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Reene posted:Hey friends! Post your incredibly navelgazey ideas about the philosophy of tabletop/RPG game design and play here. If you want to talk about what kind of play a particular ruleset encourages and how it is framed to players, how player choice influences gameplay, etc then this is the place to do it. I usually don't go posting in threads these days willy nilly but this seems like a topic that's up my alley. Time to ramble and pontificate! I'm running 4 live weekly games at the moment, soon to launch a 5th one. Four of them are D&D 5th Edition, and one's a Lancer game. I think for as much as I've been a tabletop games person since the 90s when I first ran into AD&D at the local game store and my school buddies, I have had the chance to explore, but not necessarily run or play in, many different systems out there. I've also come to the realization that if I want to get any game playing done, I'm going to have to actually take the bull by the horns and run the system with the greatest degree of recognition and appeal, and socket in components from other games that I happen to like. For players, sometimes I tell them about it, other times I just do it behind the scenes and it's just part of the narrative. Whether or not it's a morally good and just thing to buy and support a rules system with questionable designers from a large corporation, I feel like I am having a good time, and would be hard pressed to find a weekly group that's actually open to trying out all these fantastic new games people are pushing out every month. The people who are playing in the games I'm running also seem to have enough of a good time that they're not hung up on things like caster supremacy or character optimization, and if my math is right, I'm running games for more than 20 people a week at this point. If I could, I'd probably try to run 7 nights a week, but surely this is the path to madness. In essence, I've come to a certain peace of using D&D as a vehicle to get more people into the hobby and not as just a standard fantasy rules system, but a platform that pretty much enables me to do whatever it is I want from whatever flavor of weird fantasy that I like without too much breaking of the system. Sometimes I like giant robots too, and it was a small miracle I was able to find some folks who were into Lancer that I could actually get a game off the ground. My brain has gone through so many cat piss groups and legendary groups and pretty mediocre groups and all different kinds of rules that I'm convinced that no situation players or DMs throw at me is untenable. There's always some type of compromise, and it tends to be more enjoyable when I'm at a table that I've spent at least an hour understanding and calibrating with. Someone at one of my tables is well seasoned across multiple editions of D&D. Probably gone through way more levels in a single character that I would in ten or twenty. They have no experience in roleplaying, though, and get frustrated when things aren't going their way. I don't think that they're a bad person for this. I see it as another opportunity to show them another side of the hobby that they may or may not be into. They're coming around to it, but I haven't found anybody at a table that I've run that's so stubborn that we can't talk out differences these days. My observation and meditations are, people just want to be in that social group and play, and that's good enough for them. Working together to make sure there's a seat at the table for them is my top priority as a DM over versimilitude or the like. Then again, I also like the design decisions behind stuff people on the internet classically detest, like experience points, rolling for stats, all of that stuff. I'm convinced that many people detest them because they were in groups where those mechanics and types of experiences were managed poorly, or there was some kind of miscalibration. Maybe it is another part of coming to these realizations after playing RPGs for 20+ years? But I digress...
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May 6, 2020 08:56
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aldantefax posted:Then again, I also like the design decisions behind stuff people on the internet classically detest, like experience points, rolling for stats, all of that stuff. I'm convinced that many people detest them because they were in groups where those mechanics and types of experiences were managed poorly, or there was some kind of miscalibration. Maybe it is another part of coming to these realizations after playing RPGs for 20+ years? Experience points in particular to me have gotten pretty stale... even in D&D it's much more the "every few sessions/at a milestone, up a level." It makes more sense to me than "oh, gosh, I'm just ONE kobold short of--"
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May 6, 2020 09:01
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I challenge anyone to justify rolling for stats as it exists in D&D. Rolling adds such a huge amount of variation into the character capabilities at start of play that you can easily roll one character who cannot fulfill any role in the party and another who can fulfill multiple roles. Because there are so few opportunities to make up for poor stats these are literally the most important rolls of the game. It encourages cheating or fudging rolls, because it is so important, and while rolling stats is bullshit and it is good that people cheat on those rolls it can lead to a situation where cheating continues in actual play. The usual defense of rolled stats I see is that if you don't roll all characters of a type will look similar, and this can be true. If dexterity is a god stat for combatants in you system and you are using a point-buy generation system than it is likely that a bunch of characters are all going to have maxed dexterity. I would argue that this is a sign of bad game design that rolled stats will not cure, but merely exacerbate. If there is one way to build a good gunslinger than forcing players to randomly play ones who are not only bad but can never be good is lovely design. What is actually more disturbing is the real world implications of this narrative: Your maximum capabilities in intelligence, strength, health, and other factors were all set by your birth, and can only be tweaked slightly by extremely powerful magic. Education is worthless, those who score low on the IQ test have low intelligence and those who score high have high intelligence. This is a continuation of the application of IQ scores to enforce race and class hierarchies in real life and was part of the traditional argument for Eugenics. Given traditional D&D's narratives on killing orc babies the eugenicist narrative isn't surprising, but it is surprising that it has continued for so long while writers try to pivot away from more openly problematic issues. Edit: I realize that there has been a limited pivot away from this, you've been able to make minor adjustments to attributes since 3rd edition D&D with your limited number of level ups. But at the same time you know in the first few minutes of rolling your character whether you will be able to fulfill your desired build or not, since you can only level up so much and in 5th edition you need to choose between stats or feats. If your GM watches rolls then you're stuck with what you rolled and just have to hope for an early character death. And D&D editions 3+ have been so focused on viable builds that it can really take the fun out of things. To be fair people have been coming up with systems for breaking the set nature of ability scores for years, and if you use a method like that s lot of the problem goes away. Servetus fucked around with this message at 13:56 on May 6, 2020 |
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May 6, 2020 13:18
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Zeerust posted:I really don't understand this. You've pointed out yourself that the price you gave was completely arbitrary, because the value of a service or good in a fantasy economy is always going to be completely arbitrary. You have a Level 17 party for whom a 10 GP fee is effectively free of charge. How is eyeballing a cost that is equivalent to free of charge superior to having players just have an effective Resources stat that would let the GM just go 'yeah, this is going to be a minor clerical fee, that's within well within the means of some of the most powerful and dangerous people in the world.' I don't know if it's a UK cultural or age thing? Most people I know consider the attitude that "I'm sorted for money, so anything below X is effectively free" to be actively foolish and/or arrogant, and not something that a sympathetic character would do. Plenty have learned the hard way that getting your paycheck and then buying a ton of "cheap" stuff is a recipe for disaster when you remember that (cheap * a ton = expensive). Serf posted:the trouble here is that you're trying to think of how an improvised game would somehow be as deep and complex as a pre-written adventure module (also few games are 100% improvised. i usually take some time before a session to think of some characters, locations and setpieces that might show up and jot them down. jason cordova's 7-3-1 technique is a more structured version of this that i've adopted and recommend looking into). and the thing is that a session that is largely conducted from an improvisational standpoint is not going to be that detailed. the tradeoff for memorizing or referencing extensive adventure module information is speed and reactivity at the tab This does tend to get me stuck because several of the games I'm interested in seem to have writing or background that contradicts this. Spire is a good example. The book suggests that the players and GM should focus on subverting a single organization at a time in order to prevent complexity explosion, but there's no limit to what else in the city they might potentially want to interact with in the course of doing that. And like 70% of the cool stuff in the book is detail about how parts of the city work, so a game that's not that detailed seems to go against the tone of the writing. (Actually, it reminds me of Over The Edge 1e/2e in that regard.) quote:why? the player characters are special, they aren't just "newcomers to the town." if i'm reading this right they were 15th level, which puts them at the top level of beings in the world, which makes it even more likely that when they show up they start moving and shaking without a lot of preamble. now i know what you're thinking, and i'm not saying they should have an easy time of getting these guilds on their side. but the opportunity to do so should be clear, and that's true at any level. the pcs shouldn't stumble around for hours looking for an in. provide them with the in and make it challenging to achieve, because the fun of the game is in exploiting an opportunity, not searching for the opportunity. The trick is working out what the "in" would be in a way that doesn't run into the question "why didn't anyone else do this?" The high level business is a problem in pretty much every game though, especially in Pathfinder where canonically some NPC guy just got drunk one night and became a god but no PC of any level has that option. Most of the PCs are now "legendary" in most of their class proficiencies but nobody seems to be singing any legends, especially not when everyone significant they meet is just as good. quote:i have ever sicced the authorities on a group of player characters they have either chosen to escape or gone loud immediately. the level of opposition has never mattered, the pcs have never once submitted to the guards, army, cops etc. and its really weird to hear that yours do because there were times when i would have dearly loved to introduce a new antagonist or plot element by having the characters arrested and then launching into a daring escape, but those dreams always end in imaginary blood. They might try to escape, but I think they've learned (possibly from video games though) that attacking the actual police in a heroic game is certain to end the campaign by some means or other. quote:i'm glad that this player accepted the 10gp cost because the fact that you even had to make it up is wild. the price seems so low that it might as well be inconsequential and handwaved. not to mention that time spent out of game referencing charts and deciding on a price is time not spent killing imaginary slavers and casting pretend spells Oh, bear in mind, Pathfinder 2e combat at levels 16-17? A few moments referencing charts is nothing compared to the amount of time it takes to do a round. quote:listen to their speculation and either a) go with the one that sounds more interesting or b) just have it be the very first thing they pursue. if it seems convenient that the first thing they go after is the right one, that's fiction baby. this ain't a dashiell hammett story, its an elfgame. the interesting thing, again, is not the discovery of the clue but the follow-up and the confrontation with the culprit This assumes that they don't just go "well, there's so many possibilties, it's a massive city, anything could have come from anywhere, we can't follow up on this" and then leave it be, presumably expecting that a later plot trigger will give them a clearer answer. Unfortunately in many PF adventure paths the PCs are expected to do exactly that, as we found out in a previous AP (run by the General, not me) in which we spent about two sessions kidnapping and then threatening a perfumier who seemed to have a lead to a cure to a citywide plague. quote:side note: i do like that the fact that one of your players didn't notice this detail and presumably didn't call you out on it has you acting like you're db cooper It's partly that, but it's also the fact that it's very hard for me to be objective when I know exactly what the stats the PCs have are. It is not supposed to be a game of rolling flat d20 checks but that's what it becomes if I set the DC arbitrarily based on knowing the save bonuses. quote:again there is the desire to disclaim responsibility. what would be the consequences if you had come up with the number? you interpret the module as a shield between yourself and player "bad feelings" which may be accurate to your toxic group but does not hold for any group i've played with The consequence of me coming up with the number would be that there would be no objective decision on the players having not prioritised their Will saves. Instead of the module author's judgment that the PC's Will saves are below where they could be expected to be compared to the hundreds of other players who will play this module, it's just me deciding to punish them. quote:on a failure they do it, on a success they don't. stress is assigned per the rules, and if no fallout triggers who cares? that just loads them up with more stress for a bigger future fallout. That's what I was saying though. The problem with "on a failure they [follow the mind control]" is that it is a potential fallout result. Like for example, suppose that instead the NPC was just using a fear spell or something to make them afraid and run away. Panicked and Shaken are both minor Fallout results, so if the PCs roll no fallout presumably neither of those can happen to them. Leperflesh posted:For example: now she has a magic item that blocks the clairvoyance. Perfectly reasonable for a powerful mage with her set of abilities to acquire or make, and keep on her person. Eeeeek! I've very quickly learned that you never make things into items, because they will be looted. ZypherIM posted:When you're building stuff you shouldn't be constantly trying to counter the party, you should be building stuff that makes sense. That's the real twist though, there isn't any sense involved. For example you can say, if I decide that there is a social-butterfly magic assassin then they would have mind control type spells, that makes sense and I am not just trying to penalize the PCs for having low Will. But then, hang on, on what basis did I decide that there would be such an assassin or that an assassin would be part of the plot at all, when I know the PCs are weak in that area? It becomes impossible.
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May 6, 2020 14:47
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No, it's more fear that if I couldn't come up with that much without introducing a contradiction, how would I do more?
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Absurd Alhazred fucked around with this message at 18:53 on Jul 22, 2020 |
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May 6, 2020 15:00
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Just lol if your adventuring party can't kill the entire police force of even a town of significant city.
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May 6, 2020 15:11
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Absurd Alhazred posted:What does this have to do with rolling for stats? What you're arguing here is against stats, period. Which, fair enough, but those are two different conversations. I'm arguing against unalterable or minimally alterable stats more generally. Which is definitely a part of the traditional D&D experience of rolling stats. If rolled stats were a part of a system where you could freely raise them then you would still have inequal resources between characters, but it would be much more manageable and wouldn't have the same implications. This has not been the case in any version of D&D.
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May 6, 2020 15:46
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hyphz posted:I don't know if it's a UK cultural or age thing? Most people I know consider the attitude that "I'm sorted for money, so anything below X is effectively free" to be actively foolish and/or arrogant, and not something that a sympathetic character would do. Plenty have learned the hard way that getting your paycheck and then buying a ton of "cheap" stuff is a recipe for disaster when you remember that (cheap * a ton = expensive). I'm from the UK as well. I think the difference between us here is that I'm not equivocating my fiscal behaviour in real life to that of a dramatic fantasy game, where figuring out how many gold pieces to count out for a minor clerical task is meaningless, time-wasting pedantry when you can just abstract it and go "Yeah, you guys are literally minted with ancient jewels and scepters and bags of gold and poo poo, this wouldn't make a dent.' I've literally done this with my own D&D games because I don't see the point in having the party banker adjust a 5-figure sum to reflect the couple of gold they'd spend finding a place to sleep in a town. Servetus posted:I'm arguing against unalterable or minimally alterable stats more generally. Which is definitely a part of the traditional D&D experience of rolling stats. If rolled stats were a part of a system where you could freely raise them then you would still have inequal resources between characters, but it would be much more manageable and wouldn't have the same implications. This has not been the case in any version of D&D. The interesting thing here IIRC is that the 2nd Edition books at least did make mention of allowing PCs to change their ability scores, just in the vaguest terms possible, and not to allow them to go hog wild, since numbers above 15 were considered superheroic for adventurers.
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May 6, 2020 15:54
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e: nm
Absurd Alhazred fucked around with this message at 18:53 on Jul 22, 2020 |
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May 6, 2020 15:55
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hyphz posted:I don't know if it's a UK cultural or age thing? Most people I know consider the attitude that "I'm sorted for money, so anything below X is effectively free" to be actively foolish and/or arrogant, and not something that a sympathetic character would do. Plenty have learned the hard way that getting your paycheck and then buying a ton of "cheap" stuff is a recipe for disaster when you remember that (cheap * a ton = expensive). its a game. real life rich people don't worry about the costs of incidentals unless they're extra evil so don't worry about it in your games hyphz posted:This does tend to get me stuck because several of the games I'm interested in seem to have writing or background that contradicts this. Spire is a good example. The book suggests that the players and GM should focus on subverting a single organization at a time in order to prevent complexity explosion, but there's no limit to what else in the city they might potentially want to interact with in the course of doing that. And like 70% of the cool stuff in the book is detail about how parts of the city work, so a game that's not that detailed seems to go against the tone of the writing. talk to your players and see what interests them the most. not everything is going to be equally intriguing or exciting, so focus on one faction or one place. all it takes is a little bit of talking to sort out what people want to see from what they're not so interested in seeing hyphz posted:The trick is working out what the "in" would be in a way that doesn't run into the question "why didn't anyone else do this?" The high level business is a problem in pretty much every game though, especially in Pathfinder where canonically some NPC guy just got drunk one night and became a god but no PC of any level has that option. Most of the PCs are now "legendary" in most of their class proficiencies but nobody seems to be singing any legends, especially not when everyone significant they meet is just as good. most people are not the pcs. remember when i said they're special. most folks are not swaggering badasses who stroll into town looking to shake things up. this kicks in early in a game and only ramps up as they grow in power. the reason someone else hasn't done it is that they lack the skill or audacity to try it themselves. hyphz posted:They might try to escape, but I think they've learned (possibly from video games though) that attacking the actual police in a heroic game is certain to end the campaign by some means or other. i suppose that's up to the individual gm to decide, but the genre expectation here is that attacking the guards is dangerous but not a campaign-ender hyphz posted:Oh, bear in mind, Pathfinder 2e combat at levels 16-17? A few moments referencing charts is nothing compared to the amount of time it takes to do a round. sounds like you'll need all the time for combat that you can get then hyphz posted:This assumes that they don't just go "well, there's so many possibilties, it's a massive city, anything could have come from anywhere, we can't follow up on this" and then leave it be, presumably expecting that a later plot trigger will give them a clearer answer. Unfortunately in many PF adventure paths the PCs are expected to do exactly that, as we found out in a previous AP (run by the General, not me) in which we spent about two sessions kidnapping and then threatening a perfumier who seemed to have a lead to a cure to a citywide plague. i usually have the opposite problem where i have to tell the players that they're chasing a dead end. but there's no reason that you can't step out of character and say "the poison is a good thing to investigate. can you think of any angles to look into?" and then keep things rolling. hyphz posted:It's partly that, but it's also the fact that it's very hard for me to be objective when I know exactly what the stats the PCs have are. It is not supposed to be a game of rolling flat d20 checks but that's what it becomes if I set the DC arbitrarily based on knowing the save bonuses. the book literally comes with a chart of numbers that track expected dc by level. if you feel like you need to shift "blame" onto something else, you still have the book. but why do you feel the need to be objective? i come up with things subjectively both to challenge the players and to reward them. hyphz posted:The consequence of me coming up with the number would be that there would be no objective decision on the players having not prioritised their Will saves. Instead of the module author's judgment that the PC's Will saves are below where they could be expected to be compared to the hundreds of other players who will play this module, it's just me deciding to punish them. why is there this perception that you will "punish" the players by putting something overwhelmingly powerful in their path? are you afraid that you will be punishing them or are you afraid that they will accuse you of punishing them? this sounds like toxic group behavior to me. when i put something powerful in the characters' path, its not because i want to gently caress with them, but because i want to challenge them. and they don't perceive it as punishment because there is a mutual trust there. and if it turns out that something that i didn't intend to be overwhelming is, then as i said i can go back, admit that it was my mistake and we can move on. no one has to get punished for a mistake, we all make them hyphz posted:That's what I was saying though. The problem with "on a failure they [follow the mind control]" is that it is a potential fallout result. Like for example, suppose that instead the NPC was just using a fear spell or something to make them afraid and run away. Panicked and Shaken are both minor Fallout results, so if the PCs roll no fallout presumably neither of those can happen to them. no, that's not how spire works. if you fail a roll you still suffer the consequences of failure. fallout is what happens on top of that, if it triggers. the consequences of failure and fallout are two distinct things, you see what i'm saying? hyphz posted:Eeeeek! I've very quickly learned that you never make things into items, because they will be looted. the great thing about items is that they can be destroyed. or they can just not work for the pcs, run out of power, etc. hyphz posted:That's the real twist though, there isn't any sense involved. For example you can say, if I decide that there is a social-butterfly magic assassin then they would have mind control type spells, that makes sense and I am not just trying to penalize the PCs for having low Will. But then, hang on, on what basis did I decide that there would be such an assassin or that an assassin would be part of the plot at all, when I know the PCs are weak in that area? It becomes impossible. i'm having a hard time wrapping my brain around this logic. who cares? the social-butterfly magic assassin sounds like a cool and genre-appropriate thing that could appear and so it could be used. there's nothing wrong with that concept. you're not trying to "penalize" anyone by doing so. but i think the issue here is that your group would see it as a penalty because they have a warped, toxic view of gaming. and honestly i'm surprised to hear that this was such an issue. surely the mighty brain of the general would relish the chance to be challenged by something that requires him to think outside the box? or is he just mad that he didn't take the exact right spell that lets him skip the challenge and get to the winning?
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May 6, 2020 16:49
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Serf posted:i'm having a hard time wrapping my brain around this logic. who cares? the social-butterfly magic assassin sounds like a cool and genre-appropriate thing that could appear and so it could be used. there's nothing wrong with that concept. you're not trying to "penalize" anyone by doing so. but i think the issue here is that your group would see it as a penalty because they have a warped, toxic view of gaming. and honestly i'm surprised to hear that this was such an issue. surely the mighty brain of the general would relish the chance to be challenged by something that requires him to think outside the box? or is he just mad that he didn't take the exact right spell that lets him skip the challenge and get to the winning? Yeah, hyphz, I really feel like this is the real issue. How do you know that you didn't design something specifically to penalize the PCs? Because you literally are the person who did it, and you know what you did and why. If you pick something because of the internal logic of the story you developed, or because you thought it would be cool, or because you rolled a dice to see what happened, or for whatever reason, you specifically know why you made the choices you made. If you're uncomfortable with that because you worry your decisions are tainted by a secret desire to punish the PCs, it's you being too hard on yourself by a mile. As long as you're not actually deliberately loving with your table, be confident that you're not punishing them! If your table accuses you of loving with them when you're not, then there's a fundamental lack of trust between your players and you and the problem won't be solved by any ruleset.
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May 6, 2020 17:47
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Serf posted:the great thing about items is that they can be destroyed. or they can just not work for the pcs, run out of power, etc. Or just be practically immobile. The anti-scrying device? It fills a small room and looks like a whirring orrery full of complicated fiddly little metal parts and it has to be perfectly level in order to work right. Protects magic lady while she's holed up in her apartment above the warehouse, but does not exactly appeal to the players as something for them to loot and take with them.
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May 6, 2020 17:51
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Notahippie posted:If you're uncomfortable with that because you worry your decisions are tainted by a secret desire to punish the PCs, it's you being too hard on yourself by a mile. As long as you're not actually deliberately loving with your table, be confident that you're not punishing them! I'm going to both agree with this sentiment and suggest that Hyphz' players deserve to be punished.
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May 6, 2020 17:56
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mllaneza posted:I'm going to both agree with this sentiment and suggest that Hyphz' players deserve to be punished. The interesting thing to me is that we have a good example of what true fuckery looks like - just go back to Gygax. Half of the original monsters in D&D were developed specifically to gently caress with the players. Rust monsters, mimics, those crazy worms that hang out on doors to crawl into your ears, those were all a deliberate attempt to punish players for their playstyle. I think with that in the background players have a lot of balls to complain if the boss is too hard.
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May 6, 2020 18:05
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Absurd Alhazred fucked around with this message at 18:53 on Jul 22, 2020 |
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May 6, 2020 18:09
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The thing is that characters built in systems like D&D, pathfinder, etc. are built from a series of compromises and choices. If all of Hyphz' players' characters made a choice to emphasize certain defenses over others, and by coincidence or design they all chose Will saves as a dump stat, it's not punishing them to have them sometimes face an enemy that does a lot of stuff vs. Will. It's expected. And yes, the GM ultimately is responsible for deciding whether and how often to put in a tough anti-Will enemy. That decision can't be offloaded by saying "oh, well it's just in the module" because the GM picked the module, the GM read the module, the GM could have changed the enemy. But it doesn't matter, because again, it's expected that sometimes there will be a tough enemy that attacks Will; just as sometimes there will be an obstacle that needs Athletics to get past safely, sometimes there will be a social encounter where someone having high Cha would be easy, etc. etc. The GM does not need to feel guilty about "arbitrarily" deciding to run a balanced game. The players, if they're at all reasonable, will just shrug ruefully and say "welp I guess that's what happens when everyone dumps Will, eh?" and move on to the next encounter. It's not like you're doing a TPK here, right? It's not punishment. It just isn't. It's playing the game how the game is designed and intended to be played. And if you're really struggling with "well, how often is 'sometimes'?" the best answer is to make a gutfeels decision, but if you really want to: chart the options and distribute challenges evenly between them. So if we're talking three or four standard defenses (AC/Fort/Ref/Will for example), about a quarter of the strong enemies should be piling on the attacks against WIll. There, now you're not being arbitrary, you're just following the game's design. Part of the reason it's not punishment is because the players got a benefit for dumping Will defense; they got to pile on their other defenses. It's also not punishment, because a tough encounter that the players struggle with - or even lose - can still be entertaining and fun and dramatic. You know, adventurers in basically every medium (film, books, etc.) suffer setbacks? Protagonists who never lose a match aren't actually interesting, they're Mary Sues. If your players are genuinely getting upset about setbacks, then... aldantefax posted:They have no experience in roleplaying, though, and get frustrated when things aren't going their way. I don't think that they're a bad person for this. I see it as another opportunity to show them another side of the hobby that they may or may not be into. They're coming around to it, but I haven't found anybody at a table that I've run that's so stubborn that we can't talk out differences these days. ...just talk to them, make it clear that when you run adventures you expect the PCs to sometimes lose an encounter or fail to get past an obstacle on their first try, and that if they were actually succeeding at everything you'd see that as a problem and ramp up the difficulty more, because the sense of challenge is only there if the PCs can, demonstratably, fail. Moreover, you're not "arbitrarily punishing them" when you set up a difficult encounter, and you think it's reasonable and normal for enemies to use many different approaches and builds, including ones the party are "weak against," although you aren't making those enemies or challenges appear disproportionately often. A reasonable player will understand and/or communicate that this isn't a play mode they're willing to engage with. Either way, you have your answer: keep on with what you're doing and encourage the players to roll with the punches, or, find a different game to play with that player (or maybe they need to find a different group).
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May 6, 2020 18:25
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Absurd Alhazred fucked around with this message at 18:53 on Jul 22, 2020 |
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May 6, 2020 19:01
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My take on rolling stats in games: its sometimes fine, but the game needs to account for the variance it causes. D&D doesn't do this at all, there is a reason they've added a bunch of non-random ways to generate your character: a difference of a couple modifiers is pretty huge in terms of the math for the game. The game won't be unplayable especially if your DM takes those into account. I think the biggest thing is that when you use random stats the way you generate a character has to start from those stats to not be worthless, instead of starting from a character idea. The real reason I see people wanting rolled stats is the hope that they'll roll good and have an above expected strength character. Then there are several homebrew rules to mitigate all the times you get terrible rolls. hyphz posted:That's the real twist though, there isn't any sense involved. For example you can say, if I decide that there is a social-butterfly magic assassin then they would have mind control type spells, that makes sense and I am not just trying to penalize the PCs for having low Will. But then, hang on, on what basis did I decide that there would be such an assassin or that an assassin would be part of the plot at all, when I know the PCs are weak in that area? It becomes impossible. If all you make are things that target will saves that becomes an issue. If like the only magic that gets used against them targets will that may be an issue. The other thing is that how ruthless you should be about this stuff is heavily dependent on the party level. If the party is level 3, all have bad will saves, targeting that excessively is an issue because the party doesn't have recourse to counter that and in fiction it doesn't make sense that they'd run into only anti-will things. When they're level 15, they have the resources to mitigate their weakness, and enemies have the resources to figure out that they have these weaknesses. The basis for the assassin targeting will is because they pissed off a large powerful enemy, and he spent the time and gold to figure out that they suck at will saves and hired someone to do the job. This feeds around to a more general discussion about flaws to a character giving mechanical benefit. Which are fine, but when someone is taking flaws they need to realize that they're expressly giving the DM leeway to gently caress with them. If a flaw (or low save, or whatever) never comes up in play, its just a free mechanical benefit for the parts of the game that are coming up. If your characters have low will saves they've actively avoided the many options open to them increasing them in exchange for being better at other things, and they should sometimes have to deal with the drawbacks of that choice.
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May 6, 2020 19:38
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Notahippie posted:Yeah, hyphz, I really feel like this is the real issue. How do you know that you didn't design something specifically to penalize the PCs? Because you literally are the person who did it, and you know what you did and why. If you pick something because of the internal logic of the story you developed, or because you thought it would be cool, or because you rolled a dice to see what happened, or for whatever reason, you specifically know why you made the choices you made. If you're uncomfortable with that because you worry your decisions are tainted by a secret desire to punish the PCs, it's you being too hard on yourself by a mile. As long as you're not actually deliberately loving with your table, be confident that you're not punishing them! Yeah, if you design a thing within the guides of the internal logic of the story then you should be able to explain to them why it is the way it is and then ideally they should understand and respect that. ZypherIM posted:This feeds around to a more general discussion about flaws to a character giving mechanical benefit. Which are fine, but when someone is taking flaws they need to realize that they're expressly giving the DM leeway to gently caress with them. If a flaw (or low save, or whatever) never comes up in play, its just a free mechanical benefit for the parts of the game that are coming up. If your characters have low will saves they've actively avoided the many options open to them increasing them in exchange for being better at other things, and they should sometimes have to deal with the drawbacks of that choice. Yes, this! Ideally the system isn't bad and a negative is met by at least a commensurate benefit which they can use to solve problems. It's also a cool story when a character realizes they have a hole in their game and then trains or whatever to try and shore it up. What would be the solution, hyphz, if they all wore no armour and had very low AC? Would you just never attack them?
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May 6, 2020 19:58
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More rambling!Nessus posted:I'm curious about this, particularly the experience points and rolling for stats things. Players love getting rewards and the feeling of advancement. If you're not giving them treasure every session because you're not a "Monty Haul" style DM or a session could perhaps only encompass one or two encounters tops (common for me) that may have nothing to do with looting, there should be some acknowledgement of that through an immediate, clear feedback as a reward. Experience points are a fantastic carrot for this. That's not to say that experience points are the be-all, end-all in my book, but there are so many things you can do to influence player choice and decisions that are really familiar to people who have played video games etc. that you can dangle in front of them that can be narratively and mechanically rewarding. Yeah, if you start the fight? That's some experience. You decided to go out of your way to help an old lady across the road? That's some good karma, get some experience for this. Showed up ready to play with snacks? Helped out other players at the table figure out a tricky rule? Just had a good-rear end time? These are all valid candidates for awarding experience. Having a level up every few sessions or at a milestone in 5e just doesn't feel like I actually earned anything. It's that I got to a certain point in the game and welp I better power up now! If I was going to really commit to a milestone-based way of gameplay, I'd do it like Weapons of the Gods or Legends of the Wulin and make milestones specific deeds or achievements that players accomplish in the game world. How else will they become heroic or villainous if they don't get recognized for doing heroic or villainous things that people respect and fear? I'm doing some more writing on this and might end up posting some homebrew for it soon. -- Servetus posted:I challenge anyone to justify rolling for stats as it exists in D&D. On the topic of rolling for stats, it represents a fundamental difference in mindset from "creating" a character to "discovering" a character. It really depends on the type of game that you're playing - I wouldn't roll for stats in GURPS, because it makes no sense mechanically - but D&D is designed to allow people to do "something" with any stat array, it gives you some variety and pushes you one way or the other with those stat rolls. Maybe I am used to playing fighters, for example, but in older editions, we used to roll for stats that we could rearrange as we like, *except Charisma*. I roll my stats and I got pretty mediocre stats but just enough to qualify to being a Paladin. That character ended up being one of the longest running characters I had (almost 7 years!), and it was informed because of a choice the randomly generated stats funneled me down. I didn't "Choose" for that character to become a Paladin due to some type of perfect build that I had in mind - he just ended up that way. This type of organic stat generation method allows for these kinds of interesting discoveries. The rarity of a Paladin was such that it was (at the time) something I considered a once in a lifetime opportunity - who knows if I'd end up getting those rolls ever again! - and I played accordingly as if there were no second chances to get to play that character. I played the *poo poo* out of that dude. He had a giant crab as a mount. It ruled. Of course, we also used old point buy systems and the popular "well this array sucks so I guess this character died in childbirth" -- which, in retrospect, is a bit of a terrible way of looking at it -- but more often than not we took the rolls and, well, rolled with it. To me I never felt like I was being penalized in stat rolls because I approach character creation as a method of Discovery, even in games where it expects you to build in a very specific way. The most recent character I made for a game was a D&D 5e basic rules Human Fighter Champion with Defense, took the standard array. Didn't even look at the starting equipment or anything, just told D&D Beyond to give me an instant character and I was good. That character is loving fun as poo poo to play! But, it's not because of his stats that he is fun or not fun. If there's a shortcoming inside of a party where you're not build optimizing and doing all the tactical planning and the like to cover all the bases, historically we just dealt with it. No cleric? Try to go see if we can get healing potions or agree as a group to run if things start looking even remotely bad. Ambushes become a really big deal, as does placement on a battle mat. It becomes super dangerous to do things alone because you only have so many resources available to you. In other words, the mechanical restrictions are informing narrative choices made. I don't need to have a Fighter that can also find traps or heal other people, or a Wizard that is ready to cast sleep spells at the drop of a hat. I work with what I have. This ultimately depends on the table you sit at or run with. If it's a key thing to have players be extremely tactically engaged and optimized, then I don't see a reason to roll for stats unless they want to spice things up a bit. Rolling crappy or amazing stats is fun, and I'd argue that if you're in a collaborative experience there should not be a limiter that your "good stats" are needed to carry the day. The math might be flattened, but that doesn't mean you have to use things that explicitly require dice rolls to get what you want or need. "But why do the thing that isn't the optimal thing? Why do the bad thing?" Despite what the rules imply, having mishmashed stats that you rolled for isn't bad, or good. It's just another way of playing the game (discovery vs. creation). By way of example, at my tables I don't just rely on stats for rolls. I ask players what they want to do, and if it makes sense or if they have proficiency in a skill, then sure they roll. The stats certainly apply then, but even in a normal skill test I give people margins of success and tend to favor middle to high difficulty DCs (it's not worth rolling for easy tests, I just give it to players). This has the benefit of allowing a character, even with a +0 or -1 in a stat, to still think and reason and act with their character's skillfulness rather than relying solely on their stats. I'll tell them to make skill tests with different stats because it makes more sense that way. That really makes em think about it. Regarding stats in general, GURPS handles stats pretty decently. You buy stats up and some stats are more important than others because they influence more things mechanically. However, your stats don't determine how good you are at something, only the starting line of your natural talent. Someone can have a poo poo DX but be a master of Judo and Karate, which are the generic advanced combat styles GURPS presents. They can have any number of techniques to take someone down without having a high IQ or ST because they practiced in this way. Servetus posted:What is actually more disturbing is the real world implications of this narrative: Your maximum capabilities in intelligence, strength, health, and other factors were all set by your birth, and can only be tweaked slightly by extremely powerful magic. Education is worthless, those who score low on the IQ test have low intelligence and those who score high have high intelligence. This is a continuation of the application of IQ scores to enforce race and class hierarchies in real life and was part of the traditional argument for Eugenics. Given traditional D&D's narratives on killing orc babies the eugenicist narrative isn't surprising, but it is surprising that it has continued for so long while writers try to pivot away from more openly problematic issues. While that's one interpretation of things (D&D certainly does attract a certain crowd of chuds who advocate the game mechanics are an accurate simulation of real life and that the rules are meant to be as close to real life as possible), D&D always had outs in order to go ahead and resolve stat-based issues through any number of mechanical vectors, none of which require a ridiculous amount of work in the older editions - or, it becomes a part of the character concept and the player rolls with it. Whether or not stats actually make a big deal, again, is up to the perception of the player, and buying into the rigid idea that "YOU MUST HAVE GOOD STATS TO BE A HERO" is, if anything, a fantastic way to illustrate that not all heroes start with a 16 in their primary stat, nor do they need to. Also, while we're in this head space, D&D takes from Tolkien, and race is certainly a big deal there, sure (whee Easterlings vs Dunedain), and this informs the narrative and mechanical design as presented. Not going to defend that or sweep it under a rug. I like that Pathfinder decouples races by having Ancestries instead, or completely eschewing it at all in other games. That said, when I'm running and playing D&D I am not putting situations in play that my players aren't comfortable with. I've had players even ask me to make race a bigger deal, because they wanted the feeling of being a Tiefling that was an outsider that was viewed with suspicion by race and overcoming that stigma. This would not be someone I would expect that wants to explore that narrative path, but it is something that we'll explore in greater detail one day. No player has asked me, and I hope they will not ask me, if they can go on an adventure to commit genocide starting with orc babies. If they did, I'd like to talk with them in private to see what's prompting this, and consider removing them from the table, because the hell you doin'? -- I personally give really little poo poo about maintaining the balance of a system's mechanics as a player or DM because I celebrate limitations and challenges that can be overcome with some lateral thinking, and not just because D&D is a system that has reality-bending powers like Wish. If a body wanted to do some kind feat of strength not in the rules then sure, let's do it and see how it goes. Bend Bars / Lift Gates isn't a thing anymore, and it's only tenuously referenced in Athletics checks, but who cares? Roll the dice (because it's fun) to see if you can powerlift the big statue to throw at a group of enemies. I'll allow it because you're a fighter and have Athletics trained, and hope you succeed! Putting players into challenging situations and letting them deal with it on their terms (or die trying) is one of the hallmarks of running D&D in my opinion, especially that has shifted to being just a little bit meaner with encounters. It also has some degree of forgiveness as well if you're designing with your specific table in mind. Sometimes this translates into games fairly well, like Dark Souls being a challenging game for a variety of reasons, but it didn't restrict you from trying new strategies or re-trying things over and over again in a given segment of the game, and you get a good feeling of accomplishment when you get past the part that you were stuck at for hours. As a result of being a tiny bit meaner at my tables, I have gallon of player-generated sweat at my table for my Friday game now that the level 1 party has accidentally freed a Beholder. They thoroughly enjoyed the comedy of errors that lead to this, and can't wait for this week to get potentially vaporized by it.
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May 6, 2020 21:16
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Absurd Alhazred fucked around with this message at 18:53 on Jul 22, 2020 |
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May 6, 2020 21:41
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I think it also has a major impact on the game itself when you have to structure things to have this kind of a tier of challenging, where you have entities you enter conflict with that are challenging at this point, but who would be more or less garbage, useful only as a delaying tactic at best, some time later. Like I don't think that this is fundamental to a good RPG experience. In my pet favored system (Call of Cthulhu) people start out reasonably capable and will become more capable - either far better at certain actions or with a broader base, or both - but there isn't the "peasant to godslayer" story arc implicit to a lot of D&D campaigns.
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May 6, 2020 21:47
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Absurd Alhazred fucked around with this message at 18:53 on Jul 22, 2020 |
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May 6, 2020 22:11
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Absurd Alhazred posted:My experience with (ha!) experience was that essentially people would be punished for missing out on sessions for whatever reason, and cumulatively this lead to uneven-level characters. Could you give rewards to the whole group? Even for individual achievement? I like the idea that whenever any player does something cool or exciting or dramatic, that ultimately benefits the whole group, both in terms of in-game events (the character dramatically convinced the chancellor to grant the party clemency...) and in abstracted mechanical cheevoes (...and therefore you all get 100 xp). I imagine that'd shift the feelings around what XPs are and how individuals within the group behave, in subtle ways, perhaps. Even the player who is absent, still benefits from what happened; although routine absenteeism to me calls for choosing a game that more flexibly handles that than D&D and its -alikes. I also wanna speak a little to Fax's "roll to discover a character" idea, because it's one of the things I'm very attracted to in non-D&D RPGs that offer a chargen process where randomness works. D&D stats are determinitive of which classes you get to be, which is one place where rolling for D&D stats can provide that experience nicely; but they're also determinitive of combat effectiveness, in particular whether or not your prime requisite stat is high enough; and given how much combat features, and how every character has to participate in combat, and how disparities of capability in combat can tend to skew the experience, that's the biggest failing, for D&D. But lots of RPGs give you a path to roll to discover a character, without introducing significant disparities of intraparty power. One that made a big impression on me 10 or 15 years ago was some older edition of Traveller, where the experience of generating a character was a discovery of a life path, which could go on for decades, potentially producing a middle-aged or even elderly character, could involve multiple tours of duty or academic degrees, and it was even possible to die in character creation. Wonderful! More recently, the game I've invested in and read and want to play is Modiphius Conan 2d20, and the online character generator is really really good. It offers you several different "degrees" of randomness, letting you discover a character as you determine their origins, some defining or formative events in their past, their social status, etc; even with the most-random option, you still have choices to make at every step, and the game is explicit that you can choose at any point to reject a roll that produced a result you hate... you can also re-flavor a lot of it, so you're not necessarily tied to "well my character is from Ophir so I guess her homeland talent of Gilded is written in stone" - you can totally just declare that you're from Ophir but take the Cosmopolitan talent instead, because gently caress it, she's from the largest city in Ophir, or whatever. But if you use Play the Hand You're Dealt, don't reflavor anything, and walk through the character generator ten times, you'll get ten completely viable, totally different characters, all of whom are reasonably even in terms of intraparty power. And you'll have made a bunch of decisions as you discovered that character, too. So I guess what I'm getting at is, it's totally cool and OK to use rolling with a D&D character to get that experience; but D&D's legacy chargen method mostly just presented the six ability scores and your HP as places you rolled for, and those are the least interesting things to roll for IMO. House rule and modify the game enough to turn the chargen experience into a more thorough process of randomly choosing subsets of options to pick from, where those subsets are more or less guaranteed to produce a character at the end that is at least playable? Yeah man I'm totally on board with that. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 22:16 on May 6, 2020 |
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May 6, 2020 22:14
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Absurd Alhazred fucked around with this message at 18:53 on Jul 22, 2020 |
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May 6, 2020 22:18
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Yeah I specifically meant, a single XP stat for the whole group, basically. Even someone not present, but whose character is normally part of the group (or present as a GM-run character who hangs int he back, or however you handle this) would still get the XP. But you'd still call out individual as well as group achievements as triggering XP rewards. To me, this avoids the problem of XP ever being a punishment - even just "I didn't get as much XP as Dana, because Dana RPs more and I'm less comfortable with it" can feel like a punishment. But if Dana's RPing rewards the whole group with XP, then the whole group is happy that Dana RPed a bunch, and will encourage Dana to do it more. That's good for morale and good for the game.
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May 6, 2020 22:25
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Absurd Alhazred fucked around with this message at 18:53 on Jul 22, 2020 |
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May 6, 2020 22:26
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Absurd Alhazred posted:Isn't the story arc of a Call of Cthulhu character "mildly competent to asylum dweller envying the dead", though? That seems limiting in its own way.
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May 6, 2020 22:31
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Absurd Alhazred posted:That's really good. Something to consider for my next D&Desque campaign. Interestingly, computer-based RPGs seem to have moved in that direction - it's how the KOTOR series works, for example.
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May 6, 2020 22:34
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Absurd Alhazred fucked around with this message at 18:54 on Jul 22, 2020 |
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May 6, 2020 22:36
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Absurd Alhazred posted:My experience with (ha!) experience was that essentially people would be punished for missing out on sessions for whatever reason, and cumulatively this lead to uneven-level characters. Unfortunately, at least as far as I can see, it's not particularly fun to play D&D 5E with a group that has uneven levels, especially if you're writing from modules. And that means that instead of enjoying the fact that someone who comes only once every two weeks has been able to make it, everyone suffers because there's now an uneven party. And this is under mostly even split of XP; rewarding differentiated XP to different characters based on how their players did that session would seem to me to encourage antagonism between the players, which is not what I would prefer. I was much happier when the group reformed around another campaign and we went with milestones. In this case (for me), suffering in this context is good, and if people have a beef with EXP being uneven and can't join the table all the time usually I will have them be tied to whoever the lowest level of the party is. I can, again, see where the pitfall is for experience as a stand-in for balanced progression in a system where power spiking happens at very clearly defined tiers (the poo poo-farmer tier, the fireball tier, the heroes feast tier, the godkiller tier). I also am very mindful of saying that "for me!", in the way that I have run experience for groups, it is not a huge deal. You should get rewarded for showing up. If you can only show up so often, we should talk about what works best for you, the game, and your advancement, and what you want out of the game. In the Friday game I run experience advancement. Players show up and play and thus get the right to earn experience, loot, etc. Some players show up more often, and this means they get to bring more than one character to the table to fill out the empty seats. Other players that show up only intermittently can put their character in or out anywhere, and will always have their items and experience saved or re-fixed to be in the party ranges. This seems a happy medium for people so that they aren't left behind but also reward those who go through the effort of being dedicated to the game as a primary thing in their life. I *want* to reward this enthusiasm and willingness to commit 3 to 4 hours out of a weekend to show up at a table all the time. It would be weirder if I gave them truly nothing other than the privilege of being at the table. I'm sure that those tier ascenscion levels are going to be somewhat fiddly when we get to that point, but even though I don't have any particular plans (sexy beholders instead of regular beholders, maybe) for how to handle it, I do have specific checks and balances in place narratively. To use Friday game as an example, this is a classic hexcrawl where the players are in a sandbox and can go take on quests. There are "Class Trainers" and "Guild Halls" where they must go to level up in civilized lands, and this furthers their character's narrative. If they are at a threshold level to get to the next power spike, they must undertake a quest in order to be recognized as such. This ties the mechanical progression to the narrative and also gives the players a clear reason that in order to reach a new tier of power, they must earn it. This has been clearly communicated and the players at that table are completely on board with this structure of play. It also really tickles me because I remember when Druids and Monks had to challenge other Druids and Monks to get to the higher tiers of their class, which is extremely silly because you could de-level or die trying to progress your character, but that concept always seemed to be wild to me and I want to try that out in maybe a lower-stakes way that is more inclusive. I would NOT run experience for a table that is short-lived or limited-run. The game I'm running on Saturday is milestone-based and is slated to run only for 5, 6 sessions before the adventure is over. The adventure itself is probably only over the course of a week of in-game time, and while I could put experience in this, it made more sense to me to award the milestone to level up from 4 to 5 at a dramatically appropriate part - which, in this case, is just before everything comes to a big fireball-ey head (specifically, the king of the land being very fireballed). I would run experience for long term tables where player decisions are the primary driver, however, which is the Friday game's setup. Thursday is also similar because experience is directly tied to their progression in dungeon crawling, and it's a much more casual game. They may have been only able to get through 2 or 3 chunks of rooms, but that's good enough to get it. Hell, they even said: "Where's the XP?" at the end of the session, which is just a direct communication of "I killed some rats in a dungeon and opened some doors and I got nothing, throw me a bone here". Which, I wasn't even thinking about it, but then I went "oh yeah here is the experience" and people were happy with being rewarded with that. Being rewarded with the ability to play again next week or the joy of play just doesn't have the same type of lizard brain reward value as experience did. Also, to ride on my other post from earlier, I just let the players figure out what they want to do with those uneven levels. They're having a good time and it doesn't seem like it makes it any more burdensome to do since they really are only worrying about their individual characters and merits, and as a DM I am only kind of spitballing to put an encounter in a roughly, like real roughly balanced setup for them to figure out. In other words, I'm taking the Kurt Vonnegut approach here: be a huge fan of the characters and love them, but also, do horrible things to them. That's what makes for some interesting drama at the table for everybody, and that's the well-calibrated expectation. Also, to get even more navel-gazing, what ARE balance and levels anyway? In the greater scheme of things, these are only rule constructs to allow for escalation and relative challenges to be easier or harder for the players. It's generally implied that players will win overall, because unless you are truly mean as a DM with unlimited power you are putting problems in front of them to solve. Nobody would buy a crossword book that was impossible to solve. There's games where stats and levels etc. are so out there and the conflict resolution is literally "interpreting a deck of wordless cards" (looking at you, TSR - someone please bring back Everway as a boxed game thanks) - balance and experience and levels are just a conceptual framework to get stories out onto the table, because nobody wants to just pretend to be an elf for four hours. They want/need some way of representing what an elf is, what an elf does, what their specific elf is good at, and how that specific elf is more and more awesome or badass over time, either through progression or actions. There are vehicles out there for pure improv and freeform role-playing. Anyway, I agree regarding D&D's mechanical failings, and I would much rather play a game that has tighter mechanical combat like GURPS Dungeon Fantasy + Martial Arts or a game that is more streamlined but even weirder like Dungeon Crawl Classics. However, these groups are still too new and untested to put themselves into "tabletop RPG" brain mode that it would be difficult for me to sell like "hey, what about playing this anime RPG where you just go adventuring and feed your bullet journals to this dragon god" (Ryuutama), or whatever. Just because the car don't run 240 mph doesn't mean it can't get you from point A to point B, ya feel?
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May 6, 2020 22:38
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Absurd Alhazred posted:Are those multiple characters for one player or multi-player groupings that stick around from formation? For the former I could see how it could be even more frustrating when you don't even get any sense of fun competing essentially against yourself. It's the former, I don't whether there's any MMORPGs that do anything similar.
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May 6, 2020 22:50
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Notahippie posted:It's the former, I don't whether there's any MMORPGs that do anything similar.
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May 6, 2020 23:59
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More people should play Ars Magica and just embrace the story over balance. More people should play Ars Magica is pretty much always true in any discussion though. Having a well balanced party is really important to something like d&d or Pathfinder where a lot of the focus is on combat so everyone getting to contribute to the core activity of depopulating the countryside. In more story driven games it can definitely be interesting to have people at different power levels. I might be an outlier though. I used to play a lot of super hero games with zero advancement where people just each had two or three characters at different power levels we would just mix and match depending on the story.
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May 7, 2020 01:00
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Story driven games usually understand that they need to balance the players' ability to control the narrative, not the numbers output of knife-on-a-stick guy vs invisible flying fireball guy. I mean, either the game itself has the mechanics for this, or the players/gm explicitly or implicitly understand what's going on and play so that Superman and Robin both have equivalent narrative input despite their in-fiction power disparity. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 01:15 on May 7, 2020 |
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May 7, 2020 01:12
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hyphz posted:I don't know if it's a UK cultural or age thing? Most people I know consider the attitude that "I'm sorted for money, so anything below X is effectively free" to be actively foolish and/or arrogant, and not something that a sympathetic character would do. Plenty have learned the hard way that getting your paycheck and then buying a ton of "cheap" stuff is a recipe for disaster when you remember that (cheap * a ton = expensive). most people you know probably aren't rich
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May 7, 2020 05:16
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Servetus posted:I challenge anyone to justify rolling for stats as it exists in D&D. hyphz posted:I don't know if it's a UK cultural or age thing? Most people I know consider the attitude that "I'm sorted for money, so anything below X is effectively free" to be actively foolish and/or arrogant, and not something that a sympathetic character would do. Plenty have learned the hard way that getting your paycheck and then buying a ton of "cheap" stuff is a recipe for disaster when you remember that (cheap * a ton = expensive). Absurd Alhazred posted:In the campaign I'm running I do milestone-based leveling, but I don't see it as a reward. I hope that what they actually find rewarding is the interesting experiences and the changes they are able to see themselves create in the world; the leveling up just widens their possibilities and the kinds of challenges they can tackle head-on. I've not had complaints yet, and we've just reached level 5, starting from 1. aldantefax posted:In the Friday game I run experience advancement. Players show up and play and thus get the right to earn experience, loot, etc. Some players show up more often, and this means they get to bring more than one character to the table to fill out the empty seats. Other players that show up only intermittently can put their character in or out anywhere, and will always have their items and experience saved or re-fixed to be in the party ranges.
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May 7, 2020 05:48
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Tiggum posted:Stats, as they exist in D&D are just complete nonsense. Not just rolling for them being a dumb idea, but in their whole conception. My favourite example is that Clerics, Paladins and Monks tend to be bad at Religion because it relies on Intelligence and neither of those classes prioritises Intelligence. And once you start looking for them these kind of inconsistencies are just everywhere. Also, what even is the distinction between Intelligence and Wisdom? Everyone seems to think they know, but no explanation I've ever heard actually accounts for the things that those stats do in the game. Strength, Constitution and Dexterity is the same issue. And Charisma is just a whole thing on its own; like, what does it even mean? I know what charisma means, like, as a word, in English, but as a concept in D&D? But that's basically everything in D&D. It's a complete mess that only works if you don't think about it and also overrule the rules any time something doesn't make sense. I’ve toyed with the idea that the way to make the DnD stats work conceptually is to treat them as a matrix where one axis is the type of stat (physical vs mental) and the other axis is how it affects the world (withstand, go around, go through). So Constitution and Wisdom represent the characters’ ability to withstand attempts to harm the body or mind respectively. Dexterity and Intelligence represent the characters’ ability to get around or avoid dangers/problems. And, Strength and Charisma represent the characters’ ability to use their body or personality to affect the world and people around them.
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May 7, 2020 06:26
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^^^^You just invented nWod's stats. Servetus posted:I challenge anyone to justify rolling for stats as it exists in D&D. Basically just for fun/discussion I'll try argue this just as like a classic Devil's Advocate kind of academic sense. Firmly because I agree with you and your points but I'm gonna play chess against myself or whatever metaphor you want to make the argument stronger. So white-boarding this as I go : 1) Like AD&D style : stats don't really matter much, or at least not as much as in later games. They have some effects on the tail ends of the probability, but they're kind of minor except at the extremes. One could argue that the "classic" roll down the line is a simple way of very, very quickly making a character who'll probably die unless they make it to like level 3 or whatever anyway. Of course the problem is that many of those tail-end probabilities make you significantly more survivable (by just granting bonuses or also letting you do better classes), and in the most egregious versions just straight up making you level faster. No, this is garbage. 2). D&D after 2e : no this is straight up garbage and bad and should never be done. There is no defense for rolled stats in those editions. 2.5) Like even the fact that you have stats in these additions is dumb and terrible. Let alone rolling them. You're just telling your friend Steve to get hosed for having poor luck for possibly dozens of hours of gameplay. It's terrible design. 3) Getting slightly warmer, years ago I was running a Mage the Awakening game and one player was just being a prick and not making a character, so I (jokingly over the course of like 5 minutes) made a script to randomly make a character in Mage and just handed that to them. They got the hint and actually made a character but this might not be total garbage per se if it didn't actually assign everything and was just giving you prompts and you're free to tweak stuff and this is just inspiration ; it spits out "You're a Moros Celestial Ladder with Primary physical stats and whatever the knowledgey skill are I forget" could be an okay writing prompt. Obviously much better if it wasn't made by me on like a smoke break to troll my friend. But there's at least a core idea that's not crazy. Something like seeding saying "you should have Science (2) and Contacts (Police 3)", for instance, starts making you think. 4). Lots of poo poo like Gamma World and Reign where the randomness is either designed to be semi-superfluous fluff or is well rounded to make good characters. 5) Pure comedy games like Kobolds Ate My Babies. Enh, some of the results are funnier than others but I'm probably drunk when I play this. Yeah, I haven't convinced myself of poo poo. I don't think rolling for attributes in anything resembling D&D can work. I think I've shown some example of random generation having some fertile ground to explore, but they don't integrate with either how D&D works/has worked and how the rules and attributes are implemented. This has been me thinking out loud.
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May 7, 2020 06:27
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| # ? Jun 8, 2024 02:03 |
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Xiahou Dun posted:^^^^You just invented nWod's stats. Neat! I’ve wondered if there was a system that used something like that, but never bothered to actually look.
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May 7, 2020 06:47
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