|
hyphz I believe in you, don't give up! Because the situation you're describing right now sounds cool as heck and I'm interested in hearing how things pan out if you run with the suggestions.
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2020 03:03
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 2, 2024 22:52 |
|
|
Tuxedo Catfish posted:Bolded part is cutting right to the heart of the matter, yeah. The problem comes in when the author or the player or both are in denial about that. Yeah but, like, that can be cool. No portrait is actually true to life (even if it has photographic detail, it is a 2D still and not a living, aging being) but that doesn't mean trying for realistic detail is a waste of time. I find stuff like Ars Magica's super detailed season-by-season aging and study rules really charming, and while they naturally cause certain gameplay behaviors and story structures to emerge I'd say my favorite thing about them is what they teach me about what being a medieval wizard is like.
|
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2020 03:06
|
|
|
Xarbala posted:hyphz I believe in you, don't give up! The Spire stuff isn’t in an actual game. I’d have to have a ton more ideas before trying to solicit it.
|
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2020 03:16
|
|
|
hyphz posted:Depending on if I can actually somehow adlib an entire criminal underground. Eeeeek! I'mma go back to this. Serious non-confrontational question : did you read The Spire? It's almost entirely various conspiracies by page-count. Even the class descriptions are usually narrative ties into vast conspiracies. You're tripping over them. One of the things I've heard argued is that it has too much of that kind of thing or weird stuff with the Heart or other setting stuff instead of more game mechanics. I don't understand how you can have this problem with this specific RPG that is set up to be just a giant, thorny pile of plot-hooks. It's a concertina wire of narratives. Like Blades makes you create a bunch of stuff from whole cloth, even if you use the default setting. The Spire spoon feeds you stuff to do. You could literally arbitrarily pick a faction and they'd have a compelling narrative reason to deal with your water-poisoning plot and all the hooks are there. If you don't like improv, that's fine, but The Spire is one of the most improv-friendly training wheels games I know once you get the setting's assumptions. If you conceptually don't like improv, that's fine, but it's not the fault of the game ; the fault is that you don't like improv and it makes you uncomfortable. We can talk about working on that, but we're not talking about game-systems at that point. This is like arguing that hammers are bad frying pans. I get it. I have an anxiety disorder and sometimes improv is hard. Just let it go. Ask for player input, take a break if you need it, admit to players that you're making things up on the fly sometimes (it can sting at first but when you do something good, it looks even better). Just relax, this is you having fun with your friends and you're all working on this together. If your players aren't, they're assholes. The amount of times I've had some player do something buck-wild (especially in Mage) where I just had to be like "guys, you just changed my everything, I need to have a smoke and stare into space and come up with a new plan" is legendary. That's OKAY! Players are happy to use the bathroom and catch up and be friends for a bit. Chill, duder.
|
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2020 03:33
|
|
|
hyphz posted:Depending on if I can actually somehow adlib an entire criminal underground. Eeeeek! this to me is the heart of your problem. it's the same as "well i can't think of a way to rob a bank so it can't be a plausible story" you don't need to adlib an entire criminal underground you just need to create what the players see and nobody is going to care too much about the parts they don't. If they do 90% of the time players will make their own guesses and you can either use that or subvert them (both can make the players feel smart if done right)
|
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2020 04:04
|
|
|
hyphz posted:The Spire stuff isn’t in an actual game. I’d have to have a ton more ideas before trying to solicit it. oh I missed that lol
|
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2020 04:16
|
|
|
I have no idea how you can think D&D or Pathfinder give more background for how to deal with an adventure than The Spire. I'd argue it's kind of a premiere example of a setting designed to give you stuff to do in it. It has some flaws, but I don't think that's an axis you could argue on unless you also damned every other single RPG. You picked an example so bad that I can't even respond because I don't think you read the book. I'm trying to not be lovely, and this isn't that you didn't like my pet setting and yar yar yar why don't you love it ; I literally don't understand how you could skim the setting and not cotton to it being full of criminal undergrounds that care about everything. It's like if you watched Evil Dead II and said, "But why didn't anyone get cut up with a chainsaw?" Did you watch the movie/read the book?
|
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2020 04:19
|
|
|
Btw, I didn’t run CFA for my group. I ran it for a group from the Dragon Friends fan discord, one of whom had only ever played 5e before so fighting the good fight I guess, plus a goon who joined from the TG discord where I recruited to balance the numbers. And I guess the reason D&D and PF are less stressful is that they have a standard way of creating narrative weight which is to gate stuff behind a dungeon and/or hexcrawl. That can be very irritating in plot terms but if you signed up to play D&D or PF you’re presumably up for dungeons and hexcrawls and enjoy playing them. And it creates a play mode which is challenging, gives players low level choices with responses, takes time, and can be resolved and described in detail. CFA doesn’t really have a play mode like that but makes up for it by flooding the players with possible goals. But Spire? I love the setting and I know it’s full of hooks but there is no integration of any them into anything but the abstract d10 based play mode. HJ didn’t answer the question about how many rolls to spike the water; but even if that’s over the top, how many rolls to do anything else?
|
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2020 05:10
|
|
|
hyphz posted:Btw, I didn’t run CFA for my group. I ran it for a group from the Dragon Friends fan discord, one of whom had only ever played 5e before so fighting the good fight I guess, plus a goon who joined from the TG discord where I recruited to balance the numbers. Hyphz, Spire has an explicit play mode in the back half of the book. It's not hugely elaborate, but it discusses the phases of a heist - planning, execution, and complication. There is absolutely integration into a model of play, it's just a more fluid model than "there is a dungeon you have to pass through to solve the problem." E: It's also really not abstract. You do a thing, you roll the dice, just like D&D. There are enemies with stats, just like D&D. You go to a place and get to doing various things, just like D&D. It just doesn't use a grid. What Spire is, is flexible, not abstract. Joe Slowboat fucked around with this message at 05:18 on Apr 16, 2020 |
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2020 05:13
|
|
|
hyphz posted:
It's in the book. Did you read it. No, like, seriously tell me you actually read all of the book and didn't just skim it. Cause there's a difference between if you just didn't understand the book and you just skimmed it.
|
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2020 05:24
|
|
|
I will never understand why this thread lets itself get derailed by hyphz over and over and over again. His group is the Galapagos Islands of roleplaying, using the basic building blocks of the hobby to produce play that could never survive beyond the borders of their dysfunctional table. Why engage? I genuinely do not get what value people are deriving from this cycle.
|
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2020 07:22
|
|
|
Kestral posted:I will never understand why this thread lets itself get derailed by hyphz over and over and over again. His group is the Galapagos Islands of roleplaying, using the basic building blocks of the hobby to produce play that could never survive beyond the borders of their dysfunctional table. Why engage? I genuinely do not get what value people are deriving from this cycle. Hyphz provides a genuinely unique perspective on games, and while eventually we just run up against a totally incommensurables element, I don’t think it’s ever been precisely the same point of strange disagreement between discussions. What else is this for if not tabletop chat? Even if from my perspective Hyphz is communicating from the negaverse of RPGs.
|
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2020 07:57
|
|
|
A genuinely unique perspective of pretending to misunderstand basic human activities such as "playing a game because it is fun".
|
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2020 08:14
|
|
|
Elector_Nerdlingen posted:A genuinely unique perspective of pretending to misunderstand basic human activities such as "playing a game because it is fun". See, I think Hyphz is being genuine - getting fixated on “I don’t know if I’m doing this right, so I want a standard to measure it by that isn’t subjective, so I need a structure like a dungeon that clearly does a specific mechanical thing” is a failure mode, but I see how it can arise. And now I can keep an eye out for it in the games I run, or when I’m helping friends start GMing.
|
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2020 08:28
|
|
|
Joe Slowboat posted:See, I think Hyphz is being genuine - getting fixated on “I don’t know if I’m doing this right, so I want a standard to measure it by that isn’t subjective, so I need a structure like a dungeon that clearly does a specific mechanical thing” is a failure mode, but I see how it can arise. And now I can keep an eye out for it in the games I run, or when I’m helping friends start GMing. If it was just this time then yeah, I'd agree with you, but my first interaction with Hyphz was him pretending that if you gave out per-session xp in D&D then the the only possible player action would be to sit there refusing to do anything and accumulating xp because there would be no incentive to do anything else, and that was years ago.
|
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2020 08:34
|
|
|
Elector_Nerdlingen posted:If it was just this time then yeah, I'd agree with you, but my first interaction with Hyphz was him pretending that if you gave out per-session xp in D&D then the the only possible player action would be to sit there refusing to do anything and accumulating xp because there would be no incentive to do anything else, and that was years ago. See, I think that’s a useful total nonsense position, because it neatly points out how there must be non-exp goals players have, or at least that you can use exp reward systems to shape player responses to mechanics - via hyperbole that Hyphz considers normal play. Hyphzperbole? And it’s of a piece - paying attention solely to the moving parts of the system and being terrified of the emotional and subjective context that gives the system meaning.
|
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2020 08:43
|
|
|
Joe Slowboat posted:See, I think that’s a useful total nonsense position, because it neatly points out how there must be non-exp goals players have, or at least that you can use exp reward systems to shape player responses to mechanics - via hyperbole that Hyphz considers normal play. Hyphzperbole? And it’s of a piece - paying attention solely to the moving parts of the system and being terrified of the emotional and subjective context that gives the system meaning. But when Frank Trollman does the same thing nobody here feels obliged to go and engage with him in endless attempts at debate because we all know Trollman's a dipshit idiot. This is literally just Gaming Den logic, "my elf spends the first 100 years of his life making Performance checks before the game starts so I begin play with eleventy billion gold" kinda stuff.
|
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2020 08:49
|
|
|
Elector_Nerdlingen posted:If it was just this time then yeah, I'd agree with you, but my first interaction with Hyphz was him pretending that if you gave out per-session xp in D&D then the the only possible player action would be to sit there refusing to do anything and accumulating xp because there would be no incentive to do anything else, and that was years ago. This would never actually happen but tbh I kind of love the mental image of a group of people just sitting there eating pizza and staring at unrolled dice for four hours, then saying "Well, see you next week"
|
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2020 08:58
|
|
|
Ettin posted:This would never actually happen but tbh I kind of love the mental image of a group of people just sitting there eating pizza and staring at unrolled dice for four hours, then saying "Well, see you next week" If David Lynch made Mazes and Monsters...
|
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2020 09:10
|
|
|
Or Waiting for Godot, the Role-Playing Game. - By the way, this sale ends in 15 hours: UnCO3 posted:
|
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2020 09:12
|
|
|
so you're not just saying you don't know how to handle this in spite, you're saying you don't know how to do any form of non-dungeon crawl GMing? That it's a game-independent issue with your players doing anything ithervthan "I stab the orc" or "I disarm the trap"?
|
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2020 09:18
|
|
|
hyphz posted:HJ didn’t answer the question about how many rolls to spike the water; but even if that’s over the top, how many rolls to do anything else?
|
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2020 09:19
|
|
|
I'm reading through tales from the loop. Are there any brakes on the dice stacking train, or is best stat + best skill + equipment always, uh, best?
|
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2020 13:24
|
|
|
GimpInBlack posted:If David Lynch made Mazes and Monsters... Or perhaps John Cage.
|
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2020 13:57
|
|
|
Is there a Cortex thread that I missed?
|
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2020 13:58
|
|
|
Tuxedo Catfish posted:I am saying that you're missing an obvious third option: that immersion/simulation is about representing reality "truthfully" and without comment, and ignoring all the ways in which that is impossible. I feel like you are reacting to some bad gaming you witnessed or got dragged into once, not the type of gaming I'm actually talking about. Warthur fucked around with this message at 14:12 on Apr 16, 2020 |
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2020 14:09
|
|
|
Splicer posted:so you're not just saying you don't know how to handle this in spite, you're saying you don't know how to do any form of non-dungeon crawl GMing? That it's a game-independent issue with your players doing anything ithervthan "I stab the orc" or "I disarm the trap"? Ok, let me try to marshal this. As I said, D&D and PF2e have the trick of creating narrative weight by gating things behind dungeon crawls and tactical combats, which isn't always ideal or satisfactory. But it does have a benefit. When the PCs fight that dragon (or whatever) it provides a ton of support for creating a challenge and overcoming narrative weight, in both a technical and narrative way. Because it's played out in tactical detail, the PCs can make small decisions that they know directly contribute to their result, such as remembering to position themselves to avoid breath weapons. Plus there is the objectivity benefit. If the dragon is in the Bestiary or whatever, and the encounter meets the game's balancing rules, then the players know that objectively someone outside the group who is (hopefully) good at this stuff has determined that dragon to be a suitable or difficult challenge for the PCs. If they turn out to beat it easily, they can therefore know it's because they played well. If it's a module they're playing it's even more so; if they beat encounter D2 easily they can find any number of groups online reporting that it was hard, and know that in fact, they just did well. But in games that don't have that, in general, then yes - I get very stuck on the issue of challenge and associated narrative weight. Any details the players mention are only arbitrarily converted into bonuses or advantages by me, but even that doesn't matter because everything is made up. If the players defeat the challenge easily then they have no way of knowing if they played well or I just let them. If they do not defeat it easily they have no way of knowing if they could have done better or if I would have spun it out whatever they did to make it seem significant enough (aka "cat and laser pointer GMing", an idea that I really dislike). The case in Spire that always gets at me is in the Knight class, where one of the quests on a High advance just casually reads ".. venture to the Heart of Spire, find the nightmarish Dragon pub, and slay the vile guardian that dwells there." Doing this grants immortality, so it's presumably meant to be a big honkin' deal. But nothing tells us what makes it difficult to find (unless you use the poster map in which case apparently it's just down the road from the old Grist station, huh) or even what the "vile guardian" is. I can try to make these up, but how can I do that while avoiding the cat and laser pointer? It's wholly subjective, it's just my own PC group doing it, I know all their stats and I know them well enough to have an idea of their approaches. I'm still in the same position, where I have to either try and set a difficulty and have the players just think "oh, Hyphz got it wrong" if it's too easy orr too hard; or else, do it purely subjectively and play cat and laser pointer.
|
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2020 15:50
|
|
|
The thing about more narrative/group storytelling style RP is that although something that a bunch of random nerds improvise together most likely isn't going to make an amazing story, it's yours in a way that very few other media ever are, and unless your actual aim is producing something for an outside audience, the reactions of anyone not at the table are pretty much irrelevant. There's a reason why telling other people about what happened with your RPG campaign is a lot like telling other people about dreams you had. Also there was that time someone did a "Tell Me About Your Character" booth to raise money for Doctors Without Borders. 
|
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2020 16:20
|
|
|
hyphz posted:Btw, I didn’t run CFA for my group. I ran it for a group from the Dragon Friends fan discord, one of whom had only ever played 5e before so fighting the good fight I guess, plus a goon who joined from the TG discord where I recruited to balance the numbers. It's entirely contextual, but the context should create the rolling conditions naturally without effort on your part as hypothetical GM. In Spire and other PbtA games, you roll when
AND there is a reasonable chance of failure, AND the consequences of success or failure are both relevant and interesting Moves come up contextually as part of the conversation. They would say to you, "Hyphz, I want to dose everyone in Spire by poisoning the water." And you would say "Okay, how?" "By obtaining poison, and tipping it into the water supply." "Okay, how do you get the poison?" etc. until you get to granular points where they start triggering moves. Let's say the players have narrowed it down to finding a distributor for their chemicals. The Azurite player wants to use their contacts to find someone who can provide the poison. They already blew their once-per-session find a guy move, so they can't just do what they want. You ask them to describe how they're finding a poison distributor. They say they're going out onto the street and asking discreet questions about who might know a guy who knows a guy who has some poison of the type they need. You feel this makes sense and doesn't need any more specification, so you ask them to roll +Investigate, because success or failure matters. From here, they can get a perfect success and find a guy, so now they need to convince him to sell them the poison, which may mean more rolling, and get it back to the reservoir undetected (more rolling), and they may have to live with the fallout of being hunted because they killed thousands of people. Alternately, they could blow the roll, which means the Paladins know someone is asking dumb questions about buying a shitload of poison, so now they have to evade the fuzz, which means they're probably going to roll more times. Note that in each instance, whether or not you should roll comes up naturally as part of the flow of what's going on in game. You're also not rolling at the player's whims - you have to do a thing to do a thing in PbtA games, you don't just get to pick a move and roll. Additionally, it's got to be important - if they fail their check finding a source, that's interesting. It's not interesting if they have to make a roll to open an unlocked door when nobody's around or put one foot in front of another while they're idly walking. It would be interesting, and potentially merit rolling, if the PCs were trying to open a locked door in a warehouse full of hostile guards, or trying to put one foot in front of another crossing a tightrope five stories up. There is not a set of conditions more specific that the ones I've broken out above to tell you when to make rolls.
|
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2020 18:00
|
|
|
Kai Tave posted:But when Frank Trollman does the same thing nobody here feels obliged to go and engage with him in endless attempts at debate because we all know Trollman's a dipshit idiot. This is literally just Gaming Den logic, "my elf spends the first 100 years of his life making Performance checks before the game starts so I begin play with eleventy billion gold" kinda stuff. I mean, I think the difference is that hyphz does genuinely seem to be trying to understand, or at least isn't acting like hyphz's perspective is superior to everyone else's and it's not like we all have hugely better things to do on this elfgames forum. Hyphz does have the really frustrating And I think we did get something really interesting in the big Hyphzpost above: Hyphz's concern with 'correctly' GMing the elfgame imagination times, lest they feel too much like imagination times with rules. Hyphz, I think you're sort of committing a category error. Tabletop games can involve tactical challenges of whatever kind, but ultimately there is no objective or correct reality to any of them, only a social contract between the players, including the GM. Having a pre-written collection of texts doesn't actually mean you're GMing well when you just regurgitate them, not just because plenty of modules are trash, but because editing the module to provide what players find interesting and to keep things fun is precisely what a GM is for. Tabletop gaming cannot actually simulate one-player CRPGs. If you can let go of that impossible desire for a game with independent rather than dependent reality, I'm reasonably certain you'll have a better time. Coincidentally, this is what the WTF charts are about.
|
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2020 18:22
|
|
|
All of this has convinced me to finally check out Spire. Not sure why I hadn't before; it's like a perfect distillation of poo poo I love. 
|
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2020 18:41
|
|
|
grassy gnoll posted:Let's say the players have narrowed it down to finding a distributor for their chemicals. The Azurite player wants to use their contacts to find someone who can provide the poison. They already blew their once-per-session find a guy move, so they can't just do what they want. You ask them to describe how they're finding a poison distributor. They say they're going out onto the street and asking discreet questions about who might know a guy who knows a guy who has some poison of the type they need. You feel this makes sense and doesn't need any more specification, so you ask them to roll +Investigate, because success or failure matters. From here, they can get a perfect success and find a guy, so now they need to convince him to sell them the poison, which may mean more rolling, and get it back to the reservoir undetected (more rolling), and they may have to live with the fallout of being hunted because they killed thousands of people. Alternately, they could blow the roll, which means the Paladins know someone is asking dumb questions about buying a shitload of poison, so now they have to evade the fuzz, which means they're probably going to roll more times. I can see how the breakdown works, but I'm cautious about it. This is an experience I had as a player in a D&D game: we were secretly scouting a rebel camp, but when we got there we noticed that most of it had been dismantled and started moving on. They were just regular folks, they didn't have established uniforms or anything, so the group suggested that maybe my character who was Deception/Diplomacy heavy could pretend to be one of the rebels and find out, from the remaining ones, where they were going. "Ok," I say, "But I'll have to watch them for a while." So I say I'm watching them and trying to listen in for any recognition symbols they have, any signs of how far through the movement operation was or what might need still to be moved (since that's what they'd most likely be asking about), any names I could overhear for the people remaining there, or generally any kind of stuff that could be used for social pretexting. The GM naturally went deer-in-the-headlights, and honestly I sympathised. Just because of an approach I'd taken he potentially had to come up with the entire delegation structure and schedule for the movement of the camp. He basically OOC told me that I shouldn't do that. So my PC went randomly wandering up to one of the remaining tents, was asked what he was doing there. I ad-lib that I've come back since we found we needed extra supplies for the trip. "There aren't any here anymore," he says, rules that no Deception check could convince him of something obviously false, and the NPC attacks. Was that bad GMing? Well, I think it probably was but at the same time I couldn't really complain or comment because I would have really struggled to do any better in that situation - other than by just allowing an abstracted Deception check, which then creates the problem of the whole thing potentially appearing too easy.
|
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2020 18:50
|
|
|
Yes that was bad GMing
|
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2020 19:07
|
|
|
You also clearly expected more than the GM needed to give there. The GM could simplify considerably - you seem to think this required "the entire delegation structure and schedule for the movement of the camp" and you asked elaborate and detailed questions. Consider instead saying "I listen in to try to overhear useful information." You have really elaborate expectations for the realism and structure of settings, but realistically, all you would get in a movie or a book would be "the character listens to two sentries and one says to the other, 'so where are we taking all of this?'" And then, if the GM wants this information to be harder to get, the other sentry refuses to say and tells the first to go ask Captain Example, since the information is on lockdown. Players can and should suggest things like 'maybe there are some sentries I can listen in on' or 'maybe they have a password I can try to overhear' - but even apart from that, the degree of detail necessary to something like that is minimal. Think of it like animation, the more detail there is, the harder the actual animating is. So a lot of designs and real-life complexity get simplified, and highly detailed elements are chosen carefully in order to create the feeling and design people want. The thing you wanted there is something there's no need for in the detail you asked for it, and you seem to read any request by players to do something you didn't expect as a request for that kind of carefully detailed setting expansion. Again, it seems like you want to hold things to an external standard of realism or concrete reality, rather than the dramatic standard of 'what's interesting and fun at the table for the people involved.' E: It was also bad GMing, but you don't identify what makes it bad GMing, hyphz. You think the problem is failing to provide intricate setting detail on the fly, when the actual problem is not thinking about how to create a smoothly flowing game experience and fudging the necessary details to get the scene to work. Which can be as simple as abstracting out the complex system of delegation and scheduling to 'ok, you listen in on their operations, but since they're using code words you don't think you know where they're going yet.' The details of their delegation structure only matter if you're playing a spy game where it's appropriate for players to get deep into the logistical structure of this group. In general, think about things in terms of how much they matter. What would actually influence play? What actually matters to the story? If something matters, then you think about the obstacles and complexities that give it weight as an in-game action. If it doesn't matter, even if it's theoretically quite difficult, it... doesn't matter. EE: Also yeah 'this doesn't work and you get attacked' is the first and most basic Bad GM move, it's collapsing into a game mode that has more concrete and specific rules so the GM doesn't have to elaborate on anything. It's a bit like turning every problem into a dungeon crawl because that has clear and concrete rules. Joe Slowboat fucked around with this message at 19:16 on Apr 16, 2020 |
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2020 19:09
|
|
|
Entirely basing the success of a deception test on what you just "improved" without a dice roll is, indeed, bad DMing.
|
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2020 19:13
|
|
|
I really really really want to try PF2E so I'm going to probably rope my wife into a one-shot where she's like the party leader and I'll control a couple of other characters in combat, someone talk me out of it please
|
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2020 19:27
|
|
|
hyphz posted:HJ didn’t answer the question about how many rolls to spike the water; but even if that’s over the top, how many rolls to do anything else?
|
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2020 19:31
|
|
|
Joe Slowboat posted:E: It was also bad GMing, but you don't identify what makes it bad GMing, hyphz. You think the problem is failing to provide intricate setting detail on the fly, when the actual problem is not thinking about how to create a smoothly flowing game experience and fudging the necessary details to get the scene to work. Which can be as simple as abstracting out the complex system of delegation and scheduling to 'ok, you listen in on their operations, but since they're using code words you don't think you know where they're going yet.' The details of their delegation structure only matter if you're playing a spy game where it's appropriate for players to get deep into the logistical structure of this group. Well I wasn't asking for intricate setting info in order to be an rear end. I was asking because it was the kind of information a character would need to infiltrate something like that. It's social engineering 101. Just finding out "I don't know where they're going yet" wouldn't have enabled my PC to convincingly sneak in. No competent infiltrator would just stride up to the camp without having any background information, and no competent camp would be randomly reading out their passwords out loud. So how could the GM have made it reasonable without making people involved look like twits? hyphz fucked around with this message at 19:35 on Apr 16, 2020 |
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2020 19:33
|
|
|
Halloween Jack posted:Why would I answer this question when I can let it stand as a summary of everything wrong with your approach to the medium Um, you said I shouldn't allow it in one roll, so I asked how many I should allow it in. It seemed to be your statement that implied that the number of rolls was the key?
|
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2020 19:37
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 2, 2024 22:52 |
|
|
hyphz posted:I can see how the breakdown works, but I'm cautious about it. That was pretty bad GMing on your friend's part. My first thought is "why does the specific information matter?" You either successfully infiltrate the rebels, or you don't. We don't care if you did it by giving them the high sign from the Sting or you happen to share their unique accent so they accept you as one of their own. The proper response is "Okay, you attempt to do some signals intelligence on the rebels, and [PASS/FAIL/BUT WITH A COST]. Now what do you do?" But! I understand. I like those kind of minutia, plus you can always turn them using the high sign into a recurring plot element. So the second big trick here is for your GM to instead say "I don't know, Hyphz. You made a listen check - tell us what you hear?" That way you as a player have some agency in the game, and the GM doesn't have to think of something on the fly. To torture our extended metaphors, I don't think your core problem is one of plotting, so much as editing. We shouldn't give a poo poo how the warp drive works, only that it gets Kirk to the scene of the action [in the nick of time/alas, too late]. Editing is hard, but it is easier to figure out than improvisational storytelling, because the big thing you need to do is just ask yourself "is this thing in front of me interesting?" And if so, "Is this interesting thing important?" If the answer to the first question is "no," then why is it in your game? If the answer to the second question is "no," don't spend much time on it. It is a total coincidence, I assure you, that these conditional statements strongly correlate with the parameters for rolling that I laid out in my last post.
|
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2020 19:44
|
|