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hyphz posted:I'm not sure that was what I was thinking of, though. Working out how every 4e class plays is one thing, but the tone of the game you get is what you signed up for - heroic fantasy adventure - and the book makes that clear. Finding that the stock Wizard is a bit rubbish is a bit different from that, especially since there's options within the game. are there any clear examples you have for this issue?
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Feb 26, 2019 17:10
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I feel like he's referencing Dark Heresy, which infamously buried that you get +20% on normal / routine skill checks.
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Feb 26, 2019 17:51
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Serf posted:are there any clear examples you have for this issue? Well, there's a few cases I can think of from a while back. InSpectres looks like a fun game about running a Ghostbusters-style small business. But 90% of the mechanics are based on management of scarce resources, which kind of creates the small business feel. But unless the GM is very careful it can easily result in a death spiral of resource exhaustion, which is not really what's hinted at by the tone, since the idea of the Ghostbusters actually going bust isn't something you think of quickly. Red Markets has a similar thing but is at least open about being a horror game (although people have claimed on forums that that's darker than they expected) Continuum had the incompetence problem; it's a game of playing as time travelling agents of a good-guy(?) organization and the game emphasizes that the Continuum train people to try to make any changes to the timestream as small as possible. But the skill system has a pretty big whiff factor and very limited ways of mitigation, so all the setup in the world can screw you over when you fail an unlikely roll and suddenly create a massive paradox that's going to take huge effort to resolve. That might still have interesting story to it, but the tone of the game is of competent and experienced time manipulators and this is not that. Even Blades in the Dark has had issues with its obvious associations with Thief: The Dark Project and Dishonored, since those games generally portray powered and heroic rogues, not ones who are having to go on raids with broken ankles in order to get the money to have the ankle set. By hearsay, Dresden Files has the same issue - the version of FATE it uses is actually pretty "gritty", which is a definite tone shift compared to the books. hyphz fucked around with this message at 17:54 on Feb 26, 2019 |
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Feb 26, 2019 17:51
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hyphz posted:Even Blades in the Dark has had issues with its obvious associations with Thief: The Dark Project and Dishonored, since those games generally portray powered and heroic rogues, not ones who are having to go on raids with broken ankles in order to get the money to have the ankle set. By hearsay, Dresden Files has the same issue - the version of FATE it uses is actually pretty "gritty", which is a definite tone shift compared to the books. So am I correct in assuming that you feel that Blades, taken in terms of its Kickstarter claims and text alone, is a failure of a text? That because it marketed "daring scoundrels" and the text talks of "daring scoundrels" but what the game often (but not always) plays like is "desperate, hungry scoundrels", that it's a failure of a text? Because I think it's a really solid game, but I knew about the "desperate, hungry" part going in because of reviews and Let's Plays. Which feels like an argument in favor of curation, but I don't want to ascribe that to you if that's not what you're going for.
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Feb 26, 2019 18:01
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i've only run one campaign of Blades, but in the first session the whisper was calling down lightning bolts and the leech was tossing around fire grenades, and things pretty much just escalated from there. and harm is indeed pretty bad for them, but thief and dishonored are pretty difficult games and the harsh penalties of harm are supposed to be reflective of that (and harm being so harsh pushes you to spend stress to avoid it, which is a fun gamble)
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Feb 26, 2019 18:11
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hyphz posted:Well, there's a few cases I can think of from a while back. The dresden books are pretty much World of Darkness with the numbers rubbed off, so yeah.
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Feb 26, 2019 18:18
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Yeah, uh, the way that Resistance rolls work 100% let you go ham in BitD. The consequences that can get thrown your way are pretty bad, especially actually taking harm, but you have a lot of tools to mitigate risk and pick and choose the consequences you let stick.
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Feb 26, 2019 18:21
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Blades is a really good game, but consequences tend to stick around forever. Even if you only stuffer like level 2 harm you are going to have to live with it for several sessions, unless you use up all your downtime actions to just lay in a hospital bed and pray you get lucky on your recovery rolls. God forbid you ever have Level 3 Harm.
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Feb 26, 2019 19:56
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Garrett is neither heroic nor powerful (except for being very good at not being noticed). The better reason why Thief and Dishonored are bad mechanical touchpoints for Blades is that those are games about being a solo, unseen infiltrator and Blades is a game about being a group of people who lead dramatic lives because they commit crimes.
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Feb 26, 2019 20:05
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Lemon-Lime posted:The better reason why Thief and Dishonored are bad mechanical touchpoints for Blades is that those are games about being a solo, unseen infiltrator and Blades is a game about being a group of people who lead dramatic lives because they commit crimes. It's much more The Lies of Locke Lamora in that way.
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Feb 26, 2019 20:06
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The steampunk setting honestly is one of the weakest parts of BiTD. I'd like it more if it was a modern day setting and went full Ocean's X on it
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Feb 26, 2019 20:30
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Plutonis posted:The steampunk setting honestly is one of the weakest parts of BiTD. I'd like it more if it was a modern day setting and went full Ocean's X on it Luckily it is comically easy to reskin. I run it as a game set in the 40k universe about Necromunda style gangers but anything works just fine because combat and weapons are so abstracted. The only thing that is mechanically tied to the setting is ghost problems meaning that if anyone dies it always raises heat. I just have the heat go up and ignore the explanation. Easy as pie.
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Feb 26, 2019 20:36
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Evil Mastermind posted:There's also the problem of how nerds treat criticism of a thing they like as an attack on themselves personally. Or how a depressing amount of nerds can't understand that you can like something and be critical of it at the same time. Yeah, speaking personally, this is why I think trying to turn tabletop gaming from a "hobby" into an actual "industry" isn't gonna work. You can't have shared criticism with people who literally do not believe in criticism as, like, an entire concept, and that's most of the tabletop gaming fandom.
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Feb 26, 2019 20:45
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As someone adjacent to an artist who got through a MFA in art: there are legions of artists who also cannot handle criticism, and consequently fail as professionals (but many can continue to operate as hobbyists indefinitely, as long as the people they show and sell their art to are friends, family, and uncritical strangers). And in my own technical writing degree program, there were plenty of students (esp those coming from a creative writing background) who could not handle peer review and critique, and mostly those people dropped out to pursue some other career. We can also see the affect of nerds hating to see the thing they love critiqued in poo poo like rotten tomatoes scores for star wars movies: https://qz.com/1160551/the-rotten-tomatoes-score-for-the-last-jedi-may-be-rigged/ The cool thing is that critque-for-the-artist makes for better artists, and critique-for-the-audience makes for better audiences. There will always be detractors, but over time, good critique tends to stand out and succeed anyway.
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Feb 26, 2019 21:05
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Lord_Hambrose posted:Blades is a really good game, but consequences tend to stick around forever. Even if you only stuffer like level 2 harm you are going to have to live with it for several sessions, unless you use up all your downtime actions to just lay in a hospital bed and pray you get lucky on your recovery rolls. Having any combination of a Spider, Leech and Cutter in the gang makes healing laughably easy.
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Feb 26, 2019 23:23
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hyphz posted:
This is actually a fairly big misread of Continuum, which is explicitly set up with the default mode of play being a group of newbie time travelers living in a “dorm” with a more experienced mentor, the idea being for PCs and players alike to get their heads around time travel, the problems it causes, and the solutions it provides, in a leisurely, sustained fashion. Failing and needing to think fourth-dimensionally to fix it is a feature here. Time Cops are basically part of the setting and something PCs can get up to eventually, but this is directly equivalent to saying D&D has an incompetence problem because 1st level characters insta-die when they visit the Elemental Plane of Fire. (yes, D&D has an incomptence problem, just for other reasons). Lord_Hambrose posted:Luckily (Blades) is comically easy to reskin. I run it as a game set in the 40k universe about Necromunda style gangers but anything works just fine because combat and weapons are so abstracted. The only thing that is mechanically tied to the setting is ghost problems meaning that if anyone dies it always raises heat. I just have the heat go up and ignore the explanation. The first twenty minutes of Yakuza Zero are a textbook example of a murder bringing down Heat on the gang, and considering giving someone over to the cops to cool things back down.
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Feb 26, 2019 23:42
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Serf posted:are there any clear examples you have for this issue? GURPS 4e often has people making characters with highly-inflated skill levels because the Characters book (the Player's Guide equivalent) tucks away into an easy to miss example the fact that you get +4 or higher on very routine use of skills (on a 3d6 roll under check, where +4 is huge) like doing things as part of your career or lifestyle. The Campaigns book (the Game Master's Guide equivalent) makes this very explicit in the skill check section but players will probably need to be told this. If you're a maid or electronics tech you don't need to have 15 in housekeeping or electronics, 1 or 2 points giving the average person a 10 or 11 is just fine because you're probably going to be rolling against a 14 or 15 on the job. But if you need to clean up a crime scene before cops arrive or hack an electronics lock while the party is getting shot at, that 10 (or less!) is more reasonable.
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Feb 26, 2019 23:47
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Hackmaster 4e does something similar where most of your starting skills should have numbers around 1-15% but players sacrifice other things to get them way higher because the game does a horrible job at explaining to the player that that's their bonus, not their base chance of success (which is something like 75% for a normal check with no modifiers).
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Feb 26, 2019 23:55
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Serf posted:are there any clear examples you have for this issue? The one time I played RuneQuest our starting characters were laughably inept in pretty much all ways. And trying to make a character in the HERO system I think walks very similar lines, since power design is so mind-bending.
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Feb 26, 2019 23:58
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Tricky posted:Yeah, uh, the way that Resistance rolls work 100% let you go ham in BitD. The consequences that can get thrown your way are pretty bad, especially actually taking harm, but you have a lot of tools to mitigate risk and pick and choose the consequences you let stick. Yeah, we've run for like... a year? With about a month out for holiday stuff. And I don't think anyone's had harm lasting more than one session.
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Feb 26, 2019 23:58
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Razorwired posted:Having any combination of a Spider, Leech and Cutter in the gang makes healing laughably easy. Yeah my players have a Leech with the healer trait and I definitely have to filter all the 'don't inflict too much harm, it's ruinous' with a mental 'not to my group it's not'
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Feb 27, 2019 00:16
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Dresden should be fairly gritty given that the novels ' protagonist is constantly getting the poo poo kicked out of him. He gets an injury to his hand that takes like half a dozen books to heal, and even then it's only mostly healed instead of fully functional.
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Feb 27, 2019 00:21
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moths posted:I feel like he's referencing Dark Heresy, which infamously buried that you get +20% on normal / routine skill checks. God I remember that way too well, its basically a giant neon sign indicating why the vague naming of 'how difficult something is' can cause so much damage and assumption of how to play. +0 was the test for 'challenging' but doing something but people assuming your normal checks themselves should be challenging (the beginner adventure gives most checks as +0 too which makes things even more confusing) and your basic attack is at +0. The big assumption it misses is that most standard things your special agent types are doing should be at +10 and you pretty much are always aiming + attacking which means you're rolling at +10 with even beginner gear. Thanks to confusing general language though people always forget this and it turns into a game about incompetent idiots.
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Feb 27, 2019 01:18
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BattleMaster posted:GURPS 4e often has people making characters with highly-inflated skill levels because the Characters book (the Player's Guide equivalent) tucks away into an easy to miss example the fact that you get +4 or higher on very routine use of skills (on a 3d6 roll under check, where +4 is huge) like doing things as part of your career or lifestyle. The Campaigns book (the Game Master's Guide equivalent) makes this very explicit in the skill check section but players will probably need to be told this. GURPS expects 12 as the skill level for something you can take employment as, and 16 (which you get from the +4 for non-adventurous use of skills) is explicitly the level where the game goes "unless it's really important, you don't need to roll for this". That said, GURPS is absolutely terrible about how this is presented, both in terms of text and mechanically. GURPS 4e really needs a major revision, and "having 12 in a skill means you don't fail routine tasks" should probably be an explicit rule instead of a dumb Perk.
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Feb 27, 2019 01:35
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In Gurps 4E, 12 in an Average skill for an average person (10 in everything attribute) costs 8 points which is 1600 hours of training or education (800 or 2400 hours for Easy or Hard skills). That's a lot for most jobs. Or maybe every job? I'm not sure if I have that much training as a nuclear engineer myself but that's my job... GURPS also puts it up front that you should roll when: -A PC’s health, wealth, friends, reputation, or equipment are at risk. This includes chases, combat (even if the target is stationary and at point-blank range!), espionage, thievery, and similar “adventuring” activities. -A PC stands to gain allies, information, new abilities, social standing, or wealth. And that you shouldn't roll when: -Utterly trivial tasks, such as crossing the street, driving into town, feeding the dog, finding the corner store, or turning on the computer. -Daily work at a mundane, nonadventuring job. (Excepting monthly job performance rolls) So I'm not even sure if a realistic person necessarily even has a single point in a skill related to their job. Though you'll start to rack up points working 40 hour weeks if on the job experience counts. (RAW it doesn't) In any case I don't think I want to run a campaign where people have to roll to see if they do a mundane job correctly because I'm sure as adults we all do that enough as it is in real life. For adventuring purposes a point or two in "mundane" skills that might have a use during the adventure is enough. BattleMaster fucked around with this message at 01:52 on Feb 27, 2019 |
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Feb 27, 2019 01:48
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PST posted:Yeah my players have a Leech with the healer trait and I definitely have to filter all the 'don't inflict too much harm, it's ruinous' with a mental 'not to my group it's not' also, tbh, once you get more experienced with the system you realize that harm is kinda boring and that opportunity could be better used to escalate the situation or just generally make life more interesting for the crew
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Feb 27, 2019 03:22
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CitizenKeen posted:So am I correct in assuming that you feel that Blades, taken in terms of its Kickstarter claims and text alone, is a failure of a text? That because it marketed "daring scoundrels" and the text talks of "daring scoundrels" but what the game often (but not always) plays like is "desperate, hungry scoundrels", that it's a failure of a text? I don't know how familiar you are, but hyphz is famously terrible at reading. The book makes its gritty tone abundantly clear straight from the get go. The only way you could come to any other conclusion is to have not really read the book. This is "Pride and Prejudice is about vampire superheroes"-levels of misreading. Edit : Hell, that take is even based off of not understanding what "daring" means. Me trying to walk a tightrope while slathered in mayonnaise would certainly be daring, but that doesn't mean I wouldn't fall and break my everything while failing utterly. Xiahou Dun fucked around with this message at 05:42 on Feb 27, 2019 |
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Feb 27, 2019 05:39
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Also, I would note that if you're like me and are bad at setting consequences and you forget rules a bunch of the time, you can turn Blades into goofy slapstick in which the players realize halfway through the dinner party assassination they're pulling off/attending that they've got the wrong target, and now they need to try and desperately keep the guy from drinking the poisoned whiskey, which will make him immediately combust.  But yeah, I would say that Blades is pretty clear on its actual, intended tone throughout.
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Feb 27, 2019 05:49
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The Lord of Hats posted:Also, I would note that if you're like me and are bad at setting consequences and you forget rules a bunch of the time, you can turn Blades into goofy slapstick in which the players realize halfway through the dinner party assassination they're pulling off/attending that they've got the wrong target, and now they need to try and desperately keep the guy from drinking the poisoned whiskey, which will make him immediately combust. Blades in the Dark is just a drat fine game in general.
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Feb 27, 2019 05:56
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The Lord of Hats posted:Also, I would note that if you're like me and are bad at setting consequences and you forget rules a bunch of the time, you can turn Blades into goofy slapstick in which the players realize halfway through the dinner party assassination they're pulling off/attending that they've got the wrong target, and now they need to try and desperately keep the guy from drinking the poisoned whiskey, which will make him immediately combust. Yeah this sounds like you're doing the game justice. It's really more based around doing cool heists, with sliders based on how effective and grim you want things to be. And while it doesn't point out how adaptable it is on the tin, it's explicit at its tone.
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Feb 27, 2019 06:17
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So very, very few games understand that making the difficulty of a check neigh impossible does not mean "it is a difficult task to do," it just means "you have low chances of success." Those are not the same thing.
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Feb 27, 2019 06:21
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ProfessorCirno posted:So very, very few games understand that making the difficulty of a check neigh impossible does not mean "it is a difficult task to do," it just means "you have low chances of success." Those are not the same thing. But don't you understand, professional archers always shoot themselves in the foot 5% of the time. It's why the Olympics requires reinforced metal boots for every competition.
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Feb 27, 2019 06:26
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Or like how 1 out of 20 dishes I wash I just stumble and shatter them in my face. Plates and medical bills are so expensive.
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Feb 27, 2019 06:49
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World of Darkness also has an impressive botch rate. The dice pool mechanic didn't give you better chances at success as you improved, only more chances. But each extra die also had a 10% chance to negate a success, so you often ended up with some real Casey at the Bat situations.
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Feb 27, 2019 06:55
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God, today I was listening to the System Mastery episode on WEGs Star Wars and was sitting at my desk laughing at the incredibly morbid story of an Ewok slowly coming to terms with its own mortality as it keeps spiraling into worse health by failing its healing checks until it dies.
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Feb 27, 2019 06:56
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moths posted:World of Darkness also has an impressive botch rate. The dice pool mechanic didn't give you better chances at success as you improved, only more chances. Technically that's Old World of Darkness before anyone who passed 6th grade math looked at it. Now the math is different but you can opt to make things a dramatic failure which has its own problems. But at least it doesn't punish you for being good at a thing. I remember being like 11 and still knowing, wait, this loving math doesn't add up at all.
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Feb 27, 2019 07:04
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The o-WoD patch was that botches take away successes but you just normal-fail if you had any successes at all, right?
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Feb 27, 2019 11:32
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So, to be a bit more clear, the problem with calling higher numbers you have to roll above "difficult" is that, in most games, it's purely static. You the player cannot effect the roll as or after it happens, and it's "difficulty" changes nothing narratively. There's no actual exertion of effort involved. Which is absolutely stupid. If I gave my students a math lesson and warn them that it's going to be "difficult," I don't mean that a higher percentage of them are just going to not understand it by default, I mean that it's going to take more effort from them to succeed at it. But in most games like D&D, there's no effort involved. I'm just rolling a dice with a pre-set statistical chance to succeed. Making that pre-set statistical chance less likely isn't "difficult" in the way people who actually play the games would think of it, it's just less likely. Any actual decision I could've made regarding my chances, mechanically speaking, happened hours if not entire sessions ago. If I the player cannot effect my own chances of success, then nothing about my actions are hard. Nothing's hard about rolling a dice and saying what the number is. Contrast with a game like Blades in the Dark or FATE where I actually do have the option to manipulate my roll as it happens, or where the difficulty of what I'm doing actually effects the narrative results. A "hard" challenge in D&D means I have a 7/20 chance of success instead of a 13/20 chance, that's it. A hard challenge in FATE means I have to decide how many FATE points I'm willing to devout to trying to accomplish this, meaning it actually requires effort both for my character and myself. A hard challenge in Blades in the Dark means it has entirely different stakes at hand, and I'm potentially putting myself at risk just for even attempting it - so again, you know, an actual choice for me to make!
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Feb 27, 2019 12:37
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D&D 3e actually tried to tackle that problem: if your Take 10 is good enough, and there's no time pressure, you Take 10 and do it, no rolling necessary. If your Take 10 is too low, but your Take 20 could do it, and there's no time pressure, then you Take 20 - the trade-off is that it's going to eat a bunch of time to do that, and ideally your DM will get to leverage the implied passage of time to heighten the stakes.
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Feb 27, 2019 12:46
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The Lord of Hats posted:Also, I would note that if you're like me and are bad at setting consequences and you forget rules a bunch of the time, you can turn Blades into goofy slapstick in which the players realize halfway through the dinner party assassination they're pulling off/attending that they've got the wrong target, and now they need to try and desperately keep the guy from drinking the poisoned whiskey, which will make him immediately combust. I love this idea of Blades in the Screwball Comedy.
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