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Leperflesh posted:I only hope - vainly - that people will resist the temptation to get embroiled in a point-by-point debate with him over the merits of his response. He does not deserve to be engaged with in that way, and it's a trap to do so. I'm sure that lacking any takers, he will provide his own strawman to knock around.
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Feb 13, 2019 23:10
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remusclaw posted:I'm sure that lacking any takers, he will provide his own strawman to knock around. He always does.
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Feb 13, 2019 23:34
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admanb posted:Zak's twitter replies suggest he is going to write something that will, point-by-point, dismantle every accusation Mandy made against him. Which is obviously horrifying and matches his general playbook perfectly.
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Feb 13, 2019 23:35
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dwarf74 posted:Just lmao if he thinks he's going to "well actually" or "would you agree that" out of this.
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Feb 13, 2019 23:59
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Pollyanna posted:“Dude needs to go” has been said for many individuals and in many instances and unfortunately it rarely ever happens because the people hold no power. Hence why we need to start applying mob violence if we want to accomplish anything, need to remind the people in power that the alternative to more peaceful methods of protest is them getting beaten to death by an angry mob in front of their families as their estates and holdings get looted and burnt to the ground (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Feb 14, 2019 01:16
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drrockso20 posted:Hence why we need to start applying mob violence if we want to accomplish anything, need to remind the people in power that the alternative to more peaceful methods of protest is them getting beaten to death by an angry mob in front of their families as their estates and holdings get looted and burnt to the ground Be careful with that. Not because it isn't cathartic, but because the rich do not hesitate to employ the middle classes to shoot the poor when given that motivation. Once class warfare in modern capitalism turns violent it is likely to be a slaughterhouse before real change is enacted.
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Feb 14, 2019 02:59
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Liquid Communism posted:Be careful with that. Not because it isn't cathartic, but because the rich do not hesitate to employ the middle classes to shoot the poor when given that motivation. Once class warfare in modern capitalism turns violent it is likely to be a slaughterhouse before real change is enacted. Make no excuse for the terror
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Feb 14, 2019 03:18
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Liquid Communism posted:Be careful with that. Not because it isn't cathartic, but because the rich do not hesitate to employ the middle classes to shoot the poor when given that motivation. Once class warfare in modern capitalism turns violent it is likely to be a slaughterhouse before real change is enacted.
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Feb 14, 2019 04:02
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Error 404 posted:Make no excuse for the terror I wish people would, in fact, not try to excuse the terror.
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Feb 14, 2019 04:40
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Halloween Jack posted:Capital's going to try to murder anyone who doesn't acquiesce to becoming chattel, it doesn't matter whether or not we give them an excuse. The question is whether or not we fight back. Very true, I just think everyone needs to go into it with the sure knowledge of what change may cost, so they don't settle for half measures. 
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Feb 14, 2019 05:56
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If you wanted to make an RPG that encouraged players to take risks mechanically, what would you do? I'm thinking of something gambling-ish, but obviously you want to be able to weight it in favor of the players. Maybe a trick-taking game? Something that involves clear and easy-to-understand escalating risk and reward, and that can be resolved fairly quickly.
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Feb 14, 2019 07:54
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Probably tie it to a renewable resource so that they don't hesitate to take the risk because they might 'waste' something hard to get back. Something to keep it grounded in 'moderate reward, but no lasting penalty for failure' seems to be a sweet spot for players actually using risky abilities.
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Feb 14, 2019 07:59
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FactsAreUseless posted:If you wanted to make an RPG that encouraged players to take risks mechanically, what would you do? I'm thinking of something gambling-ish, but obviously you want to be able to weight it in favor of the players. Maybe a trick-taking game? Something that involves clear and easy-to-understand escalating risk and reward, and that can be resolved fairly quickly. So I better understand the question, do you mean taking risks as in something which is mechanically risky? Blades in the Dark sort of does this with its Devil's Bargain which is a bonus die you can draw upon at any time, no questions asked, but doing so 100% guarantees that a consequence of some sort will occur whether you succeed or fail, so you're staking the consequence against the uncertainty that the extra die will actually help you. Deadlands has historically used poker hands as a mechanic for certain sorts of things but never really dived deeply into it. This actually has me thinking about using Skull as a resolution mechanic, where the difficulty/impact of an action is based on how many flipped coasters you're willing to wager. You'd probably need a game where the players are at least semi-antagonostic towards one another, something Fiasco-ish.
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Feb 14, 2019 08:00
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push-your-luck mechanics are common and good, you get increasing rewards for increasing risks but have to make decisions about how desperate you are for the top rewarding outcome because it carries really big risk My first encoutner with that mechanic might be the GW boardgame blood bowl, which isn't an RPG, but it's nicely illustrative. If you want to win you have to handle the ball, and every thing involving handling the ball - picking it up, passing it, handing it off - carries a risk that you could fumble, drop the ball or get intercepted, and when that happens it always instantly ends your turn. Similarly to win you will have to dodge away from enemy players, which carries a risk of being tackled, which in turn both ends your turn *and* could get your player injured or even killed. You also need to throw blocks, which same deal. But standing up when there's no nearby opponent player, and moving in uncontrolled space, is risk-free. So you do that first, if you can. Then you do the lowest-risk actions like throw blocks where you have a big dice advantage, dodge with your bastard slippery elfs, that kind of poo poo. Then you do your high-risk things like throw a pass, or dodge into two tackle zones, or throw a 1 die block. Except! If you always do things this way, you'll sometimes still fail without having done the most important things that get you scores and wins, so, sometimes you have to prioritize a high-risk action over a low-risk action just to get things going. And sometimes that will result in your star player dying on the pitch... ...it's not a game for everyone. Anyway. Not an RPG but I think it's pretty easy to understand the game. Whenever you roll dice there's a chance you could be forced to end your turn, and thus any remaining actions you could have taken, and this is an action economy. You always know what dice you're rolling and what the target numbers are, so you can always calculate your odds if you care to, and thus make a reasoned choice about how much risk you're willing to take in order to use an action that can gain or press an advantage. e, I also talked aI think in this thread earlier about Modiphius' 2d20 system, which has a players-shared momentum pool generated by extra successes, but also a pool for the GM that players can pay into to buy stuff they'd otherwise buy with momentum. That's oversimplified but you get the idea, the GM spends from her pool to add to the current or a future challenge (not too far in the future, because the pools decay from one scene to the next). Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 08:10 on Feb 14, 2019 |
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Feb 14, 2019 08:08
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Actually, there's an interesting idea. I really liked 2e Shadowrun's use of Combat Pool to give players a floating pool of dice they could apply to pretty much anything in a fight. It'd be interesting to bring that kind of thing back, with an added twist that failure when using it means the end of your turn and the opponent getting a bonus instead to act against you.
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Feb 14, 2019 08:12
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FactsAreUseless posted:If you wanted to make an RPG that encouraged players to take risks mechanically, what would you do? I'm thinking of something gambling-ish, but obviously you want to be able to weight it in favor of the players. Maybe a trick-taking game? Something that involves clear and easy-to-understand escalating risk and reward, and that can be resolved fairly quickly. Take the Monsterhearts route, you get xp for failing. That way you always want to be trying and therefore taking risks.
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Feb 14, 2019 09:22
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Runequest and its derivatives does something similar: your skill is a percentile value, and whenever you fail at using it, you check off the skill at the end of the adventure or session, every skill that's checked off increases by some amount. Delta Green has the slowest progression: 1% then, you erase all the check marks, and you do it again
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Feb 14, 2019 09:31
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One of the class/specialties in Edge of the Empire is the Gambler. Their primary ability, Double or Nothing, increases the difficulty of the task by 1 (which is far from nothing), but in return, you double all your advantage if you succeed. What makes the class work is that, as you go down it's talent tree, not only increases the rewards for winning, but you get other abilities that essentially let you cheat - reroll certain dice, remove penalties, use different stats for your rolls, etc. The end result is a class that absolutely takes a risk by increasing the difficulty of things they do - and the more dangerous the better! - but then cheats mercilessly to ensure they still have an upper hand in what should be a roll of luck. So to bring that around, my answer is "give the player the occasional ability to cheat their own luck." Players are far more likely to take risks if they think there's some form of safety net, or even just some sticks and string they can try to make into a safety net. And in my experience, when they DO gently caress up after taking the risk...they won't even always use that safety net, because hey, you might need it sometime in the future anyways. Liquid Communism posted:Probably tie it to a renewable resource so that they don't hesitate to take the risk because they might 'waste' something hard to get back. Something to keep it grounded in 'moderate reward, but no lasting penalty for failure' seems to be a sweet spot for players actually using risky abilities. The "no lasting penalty" is also a big one. Tabletop games, at least D&D-derivatives, tend to be way, way too punishing of failure, which teaches players that failure needs to absolutely be avoided at all costs, which leads to very boring play. Even worse is when players do the whole "any 1 is a miserable and embarrassing failure" thing. Give your players more opportunities to gently caress up without loving them over, and they'll be more ok with taking risks.
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Feb 14, 2019 10:14
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Yeah, one of my game design maxims after a whole lot of D&D and stuff like Arkham Horror where there is a definite failure spiral is that the consequence of failure should be complications, not losses in any long-form game. Something like a MMO-style party wipe because of failed rolls is lovely and not fun, because it invalidates a lot of ongoing effort. Instead, loving up should make the PC's situations more difficult, which makes a better story down the road.
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Feb 14, 2019 10:47
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https://twitter.com/jesawyer/status/1095838049798258688?s=20 More like Dope Kid!!!
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Feb 14, 2019 13:31
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kingcom posted:Take the Monsterhearts route, you get xp for failing. That way you always want to be trying and therefore taking risks. I agree with this in basically everything. Rewarding players for failing has always worked for me, and if I had the time and energy to actually finish my heartbreaker, it was based this as a primary mechanic.
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Feb 14, 2019 13:45
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Skill systems in general could be a lot better. Most games still have too many skills, poor guidelines for the players regarding what skills they actually need, no clear idea of what constitutes "normal" difficulty, and no clear guidelines for how often to call for skill rolls and what you should accomplish with a single roll. And for most of the history of RPGs, instead of fixing these issues, games would give the GM advice on how to punish or discourage players so they don't just take the skills they know they're going to need: the combat skills that keep you from dying. Liquid Communism posted:I really liked 2e Shadowrun's use of Combat Pool to give players a floating pool of dice they could apply to pretty much anything in a fight. It'd be interesting to bring that kind of thing back, with an added twist that failure when using it means the end of your turn and the opponent getting a bonus instead to act against you. LatwPIAT posted:I wish people would, in fact, not try to excuse the terror.
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Feb 14, 2019 14:28
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NinjaDebugger posted:I agree with this in basically everything. Rewarding players for failing has always worked for me, and if I had the time and energy to actually finish my heartbreaker, it was based this as a primary mechanic. It can be immersion breaking, though, if players try to minmax it.
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Feb 14, 2019 15:02
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hyphz posted:It can be immersion breaking, though, if players try to minmax it. how so. on both points
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Feb 14, 2019 15:06
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hyphz posted:It can be immersion breaking, though, if players try to minmax it. That's why you only roll if it's interesting. If hyphz says he wants to fly a kite you just say yes. No dice rolls needed. You just say, "Hyphz, go fly a kite."
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Feb 14, 2019 15:12
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Good but partially flawed rules work well with other good rules that mitigate the flaws of the first rule. Who knew?
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Feb 14, 2019 15:14
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LongDarkNight posted:That's why you only roll if it's interesting. If hyphz says he wants to fly a kite you just say yes. No dice rolls needed. Pretty much. My first experiment with the mechanic was in early 4e, before I'd ever even heard of PBTA, when I gave all my players a quest reward of a tattoo that accumulated charges as they rolled natural 1s, and they could blow 2 charges to retroactively set a d20 to a natural 20. They loving loved it, and being a game I was running with my coworkers, who are also all software engineers, one immediately pointed out that they could just make rolls to charge it up, I asked what they thought would happen if they did that, and that was the end of the matter.
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Feb 14, 2019 15:18
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That's an example of what I'm talking about. You should only roll dice if you're doing something important and failure has consequences! If my entire D&D group wants to become Entropomancers...sure! Have fun playing in traffic.
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Feb 14, 2019 15:24
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Serf posted:how so. on both points Well, if inconsequential failure generates XP, then the player can argue their PC goes off and spars or whatever until they have max XP. Which is awkward to argue against because it’s how people actually do learn in a world where you learn from failure. This is the same, indirectly, if inconsequential actions aren’t rolled. If failure has to be consequential to generate XP, then we’re back to the same problem again where players are risk averse to avoid the consequences of failure, they just also feel screwed over that they have to face those consequences to advance and that there is no in game advancement reward for being the successful hero they are “supposed” to be.
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Feb 14, 2019 15:46
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"You want to spar? Okay." "What do I roll?" "Nothing. You're sparring."
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Feb 14, 2019 15:50
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Halloween Jack posted:"You want to spar? Okay." "Wait, why is everyone else getting to do fun adventure stuff?" "Because they're actually doing the adventure stuff, and you decided that instead of doing any of that, you're off sparring somewhere."
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Feb 14, 2019 15:55
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hyphz posted:Well, if inconsequential failure generates XP, then the player can argue their PC goes off and spars or whatever until they have max XP. Which is awkward to argue against because it’s how people actually do learn in a world where you learn from failure. This is the same, indirectly, if inconsequential actions aren’t rolled. i've been running games for years now and i've never seen players be "risk averse" in any real sense. like they aren't constantly doing foolhardy poo poo, but we all go in with the understanding that fun comes from people taking risks, and that you should be doing it just because it creates interesting situations. rewarding them for failure only encourages that behavior like in my last Monster of the Week game, our Spellslinger has acquired a metal-bound tome of shadow magic, and i came up with a custom move where they can consult it for mystical knowledge. the player knows that since they are dealing with something that is fictionally very dangerous there will be consequences for rolling low on that move. they still did it anyways because the situation was high-stakes and because their character is all about recklessly pursuing eldritch power. they rolled low, and the book gave them what they wanted, but only when they supplied it with 2-harm, from themselves and a nearby ally. they took that deal, and accepted the consequences because the reward was worth it Serf fucked around with this message at 15:59 on Feb 14, 2019 |
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Feb 14, 2019 15:55
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Risk averseness more than anything else always seems to be a symptom of overly simulationist game systems where failure is just failure and progression only happens when you win.
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Feb 14, 2019 15:57
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remusclaw posted:Risk averseness more than anything else always seems to be a symptom of overly simulationist game systems where failure is just failure and progression only happens when you win. That’s possible, but just progression doesn’t make failure not failure. It’s much better to say “I levelled up by killing the evil sorcerer” then “I levelled up by failing to kill the evil sorcerer so that princess got murdered”. If you say “well, you don’t have to fail to kill the sorcerer, you just have to not do perfect in the fight” then it’s back to the consequences question. Most players aren’t averse to losing a few HP even if there’s no advancement in it.
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Feb 14, 2019 16:25
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^^^I mean...DOES anyone say 'I leveled up by failing'? In my games it's always poo poo like 'after going through that dungeon and even though that magic door really hosed us over we still are ready to take on the sorceror' or whatever. No one actually, like, seeks out failure in these games, failure happens what with dice existing (and usually these games like apocalypse world and all tend to make 'succeed with a cost' way more likely than 'succeed perfectly' because of how that system works) and the players adapt. yea if anything the systems that create the most 'risk averse' players are the ones where every hallway is a riddle where unless you walk down it the exact right way you could just explode or whatever. In systems where you know even failing isn't 100% a 'waste' you're way more likely to just do poo poo and see what happens. Obviously there's a line between 'yea gently caress it let's open that door that's clearly holding something weird and see what loot we can get' and 'I take my armor off and jump into the dragon's mouth' but I've yet to see a 'progress even when failing' game where the latter is rewarded more than the former or whatever. sexpig by night fucked around with this message at 16:31 on Feb 14, 2019 |
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Feb 14, 2019 16:28
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hyphz posted:That’s possible, but just progression doesn’t make failure not failure. It’s much better to say “I levelled up by killing the evil sorcerer” then “I levelled up by failing to kill the evil sorcerer so that princess got murdered”. succeeding is also rewarded in most of these games tho? like they generally have end-of-session questions to ask and give xp for having accomplished certain goals, and those goals usually mean you succeededat some point during the session. so your argument here is pretty spurious
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Feb 14, 2019 16:29
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Serf posted:succeeding is also rewarded in most of these games tho? like they generally have end-of-session questions to ask and give xp for having accomplished certain goals, and those goals usually mean you succeededat some point during the session. so your argument here is pretty spurious Well no, the question was how to address risk aversion, not what is the best advancement system overall.
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Feb 14, 2019 16:32
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hyphz posted:Well no, the question was how to address risk aversion, not what is the best advancement system overall. but they go together. You address risk aversion by making success...successful? You want to succeed, succeeding gives you more good poo poo. The systems you're talking about are literally just 'even if you fail the progress doesn't grind to a halt' not 'you get the exact same outcome if you kill the big bad or if you just shrug and let him blow up the city'.
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Feb 14, 2019 16:35
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hyphz posted:Well no, the question was how to address risk aversion, not what is the best advancement system overall. seems like a super easy fix to me, which is just called having a conversation about expectations like adults before the game starts or having a basic grasp of how entertaining stories and drama function
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Feb 14, 2019 16:35
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I'm a big fan of the progression system in Spire, and have adapted it to other games: The group earns advances by making a difference in the game's setting, good or bad. Saved the community garden from a land developer? Sure, have an advance. Oops you burned down the orphanage? Have an advance. In Spire the emphasis is on having a tangible affect on the city, with stronger advances gated behind affecting more of the city as a whole. Changing a neighborhood earns you a minor advance, influencing the entire city earns the big time advances. In other games it has included other things like significant events in a character's personal arc, having a breakthrough on a Mystery or facing the consequences of an act of ridiculous hubris in Mage, humiliating a rival or advancing the importance of your godly portfolio in Nobilis, etc. Once you set a benchmark for the kind of narrative impact you want your players to be making, you can reward both success and failure in those fields, freeing the players to make those story decisions that make the most sense to them for their characters without worrying about whether or not they could be earning more xp.
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Feb 14, 2019 16:40
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