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jivjov posted:Oof. One of my fellow players in my weekly D&D game is like this and I will never understand this mentality. Those two things should be the same thing. e: outside of situations like public play or con games or etc. obviously
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May 8, 2020 23:59
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Nessus posted:Like if the point is, "I want to play D&D - I like you, but that's where my focus is on game night," I think it's fair. If the point is "You aren't my friend, you're my D&D service provider," uninvite them. I've run Hackmaster for the "I'm here to roll dice and kick rear end and be hardcore" type players, and they sook about how it sucks and then they quit. Because they don't really want that oldschool "I'm here to notch my TPK stick" experience, because it's loving miserable if you're taking it seriously and they can't not take it seriously. And my regular Hackmaster game, while definitely a protracted joke, is at its core a straight-faced take on AD&D. The joke is that taking AD&D seriously is absolutely loving ridiculous. You have to understand that and lean into it, because actually taking it seriously produces a horrible unfair unfun bitchy rules-lawyering grind. e: I should say was, since the whole global pandemic thing has killed the momentum and there's no way I'm going to try it online. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 02:50 on May 9, 2020 |
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May 9, 2020 02:44
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e: nm
Absurd Alhazred fucked around with this message at 18:54 on Jul 22, 2020 |
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May 9, 2020 02:50
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Absurd Alhazred posted:Are there aspects of Hackmaster that make it particularly difficult to run online? It's extremely rules-fiddly and book-keepy, but the core AD&D-alike engine will run just fine and I'm sure you could move your characters through a dungeon and run combats and stuff with enough loving around to get the rules into roll20 or whatever. But it'll lose all the props, trappings, and table banter that constantly remind everyone that we're roleplaying as people who are taking roleplaying elves and wizards far too seriously. E: I mean, just, "roll a d10,000 and apply this formula and then consult this table" and dropping the book in front of someone highlights the inherent absurdity of that in a way that pressing a button for the result could never, ever manage. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 03:05 on May 9, 2020 |
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May 9, 2020 03:00
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e: nm
Absurd Alhazred fucked around with this message at 18:54 on Jul 22, 2020 |
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May 9, 2020 03:03
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Slightly off topic, but I have now run a game for hyphz and some other people and it was pretty good. I hosed up and let too many people in, but that's on me. Otherwise I think it went over pretty well, and hyphz got to see how improvising and talking things through like adults works.
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May 9, 2020 05:30
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e: nm
Absurd Alhazred fucked around with this message at 18:54 on Jul 22, 2020 |
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May 9, 2020 05:55
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AW reskinned to be set in 30 Years War Germany. There was a lot of random, hilarious fuckery and dudes with slashed doublets. The theme of the game is "30YW + Princess Mononoke", and I'm absurdly psyched to play more of it.
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May 9, 2020 06:10
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e: nm
Absurd Alhazred fucked around with this message at 18:54 on Jul 22, 2020 |
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May 9, 2020 06:18
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Xiahou Dun posted:Slightly off topic, but I have now run a game for hyphz and some other people and it was pretty good. I was working and I demand a recap.
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May 9, 2020 06:33
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mllaneza posted:I was working and I demand a recap. (If this is off-topic people can yell at me and I'll edit.) Sadly we didn't get as much done as I'd have liked cause we had a session 0 that took up a good chunk, and then there was timezone fuckery. The party is in Hintergrund am See* circa 163??????. A war-weary angry mercenary (Gunlugger), a kid who got taken by forest spirits and came back hosed up (Faceless), a Jewish doctor (Angel), a weird Italian Brainer scam artist "doctor", a young braggadocious warrior (Battlebabe), an Early Modern take on the Savvyhead and young priest running his own weird local cult (Hocus). Because of how they answered my opening prompts they're in the middle of a riot after a zombie-farmer came and accused the Burgermeister of murdering him. The gunlugger is well, the gunlugger and promptly punches someone's neck off. The Brainer tries to inject the Burgermeister but fucks up and just injects some rando and the crowd arrests him and tries to carry him off. The Hocus calms everyone down for like a hot second but within another few failed rolls it's still not going great. The Faceless is stopping the Burgermeister from leaving and ends up cold-cocking him unconscious. The Battlebabe is doing his own thing and notices a weird dude in a grey robe carrying a harp out by the woods. Eventually he remembers o yeah I could help the Brainer I guess but gets stuck on the way. The gunlugger decides gently caress this poo poo and pulls out his comically large sword to start murdering the crowd and save the Brainer, but the Hocus intervenes cause the crowd are his cult and due to a 7-9 the Brainer ate a hell of a loving sword cut (like 3-4 Harm). Then they realized the weird robe dude might be the Ruebezahl which is a sometimes benevolent sometimes evil forest spirit giant fairy thing but we were running low on time. Next time I'd split the group up so we got more done, but I thought it was okay. Hope hyphz had fun and we helped him learn how PbtA works! And that he'll come back soon. *Which no one even asked the name of but means "Setting on the Lake" which I thought would be funny.
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May 9, 2020 07:17
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mllaneza posted:I was working and I demand a recap. Claus, the Hocus, a young Catholic priest out to make a name for himself. Johnathan Koenigstein, the Gunlugger, a seasoned mercenary with a grievously scarred face who has "Seen Some poo poo (tm)". Balthazar, the Battlebabe, a young, talented warrior who is like Johnathan but with about 30,000 fewer miles on him and an awesome "alive today, could be dead tomorrow so don't plan to far ahead" attitude. Tevye, the Angel, a Jewish refugee (from what is mysterious!) woman with a fascination about the human body that some might find unwholesome. Fabian, the Savvyhead, a carpenter and friend of Tevye who has a knack for turning up when you least expect but most need him (played by hyphz). Beatrix, the Faceless, what had become of a young girl who had wandered off into the haunted woods and traded her eyes away to dark forces for survival and unspecified (but clearly supernatural!) powers. Niccolo, the Brainer, a portly, self-styled "man of lettered learning" possessed of an unhealthy fascination with peoples' "humors" and the balance thereof (played by me). The Hx round was awesome, establishing all sorts of cool stuff, like that Niccolo was a "Christmas and Easter" Catholic who hung with Claus on occasion. There was some sublimated sexual tension between young Claus and the much older Johnathan, and Beatrix had some sort of supernatural connection with Johnathan where no matter where he went she would eventually turn up (he was pretty sure she was haunting him). Everyone with half a brain knew Niccolo was trouble, and Claus had once helped Beatrix perform a pagan rite (which went against all his teachings and deeply held beliefs) to save someone from a supernatural threat. Lots of good stuff, and hyphz actually made a handy graph that explained it all, which was pretty rad. The session started with the PCs in the village where Claus' parish was located, in the midst of a festival/feast day where everyone just wanted to chill and get their drink on. Then the dead guy showed up, and accused the local Burgermeister of killing him, a charge which was refuted with insufficient sincerity. This was odd, to be sure, and cooler heads might have prevailed - had the townsfolk not taken umbrage to Niccolo surreptitiously attempting to "rebalance" the humors of said Burgermeister via clandestine alchemical injection. That's pretty much when all hell broke loose.  I'll let others jump in with their impressions, and I'd be interested to hear folks' reactions to it. I also ran an AW one-shot tonight that hyphz politely eavesdropped on for the first couple hours, and I hope found interesting/entertaining.
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May 9, 2020 07:31
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I was Tevye in that game and I just want to point out that hyphz came up with a COOL BACKGROUND THING while we were working on Hx. Jonathan, the Gunlugger, asked who had left him to bleed at some point, and I wanted to be that person because that adds an interesting angle to my otherwise generally nice character. I was having trouble justifying this, though, until hyphz proposed that his character, knowing that Jonathan hangs around with a creepy fae Faceless, had kept hidden that he needed medical attention at a critical junction. It was great!
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May 9, 2020 09:13
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O that's who you are! Cool to know. You made it sound like your name was impossible to pronounce, and I assumed it had to be worse than me making people say Chinese. (Which is an easily pronounced language but that's a different axe I grind.) I actually really like your character a lot and hope we can keep going and explore that. Although again, I know you put in the setting detail of being Jewish and it sounds cool but I literally can't touch that for moral/ethical/legal reasons. And also just not being comfortable with it. I don't know if you picked it to bring that up (which might work in the right group) but nope nope nope I just can do period anti-Semtisim in 16whatever. I'd rather have a nap or a whiskey or drink a gallon of bleach.
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May 9, 2020 09:26
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Xiahou Dun posted:O that's who you are! Cool to know.
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May 9, 2020 09:28
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Whelp. Good job me. I iz no how forumz work.
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May 9, 2020 09:28
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I played Beatrix! My starter concept had been 'someone mentioned Princess Mononoke and so I wanna play something like San' and then I found some good art and decided to make it creepier (my barometer was 'maybe slightly less creepy than a Nier weapon story'). Then people took it and ran with it and my character became a cryptid haunting another character, which was cool! I'd been kind of worried about how a concept so divorced from humanity would end up fitting into the connection-building process, but there was definitely enough there that I was able to hook my character into all kinds of bullshit. I'm still not super great with the actual gameplay of pbta (I've played monsterhearts in the past but it turned into freeform basically immediately), but I'm definitely eager to do more of it.
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May 9, 2020 15:00
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Yea, it was a lot of fun, although a very different feel - much faster than most crunchy games (I just got done running PF2e for 5 hours in which we did 3 fights), but also requiring a different attitude. A lot of the "fiore" is no longer "oh I'm going to kick rear end now" as it is with combat heavy games, but "oh god what's going to happen now" even if it's likely to be something bad, which does create a different relationship to the characters. There's a lot more of Fiasco in these games than I expected - not necessarily that there's joy in seeing things go wrong, but there's a lot in things that might go wrong. I was also quite surprised by how quickly things erupted.. which was even more the case in Ilor's game in which the PCs were already attacking each other 5 minutes in! I hope that was resolved in some pleasing way.. It did successfully make me even more intruiged about how Legacy and Under Hollow Hills play out with their different contexts and especially with the seriously involved Hx phases.
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May 9, 2020 19:45
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hyphz posted:There's a lot more of Fiasco in these games than I expected - not necessarily that there's joy in seeing things go wrong, but there's a lot in things that might go wrong. hyphz posted:I was also quite surprised by how quickly things erupted hyphz posted:... which was even more the case in Ilor's game in which the PCs were already attacking each other 5 minutes in! I hope that was resolved in some pleasing way.. In particular the Hx interplay between "Killer" (heliotrope's death-dealing Gunlugger) and "Whiskey Jeff" (Xiahou Dun's Battlebabe, whose thoroughly unearned "bad-rear end assassin" reputation had come from Killer's hard work and blood) drove much of the early action. hyphz, I think you had logged off by the time the two of them had a two-way firing squad in the old church and knocked each other unconscious (both lived, as PCs are hard to kill, but both utterly failed their Harm move and it was too perfect to have them both go down and have the rest of the PCs nope right out back to the city). And by the end, all the PCs discovered that they were on the same side, as "the Shepherds" had found the kid (the one who started the session gut-shot and bleeding out in the back of the Driver's car Reservoir Dogs style) and hustled him out of the city - against his will. Turned out the "kidnapping" was actually an unintentional rescue - but like any good crime-gone-wrong story, the protagonists didn't realize it until it was too late...
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May 9, 2020 21:37
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Ilor posted:To be fair, it was actually hyphz himself who set this up. Xiahou Dun asked each of the players a (hilariously leading) question about to set the opening scene. He saved the best for last, asking hyphz why the villagers were pissed off, and he decided that it was because Niccolo (my character!) was doing something hinky in regards to the Burgermeister. Totally threw me under the bus, and it was fantastic! I shall beg pardon there that it was XD who asked me, "What did Niccolo do....?" Also, by "hinky" he means that he was getting close to him to try to use a brain scan move on him, not anything else involving "special move partners"..
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May 9, 2020 22:28
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hyphz posted:I shall beg pardon there that it was XD who asked me, "What did Niccolo do....?"
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May 9, 2020 23:16
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I'm so glad hyphz had fun
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May 10, 2020 00:30
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Ilor posted:There are two important bits in AW that really reinforce this. The first is that needing a 10+ to get an success without complications is actually a pretty high bar. That means that most of the time, things are "not going entirely to plan." Second, violence almost always has unintended fallout. Generic NPCs are super-easy to kill and the MC is encouraged to "look at them through cross-hairs," so as soon as people start fighting there is bound to be collateral damage. As a result, stuff will go wrong pretty much from the word "go," which is something I love about the game. I think maybe the thing I like most about the pbta games is having the idea of partial success being integral to the game. It makes things so much more interesting compared to the hard binary of success/fail. 2d6 has bell curve probability shape for outcomes, compared to the flat chance of a d20. So unmodified, you've got a 16.65% chance of a clear success (roughly a 18-20 on a d20), 41.65% of a partial (just over 8 points on a d20, so let's say 10-18), and 41.64% for a fail (another 8 points, so 2-8). This leaves 1 point on a d20 leftover, so in the spirit of things I'd shove it into partial. So the most likely outcome, even with no bonuses, is that you're going to be able to get what you want, but only rarely without something complicating it. The probability shifts quite a bit with bonuses, so your character with a +2 to their roll shifts 24.99% (5 numbers on a d20) from failure to partial, and 24.99% from partial to full. That means on a d20 you'd roughly have 13-20 being clear success, 4-12 being partial success (leaving in our leftover point here), and 1-3 being a failure. Its been a while since I looked, but I seem to recall d&d/pf sort of aimed at needing a 10 after modifiers for a 'good challenge' difficulty, which means you're expected to fail more often than in pbta. Someone who wanted to put in some time could probably work out some math to modify skill DCs into a fail/partial/success framework which probably would probably be pretty nice overall (I recall knowledge skills sort of working like this in pf, where they'd have a range of info you get based on your roll).
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May 10, 2020 00:39
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XD, It was Beatrix who sucker punched the Mayor, and Jonathan who almost cut Nicollo in half after the peasants who were dragging him away used him as cover in reaction to Balthazar telling them to "Let the fat man go or else". Jonathan and Balthazar were only involved because Nicollo offered to pay them for saving him. Balthazar then laid into the group of peasants, driving them off. Apart from his insides now being on his outsides, Nicollo is technically saved. It's probably easier for Teyve to fix than him being hung.
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May 10, 2020 01:21
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hyphz posted:I shall beg pardon there that it was XD who asked me, "What did Niccolo do....?" Yeah I was very purposefully doing stuff like that. I knew Ilor would think it was awesome so I wanted to show you that that's a thing that can happen. And now you've also seen that it leads it hilarious, ridiculous fun! I don't know if you noticed but I was going out of my way to less my standard GMing structure but more of making an educational example (not that there were too many differences in the finished product, it's just that I was going out of my way to include stuff.) Ilor was a mensch and went with it cause it owned. Angrymog posted:XD, It was Beatrix who sucker punched the Mayor, and Jonathan who almost cut Nicollo in half after the peasants who were dragging him away used him as cover in reaction to Balthazar telling them to "Let the fat man go or else". Jonathan and Balthazar were only involved because Nicollo offered to pay them for saving him. Balthazar then laid into the group of peasants, driving them off. Yeah sorry if I was vague or didn't give proper credit. I always felt like gaming recaps are like telling someone about a dream you had where it's best to go really quick and give the barebones details before people's eyes glaze over. Also now I get the connection between your forum name and your discord name, duh. Don't know how that didn't occur to me. Anyway, hope you're both down for more gaming soon, although I'm definitely gonna split the group to make it easier. Probably based on timezones just cause it'll make the logistics easier.
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May 10, 2020 03:57
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I'm glad you had a good time, Hyphz, and I hope it also helped show you how these games work. Ilor posted:because everyone is driving their character like a stolen car. This is how I generally encourage pbta games to be played. Go as hard as you like, you're not gonna get excluded from the game even if your dude somehow dies. e: the game sounds awesome, too. Does anyone know what the apocalypse was yet? Are they looking in that direction at all? Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 04:18 on May 10, 2020 |
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May 10, 2020 04:15
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Elector_Nerdlingen posted:I'm glad you had a good time, Hyphz, and I hope it also helped show you how these games work. To your edit : there were setting details but we were too busy having Mexican stand-offs. It was a dark, cold, rainy swampy everything. While I agree in general that treating characters like the most disposable things possible is a good agenda, I think it's good to highlight that that's how you should treat your own character, and not the other PC's. As an example, me and heliotrope's characters were in a situation last night where I had my positively absurdly large shotgun pointed at his head. In character, just pulling the trigger and wasting him would have made the most sense, but it was only like 6 minutes into the session and out of character I didn't want to gently caress up the narrative so I back filled reasons to not kill him. Hours later then it was fun for us to go all Reservoir Dogs on each other. (Which was loving hilarious fun.) Also I had to nope out cause I hadn't eat all day and was exhausted, but Ilor left out the "epilogue" of Whiskey Jeff where he was nursed back to health by some people who are legally distinct from Innsmouth residents, married into the community and he and his fish-wife are totally coming back later. Specifically aping Clint Eastwood in The Unforgiven.
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May 10, 2020 04:28
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Elector_Nerdlingen posted:This is how I generally encourage pbta games to be played. Go as hard as you like, you're not gonna get excluded from the game even if your dude somehow dies. Elector_Nerdlingen posted:e: the game sounds awesome, too. Does anyone know what the apocalypse was yet? Are they looking in that direction at all? I love doing world-building on-the-fly and using the concepts and inspirations the players give me to really set the scenes. Weaving all of that stuff together is one of the parts of GMing I enjoy the most.
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May 10, 2020 04:52
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jivjov posted:Oof. One of my fellow players in my weekly D&D game is like this and I will never understand this mentality. Those two things should be the same thing. I don't think it's that unreasonable. I love all the people I play RPGs with (and consider that a requirement) and am happy to hang out when them, but when an RPG night is scheduled I want to play an RPG.
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May 10, 2020 06:39
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admanb posted:I don't think it's that unreasonable. I love all the people I play RPGs with (and consider that a requirement) and am happy to hang out when them, but when an RPG night is scheduled I want to play an RPG. Yeah to me that can be shorthand for "I respect the time you, the GM, have put into this game, and will not distract from it by engaging in random social chatter; let's play, and postpone catching up on the rest of our shared interests for another time." But isn't necessarily; the context matters here. Could be someone being really rude. 
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May 10, 2020 06:44
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Leperflesh posted:Yeah to me that can be shorthand for "I respect the time you, the GM, have put into this game, and will not distract from it by engaging in random social chatter; let's play, and postpone catching up on the rest of our shared interests for another time." To chime in, while I'll happily do other kind of chatter as well, I do want to move us towards the hobby that I know for a fact everyone at my table (who have all been gaming together more or less for years now) is passionate about. At which point it's more like, 'hey, we got together to do X, we all enjoy each others' company but let's remember to do X.' Like being the host getting everyone to go sit down at the table for dinner.
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May 10, 2020 06:47
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I've never played in a weekly game. Back when I was playing any kind of regular in-person RPG, we were at best meeting monthly. When you're getting like three to five hours a month, that time is precious, and it sucks if someone or two someones are more interested in having a chat, and so we only get through a couple encounters and a fight and it's gonna be three more weeks before we get to play again. Maybe you guys could have a chat on the phone later or something? But I get it. It's about expectations, and having a mature conversation about them. If our normal game was really chatty and casual (and weekly) and suddenly one player showed up and was all "I'm not here to be friendly, I'm here to game" that'd either be an expression of their social awkwardness made manifest, or, kinda being pretty rude. Actually it'd be rude either way, but one way it's unintentional. What I would try really hard not to do is take it as deeply wounding and personal, without at least quietly talking about it one-on-one with that person at some point, where we could clarify exactly what they meant, how I initially took it, and whether they thought my hurt feelings mattered to them or not.
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May 10, 2020 06:52
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I started to develop a deep resentment of boardgames because they were only being brought out when someone (usually last minute) dropped out of a session.
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May 10, 2020 08:34
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Angrymog posted:I started to develop a deep resentment of boardgames because they were only being brought out when someone (usually last minute) dropped out of a session. Fair but that doesn't stop Tzolk'in from being amazing. I understand the disappointment, but board games still rule. Also I'm drinking wine and re-watching John Wick, and while I hate the idea of narrowly ascribing RPG things to fiction, god drat I never appreciated how it's like a documentary on how the harm move in AW works.
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May 10, 2020 08:40
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Nessus posted:Like if the point is, "I want to play D&D - I like you, but that's where my focus is on game night," I think it's fair. If the point is "You aren't my friend, you're my D&D service provider," uninvite them. It was certainly the former and not the latter. I reconnected with that guy several years later after we all moved away (he even lived with me for a few months after that group disintegrated because of College Things!) and it was all good. I wanted to add that tidbit just to illustrate people coming to the table looking for different and specific things, sometimes which are unexpected. That was my first time meeting someone who had that kind of sentiment. While I would normally write many paragraphs I will just keep it mostly short this time and say that one of the players in the milestone-based Saturday game quit this week amicably, but we will continue to move on. I'm going to try the roleplay rock from Nerdlingen's runbook and see how that goes to help encourage more player engagement and moment-to-moment improv and worldbuilding, which generally was received as good and fun but hard to follow, especially for one of the remaining players. I also ran session zero for the coworker Sunday group, and that went pretty well. We have some interesting ideas popping up and I'm probably going to implement "achievement-based milestones" like I was referencing once I draft the dramatic axes those are supposed to be for that game. They are excited at the prospect of dynamic world-building, and I'm realizing that part of helping re-tune players in is to do this after the initial learning curve of D&D has been mostly dealt with. Both Sunday and Saturday groups reflect the most experienced players that I have. For tomorrow I've been designing a Lancer encounter with the Tabletop Simulator play blocks based off a half-remembered thing that someone mentioned with Infinity and tournament terrain, so once I get the chance to run it I'll see how it goes. No spoilers for my players since I've already linked them this thread, but tomorrow is going to be a Weird encounter, since I couldn't find rules for the stuff I wanted to do.
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May 11, 2020 06:53
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Hearkening back a few pages to the whole abstracted wealth vs. detailed economy sim debate, I wanted to share an experience where the intersection of these two has actually been a defining character thing. Apologies if this more properly belongs in the Good/Bad/Cat Piss thread, and I'll do some theory wanking at the end to justify the post. I'm running an Unknown Armies game and one of the characters is playing a Plutomancer. For those not familiar with UA, she's obsessed with how her net worth defines her value as a person. She gains magical charges any time people give her money, and loses them if she ever gives away too much money at once. ($100 nets a minor charge, $1000 gets a significant, and $100m gets a major. Majors are game defining things. She loses everything if she spends $1000 or more in a single transaction.) A while ago, due to hijinks, the party thief was able to give her $100m in a single go. So she gains a major charge. There aren't set spells for major charges, just a paragraph on what kind of thing is thematically appropriate and suggestions to work it out with your GM. Her player says "So... rich people get poo poo for free a lot of the time, right? Like, their aura of richness just rubs off on people, they get opportunities normal people don't. Can I use my charge to make that an intrinsic part of me?" And that sounds reasonable. She rolls plutomancy, succeeds. So now anything which costs $999 or less is free to her, because people justify just giving it away to a hyper rich person. Anything which costs $1000 or more still costs. Which means either the rest of the party has to pay for those things, or they spend half a session going on an elaborate caper to scam/steal the thing. They seriously spent 2 hours scamming their way to a copper bathtub for a ritual, because it cost too much. And on a thematic level it makes perfect sense. The plutomancer has a literal Scrooge McDuck pile of money, $100m in twenties, which she just keeps in a van. She goes to look at it sometimes. Never to touch it. Money has to be kept pure, everything else is dirty. This money will never be spent, because cheap things don't need it, and expensive things would be a sin. So as GM I'm abstracting all purchases into one of two categories, either "Cheap enough to be free, you have it, don't even bother telling me how," or "You need to justify this, do me some plot." And that has worked out great. I cannot imagine making this work in the sort of copper-counting hellgame Hyphz has thus-far described. Question, to justify posting in the philosophy thread: How do you balance games with intentionally asymmetric class design in a way that feels fair? To use Unknown Armies as an example, an Entropomancer or Epideromancer can gain the highest level of magic whenever they want just by doing a thing (albeit with potentially very high costs), whereas other magic schools like the Dipsomancer or Oneiromancer basically have to say "Dear GM, I would like one of these, please can I have a side plot to earn it?" I try to make sure everyone gets at least one over the course of the campaign, but of course the game is designed with the idea that some are easier to come by than others, and I want to know how to balance that against perceived player fairness.
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May 12, 2020 17:00
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Xiahou Dun posted:Also I'm drinking wine and re-watching John Wick, and while I hate the idea of narrowly ascribing RPG things to fiction, god drat I never appreciated how it's like a documentary on how the harm move in AW works. Raiders of the Lost Ark is a documentary on partial successes, particularly the fight on the truck. I did an archaeologist playbook for my Traveller hack and was able to fill out their moves list just from watching Indy and Marion flail their way through what would have been one hell of a gaming session.
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May 12, 2020 17:51
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Exculpatrix posted:I'm running an Unknown Armies game and one of the characters is playing a Plutomancer. For those not familiar with UA, she's obsessed with how her net worth defines her value as a person. She gains magical charges any time people give her money, and loses them if she ever gives away too much money at once. ($100 nets a minor charge, $1000 gets a significant, and $100m gets a major. Majors are game defining things. She loses everything if she spends $1000 or more in a single transaction.) This seems like a severely imbalanced set of thresholds. The difference between $100 and $1,000 is one order of magnitude; the difference between $1,000 and $100,000,000 is five orders of magnitude. Does the game give any explanation for why such a huge disparity? I would also say that the poo poo that hundred-millionaires get for free is way more of the stuff that costs hundreds or even thousands of dollars, and way less of the stuff that costs five or ten. It's just that something that costs five or ten dollars is a meaninglessly tiny fraction of their wealth. But what they get that's worth vastly more is things like: investment opportunities, lower borrowing costs, free college tuition/entrance to elite schools for their kids, rides on other rich people's private jets and yachts, access to political leaders, escape from legal consequences, things like that. If I wanted to buy a ticket on someone's private jet it'd cost like $10k or more; rich guy just asks his rich buddy and gets to borrow it (and the pilot and the fuel) for the weekend for free. If I want a private audience with my senator, I probably have to pony up to a $1500 a plate fund raiser, and even then, I'm just in the same room and might get no more than a handshake and one or two words; rich guy can just get his number and have a chat. If I want to buy a Versace dress for my wife to wear to a party, I have to pay full price: the multi-millionaire gets to borrow it for free, just to be seen wearing it on the red carpet, because that's good advertising for Versace. I guess "let's deal with those things in-game" still makes sense. It does not make sense to me to keep $100M in a van, though. People can't/won't treat you as an influential rich person if your money isn't effectively visible. You have to own things that media can verify, like buildings or be a major stockholder in some big company or own a company or ten. The privilege of extreme wealth is enabled through social networks and systems of interchange-of-favors. You're not getting that audience with the senator for free, if you merely assert without verification "why yes, I'm extremely rich, didn't you know?" Plus there's that whole "what if the van gets stolen." One of the things the fabulously wealthy do is secure their money, and because they're fabulously wealthy they have access to all kinds of security mechanisms that normal people don't. Swiss bank accounts, tax avoidance opportunities, diversity of investments, access to lawmakers to ensure their particular financial interests are taken care of (favorable tax treatment, free government loans to prop up their industry, etc.) Not that it's impossible in an RPG to have a character with a van full of money, just.... yikes, don't they know how easily they could lose it that way?
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May 12, 2020 19:28
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Leperflesh posted:This seems like a severely imbalanced set of thresholds. The difference between $100 and $1,000 is one order of magnitude; the difference between $1,000 and $100,000,000 is five orders of magnitude. Does the game give any explanation for why such a huge disparity? It pretty much comes down to the difference between a minor and significant charge being the difference between lightly injure or severely injure a guy in front of you, while the difference between a significant and a major is the difference between severely injure a guy or rewrite a nation's economy. For plutomancers, anyway. Other schools of magic have different distances between the three charge levels, and different levels of power. And epideromancer can get a major charge by seriously maiming themselves, but they aren't going to shake nations with it, they're going to do something personal and horrible. quote:It does not make sense to me to keep $100M in a van, though. People can't/won't treat you as an influential rich person if your money isn't effectively visible. You have to own things that media can verify, like buildings or be a major stockholder in some big company or own a company or ten. The privilege of extreme wealth is enabled through social networks and systems of interchange-of-favors. You're not getting that audience with the senator for free, if you merely assert without verification "why yes, I'm extremely rich, didn't you know?" Plus there's that whole "what if the van gets stolen." One of the things the fabulously wealthy do is secure their money, and because they're fabulously wealthy they have access to all kinds of security mechanisms that normal people don't. Swiss bank accounts, tax avoidance opportunities, diversity of investments, access to lawmakers to ensure their particular financial interests are taken care of (favorable tax treatment, free government loans to prop up their industry, etc.) In this case the answer is literally magic. The money in the van doesn't do anything except satisfy a psychological itch now, she gets free stuff because she did a big magic to make that happen. But yes, the van could get stolen, and that is a serious vulnerability which may come up later in the campaign and cost her a lot of magical power. For context, Unknown Armies adepts are basically addicts, for whatever their personal and specific addiction is. And that addiction is so strong that sometimes the universe just gives up and lets them be right. In this character's case, her addiction is having as much physical cash as humanly possible. Illiquid assets would be meaningless, they don't fit her understanding of what matters in the world.
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May 12, 2020 19:38
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| # ? Jun 8, 2024 00:49 |
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Yeah, in Unknown Armies you play a character that just isn't... Right. They are doing life wrong in a spectacular fashion. This person is not a proper rich person, they don't care about money as power or leverage or an investment or freedom or something sensible. They care about money for its own sake. A plutomancer might live in that van as a homeless person and eat out of the trash because that's preferable to parting with their precious. Every dollar gained is a minor victory but every cent lost is a moral failure. If you have your head on straight and you're making good decisions you can't be a PC in Unknown Armies.
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May 12, 2020 19:49
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