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hyphz
Aug 5, 2003

Number 1 Nerd Tear Farmer 2022.

Keep it up, champ.

Also you're a skeleton warrior now. Kree.
Unlockable Ben

Splicer posted:

Then that was an unsuitable consequence and should not have been on the table. Break an arm, you can get about with a broken arm. Or sprain an ankle. Or give the character a cell phone and alert the bad guys to his location so they kidnap him to the showdown location.

In all cases his buddies are going to let him heal if that's an option instead of taking him places where he might be further beaten up, and they don't at that point know what the adventure timeline is.

quote:

Also you were solo running what a quick Google search says is an explicitly rotating GM game. Maybe you were supposed to hand gming over to the incapacitated player.

I was doing it as a test and conscious of that. It is a strictly rotating GM with no consideration of PC activity for GM selection. The first GM is supposed to make a character then kill them in the first session and have their "real" PC join in the second, and they'd done that, then another character unexpectedly pulled a death result on the cards. Ironically a true rotating GM would have messed things up even more, because the first GM doesn't get to know the truth of the setting and could easily have derailed the whole thing by being forced to improvise how a wounded PC is treated.

quote:

This paragraph is Ken Ham level

I... don't know who that is, but looking at his WP, it's not a good thing? I'm not sure how you're saying that? If you see Jackie Chan walking along a thin walkway on the edge of a skyscraper, the direction of the movie can still make you feel exhilarated and afraid of the height even though you know Jackie's not going to fall and he'll be fine if he does. RPGs can't pull that trick (yet)

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Serf
May 5, 2011


hyphz posted:

It’s not always narrative agency. Or rather there’s a lot of “fake narrativism” where narrative is invoked, but only against negative consequences.

But there’s often paradoxes in sequences of effects. For example. We shouldn’t get killed by random lizard encounters in the desert because that’s a bad story. Fighting the lizards would be boring if we know we can’t lose so we might as well not have the encounter. But we must have the random lizard encounter because if we don’t and just skip between destinations then the world doesn’t feel large and hostile. So the GM is expected to run the fight with no real risk on a nod and a wink, and if the curtain ever drops, the complaints come out.

you understand that this a shared agreement between the gm and the players, right? for most systems at least. session 0 and system choice should establish whether or not the players and gm are going to be okay with random tpks (which aren't a thing if you're even halfway decent at gming, assuming you've agreed to that tone of game)

and hell, i have far more issues with actually making fights seem dangerous than killing characters

Moriatti
Apr 21, 2014

hyphz posted:

In all cases his buddies are going to let him heal if that's an option instead of taking him places where he might be further beaten up, and they don't at that point know what the adventure timeline is.

How the gently caress have you not set stakes at this point?

Splicer
Oct 16, 2006

from hell's heart I cast at thee
🧙🐀🧹🌙🪄🐸
Alas Vegas is, according to Google, a game where you start off unconcious and amnesiac in a shallow grave. The stakes are pre-set!

Also with a broken arm they cast you up and kick you out the door. The most time consuming part is waiting your turn and waiting for your X-ray.

Nea
Feb 28, 2014

Funny Little Guy Aficionado.

drrockso20 posted:

Is it bad that the most I've ever individually tipped is like 5 bucks and usually I only tip 2 or 3 bucks?

I do have the sorta excuse that except for a couple month period last summer I've never had gainful employment and the only reason I have any money at all is because I get Social Security benefits, so my finances are normally extremely limited

While I understand the monetary situation, you shouldn't eat out if you can't tip at least 15%, ideally 20%

hyphz
Aug 5, 2003

Number 1 Nerd Tear Farmer 2022.

Keep it up, champ.

Also you're a skeleton warrior now. Kree.
Unlockable Ben

Serf posted:

you understand that this a shared agreement between the gm and the players, right? for most systems at least. session 0 and system choice should establish whether or not the players and gm are going to be okay with random tpks (which aren't a thing if you're even halfway decent at gming, assuming you've agreed to that tone of game)

and hell, i have far more issues with actually making fights seem dangerous than killing characters

Well that sounds very much like the issue I'm referring to here - the fact that the players aren't OK with random TPKs, but at the same time, want to have fights seem dangerous. So they want the fight to seem dangerous while at the same time knowing that their PCs aren't in danger.

Splicer
Oct 16, 2006

from hell's heart I cast at thee
🧙🐀🧹🌙🪄🐸

hyphz posted:

Well that sounds very much like the issue I'm referring to here - the fact that the players aren't OK with random TPKs, but at the same time, want to have fights seem dangerous. So they want the fight to seem dangerous while at the same time knowing that their PCs aren't in danger.
They want dangerous fights without random TPKs. Why is this hard for you. Genuinely. Why is this hard to parse. This is a completely sensible request that is extremely easy to fulfil.

Serf
May 5, 2011


hyphz posted:

Well that sounds very much like the issue I'm referring to here - the fact that the players aren't OK with random TPKs, but at the same time, want to have fights seem dangerous. So they want the fight to seem dangerous while at the same time knowing that their PCs aren't in danger.

they want that, and agreed to it. they have to give to get. this is fundamental to group rpg dynamics

Warthur
May 2, 2004



Splicer posted:

Then that was an unsuitable consequence and should not have been on the table. Break an arm, you can get about with a broken arm. Or sprain an ankle. Or give the character a cell phone and alert the bad guys to his location so they kidnap him to the showdown location.

Also you were solo running what a quick Google search says is an explicitly rotating GM game. Maybe you were supposed to hand gming over to the incapacitated player.
The core scenario in Alas Vegas is very on-rails and constricted (because James Wallis came up with the idea of a rotating-GM game but didn't actually have very good ideas as to how to make that work), so I think a) it's entirely possible that you're meant to handover here, and b) it's entirely possible that getting a limb broken is a possibility directly written into the scenario. Which is it, hyphz?

Splicer
Oct 16, 2006

from hell's heart I cast at thee
🧙🐀🧹🌙🪄🐸
My dinner guests want spicy foods without ginger!

Have you considered chiles, mustard, or pepper?

I fed a guy a Carolina reaper once and he didn't like it so chiles don't work. This also doesn't address my problem re: my dinner guests only thinking they want spicy foods.

fool of sound
Oct 10, 2012

hyphz posted:

Well that sounds very much like the issue I'm referring to here - the fact that the players aren't OK with random TPKs, but at the same time, want to have fights seem dangerous. So they want the fight to seem dangerous while at the same time knowing that their PCs aren't in danger.

'my character goes unconscious/has to retreat from the fight and i don't get to participate until the situation changes' is stakes that players seek to avoid

hyphz
Aug 5, 2003

Number 1 Nerd Tear Farmer 2022.

Keep it up, champ.

Also you're a skeleton warrior now. Kree.
Unlockable Ben

Warthur posted:

The core scenario in Alas Vegas is very on-rails and constricted (because James Wallis came up with the idea of a rotating-GM game but didn't actually have very good ideas as to how to make that work), so I think a) it's entirely possible that you're meant to handover here, and b) it's entirely possible that getting a limb broken is a possibility directly written into the scenario. Which is it, hyphz?

Neither.

a) - the GM rotates for each of four sessions that the adventure is scripted to contain, and each GM is supposed to read only the part of the adventure for their session. The rotation of the GM is disconnected from anything that happens to the PCs during the game. And yes, the rotating-GM thing works terribly, especially if the first GM decides to let the poor old player have a break and gives Vegas a nice well-equipped and available hospital which then creates a lot of laughter when they get to the second session and learn it's actually Hell.

b) breaking a limb is suggested as a possibility to avoid killing PCs. The text helpfully says that you shouldn't kill PCs because replacing them once the adventure has started in earnest is virtually impossible, but then gives you the Fugue combat system which has explicit (and very sudden) events that "kill or incapacitate" PCs (and again, since it's hell and gathering the chips that people drop when they "die" is how you escape, it's going to take a lot of fiddling to work out why getting incapacitated around enemies isn't death)

DalaranJ
Apr 15, 2008

Yosuke will now die for you.

drrockso20 posted:

That in many ways ties back to the original Oz books which are weird as hell in the best ways, someone really should make a proper Oz RPG someday

Please do, by the way, I have a friend who loves these books.

Lemniscate Blue
Apr 21, 2006

Here we go again.

DalaranJ posted:

Please do, by the way, I have a friend who loves these books.

I had a complete set of Baum's originals from a 1960s printing, the first 14 when I was a kid. Got rid of them when I turned 14 or so when I sold a few boxes of kid's books at Half Price Books and I've regretted it for years.

Yawgmoth
Sep 10, 2003

This post is cursed!

juggalo baby coffin posted:

Whats you all's favourite character concept you've come up with? Not so much favourite character, cause you can get really invested and enjoy a fairly low-concept character that you just develop through play, but like the weird WoD 'adjective noun' sort of concept.
Dr. Dray, a squirrel wizard who was given an intensified Awaken by an epic druid for reasons. He didn't have a spellbook, just the Spell Mastery feat and a prestige class that let him pull spells from a mage's guild. Too bad the game he was in only lasted like two sessions, he was fun to play. We had a sorcerer in the group too and sometimes I'd pretend to be his familiar.

Coolness Averted
Feb 20, 2007

oh don't worry, I can't smell asparagus piss, it's in my DNA

GO HOGG WILD!
🐗🐗🐗🐗🐗

juggalo baby coffin posted:

Whats you all's favourite character concept you've come up with? Not so much favourite character, cause you can get really invested and enjoy a fairly low-concept character that you just develop through play, but like the weird WoD 'adjective noun' sort of concept.

In a d&d game I wanted to play a tiefling warlock that was a sealed away evil overlord that had been depowered and cursed with every harm he'd inflicted on others with his spirit bound to his body forever. So he had to transfer those punishments to other evils. Starting at level 1, he's just a husk with a broken horn, missing hand and eye, floating husk trapped in a chained shut sarcophagus, but with each big bad we'd defeat he'd rebuild himself by stealing bits from them or transferring a curse and otherwise escape his prison. So you know sorta a 'good guy(ish) version of the Brendan fraiser movies' mummy.

hyphz posted:

If you see Jackie Chan walking along a thin walkway on the edge of a skyscraper, the direction of the movie can still make you feel exhilarated and afraid of the height even though you know Jackie's not going to fall and he'll be fine if he does. RPGs can't pull that trick (yet)

I'm sure this has been asked before, but are these real problems that come up at your table? Or are you worrying about worst-case scenarios or playing around with thought experiments? Because this just makes it seem like your tabletop experience is the antithesis of fun to me.

Warthur
May 2, 2004



hyphz posted:

Neither.

a) - the GM rotates for each of four sessions that the adventure is scripted to contain, and each GM is supposed to read only the part of the adventure for their session. The rotation of the GM is disconnected from anything that happens to the PCs during the game. And yes, the rotating-GM thing works terribly, especially if the first GM decides to let the poor old player have a break and gives Vegas a nice well-equipped and available hospital which then creates a lot of laughter when they get to the second session and learn it's actually Hell.

b) breaking a limb is suggested as a possibility to avoid killing PCs. The text helpfully says that you shouldn't kill PCs because replacing them once the adventure has started in earnest is virtually impossible, but then gives you the Fugue combat system which has explicit (and very sudden) events that "kill or incapacitate" PCs (and again, since it's hell and gathering the chips that people drop when they "die" is how you escape, it's going to take a lot of fiddling to work out why getting incapacitated around enemies isn't death)
Aha, thanks. I''ve extensively written about why Alas Vegas is a bad game but I no longer have access to the copy someone lent me to skim over and so I didn't recall whether there was anything about breaking limbs.

Thanks, though, you've allowed me to add the following data points to my (already extensive) list of Reasons Why Wallis Is A poo poo Designer:

- Incapacitating a PC in a scenario where getting replacement PCs is impossible is either a) just as bad as killing them, because either way the player's out of the game now with nothing to do (unless they're due to GM one of the upcoming sessions), or b) not really "incapacitation", because if a PC is still capable of being involved in the action they're hardly incapacitated.

- Designing a game system where killing/incapacitating PCs is a possibility, and then making the iconic scenario for that system - the scenario, indeed, which the system was specifically built from the ground up to serve - say "by the way, killing/incapacitating PCs is completely unacceptable" should be grounds for having your game design licence revoked permanently.

- As you point out, if the parameters of the scenario and game world that the characters are in means that there's this really, really major incentive for NPCs to kill the PCs, and the NPCs are aware of that incentive, it suddenly becomes incredibly difficult to justify not having the NPCs kill the PCs if the PCs end up wholly at the NPCs' mercy. Dramatic licence can only go so far, there's only so many times you can throw in some deus ex machina to distract the NPCs, and once you have NPCs acting against their own motivations that hard you no longer have much of a consistent world.

Splicer
Oct 16, 2006

from hell's heart I cast at thee
🧙🐀🧹🌙🪄🐸

hyphz posted:

Neither.

a) - the GM rotates for each of four sessions that the adventure is scripted to contain, and each GM is supposed to read only the part of the adventure for their session. The rotation of the GM is disconnected from anything that happens to the PCs during the game. And yes, the rotating-GM thing works terribly, especially if the first GM decides to let the poor old player have a break and gives Vegas a nice well-equipped and available hospital which then creates a lot of laughter when they get to the second session and learn it's actually Hell.

b) breaking a limb is suggested as a possibility to avoid killing PCs. The text helpfully says that you shouldn't kill PCs because replacing them once the adventure has started in earnest is virtually impossible, but then gives you the Fugue combat system which has explicit (and very sudden) events that "kill or incapacitate" PCs (and again, since it's hell and gathering the chips that people drop when they "die" is how you escape, it's going to take a lot of fiddling to work out why getting incapacitated around enemies isn't death)
This seems like a bad system that works against its narrative goals and theme. Is Monte Cook involved?

Libertad!
Oct 30, 2013

You can have the last word, but I'll have the last laugh!

Lunatic Sledge posted:

as someone who used to get paid an exorbitant amount to stand at a table and deal blackjack, not only will I accept payment for DMing I will also encourage tipping

is what I would say if I lived in a part of the country where there is any demand for tabletop poo poo

Roll20/FantasyGrounds is your friend. :wink:

hyphz
Aug 5, 2003

Number 1 Nerd Tear Farmer 2022.

Keep it up, champ.

Also you're a skeleton warrior now. Kree.
Unlockable Ben

Splicer posted:

This seems like a bad system that works against its narrative goals and theme. Is Monte Cook involved?

Nah, just James Wallis. There are a few genuinely good ideas in the setting, like it isn't worth ganking every individual you meet for their chips because they'll only be single chips and you have to be able to carry 1 million of them to escape. But it absolutely does work against itself.

Coolness Averted posted:

I'm sure this has been asked before, but are these real problems that come up at your table? Or are you worrying about worst-case scenarios or playing around with thought experiments? Because this just makes it seem like your tabletop experience is the antithesis of fun to me.

It's trying to resolve feedback I've had from the group on things I've tried, like
a) they don't like Strike! because there aren't any stats so they can never really get better because no numbers go up;
b) they don't like Feng Shui because there's no actual map for combat so doing stunts doesn't really make any difference;
and so on.

Thing is, I've heard this from several other groups too and seen it reported online a lot, which is why I talk a lot about D&D's consciousness of sensory rules components and compromise tolerance - which a lot of indies seem to disregard.

Joe Slowboat
Nov 9, 2016

Higgledy-Piggledy Whale Statements



So, I do need to ask, hyphz: What does your group get out of TTRPGs? What are they playing for, primarily? It seems like they not only demand a particular paradoxical set of experiences (fair enough) but they also refuse to suspend belief in order to resolve those experiences. It just doesn't make a lot of sense.

Surely they understand that 'real chance of failure' and 'guaranteed story-shape' are not the same thing. In a movie, the sense of danger is pretty much entirely an effect, a suspension of disbelief, because the entire narrative is set in stone once the movie is created. In a TTRPG, with dice, you either fudge around the failure chances or you are not guaranteed a story. This seems really basic.

Have you ever talked to them explicitly about this? About what they (and you) want out of games, and talking over how to make it happen?

hyphz
Aug 5, 2003

Number 1 Nerd Tear Farmer 2022.

Keep it up, champ.

Also you're a skeleton warrior now. Kree.
Unlockable Ben

Joe Slowboat posted:

So, I do need to ask, hyphz: What does your group get out of TTRPGs? What are they playing for, primarily? It seems like they not only demand a particular paradoxical set of experiences (fair enough) but they also refuse to suspend belief in order to resolve those experiences. It just doesn't make a lot of sense.

Yes. None of them will make a decision, though, and they'll just say "we don't really mind". If they don't like a system, like above, they'll either put up with no energy or ghost it to death as with Strike.

I don't really blame them too much for being low-key about it, as for many of them it's the only chance they get to meet up, so they don't want to say anything that could cause conflict.

Joe Slowboat
Nov 9, 2016

Higgledy-Piggledy Whale Statements



hyphz posted:

Yes. None of them will make a decision, though, and they'll just say "we don't really mind". If they don't like a system, like above, they'll either put up with no energy or ghost it to death as with Strike.

I don't really blame them too much for being low-key about it, as for many of them it's the only chance they get to meet up, so they don't want to say anything that could cause conflict.

...so, what your group actually wants is low-key social interaction with the rest of the group in a framework of tabletop games. That's fine, to be clear, but might explain some of the issues you've had. Have you considered board games? Or maybe just addressing that the hobby is the excuse to hang out? I just feel like there has to be a way to address the catch-22 your table seems to game in.

hyphz
Aug 5, 2003

Number 1 Nerd Tear Farmer 2022.

Keep it up, champ.

Also you're a skeleton warrior now. Kree.
Unlockable Ben

Joe Slowboat posted:

...so, what your group actually wants is low-key social interaction with the rest of the group in a framework of tabletop games. That's fine, to be clear, but might explain some of the issues you've had. Have you considered board games? Or maybe just addressing that the hobby is the excuse to hang out? I just feel like there has to be a way to address the catch-22 your table seems to game in.

We've played board games for a while before. Thing is, there's at least 2 members who'll repeatedly say they want to play RPGs when asked individually, but won't say which or express a preference when seeking group consensus in case they disrupt the group. I suspect it's us all being far too English.

It's hardly uncommon. I play board games at a local club too and when someone offered to run 5e they had a table of 8 in seconds, yet nobody ever mentioned wanting to play before that.

grassy gnoll
Aug 27, 2006

The pawsting business is tough work.

hyphz posted:

English.

Oh, now I get it.

Leperflesh
May 17, 2007

I'm backtracking a bit, apologies: just catching up to the thread. Just some thoughts on this collection of info:

hyphz posted:

Fighting the lizards would be boring if we know we can’t lose so we might as well not have the encounter. But we must have the random lizard encounter because if we don’t and just skip between destinations then the world doesn’t feel large and hostile. So the GM is expected to run the fight with no real risk on a nod and a wink, and if the curtain ever drops, the complaints come out.

hyphz posted:

Well that sounds very much like the issue I'm referring to here - the fact that the players aren't OK with random TPKs, but at the same time, want to have fights seem dangerous. So they want the fight to seem dangerous while at the same time knowing that their PCs aren't in danger.

hyphz posted:

Long term consequences are a very mixed bag though. Many systems have no rules for ending consequences other than death, so it comes down to GM Fiat.

But even then, that doesn’t change the demand to perceive risk without actually suffering it, which movies and stories do all the time.

You may have to actually teach your players, or they may just not be thinking about/being aware of some factors, that I think make up a good RPG experience, regardless of system:

1. "Risk" should not only be considered in terms of player death/survival, but (perhaps much more importantly) player success/failure. An adventure usually has a goal, and the characters' motivations go beyond mere survival: they want to achieve goals. Your players' goals should usually be in alignment with their characters' goals. In this context, any given encounter or scene can be positioned as an opportunity to either advance towards some goal, or suffer a setback, or sometimes both at once. When the players "lose" an encounter, this doesn't have to mean someone died. Setbacks can include loss of valuable resources, discovery of a new complexity or challenge that must be overcome, or even an ultimate reduction in how good the adventure's goal is allowed to be (think: we were hoping to kill the big bad guy, but now the best we can do is thwart his immediate plans; or, we were hoping to get paid a million bucks, but now the best we can do is sell enough salvage to pay our current expenses; or, we were hoping to find Shangri La, but now we know this false lead at best leads us to an hidden treasure stash.)

2. "Long term consequences" do not have to be rooted in the rules. You dismissed this other option as "Just GM Fiat" but it can also be collaborative between the players and the GM, and that's not a "just" or "merely" - it's practically ingrained in the concept of role playing games. Most RPGs (definitely not all: Paranoia! comes to mind as an exception) have as an implicit goal the idea that you are going to collaboratively create a story about some characters and what they did. What kind of ending the story will have can be fixed in place by the GM's plans: today, the players are trying to defeat the spider queen and save the village... but that's the immediate team/adventure/campaign planning. How will the characters themselves grow and change along the way? Will it be fun, or scary, or intriguing, or sublimely weird? How the characters wind up in the end is part of the "long term consequences" and that's not just whether or not they live, it's their character arc, individually and as a group. And any given encounter or scene can affect that. In this random lizards encounter, a character's precious family heirloom was destroyed; she's distraught about it. Will the others comfort her, or mock her materialism, or will the party's priest help her with an appeal to her faith? Will her family be furious with her for losing the heirloom, or forgive her, or will they never know? Or will she suffer in secret, not wanting her friends to realize how upset she is, because she's insecure about how they see her?

Or, if that's more roleplay than your group is into, it can be as simple as: in this random lizard encounter, the party felt forced to use up the last charge of its wand of fireballs, irreplaceable out here in the wilderness. That was a net loss: the lizards had no treasure, and now their inevitable encounter with the Ice Queen will be more challenging.

Or: the party, unexpectedly struggling against the lizards, is forced to flee into the untracked desert and becomes lost. Roll your wilderness survival skills, use up an extra day of rations, and one of the characters gets badly sunburned. Even if your system has no special rules for being lost in the wilderness, surely you can figure this out, and don't just dismiss it as "merely GM fiat" - have the players tell you what happens when they're lost in the desert, and I bet you 99% of the time they're not gonna just say "oh it was no problem we immediately found our way out".

Etc.: setbacks and complications, even non-fatal ones, add to the adventure. To my mind this is at least half the reason for random encounters anyway: many systems intend them to serve as a mechanism for attriting the characters' resources in advance of more scripted or planned encounters with explicit plot-advancement purposes.

3. Whatever system you're playing in ought to be enjoyable just to engage with. For me, much of the enjoyment of 4e D&D is found in the combat system. It's just plain fun to fight the lizards, even if we know we're going to beat them because it's an obviously easy encounter or something. I get to use my powers! I get to team up with my fellow players and engage with the synergies we have in our powers! We get to move minis around on the map and kapow some lizards! Even with no practical risk of anything, and with players preserving all of their limited resources for later, the GM and the players together can have fun playing out combats. A creative GM can turn a random encounter into something interesting with creative use of terrain, status effects, surprise reinforcements, or just presenting monsters the players haven't encountered before so they have to figure out what this monster's gimmick is and how best to defeat it. If you and your group find random combats in your chosen system to be boring unless someone might die, I'd have to say that's a complete condemnation of either the GM's ability to create fun encounters, or your overall choice in systems, or perhaps both (and in the first case, the players have a responsibility to help; GMs shouldn't have to just guess at what the players will find fun). Maybe you have to point out to your players that what they're asking for ("we should feel like we could die so it feels dangerous!") isn't the only or most important factor in having an encounter be fun and engaging.

4. Even aside from movies and stories' typical request that the viewer suspend their disbelief about the survival of the protagonist - and let's note that Game of Thrones has likely set a precedent many other series will copy in the future of intentionally avoiding that trope, in spades - stories usually do not ask us to assume the protagonist will lose nothing at all. There are a lot of different ways stories threaten the protagonist(s), some of them terrible cliches and some of them totally good and cool. For example: someone the protagonists care about might die. The protagonists might not win, even if they're surely going to live. Something about the protagonists' beliefs or convictions are at stake: they may lose their soul, or stop being a good person, or suffer a terrible tragedy that we don't want them to suffer. Others have already pointed out that the willing suspension of disbelief is necessary in order to enjoy many of these stories: if you've seen a few dozen hollywood movies, it's often trivial to predict the outcome. We can still enjoy the movie for other reasons! The characters were fun to enjoy, the acting was great, the setting is intriguing, the plot twists were surprises, the cinematography was spectacular, there's a cliffhanger ending! And are you ignoring all the genres where character death just isn't a thing, like say a romantic comedy?

TL;DR:
I think you can try to teach your players that the game can and should be fun for a variety of reasons irrespective of whether or not anyone could randomly die in any given encounter. I think you can hand out resources, and use them up, in pretty much any system. Resources including helpful NPCs, important information, or the availability of potential story rewards, not just ammunition or hit points or XPs or a mcguffin. I think you can play with systems that are fun to engage with regardless. And I think even with pre-printed modules or one-offs, you can find opportunities for the players to give their characters an arc, and every encounter can have the potential for the players and the GM to collaborate in discovering and exploring those arcs. The story arc, the character arcs, the engagement with the system, and the social time spent together are all more important than the simplistic "perception of risk of death" factor.

Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 21:51 on Jul 10, 2019

juggalo baby coffin
Dec 2, 2007

How would the dog wear goggles and even more than that, who makes the goggles?


there's a bunch of things you can do to add tension other than just killing players

- burn through resources, whether theyre actual resources or ability uses etc

- time pressure ie 'beat this guy before the other guy gets away' 'stop the orcs before they kill the villagers' 'stop the necromancers before they burn the holy book you need'. Story consequences are very effective because normally the players want to achieve their goal. Like people have said, there are ways for them to fail their objective without dying.

- have unpleasant, but not game ending, stuff happen to the characters. one time i had a hag curse someone to smell bad, and you've never seen someone so keen to break a curse. i didn't even give it mechanical stuff, it was just something npcs would mention and the other PCs would play on.

- make the stuff they are fighting scary. the players don't know what a monster is going to do or how many hit points it has. so if you build it up through how you introduce it, then have it hit with some big abilities out of the gate, the players are gonna be keen to put it down asap and nervous about what its going to do next, even if you effectively had it shoot its bolt almost immediately. keep something in reserve to bust out a little afterwards so they don't get suspicious if your demon just does claw attacks for 5 rounds in a row.

- most games have some type of downed state, whether its 'last breath' or 'negative hp' or whatever. have your monster behave like a real animal. if an animal KOs one guy but still has three other guys attacking it, its not going to go for the coup de grace on the downed guy, its going to switch to the guys who can still harm it. if the monster is intelligent they can grab up the downed guy and take him hostage, forcing the party out of combat in exchange for the guys life. nobody has a hard fight where one or two of them got downed but lived is going to go 'well that fight was a cakewalk'. its tense to be downed and have your character at risk. you don't need to go much further.

- the unknown is scary. I had a mutagenic monster I adapted from pieces of different monsters, and one of its abilities forced a roll on a mutations table. I think i'd put together the mutation table from a bunch of variant basilisk gaze abilities and a couple of spell effects from different sources, but the players didnt know what was on it. the first guy to get hit with the attack rolled on that table and had his eyes explode with acid, blinding him and burning the people next to him. everyone was scared as poo poo after that cause they didn't know what other kind of horrors were on the mutation table, even though by comparison everything else was much less horrifying.

nobody died during that encounter, but it was very tense. especially because there had been a chance earlier to use an evil artifact to gain protection from mutagenic effects (although with moral costs), so the party members who didn't use it also had a sense of 'uh oh, maybe we should have used that thing after all'.


but killing people in tabletop games sucks because its basically just 'you can't play any more for this session'. if you are going to do it you should keep around some npc characters or characters of PCs whose players arent there that people can play for the rest of the session if their character is killed.

Antivehicular
Dec 30, 2011


I wanna sing one for the cars
That are right now headed silent down the highway
And it's dark and there is nobody driving And something has got to give

juggalo baby coffin posted:

- have unpleasant, but not game ending, stuff happen to the characters. one time i had a hag curse someone to smell bad, and you've never seen someone so keen to break a curse. i didn't even give it mechanical stuff, it was just something npcs would mention and the other PCs would play on.

Seriously, don't underestimate the power of roleplaying-based consequences. I once ran an Exalted game where I had an NPC curse a PC with the Shun the Smiling Lady charm (which "blots the target's name from the rolls of those destined to be loved" and makes their effective Appearance score 1 for romance-adjacent purposes) and the table went nuts about it, despite its almost complete lack of mechanical teeth. That specific example might not work for a non-soap-operatic game (that game was really soap opera), but every game will have some intangible thing or quality the PCs value that can be put at risk for a meaningful consequence.

Humbug Scoolbus
Apr 25, 2008

The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers, stern and wild ones, and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.
Clapping Larry

Splicer posted:

Mrs. Splicer has been having a similar issue with trying to find decent female protagonist, non-YA genre fiction. Most of the women are either, well, the usual women in sci fi and fantasy, or the book is all about Exploring Female Themes. She just wants to read a book where a person goes around being a badass in space/elfland/space elfland and that person is also female. Bonus points if that person occasionally bangs people* and it's not treated like a big deal or in a weird male fantasy way.

She hated The Fade so much she made me read it just so she would have someone to get angry about it with.

*not, like, explicitly, but it's one of her pet peeves about women in fiction in general

Bizarro urban fantasy The Rook by Daniel O'Malley. Myfanwy Thomas is not your typical female protagonist.

Kestral
Nov 24, 2000

Forum Veteran

Antivehicular posted:

Seriously, don't underestimate the power of roleplaying-based consequences. I once ran an Exalted game where I had an NPC curse a PC with the Shun the Smiling Lady charm (which "blots the target's name from the rolls of those destined to be loved" and makes their effective Appearance score 1 for romance-adjacent purposes) and the table went nuts about it, despite its almost complete lack of mechanical teeth. That specific example might not work for a non-soap-operatic game (that game was really soap opera), but every game will have some intangible thing or quality the PCs value that can be put at risk for a meaningful consequence.

I love this example because I recently finished an Exalted 3e campaign where the use of Shun the Smiling Lady completely derailed what we thought would be the endgame, and sent a character into a spectacular moral / ethical failure cascade. The emotional gut-punch that charm delivers is amazing. I suppose the takeaway here is, if you ever want to see characters with social and emotional connections move heaven and earth, do your setting's equivalent of striking them from the rolls of those destined to be loved and see what happens.

Rand Brittain
Mar 25, 2013

"Go on until you're stopped."
Yeah, people have been losing their minds for Shun-the-Smiling-Lady-related reasons ever since 1e. That Charm causes madness.

juggalo baby coffin
Dec 2, 2007

How would the dog wear goggles and even more than that, who makes the goggles?


I found out what Goblins were doing in between Pathfinder and Starfinder:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KsMKOx6fumc

Len
Jan 21, 2008

Pouches, bandages, shoulderpad, cyber-eye...

Bitchin'!


So I have a minor problem with the local game parlor and I'm too poo poo at polite social interaction to know the best way to hurt it without becoming the rear end in a top hat of the parlor.

There's a 19 year old guy who has been coming to the Thursday meetups now that school is out and he's a nice guy and all but he either needs to start wearing deodorant or get stronger deodorant. What the best way to approach the subject and not be seen as the bad guy?

BattleMaster
Aug 14, 2000

Some venues have started enforcing hygiene standards so perhaps suggest to your venue that they should start doing it because (don't name any names) it has started to be an issue that bothers you. If they go along with it then they can deal with him

alg
Mar 14, 2007

A wolf was no less a wolf because a whim of chance caused him to run with the watch-dogs.

Len posted:

So I have a minor problem with the local game parlor and I'm too poo poo at polite social interaction to know the best way to hurt it without becoming the rear end in a top hat of the parlor.

There's a 19 year old guy who has been coming to the Thursday meetups now that school is out and he's a nice guy and all but he either needs to start wearing deodorant or get stronger deodorant. What the best way to approach the subject and not be seen as the bad guy?

Ask the owner / an employee to take care of it. It isn't your problem. They should have a policy already in place they can point to.

Dawgstar
Jul 15, 2017

alg posted:

Ask the owner / an employee to take care of it. It isn't your problem. They should have a policy already in place they can point to.

As the game store employee who was the one who had deliver the bad (and stinky) news, this is exactly right.

Kaiser Schnitzel
Mar 29, 2006

Schnitzel mit uns


Dawgstar posted:

As the game store employee who was the one who had deliver the bad (and stinky) news, this is exactly right.

How does that conversation usually go?

Splicer
Oct 16, 2006

from hell's heart I cast at thee
🧙🐀🧹🌙🪄🐸

Kaiser Schnitzel posted:

How does that conversation usually go?
Nasally

LongDarkNight
Oct 25, 2010

It's like watching the collapse of Western civilization in fast forward.
Oven Wrangler
How do folks organize their RPG pdf collections? Mine's gotten badly out of control and I'd like to not scroll thru hundreds of files trying to remember theme and mechanics based solely on name of the file.

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Jeffrey of YOSPOS
Dec 22, 2005

GET LOSE, YOU CAN'T COMPARE WITH MY POWERS

LongDarkNight posted:

How do folks organize their RPG pdf collections? Mine's gotten badly out of control and I'd like to not scroll thru hundreds of files trying to remember theme and mechanics based solely on name of the file.
Windows is pretty good at indexing PDFs so, at least if they have searchable text, it's not that hard for me to get to one of them by typing <windows>keyword. Browsing is harder and I have them sorted into ad-hoc groups but...it's not great.

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