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re: poison it sounds like the module is expecting the PCs to use something non-lethal, so she retires feeling queasy rather than going straight to "OMFG, I've been poisoned, RED ALERT!" before expiring; but the module should state that assumption. Avoiding her detection spells with skill rolls sounds like bullshit unless Pathfinder 2e has changed that sort of thing and now allows you to do that; there's plenty of games where you could do that, but Pathfinder and 3.x aren't it, afaik. Was this one of the first APs for PF2e? They tend to be written whilst the game is in dev, so author's assumptions about the rules just might not actually be true by the time its published.
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Apr 27, 2020 17:10
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hyphz posted:But, yea, forcing the players to carry out the heist as written would feel a bit like railroading to me. If you're running a module, some degree of railroading is inevitable
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Apr 27, 2020 17:37
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hyphz posted:Now here's the thing - I'm not trying to just kick the module at this point. Rather, I'm leading into the fact that this is exactly the kind of thing I'm worried about when trying to improvise scenes of this kind on the fly; obviously the module author thought this would be a cool touch and that it would make sense to be there (and yes it would make perfect sense for there to be magical protection against infiltration) but didn't see all the consequences. And they had no time limit. But I might have to do something like that on the fly, and I'm not a paid author for the 2nd most successful RPG company to begin with. So yea, I tend to be thinking "there but for the grace of god..." with this stuff. The secret of RPG adventures, even from adventure-focused companies like Paizo, is that most of them are really bad at accounting for everything PCs would want to do. So, here are some of my thoughts on pre-written adventures and planning games. -Good adventures and good session plans both involve identifying the key moments your players will probably hit and making sure you have multiple ways into and out of them. I don't mean that in terms of dungeon-mapping, just in terms of making sure the scene you've planned will work no matter the circumstances. I know I want some goblin bandits, and I could put them here, here or here depending on how my players decide to go through this. If they just try to fight them, they'll do this. If they try talking, they'll ask for X. If my PCs just suddenly because they were sneaking or they teleported in or whatever, the goblins will do this instead. That means you'll have much less prepared for each specific possibility, but you also have a base to work from much more of the time. -The greatest advantage you have over someone writing a prewritten adventure is knowing what your PCs specifically are likely to do, instead of having to account for what every PC ever is likely to do. You know Bob is probably going to use magic to bypass half the adventure, so you can think about how to make the back half of the adventure interesting despite him walking through the back door with Passwall. You know Frank's barbarian is never going to forgive Lord Traxx for killing his family, so you don't need to prepare that much dialogue because Frank's attacking him anyway. Even with all of that, you're still going to need to improvise to fit the pieces together in a fun way. However, it's both easier to make pieces that fit together than it is to make a whole adventure in one piece and easier to make those pieces fit together in a new way that's still satisfying when your PCs inevitably do something you didn't plan for. Lurks With Wolves fucked around with this message at 17:46 on Apr 27, 2020 |
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Apr 27, 2020 17:40
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jivjov posted:If you're running a module, some degree of railroading is inevitable This is what I'm starting to wonder about, to be honest. If there's a rule that If you're running a module, there must be some railroading. If you're not, there must be some romeroading.
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Apr 27, 2020 17:47
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hyphz posted:This is what I'm starting to wonder about, to be honest. If there's a rule that In Pathfinder maybe, but not in tabletop gaming as a thing. In a modern story-oriented game, the only thing the players have to commit to is to care about their characters and the world they live in. The GM can improv everything else, because you don't need to draw up a map on grid paper and write out the watch schedule, you can just say, "Yeah, sneaking in is probably possible, but you'll have to get over the walls and past the guards. How do you plan to do that?" Or the players can decide that the heist is dumb and they're going to do a stealth siege of the castle by hijacking all the food deliveries, and all you have to do is say, "Wild! How are you going to do that?"
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Apr 27, 2020 17:54
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Hey friends, while I understand this is the designated zone for hyphzposting that does not mean it is open season on hyphz. Please try to tamp down a bit on the hostility.
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Apr 27, 2020 17:57
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Zorak of Michigan posted:In Pathfinder maybe, but not in tabletop gaming as a thing. In a modern story-oriented game, the only thing the players have to commit to is to care about their characters and the world they live in. The GM can improv everything else, because you don't need to draw up a map on grid paper and write out the watch schedule, you can just say, "Yeah, sneaking in is probably possible, but you'll have to get over the walls and past the guards. How do you plan to do that?" Or the players can decide that the heist is dumb and they're going to do a stealth siege of the castle by hijacking all the food deliveries, and all you have to do is say, "Wild! How are you going to do that?" I can understand that, but it's a kind of different issue. Here for example, the players decided to break into the manor through the sewer. The module did not expect that and therefore I am confident in saying that the manor guards did not expect that either, and therefore things were a bit disorganised as you would expect. But what if it was improvised? First, I have to decide if it was unexpected or not. This would probably be OK in this case, but not in every case - the obvious case being robbing a bank in a modern game. (Do you know what the security holes that would allow a bank to be robbed are?) Now, I have to know how that unexpectedness will affect what happens. To do that, I have to decide what they did expect, and then what they would have done about it. And then I have to do what I did with the module, which is to decide how the unexpected events are going to change it. It might seem unnecessary to go through that process, but the problem is that if I don't, then a) it'll be much harder to describe what's actually going on inside the manor with a reaction to an unexpected approach, and b) I have no way of knowing that the player's unexpected approach has actually changed anything, like it should. If I just say "well, hey, there'd still be guards right" then I would have just been saying that if they'd charged the front door. If I want to be sure that the players can change the world I have to know what they are changing it from.
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Apr 27, 2020 18:22
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hyphz posted:But what if it was improvised? First, I have to decide if it was unexpected or not. This would probably be OK in this case, but not in every case - the obvious case being robbing a bank in a modern game. (Do you know what the security holes that would allow a bank to be robbed are?) No, but there's a ton of films and books about bank heists, even if I only vaguely remember scenes from them, everyone's got the basic cultural touchstones of what a fictional heist looks like.
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Apr 27, 2020 18:41
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hyphz posted:If I want to be sure that the players can change the world I have to know what they are changing it from. Let's zoom WAY out to give an example. There is a mansion you must get into to do <thing>. The mansion is heavily guarded. Getting into the mansion, the party is deciding between two general options they feel like they can pull off - go in loud through the front door, or go in sneaky-sneaky through the basement. What is the difference between the two? The answer is not the number of guards they'll fight (because as soon as any or warning alarm is sounded in either the front foyer or the basement, guards are presumed to respond to any threat en masse). No, the answer is simply where the fight takes place. And by that I mean what the environment looks like and what bonuses (if any) it confers on the defending guards or what penalties it imposes on the attacking PCs. So if the front foyer is effectively a barbican gatehouse complete with a portcullis and arrow slits and murder holes, the defenders are going to have an advantage. But if the fight takes place inside the mansion itself, the defenders may have less cover/protection/advantage. So that's your top level "how is this going to work" problem settled. Next you can start to drill down, letting that first decision drive the next: deprived of the advantage of prepared positions/defenses, how do the guards' tactics change? Instead of hanging tough and fighting to the finish, the guards adopt hit-and-run tactics and harassing attacks. Maybe they take advantage of their familiarity with the floorplan to flank the party. Maybe can come at the party from multiple directions. Thus the nature of the fight is less a static shoot-out and more of a running battle. But here's the important bit - this naturally follows from the answer to the first question - where is the fight taking place? I don't need to know much about the mansion and already these two approaches (go in loud through the front door or sneak in through the basement) are going to "feel" very different to the players. They are going to know without a shadow of a doubt that their decision to do one or the other has shaped what is happening in a meaningful way - yet both ways are going to offer a challenge. A different challenge, but a challenge none the less.
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Apr 27, 2020 19:00
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hyphz posted:I can understand that, but it's a kind of different issue. You don't have to do any of those things. If the module gives you a "default" and an "on alert" choice for the guards, and the players choose some alternate way in that's remotely plausible, let them do it, and give them one challenge on the way -- a combat, an obstacle, whatever. You've seen movies/read books where people sneak into something via tunnels or sewers, what problems do they have? Give the players one of those. If they succeed, the guards are default. If they fail, the guards are on alert. You don't need to change the guards from default to "on alert" until the players fail something. If the module doesn't give an "on alert" status, assume all combatants within plausible distance will congregate at the source of the action, or retreat to the thing they are most supposed to protect; they will go on alert when the players fail something that would alert them. If you read the paragraph I just wrote carefully and think "That doesn't make sense, I can't do that! How can my players and I know what really happened if I don't procedurally generate a world-state for the manor using principles devised in advance" then really, we should just stop trying to "help" you, because advice like the stuff I just typed cannot and will not help you, and everyone's just gonna get frustrated again. Rather than reading our advice here, you might be better served spending some time coming up with some templates for bad-guy AI in whatever game you play, with some flowcharts or tables for you to follow. Like, "If not on alert and sound comes from a Priority 2 area within 60 feet, go on alert" sort of things. Do one for dumb critters, one for intelligent but somewhat apathetic creatures, and one for very serious, watchful creatures. More variations might spring to mind but start there, and keep it as simple as you can so you can come up with "what happened" quickly in play. You would decide in advance how smart creatures in the module were, and what areas of the map they would care about. When I read your posts, that is what I am inferring you and your players gravitate toward. For whatever reason, improvisation of any kind may not be for you or your group.
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Apr 27, 2020 19:05
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Angrymog posted:No, but there's a ton of films and books about bank heists, even if I only vaguely remember scenes from them, everyone's got the basic cultural touchstones of what a fictional heist looks like. This is an important point: Fiction doesn't have to be identical to real life, even if it's 'realist' fiction. Verisimilitude is different from fidelity to reality, and brainstorming with your players or asking them for what they prep for or expect will help determine what kind of touchstones they consider reasonable. If they're thinking Ocean's Eleven or Leverage then the trick is to have an NPC show up as the security for any given drama point in a plan, and let the players outwit, fast-talk, or brutally incapacitate the NPC using their skills. If they're thinking of a 'run into the bank with a gun and shout at people' heist, then the drama points are going to be things out of The Dark Knight or some hostage drama. If they want to drill into the vault from underneath, then the kinds of security they'll be faced with are machinery and technology kind of things that they can get around with technical skills or bright ideas. None of these need to exist beforehand, because you can't simulate a bank that precisely reproduces any literary genre as a material structure, and neither you nor your players are competent to plan and execute a fully realistic (rather than 'realist') bank heist. I mean, I suppose if you have a very exciting past as a group, maybe. But what you actually have is a sense of how difficult it should be, maybe some exciting ideas for specific security they can defeat by planning that will make things easier for them (the twists you bring in being less difficult to get past than the initial security is a good way of letting their actions absolutely matter to the difficulty without it becoming a cakewalk) and so on. But, that's just how I'd approach it, and even these will change based on the group's favorite modes of play, approaches, and characters. Not to mention the setting and experience I'm trying to create! E: We should also remember that a major issue here is that Hyphz's players will apparently revolt and get nasty if they ever lose, and Hyphz' defense against this is to point to a prewritten map and module. Not just that, but if Hyphz wrote that map and module, they'll say he did it wrong, so it has to be pre-published. As long as these are true, none of our advice can actually change anything because Hyphz can't actually change his bad players' behavior unless they want to change, and they seem perfectly content if not very happy with the way of things. Joe Slowboat fucked around with this message at 19:08 on Apr 27, 2020 |
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Apr 27, 2020 19:05
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hyphz posted:But, yea, forcing the players to carry out the heist as written would feel a bit like railroading to me. I didn't mention before that The General is the guy who actually got me into RPGs running AD&D 2e way back in the day, and I know he's a big fan of the "sandbox dungeon" approach where every inhabitant of the dungeon is active at once and responds to anything happening anywhere. When it works it creates a lot of fun organic interactions. When it doesn't work it means that every dungeon comes down to entering the first rooms, getting into a fight, the noise provoking everyone else in the dungeon, the PCs fighting until they're worn down and then fleeing and this repeating until they eventually wear the dungeon population down by attrition. That actually happened when he ran Princes of the Apocalypse in 5e and that was what made it apparent that almost everyone in the group will sit playing disengaged even if they don't like the game. yes this is toxic behavior. the general is a bad player who has a very specific mode of play in mind that the module you were running is not designed to handle. if he were a good player he would have recognized that the module does not support that style of play and adapt his behavior accordingly. i have players who have gone from system to system with me and we are able to establish up front the expectations of each game along with the themes and tones and people play those games with different mindsets. the fact that the rest of your group is willing to just sit there dead-eyed and put up with that nonsense should be a red flag for you hyphz posted:It also didn't help that I already knew I would have to deviate from the module because the heist is so goddamn badly written! It's written up as a series of skill rolls occuring in abstract order with little detail about interactions. if you consider the module to be so bad, why are you running it? hyphz posted:
i'll try to address this point for point -seems like a reasonable criticism. does pf2e not have a gm screen or a table with expected dcs by level to reference in this case tho? those charts saved my rear end a lot of work back when i ran 4e -see above. sounds like you could extrapolate those numbers from the one provided or use generic dcs. and if they provided a list of ways to deal with her that covered every possible skill i think the entry would be quite large -also this seems like something you can just come up with yourself using simple logic. the module cannot cover every single little interaction because its not a computer -true seeing appears to have a duration of 10 minutes and its a level 6 spell. seems like the caster would save that until her trigger goes off. you could argue that she would use detect magic, but even as a cantrip that spell has to be cast over and over again, right? there's no listed duration. so you've got verbal and somatic cues to pick up on that tells you maybe you shouldn't go into the room with the diviner if she's casting it non-stop for some reason. and the spell doesn't detect illusion magic unless some requirements are met, so its perfectly reasonable that their disguises hold up until they do some sort of overt magic stuff. like doesn't most magic have somatic and verbal components that would make it noticeable and therefore draw the diviner's attention? how many other people at this event are going to be wearing magic items and have their own illusion magic that is completely benign? -isn't the point of the abstraction here to streamline things will skill checks rather than go through every single moment of the events? so if you don't want to get into details you can just use those -don't demand nonsense. if the diviner reads someone's mind and finds they're going to poison her, she would logically say/do something about it. mind reading is also a spell that needs a casting with somatic and verbal components, she can't just spam it on everyone -you addressed this yourself back in point 2 and in your comment about the abstract skill checks. there are multiple ways to deal with the diviner, the poison one is just the one they detailed. i reckon that if they did that for every possible solution the adventure would be 100 pages because you'd need to address every single obstacle and every single approach. there will need to be some improvisation even with a module, but reasonable players (which you don't have) would go along with it. -this is a reasonable criticism. i would expect that poisoning the diviner would raise the alarm just a little bit, but if done cleverly there's no reason it has to point to your group. a hallmark of heist scenes in fiction is that the protectors get constant updates that weird stuff is happening but they attempt to play it cool and pretend they have everything under control because if they break down and go loud against the heisters it will cause a panic/look bad etc. -presumably here there's some reason that you don't want to murder everyone in the place. you could just start wrecking shop as your players did, but there's both the fictional thing of "what are the consequences of killing a bunch of people at this place" and there's the out of game thing of "the module was designed to do a heist, so in the spirit of the game we should do a heist" hyphz posted:Now here's the thing - I'm not trying to just kick the module at this point. Rather, I'm leading into the fact that this is exactly the kind of thing I'm worried about when trying to improvise scenes of this kind on the fly; obviously the module author thought this would be a cool touch and that it would make sense to be there (and yes it would make perfect sense for there to be magical protection against infiltration) but didn't see all the consequences. And they had no time limit. But I might have to do something like that on the fly, and I'm not a paid author for the 2nd most successful RPG company to begin with. So yea, I tend to be thinking "there but for the grace of god..." with this stuff. i can see how, given the people in your group, improvisation would be scary for you. i improv stuff all the time, but i would be a lot worse at it if my players weren't bought in and willing to help me and instead chose to bully me by poking at anything i said until it fell apart. earlier in the thread you said that people at your table would start writing down measurements that you said and use those against you and that's not normal. that's toxic. also i think that at this point you should realize that modules aren't bulletproof and that writers are fallible. i don't particularly like modules like the one you're describing, but if i was running one i would establish expectations with the players beforehand about the fact that we would be following the module to some extent and that while i'm happy to improvise some i bought the module so that i wouldn't have to do that. jivjov posted:If you're running a module, some degree of railroading is inevitable 100% exactly this right here hyphz posted:This is what I'm starting to wonder about, to be honest. If there's a rule that i think i can guess, but what is romeroading?
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Apr 27, 2020 19:14
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Serf posted:i think i can guess, but what is romeroading? Also, it's bullshit, because in a well-done sandbox game you don't force your players to go to Rome if they'd rather hang out and do canal-crimes and gondola-getaways in Venice.
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Apr 27, 2020 19:18
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Ilor posted:As in "all roads lead to Rome," meaning that no matter what the players do/attempt, they're going to end up in the same place anyway. hmm. i can see it having some uses, but less literally than is being shown here. before a session i try to write down like 5-10 things that could appear, like people or places or just set dressing and encounters. then i draw on them as needed. i don't try to force the players to come across them, but if i need a thing and one of them fits i have a list to use. and then if things don't wind up being used in that session i take those ideas and add them to a master list that i used in later sessions. of course the absolute most useful thing you can do in running rpgs, which i learned from stars without number, is that when you end a session and there isn't a clear starting point next week you ask the players "so what do you want to to next week? where do you want to go, who do you want to talk to, what goals do you want to pursue?" and use their answers to generate my next session. incredibly useful but simple advice
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Apr 27, 2020 19:32
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Angrymog posted:No, but there's a ton of films and books about bank heists, even if I only vaguely remember scenes from them, everyone's got the basic cultural touchstones of what a fictional heist looks like. The trick is that the well-written ones tend to hinge around a particular opportunity, like a man on the inside or some unusual event. That can work for a single piece of fiction but it could get awfully cheesy if every time the PCs are in a position where they might need to rob somewhere, mysteriously something happens that makes it possible.
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Apr 27, 2020 19:58
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Serf posted:if you consider the module to be so bad, why are you running it? The module as a whole isn't bad, that particular bit is. quote:-you addressed this yourself back in point 2 and in your comment about the abstract skill checks. there are multiple ways to deal with the diviner, the poison one is just the one they detailed. i reckon that if they did that for every possible solution the adventure would be 100 pages because you'd need to address every single obstacle and every single approach. there will need to be some improvisation even with a module, but reasonable players (which you don't have) would go along with it. I know that's a common argument, but it doesn't wash that well in this case, because all they really needed to do would be to actually give this lady a character sheet and tell me who she is and what her plans and intents are and then it should flow from that. Honestly, I think this is kind of why people get annoyed at social bits in RPGs, as they love sending people to dinner parties and saying "your only goal is to meet guy X" with there being no merit to meeting anyone else there, finding out what tensions and opportunities might exist amongst the others, or having any stake in those tensions themselves.
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Apr 27, 2020 20:01
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hyphz posted:The trick is that the well-written ones tend to hinge around a particular opportunity, like a man on the inside or some unusual event. That can work for a single piece of fiction but it could get awfully cheesy if every time the PCs are in a position where they might need to rob somewhere, mysteriously something happens that makes it possible. why? i ran a pretty long campaign of blades in the dark and every time we had to do a heist the players and i would work together to come up with an opportunity to pull the heist. no one ever complained or thought that it was cheesy hyphz posted:I know that's a common argument, but it doesn't wash that well in this case, because all they really needed to do would be to actually give this lady a character sheet and tell me who she is and what her plans and intents are and then it should flow from that. you would need to provide character sheets for every single person in attendance, along with all their plans and intents. this is unreasonable. it would be unusable as a gm. now to distill that down a bit, a table with some evocative names and some genre-appropriate motivations/goals/secrets/conflicts etc would be extremely useful. but it would require you to improvise the details and that seems unacceptable
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Apr 27, 2020 20:08
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Serf posted:yes this is toxic behavior. the general is a bad player who has a very specific mode of play in mind that the module you were running is not designed to handle. if he were a good player he would have recognized that the module does not support that style of play and adapt his behavior accordingly. i have players who have gone from system to system with me and we are able to establish up front the expectations of each game along with the themes and tones and people play those games with different mindsets. the fact that the rest of your group is willing to just sit there dead-eyed and put up with that nonsense should be a red flag for you In the case of Princes Of The Apocalypse, it was The General who was running (he's actually a more regular GM than me), and yes, it ended up coming down to making guerrilla raids in turn on each of 4 elemental temples and not getting very far in any of them (not helped by the fact that The Gentleman was still playing at that time, and was playing a monk, and one of the temples has guards with weapons that specifically give a big bonus against unarmored targets - pretty much no reason for that to be there except to screw monks really). What made it worse is the fact that the adventure assumes that you do 1 temple at a time, and all of the story events are based on the number of temples the PCs have defeated, so nothing actually happened because we weren't focusing on just one of them. But yea, people tend to sit there because we've known each other for years and don't want to break up the meeting, and we've never found a game that we all liked equally. But it does mean that getting feedback is a huge pest.
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Apr 27, 2020 20:12
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Serf posted:why? i ran a pretty long campaign of blades in the dark and every time we had to do a heist the players and i would work together to come up with an opportunity to pull the heist. no one ever complained or thought that it was cheesy I find this very interesting because it's exactly the kind of thing that I worry about with regard to narrative weight. Duskwall's supposed to be a fairly oppressive setting, yet by coincidence something always given the characters a break? That really didn't come out as a contradiction?
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Apr 27, 2020 20:13
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hyphz posted:In the case of Princes Of The Apocalypse, it was The General who was running (he's actually a more regular GM than me), and yes, it ended up coming down to making guerrilla raids in turn on each of 4 elemental temples and not getting very far in any of them (not helped by the fact that The Gentleman was still playing at that time, and was playing a monk, and one of the temples has guards with weapons that specifically give a big bonus against unarmored targets - pretty much no reason for that to be there except to screw monks really). What made it worse is the fact that the adventure assumes that you do 1 temple at a time, and all of the story events are based on the number of temples the PCs have defeated, so nothing actually happened because we weren't focusing on just one of them. i'm sorry but this sounds like a pretty miserable experience and i'm sorry you have to deal with it. as a player i would say something, and as a gm i would want something said to me so that we could work on finding a game or a mode of play that works best for everyone involved hyphz posted:I find this very interesting because it's exactly the kind of thing that I worry about with regard to narrative weight. Duskwall's supposed to be a fairly oppressive setting, yet by coincidence something always given the characters a break? That really didn't come out as a contradiction? i think you're confusing terms here a bit. an "opportunity" is what makes the heist possible in the first place. its the in, the thing the protectors have forgotten about or the new element that they could otherwise deal with but didn't account for someone exploiting it. a "break" imo would be something that makes things easy. an opportunity doesn't make things easy, it makes them possible. exploiting opportunities and getting successes can lead to breaks down the road, because actions tend to snowball, and the pcs tip dominoes. also my interpretation of duskwall is less oppressive than i think yours is. pcs in a blades game are tough as hell. and they need to be because the gm should be hitting them hard on every opportunity. they have so many tools to deal with it that they tend to succeed anyways. but that's because the pcs are exceptional, special people. this is as true in pf2e as it is in blades after all blades' main aesthetic inspiration is dishonored. and i could see that how to the random mooks you deal with in dishonored the world can seem pretty oppressive, but on the random mook <----> corvo scale pcs in a blades game fall closer to corvo
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Apr 27, 2020 20:24
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hyphz posted:I find this very interesting because it's exactly the kind of thing that I worry about with regard to narrative weight. Duskwall's supposed to be a fairly oppressive setting, yet by coincidence something always given the characters a break? That really didn't come out as a contradiction? No, because the player characters are daring rogues who are willing to take chances and lean on their assets to make these opportunities happen. This is why you always have a detail that you need to provide when picking a plan and working through the engagement. Sometimes you'll have developed a man on the inside and can use that as the key detail in your stealth plan. They've arranged for a side entrance to be unlocked or planted a key nearby. Sometimes your Leech is just going to blast a hole in from the sewers and, hey, they have Saboteur. It's still stealthy. The job of the GM isn't to deny the opportunity, honestly you can do some really dumb plans and it just influences how likely it is that things are going to be going wrong when you zoom in. It could be that you roll poorly and the man on the inside double-crossed you. It could be you blew a hole into the guard barracks, not a supply closet. Hell, sometimes it might even go better than you'd hoped. The man on the inside left some extra uniforms and papers and you'll be able to bypass the guard checkpoint. The spot you breached at might put you significantly closer to the vault than expected. That's the beauty of the engagement mechanics in a heist-based system.
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Apr 27, 2020 20:29
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Tricky posted:No, because the player characters are daring rogues who are willing to take chances and lean on their assets to make these opportunities happen. This is why you always have a detail that you need to provide when picking a plan and working through the engagement. Sometimes you'll have developed a man on the inside and can use that as the key detail in your stealth plan. They've arranged for a side entrance to be unlocked or planted a key nearby. Sometimes your Leech is just going to blast a hole in from the sewers and, hey, they have Saboteur. It's still stealthy. Let's go back to the Star Wars analogy from earlier*, the Empire has won and crushed nearly every bit of opposition in that setting. They tracked down and murdered pretty much every jedi except for the two who go into complete isolation and hermitage, living and looking nothing like the great warriors they once were. There are pockets of resistance, but every movie shows the rebels paying heavy costs for their victories. Losing heroes, bases, and even whole planets. The empire is not some giant incompetent clownforce with Stormtroopers that can't hit the broadside of a barn, they win pretty much every encounter in universe. We just get to see the few the heroes who got lucky in getting their hard fought victories, and only getting wounded at critical story points. Like you understand that right? You make the big bad scary, and yes the players are the protagonists who happen to find their 'in' and hopefully wind up victorious in the end. Think of it as you're writing the story with the players. The exhaust port wasn't always written on paper -it's what made sense when the writers got to that section. Yes in universe it was always there, and Luke used the force to do that, but it was artifice and only became a thing when important. *ignoring EU, and the prequels, or other pop culture stuff that has been spawned. We're looking 'in universe'. Yes, our real world gag is the stormtroopers can't hit a thing and their armor is useless, just like we've got 'star trek redshirts' but in universe the federation doesn't have a whole class of expendables they keep throwing into the maws of waiting aliens.
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Apr 27, 2020 23:12
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I think there's a bit of the simulationist vs storygame tension in how this is being framed, too. hyphz, it sounds like you're committed to the simulationist idea - that RPGs represent a way of simulating a fictional world, which means that they need to have knowable dimensions and ways for players to interact with everything. At the same time, you're concerned about improvisation but don't want to railroad your players. The problem is that there's a fundamental tension between those two goals. If you want a pure simulation, then almost everything your players do is going to end up being organic and unscripted, and you have to be comfortable with improvisation. Your players killed the evil slavers, or at least the ones in the house, but it sounds like they botched the timing - did they rescue the slaves? You pretty quickly end up off script in a simulationist approach, and that's okay! It's what your players sound like they want, and out of all the stuff you've said that they do you've never mentioned them complaining about your improvisation. You say you can't improv or don't trust your skills, but it sounds like your players are happy with them! If you want to approach RPGs from a pure rules/simulation standpoint, then the trade-off is going improv. On the other hand, the discussions with your group about what stories they want to tell/what they want to get out of it are the right way to go if that's the thing your group cares about. Not everybody gets that narrative kick out of RPGs, but if your group does then I guarantee they will be okay with more vagueness and more narrative railroading. It's the only way to achieve that kind of collective storytelling.
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Apr 28, 2020 00:23
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A pre-written, pre-scripted, pre-built One of the oldest ways to compromise is to draw a high level hex map with some detailed parts and associated random tables to help populate it, and detailing/expanding that with relevant things to see and do as players explore more of it. This is similar to Dungeon World's "draw maps, leave blanks" concept. Either way, you're eventually gonna run into a scenario that makes you go "uh..." and blank out, and have to either say that you need time to sort it out, or else conceal your lack of prep/improv/etc with a "random encounter" until the end of the session. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 01:27 on Apr 28, 2020 |
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Apr 28, 2020 01:23
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Notahippie posted:I think there's a bit of the simulationist vs storygame tension in how this is being framed, too. Eh, "simulationist" was always the worst defined bit of GNS. Basically, I am very much down with the idea that the players should be able to have reasonable predictions of how things are going to go and have the opportunity to experiment within known criteria. Mainly because I like it when that leads to interesting solutions. quote:and out of all the stuff you've said that they do you've never mentioned them complaining about your improvisation. You say you can't improv or don't trust your skills, but it sounds like your players are happy with them! If you want to approach RPGs from a pure rules/simulation standpoint, then the trade-off is going improv. That's because I've limited it. If I actually try and say, write a whole adventure (even in advance), I tend to blank heavily. hyphz fucked around with this message at 02:36 on Apr 28, 2020 |
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Apr 28, 2020 02:27
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hyphz posted:Eh, "simulationist" was always the worst defined bit of GNS. Basically, I am very much down with the idea that the players should be able to have reasonable predictions of how things are going to go and have the opportunity to experiment within known criteria. Mainly because I like it when that leads to interesting solutions. I think you’re putting a lot of pressure on yourself- don’t worry about the whole adventure, or even a story arc, if the players want a sandbox. Just worry about what happens next. Your description of how you handled your players going off-script sounded just fine. It screwed up the story arc that Paizo wrote, but so what?
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Apr 28, 2020 02:40
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Back in the day, when I used to run live in-person D&D (which was a long time ago), I'd help the players distinguish between "story cues that yeah, I totally prepared for and you should strongly consider pursuing one of" vs. "random details that I just improvised because you decided to speak to a random NPC or check out a random building, which probably don't lead to material I prepared" was to make a deck of 3x5 index cards and spend an hour of prep time just putting together rumors and tips. I'd leave a spot blank at the top to fill in the name of an NPC, location, or other info about where/how the PCs get the card; and then, at key story points (or when the players go fishing for rumors or info) I'd hand them one to three cards. I'd salt false rumors and dead ends in with the good stuff, both because back then I didn't think that was a bad idea (it's sorta a bad idea) and to give the players a signal that while the cards are things to pursue, that doesn't mean everything you hear from random strangers in an inn are definitely true. (It's sorta a bad idea because sometimes players get really excited about a false tip you wrote on a whim and now you kinda feel bad about not giving them that adventure.) The fact you went to the trouble to type up and print out a card in advance gives the players the confidence that they're not accidentally making me do extra work/skipping work I did; but, it has the added benefit of giving them a note/reference to look back on later when it's two sessions/six weeks later and they just don't loving remember what the gently caress I told them already. Because most of my players over the years have been pretty bad at taking notes. With a module maybe this approach isn't needed because they players can see you reading the text box out loud to them from page 8, but that only goes so far (and I almost never read that poo poo out after like, age 14, when I realized the writing was almost always atrocious hackneyed crap, lol).
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Apr 28, 2020 03:01
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So blanking heavily on a whole campaign tends to stem from trying to figure *everything* out at the outset. Instead, you should steal heavily from dungeon world (even if you don't plan on trying to get your players to play it and just stick to pathfinder or whatever). The whole 'fronts' system is really just a way to give you a framework to figure out how your antagonists sort of go about their plans and makes the world feel alive instead of static - think back to the guy digging out the tunnel with an pick and the enemy just doing nothing at all ever. Making a small amount of concrete enemies with goals of their own, a few places around where the campaign starts that are interesting, a couple things about the town they start in, and you're good to start. In d&d/pf you might need to work up some potential encounters before hand to get the challenge of fights right, but you don't need to have preset "this is exactly where this group of slavers is sleeping". As the group goes about doing stuff you just detail what they're pursuing with more detail in your prep, and have your various fronts progress as needed. A bunch of the book is online at: https://book.dwgazetteer.com/gm.html Fronts in specific: https://book.dwgazetteer.com/fronts.html Note that while it gives examples of dangers and such, that isn't a list of "you can only do these", instead if your idea doesn't fit one of those make your own. While D&D/pathfinder doesn't have codified 'moves', in reality you do them anyways. So what codifying them does is give you structure to aid you in improving in response to the players. Some of the guys in the dungeon world thread make a pdf about DM'ing dungeon world, and while not all of it will be directly usable in pathfinder, a lot of the general idea of keeping the game moving forwards while improving around a loose structure still applies and is very useful: http://www.mediafire.com/file/ypk10uede2sgri6/Dungeon_World_Guide_pdf_version_1.2.pdf/file The section on combat is a good read but not too applicable, but the intro and the section on worldbuilding are excellent. There is a sample campaign front at the end as well. You can also steal ideas of partial failures/succeed at a cost easily, especially for areas like skill checks that d&d/pf don't handle well. Leveraging those for stuff like "fail to pick a lock" lets you keep the game moving and be a ton more interesting instead of a comedy of errors as everyone in the party tries to open the door. Just take a glace at the list of gm moves (or dungeon moves), and maybe the more detailed bits, and you can see a ton of stuff that you could have happen on a failure that adds tension but doesn't stop the game in its tracks. Others can probably expound on this better and I'd take some more time, but I have to head to work instead. Approaching a game this way makes it a ton less daunting though.
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Apr 28, 2020 03:48
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I did actually run Dungeon World once for my group, using an adventure framework provided for con demos, although The Warrior wasn’t around. It went OK, although honestly it felt like the Dragon’s Lair arcade machine with threats constantly popping up when people rolled costs. But the endemic failure and the essence of my issues with challenge came at the end where the PCs encountered the lich who had holed up in the dungeon and wanted to “redeem them”. The text does suggest this might be possible but gives no details on how and I as usual ran into the horns of the dilemma: a) let them abstract the whole thing which will make it seem far too easy; b) try to make up the steps involved in redeeming a lich on the fly, but even if I do this well, it means I’m just going to be making up stuff until I’m satisfied by some measure and there is no way for the PCs to get ahead by making good choices. I don’t even have “common sense” to fall back on. And that’s why I thought the event in PF was ultimately a failure, because the abstraction made it too light. That’s kind of distinct from the other issue of oppressive settings that aren’t, which is quite common now I think of it, from the PCs doing fine in Hell then escaping in four days in Alas Vegas or how Punch apparently enslaved all the puppets in Puppetland but the PCs are not slaves and in the standard adventures they never meet a slave.
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Apr 28, 2020 05:19
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hyphz posted:b) try to make up the steps involved in redeeming a lich on the fly, but even if I do this well, it means I’m just going to be making up stuff until I’m satisfied by some measure and there is no way for the PCs to get ahead by making good choices. I don’t even have “common sense” to fall back on. It's not always necessary, particularly when improvising, to make sure the PCs can "get ahead by making good choices." That's not the only or even the primary thing PCs are trying to do most of the time anyway. What they're trying to do is go on an adventure. If you give them adventure, they'll be happy.
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Apr 28, 2020 05:25
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Leperflesh posted:It's not always necessary, particularly when improvising, to make sure the PCs can "get ahead by making good choices." That's not the only or even the primary thing PCs are trying to do most of the time anyway. Ehhh that would be true for most people but it seems like we've established his group doesn't want an adventure, they want a puzzle. It's a very old school play style but they want to tomb of horrors and then they want to beat it by releasing thousands of chickens so they feel clever. He should get a new group.
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Apr 28, 2020 05:38
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hyphz posted:b) try to make up the steps involved in redeeming a lich on the fly, but even if I do this well, it means I’m just going to be making up stuff until I’m satisfied by some measure and there is no way for the PCs to get ahead by making good choices. I don’t even have “common sense” to fall back on. Try this: Instead of worrying about whether or not you're "satisfied by some measure", watch your players and see if they're having fun with the current stuff. As long as they're having fun, keep doing what you're doing. If they stop having as much fun, wrap the current stuff up and move on. This balance was the hardest part for me of running WWWrpg - after I set the situation, the players kind of just play against each other, and as soon as they got the hang of the rules I was left with very little to do compared to the usual intensity of GMing. So I found I was interrupting their fun way too early, which I would never do in any other RPG I've run. Mr. Prokosch posted:Ehhh that would be true for most people but it seems like we've established his group doesn't want an adventure, they want a puzzle. It's a very old school play style but they want to tomb of horrors and then they want to beat it by releasing thousands of chickens so they feel clever. Or lean into it. Get a game that supports that kind of thing and go hard on it. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 06:11 on Apr 28, 2020 |
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Apr 28, 2020 05:43
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hyphz posted:I did actually run Dungeon World once for my group, using an adventure framework provided for con demos, although The Warrior wasn’t around. It went OK, although honestly it felt like the Dragon’s Lair arcade machine with threats constantly popping up when people rolled costs. Did you read the book? All of the book?
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Apr 28, 2020 06:04
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hyphz posted:But the endemic failure and the essence of my issues with challenge came at the end where the PCs encountered the lich who had holed up in the dungeon and wanted to “redeem them”. The text does suggest this might be possible but gives no details on how and I as usual ran into the horns of the dilemma:
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Apr 28, 2020 06:33
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They want to redeem the lich how? You don't need to worry about that, they do. To do it, do it They told you their desired result but so what? I want you to give me twenty bucks <stares expectantly>. Nothing? I'd have to do something to get you to give me twenty bucks? Obviously. So, what are the characters doing? Not "What do they want the result to be", what are they doing? Do you think what they're doing has a 100% chance to succeed? Probably not, right? So what move did the character make, what was the die result, and what does that move tell you to do next?
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Apr 28, 2020 06:51
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Yeah, redeeming a lich sounds like a really cool starting point for an adventure arc. Is the lich sincere? The group needs to find that out Is it even possible? How? The group will need to research it, and probably help the lich atone for its sins. Much easier said then done when it literally wiped out a kingdom it wronged. Whats the end result? The lich a regular human? A good immortal? Released from this world? Bet they still have good enemies that won't buy that, or now know the party is working on behalf of the lich. Probably some evil forces won't be happy they're violating 'the rules' and they'll want the lich and the party squashed to avoid giving other damned wretches hope. That's all you'd need to start with in DW, then based on what direction the players take you fill in the rest. The party gets allies, enemies, ajd trinkets based on the whole affair.
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Apr 28, 2020 06:53
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Yeah, it also sounds like a brilliant wrap to the first session and something fun to write a front around. But if you're just doing a one shot and this is the climax then then you just figure out which move got engaged and roll the dice and find out what happens. You can't do that until they say what they're doing. Maybe there's another 10 minutes here, maybe not. But whatever, when this scene's over then the one shot's over and the story is that after the events depicted, the characters are either trying to fully redeem a lich, or they all got killed because they were the good but foolish people who offered the hand of friendship to the irredeemable darkness.
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Apr 28, 2020 06:59
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To be fair here, the slogan of "to do it, do it" does leave a lot of ambiguity here in a way that I can see wouldn't be fruitful. I get the idea but I can see how it would be hard to communicate to people with different habits of thought. I would express this as, "Once you have your goal, start taking actions towards that goal, and the rolls will determine how the story flows." I don't know if this is against rules for AW but something like "I pray to my god to redeem the lich" does seem like it is a place where you can say "success" is "you have a huge blinding confusing vision we'll figure out some about later telling you the path you must walk" vs. "ok, you do it, well done." Redeeming a lich doesn't seem to be against the general fictional idea but I don't think it would be presented as anything easy to do... I assume it's comparable to redeeming a vampire, but much less sexy.
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Apr 28, 2020 07:18
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Nessus posted:To be fair here, the slogan of "to do it, do it" does leave a lot of ambiguity here in a way that I can see wouldn't be fruitful. I get the idea but I can see how it would be hard to communicate to people with different habits of thought. I would express this as, "Once you have your goal, start taking actions towards that goal, and the rolls will determine how the story flows." I typed out a post here but I deleted it because I think this is where Hyphz and I actually disconnect. "To do it, do it" is written down in Apocalypse world, but as far as I'm concerned it's just stating something that's already a fundamental part of RPGs. The players don't get to sit there and theorycraft a perfect plan by bombarding me with questions about what might happen if X, Y, Z. If they want to know and it's not obvious (eg, "the wall is stone" "that's way too far to jump"), they're going to have to try it and see what happens. In pbta this is especially important because when they try it and a move triggers, the way they describe what the character is doing, the text of the move ,and the die result all inform me about the sorts of things I should be reacting with. Or in other words, "Is the lich redeemable?" is not a question I have an answer for, but I'm prepared to play to find out what happens. "What do we need to do to redeem the lich?" isn't a question I have an answer for (yet) because I wasn't expecting this. Does the character have a way to know this? Are they Spouting Lore? Cool, roll it and let's see what I have to come up with then! There's cleric and I think bard moves that might apply here too, if they're doing that kind of stuff. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 07:38 on Apr 28, 2020 |
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Apr 28, 2020 07:30
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hyphz posted:and there is no way for the PCs to get ahead by making good choices. Sure there is. You're the GM ! Does it sound like a good idea ? Let them do it. Just make sure their characters actually DO stuff. If the priest starts enchanting a barrel full of holy water... sounds iffy to me, but you can let them try. Gathering materials for a ceremony to be performed on an upcoming holy day ? Plausible. Disenenchanting phylacteries ? Reasonable. Consulting the local expert on lich-dom and the process of becoming one ? Pretty smart move. Now the GM has to come up with something, but feel free to take a break instead of half-assing something on the spot. The GM can ALWAYS take a break to think.Only assholes would object. Your players will object, that's a them problem not a you problem. Also, you can pick up one of the ideas the players were batting about and say they should do that. Your players have trained you into thinking that there's only one correct solution, and anything not leading to that isn't a good choice. That's wrong. There's usually more than one way to do anything. Some might be more time consuming, some might cost resources, some might simply be hard, or lead to an unsatisfying but technically successful outcome. edit. Wait, this was in Dungeon World ? The Wizard casts Ritual, poof do... oh right, it's going to take a visit to three secret libraries for recipes and the dark side of the moon for materials. Instant campaign. mllaneza fucked around with this message at 07:39 on Apr 28, 2020 |
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Apr 28, 2020 07:37
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