr 24, 2018 15:03
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