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hyphz posted:Which means that the PCs will just be encouraged to observe and question more and more in order to create as many existing restrictions as possible and lock out potential failures. How many guards are there in the room? What does every one of them look like? If they’re chatting to each other, what do they say? If they’re just talking lightly, then obviously nothing major has happened to them tonight that they would be talking about, so that can’t happen now right? Do they look panicked? No? Then nothing can have panicked them.. etc. this is pretty clearly not in the spirit of the game, and is another example wherein the absolute most dogshit players can ruin any game, no matter how tightly designed hyphz posted:It is the big problem, I don’t know how GMs deal with it when nothing ruins immersion more than not being able to visualise the scene because of foggy description, but a precise one can tilt the rules. I’m sure some can strike that balance but I have no idea how. a flashback can't contradict established facts. so if we've previously established that there are guards, then this flashback won't happen because it can't
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Feb 27, 2019 22:45
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Mors Rattus posted:so, like, do you accept the voices of experience with any other topic, or do you insist to lawyers that a gold fringe on the flag means this is an admiralty court and you are a boat If someone who’s basically normal can teleport to do my hour’s commute in a second, and when I ask them how they just say “it’s not a problem” then yea I’m not going to be too keen to leave it at that.
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Feb 27, 2019 22:51
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hyphz posted:If someone who’s basically normal can teleport to do my hour’s commute in a second, and when I ask them how they just say “it’s not a problem” then yea I’m not going to be too keen to leave it at that. if literally every person who has actually done the thing says it isn't a problem, consider perhaps that you have manufactured the problem for yourself
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Feb 27, 2019 22:53
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The more I think about it, the more I think you can only end up with 25 male guests of honour by design. Actually deliberately ignoring anyone who isn't a guy (albeit they did have 3 POC), it's basically blatant dismissing of any women, trans or NB people in the industry as not existing.
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Feb 27, 2019 22:58
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There's this mindset that rules exist to constrain problem players more than to set up a framework for collaborative funhaving, so if you assume that's true it makes perfect sense to worry, "Well what if this rear end in a top hat, not naming names Phil, acts in bad faith," except no system is proof against that kind of shittery and also maybe don't play with Phil.
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Feb 27, 2019 23:01
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But hyphz is Phil. That's the only explanation I can think of for continually dying on this incredibly specific, impossibly stupid hill.
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Feb 27, 2019 23:02
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Hyphz has repeatedly discussed that their game group is apparently just a bunch of Phil players and the logical advice of “don’t play with them” is apparently impossible.
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Feb 27, 2019 23:05
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PST posted:They've claimed they reached out to 2 female game designers, one of which being Margaret Weiss 'to see if they could attend' so that's them absolutely trying to be inclusive... MadScientistWorking fucked around with this message at 23:10 on Feb 27, 2019 |
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Feb 27, 2019 23:08
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I’m coming back in here because this is such a very clear example of how Hyphz is literally manufacturing his own gaming problems. Parkreiner posted:Continuum 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 This is a game that literally starts in easy mode, and yet Hyphz is somehow taking off the training wheels. “But what if I screw up so bad that the Time Cops come to kill me and the Evil Leapers find out where I live?” That’s when you go run to your explicitly provided Time Parent who is of an arbitrary enough level of skill and resource to de-escalate things. That is their literal job IC and OOC! Hyphz, your gaming seems like one long anxiety dream and it is genuinely a problem of your own/your group’s mindset’s making.
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Feb 27, 2019 23:12
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Parkreiner posted:I’m coming back in here because this is such a very clear example of how Hyphz is literally manufacturing his own gaming problems. also, y'know, the fact that you can several times per "level" have your future self show up to solve a problem for you, and your future self is a badass Like, I think Continuum has a ton of problems. But this is not one of them.
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Feb 27, 2019 23:13
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MadScientistWorking posted:The weirdest of this and I just had this weird epiphany why not ask the person who started this whole line of questioning? They can't possibly have only known two game designers???? I've emailed their 'Industry Guest Director' to ask some questions, as I was already working on a thing about the growth of women, trans and NB creators in the industry and how slow the hobby is to recognise them. I'm either expecting no reply, or some nonsense, but i'll be sure to follow up and keep on it, because 25 men, with not a single woman/non-cis male is just ridiculous. Even OSR-heavy dude-bro Gary Con manages better (9 out of 77..also holy gently caress they have 77 guests at gary con)
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Feb 27, 2019 23:23
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Mors Rattus posted:if literally every person who has actually done the thing says it isn't a problem, consider perhaps that you have manufactured the problem for yourself If everybody who can teleport says that teleporting is not a problem, that still gives no information to me who cannot.
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Feb 27, 2019 23:28
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hyphz posted:If everybody who can teleport says that teleporting is not a problem, that still gives no information to me who cannot. Hearing “quit touching the stove” as “learn to teleport” is part of the problem itself.
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Feb 27, 2019 23:32
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hyphz posted:If everybody who can teleport says that teleporting is not a problem, that still gives no information to me who cannot. In your analogy everyone is working from home but you insist on circling the city a few times first for some reason despite your managers' continued insistence that you stop being late all the time.
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Feb 27, 2019 23:33
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hyphz posted:If everybody who can teleport says that teleporting is not a problem, that still gives no information to me who cannot. I mean, to be fair, if everybody I talked to could teleport, and I could not, I would probably I assume I was the problem.
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Feb 27, 2019 23:34
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hyphz posted:If everybody who can teleport says that teleporting is not a problem, that still gives no information to me who cannot. It’s not teleportation. It’s engaging with a narrative without brinkmanship.
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Feb 27, 2019 23:34
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okay, so the examples that hyphz chose are mostly rubbish*, and he's gotten pretty deep into the mire of defending them but I don't think it's completely unreasonable to say that there are some games where playing them is often significantly tonally different to the experience you thought you'd have before you played them. like, if I can praise Monsterhearts for being amazingly clear about both communicating and embodying its intended tone, to the point where it's the only game I've ever read where reading the Example of Play made me feel like I was sitting down at an actual table, surely this is a quality that some games have and others do not. I think some better examples would be: - the way the fiction and setting and even rules of Dark Heresy suggest high-lethality cloak-and-dagger investigation featuring shitfarmers in over their heads, sort of a cross between Paranoia, Call of Cthulhu, and 40k, but the actual damage-soak combat mechanics and Fate Points mean it's actually really really hard for characters to die facing low-level threats and at high levels it devolves into rocket tag and dodge tanking. - the fact that picking up Shadowrun as your first RPG, you'd probably imagine experience of playing it as similar to what Blades in the Dark actually delivers, but because of the fact that it has none of Blades's mechanical support for making heist-based gameplay flow, your average session of Shadowrun is six real-life hours of your characters sitting in the room you met the Mr. Johnson in, trying to work out what the plan is. Yes, the GM can mitigate this problem by choosing scenarios well, but fundamentally, "Corp A hires you to break into Corp B's highly secure research facility and steal something, this is a difficult job and needs perfect execution so do all the prep you need" is a scenario implicitly promised by the fiction but not really represented in the game as anything but an exercise in frustration. - iunno, hyphz's first point about InSpectres maybe? I haven't actually played it but it sounds plausible? *not that I'm not saying they don't actually present problems for him, just that I don't think those specific examples present problems for people with functional gaming groups
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Feb 27, 2019 23:45
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a computing pun posted:okay, so the examples that hyphz chose are mostly rubbish*, and he's gotten pretty deep into the mire of defending them but I don't think it's completely unreasonable to say that there are some games where playing them is often significantly tonally different to the experience you thought you'd have before you played them. This is definitely a thing: Paranoia implies a game about vaporising commies and shooting your buddies in the back so they can't talk, XP's combat rules are clunky and slow and produce lots of knockdowns and wound results from laser fire leading to dragged-out fights and hardly any quick kills. (i love you XP but your combat rules stink, stick to tricking your buddies into trash compactors)
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Feb 27, 2019 23:52
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hyphz posted:If someone who’s basically normal can teleport to do my hour’s commute in a second, and when I ask them how they just say “it’s not a problem” then yea I’m not going to be too keen to leave it at that. being able to run a game using the rules its established is not the same as having superhuman powers
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Feb 27, 2019 23:55
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hyphz posted:If someone who’s basically normal can teleport to do my hour’s commute in a second, and when I ask them how they just say “it’s not a problem” then yea I’m not going to be too keen to leave it at that. If someone who's basically normal can teleport, and you can't, what does that make you in this circumstance?
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Feb 28, 2019 00:03
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Whatever Hyphz' current "I found the least fun thing possible to do with this game and am claiming that it is the only way to play it" position is, it's in exactly as good faith as when they claimed that if you award xp per session, players have no other logical choice but to not show up to the game at all and thus reliably power up in perfect safety.
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Feb 28, 2019 00:09
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Wasn’t that one Ferrinus?
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Feb 28, 2019 00:11
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Mr. Maltose posted:Wasn’t that one Ferrinus? No but Hyphz was applying the same logic as Ferrinus was during that discussion, just from the opposite position, effectively. The logic being that EXP rewards distort gameplay because, being extradiegetic and a currency for the player rather than the character, they necessarily provide perverse incentives unless aligned with in-character goals.
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Feb 28, 2019 00:19
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I’ve come to applaud hyphz I’ve never seen someone be so completely and aggressively wrong in two separate conversation streams at the same time Edit: outside of Twitter, obviously.
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Feb 28, 2019 00:38
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Hyphz is basically echoing Frank Trollmans school of RPG thought where the rules are physics to be exploited and a group of P.C elves in D&D third edition should take 100 years to have profession rolls to save up money for equipment before they adventure. It was a silly argument then and it's even worse now.
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Feb 28, 2019 01:15
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I don’t know anything about Blades and Continuum sounded cool from when my friend told me about it months ago, but, in case anyone’s wondering, I generally don’t like it when failed skill checks determine that some totally external circumstance thwarted your character rather than that your own character’s ability wasn’t equal to some challenge, or when failed skill checks necessarily summon misfortune in general. That is, I like “you failed, which means you weren’t fast enough to finish searching before a guard appeared” but not “you failed, so I’ll say a guard interrupts you” even though those two look very similar at a glance. However I’m a big believer in playing things straight and trying to honestly execute mechanics or respond to incentives as they are laid out by the rules, so trying to collapse the quantum waveform of as many scene props as possible to control how some retroactive failure plays out is obviously not going to be effective or even kosher. The GM could just say “that’s unclear until such time as we resolve this other roll.”
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Feb 28, 2019 01:21
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Blades is way more the former than the latter. Heck, one of the big things for how you're supposed to run it, which I sometimes even remember to do, is the idea of 'clocks'. A good example would be a clock, with somewhere between 4-8 spaces, labelled "Guards Show Up", possibly as something you establish at the start of the heist, or maybe because of a previous failure. Future failures or complications fill segments of the clock. When it fills up, the consequence pops off. It's a great way to promote failing forwards. "You failed on your lock picking, but I'll say you got in, but it cost you three marks on "Guards Show Up" which... yep, that did it. Holtz, you were keeping an eye out while Bricks was breaking a bunch of picks, right? You see a house guard round the corner. What do you do?".
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Feb 28, 2019 01:29
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Ferrinus posted:I don’t know anything about Blades and Continuum sounded cool from when my friend told me about it months ago, but, in case anyone’s wondering, I generally don’t like it when failed skill checks determine that some totally external circumstance thwarted your character rather than that your own character’s ability wasn’t equal to some challenge, or when failed skill checks necessarily summon misfortune in general. That is, I like “you failed, which means you weren’t fast enough to finish searching before a guard appeared” but not “you failed, so I’ll say a guard interrupts you” even though those two look very similar at a glance. i'm much more into the idea that the PCs in most of my games are competent, and that their failed rolls should be the result of external actions they have no control over. and in blades, this fits way more with the fiction of being motivated and capable criminal sorts, as unaccounted externalities are far more often the cause of complication in heist movies. and if they really don't want the consequence, they're only a single resistance roll away from taking narrative control
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Feb 28, 2019 01:45
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Serf posted:i'm much more into the idea that the PCs in most of my games are competent, and that their failed rolls should be the result of external actions they have no control over. and in blades, this fits way more with the fiction of being motivated and capable criminal sorts, as unaccounted externalities are far more often the cause of complication in heist movies. and if they really don't want the consequence, they're only a single resistance roll away from taking narrative control Does Blades even track which character is better at what activity in a way that affects the odds of rolls succeeding? If it doesn’t then I guess every randomized test is really a measure of how bad your luck is. If it does then it’s kind of weird that Andy just consistently has worse luck than Barbara specifically when trying to sneak around. However, this is easy to synthesize - an unlucky thing happened, and Andy didn’t have the chops to deal with it while Barbara would’ve easily handled it or already been in the next room or w/e.
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Feb 28, 2019 01:55
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Ferrinus posted:Does Blades even track which character is better at what activity in a way that affects the odds of rolls succeeding? If it doesn’t then I guess every randomized test is really a measure of how bad your luck is. If it does then it’s kind of weird that Andy just consistently has worse luck than Barbara specifically when trying to sneak around. However, this is easy to synthesize - an unlucky thing happened, and Andy didn’t have the chops to deal with it while Barbara would’ve easily handled it or already been in the next room or w/e. Why are you even trying to discuss about a game you clearly don't know any thing about? Characters in blades can be better, or worse, than other characters at things they want to do Characters can support other characters for a significant resource cost to improve their chance of success Characters can do a group action where they take a significant resource cost for everyone who fails that margin of success.
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Feb 28, 2019 02:04
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PST posted:Why are you even trying to discuss about a game you clearly don't know any thing about? I’m discussing ways different games (or just different players within the same game) might interpret failed rolls. I’m sure Blades is fine.
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Feb 28, 2019 02:10
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Ferrinus posted:Does Blades even track which character is better at what activity in a way that affects the odds of rolls succeeding? If it doesn’t then I guess every randomized test is really a measure of how bad your luck is. If it does then it’s kind of weird that Andy just consistently has worse luck than Barbara specifically when trying to sneak around. However, this is easy to synthesize - an unlucky thing happened, and Andy didn’t have the chops to deal with it while Barbara would’ve easily handled it or already been in the next room or w/e. if you're asking about the mechanics, i'd advise you to look it up. there is a free srd you can look at. its a pretty simple system
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Feb 28, 2019 02:19
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Ferrinus posted:Does Blades even track which character is better at what activity in a way that affects the odds of rolls succeeding? If it doesn’t then I guess every randomized test is really a measure of how bad your luck is. If it does then it’s kind of weird that Andy just consistently has worse luck than Barbara specifically when trying to sneak around. However, this is easy to synthesize - an unlucky thing happened, and Andy didn’t have the chops to deal with it while Barbara would’ve easily handled it or already been in the next room or w/e. What? Why is a failed roll assumed to just be "bad luck" that doesn't make sense?
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Feb 28, 2019 02:25
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The Gate posted:What? Why is a failed roll assumed to just be "bad luck" that doesn't make sense? It doesn’t make sense if the roll’s success chance is based on your skill and if the bad luck has nothing to do with your execution of the skill in question, but I’m sure there are a million ways to square that circle in Blades, which I am not here to criticize, if it matters to you. I just wanted to weigh in because I saw people being like “isn’t this exactly Ferrinus’s complaint from some other thread?” Well, it’s not, and I bet I’d like Blades in the Dark if I took the time to study it. Like, this is also an issue I could raise about Strike, which I do know well - but it’s one that’s resolved through conscientious description rather than a symptom of a bad design. And, of course, many players likely wouldn’t care in the first place. Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 03:10 on Feb 28, 2019 |
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Feb 28, 2019 03:06
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Serf posted:being able to run a game using the rules its established is not the same as having superhuman powers Being able to thread the needle between underdescribing, and giving descriptions that lock out future twists that the rules require to be available, seems pretty difficult to me. Being able to arbitrarily come up with interim costs that don't contradict anything established seems pretty difficult to me. But apparently they're no problem for others so I can't complain they're hard?
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Feb 28, 2019 03:09
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Parkreiner posted:That you view the above as a) an out of context problem for the game instead of exactly what gameplay is like b) a problem worthy of the GM intensifying with maximum force, and c) *three replies in* you have yet to acknowledge that your “hardcore time cops” framing of the game was straight up incorrect tells me that Continuum is not for you and I need to stop engaging. Starting-level Continuum is absolutely a Bill & Ted thing. One of the sample adventures is literally "your groceries got retroactively stolen by a time hobo after you ate them, now you have to figure out how to fix it".
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Feb 28, 2019 03:10
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hyphz posted:Being able to thread the needle between underdescribing, and giving descriptions that lock out future twists that the rules require to be available, seems pretty difficult to me. it feels like you're way overthinking it, because i really don't consider any of that when running blades. but i think part of that comes from the fact that my players and i have a conversation before the game about expectations, and in blades its generally assumed that the goal is to have fun and interesting heists/criminal activities that involve risk and danger. so its not adversarial, its co-operative
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Feb 28, 2019 03:13
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hyphz posted:Being able to thread the needle between underdescribing, and giving descriptions that lock out future twists that the rules require to be available, seems pretty difficult to me. Being arbitrary is easy! It literally means not being based on any justification! Your problem is that you’re not being arbitrary *enough*, actually. You are being your own judge and jury and seem to be afraid of being sent to gamer jail if you are judged implausible or overly kind. You want an actionable piece of advice? You need to start lowballing things, then. Every example I see you give of what a problem “should be” brings everyone out of the woodwork to holler at you, and you yourself are clearly unhappy if you’re still looking for input. So fine, stop being so harsh. Do not argue with or interrogate this advice, just do it. Every time an idea pops into your head, just assume your judgement is suspect and you’re being at least twice as punitive as you need to be. Do not try to make things “plausible”; life is plenty implausible and it is actually very easy to justify luck going for instead of against someone. Maybe they rob the bank on the one day the flu is going around, or the silent alarm is broken because nobody inspected it. Whatever idea you have for an obstacle for the PCs to overcome, soften it up, no matter what it is or how you need to justify it. Just do it. This is the crux of whether you actually want to improve or just complain about feeling like a crappy GM: if something isn’t going right, *then do something different* and see if it works better. If this sounds like teleportation to you, *still*, then I think you are really never going to be able to GM in a manner that will live up to your standards. Parkreiner fucked around with this message at 04:38 on Feb 28, 2019 |
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Feb 28, 2019 04:18
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hyphz posted:Being able to thread the needle between underdescribing, and giving descriptions that lock out future twists that the rules require to be available, seems pretty difficult to me. I play this game with literal children. They love it and are fine. What is wrong with you.
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Feb 28, 2019 04:34
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Parkreiner posted:You want an actionable piece of advice? You need to start lowballing things, then. Every example I see you give of what a problem “should be” brings everyone out of the woodwork to holler at you, and you yourself are clearly unhappy if you’re still looking for input. So fine, stop being so harsh. I'd agree with this. And dude, Hyphz, stop dropping absolute facts all the time. If you leave yourself narrative wiggle room, it's really easy to make up things on the fly! If your players are the type to fish and make things absolute in an attempt to limit gotchas, have a discussion with them about expectations. Maybe that's an approach that works for OSR. It sure as poo poo doesn't for Blades.
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Feb 28, 2019 05:37
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