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Alignment is difficult in part because even with a century or two of psychological study, people broadly do not agree at the most basic level on things like "how do we make decisions" and "what do we actually believe, vs. what we profess or think we believe" and even questions like "maybe we're just evolved to have empathy and nobody ever actually acts out of genuine altruism." Elephant in the room: neuroscientists say we probably don't even have free will, and nobody can prove them wrong, lol. At the table, then, how can we play characters who feel believable to us as players, if the game is spelling out in hard mechanics, structures that determine their motivation in ways that we don't accept in real life? If the game tells me characters are always somewhere on an axis of good and evil, but I personally do not believe the labels "good" or "evil" are valid for people (vs. validity for individual actions, perhaps?), then what? Sure, I can suspend my disbelief to some extent, how else am I gonna play an elf or a klingon or a robot, but then there's also gaps in these sweeping rules declarations between which me and my fellow players can have significant differences of opinion. I maybe don't really want to fight with Erin and Lee about whether, having established that the Queen is unambiguously Good, it's unambiguously Evil of us to determine to depose her? Even if we think we have "good" reasons? Maybe we don't have to agree, but what is the GM gonna think, are we gonna get smited by angels for this? Do we need to engage the GM in a lengthy interrogation about their philosophical beliefs before we can decide as a party how to interact with the alignment system? I struggled with this, back when I played and ran D&D (entirely before 5th edition, of which I have no opinion). As a GM, sometimes I fiddled around with replacement systems (one example: I decided for a specific setting I was making that good and evil acts do not counterbalance one another, but rather, evil acts accumulate and can't be expunged from one's record by good acts; the entire concept of redemption is a societal fiction, and the catholic salvation-through-confession system does not apply to this here fantasy game). But more often as a GM or a player I mostly tried to sidestep the issue. I've also seen players, especially younger players, for whom I think the alignment system was more about granting each other explicit permission to play out transgression fantasy. It's OK for my character to rob, cheat, and generally be an rear end in a top hat: his alignment is chaotic neutral! It's OK for us to roleplay as murderers in this game, because it's an Evils game! It's OK for your character to endlessly preach and prosyletize their religion to ours, because they're a priest of a lawful good religion! But the classic D&D grid was a pretty crap way of doing that. And I think it's totally OK and good and maybe a bit more mature too, to conceptualize game universes in which unassailably correct deific authorities have not already determined universal morality with absolute clarity and certainty. More like the world we actually live in, where intelligent people in good faith can disagree on matters of ethics, and maybe you can't determine through experimentation whether passing up an invitation to help an old lady across the street is merely neutral, or actually evil, and whether if you help another lady across the street the next day, you've merely made up for the previous wrong, or what. Another issue as already mentioned with alignment is the notion that people behave according to their own beliefs, that everyone or even just some significant minority of people have coherent belief systems or moral codes or whatever. Perhaps some do and many or most don't. Don't we mostly just behave however the people around us are behaving, because as humans we're both conditioned and evolutionarily predisposed to try to fit in to our perceived social groups? Should one's society's alignment mostly subsume any personal alignment, except for when it doesn't? But do societies really have "alignments" either? Is North Korea "evil", how about Nazi Germany? Maybe it's better to conceptualize societal "alignment" as a set of social habits, myths, traditions... in this region, our folk stories are often about how prideful people get their comeuppance, so we have a shared tendency to scorn the prideful. But in that region, we have lots of heroic myths, and we appreciate people who tell gloriously embellished stories about their achievements... modesty isn't highly valued. Neither of those ideas are easily codified as points on an alignment grid. So I lean a bit more towards something Ilor said: Ilor posted:I'd much rather ditch these axes all together and just describe a belief system or world view. By fleshing out the tenets and principles of a religion or cultural ethos, you explicitly give internal logic to someone's motivations. This doesn't necessarily lend itself to game mechanics or cosmology diagrams, but I think a game can still provide some structures on which players can hang character ideas, and on which GMs can hang plot points, without necessarily dictating restrictive patterns of codified behavior or - worse - instructing players to roleplay their characters using ethical strictures that they find false or even offensive. It's still very much a good and useful thing for the game to do something to help especially newbie players figure out how to roleplay a character, and something akin to alignment can be one of those tools. If we can sidestep the whole "good/evil" bit, cue players to think about what their characters' beliefs and convictions and habits are, and help them understand what the (if they exist) cultures in their game setting value or devalue, and then set them free to play a character who feels "like a real person" to them, I suspect we get better results.
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May 20, 2020 00:49
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Absurd Alhazred posted:This is the kind of thing that comes up in Google, which I assumed was wrong as it's neither fiction nor an adventure module. Yeah it's Gluckman. Nonfiction can inform your RPG! Especially since a lot of where people get cranky about alignment isn't purestrain in-game logic, but how that logic stacks up to IRL ethics. (the simple version of Rituals of Rebellion is pretty much what I already said - the societies Gluckman was studying had a formal process for overthrowing the king and taking his place, and this process was generally followed and coups didn't lead to major changes in the political system, but shufflings of the people at the top. This meant that it was very possible to support the general form of the political system even when physically taking up arms against the current king). Countblanc posted:As someone who has gotten quite a few people who are aware of RPGs (read: they watch streams or listen to podcasts of D&D) into playing non-D&D games, almost all of those have come to the first session excitedly talking about where their character will exist on the alignment grid before being a bit deflated when one doesn't exist. My most generous reading on alignments is that they're a roleplaying aid for new players in a system which has painfully few of those - something that gets you thinking about your character's actions and beliefs. It doesn't really matter if your definition of "lawful" means "follows the letter of the law even in situations where that would result in immoral acts" and mine means "follows a personal code" because the only real benefit of alignment is that it got us thinking about whether our character believes those things. And in some cases it gives new or shy players something on their sheet to look at and point to when trying to figure out how their character might respond to a situation. Honestly one of my favorite things from the AW renaissance is bonds, and I'd love a game where your stats are just relationships.
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May 20, 2020 02:51
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Tulip posted:Yeah it's Gluckman. Nonfiction can inform your RPG! Especially since a lot of where people get cranky about alignment isn't purestrain in-game logic, but how that logic stacks up to IRL ethics. I was a bit confused by the section you quoted of Absurd Alhazred's hypotheticals, specifically the second half - would Gluckman not consider a monarchy being overthrown and replaced with a popularly elected republic, senate, etc as a revolution?
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May 20, 2020 03:05
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Leperflesh posted:But the classic D&D grid was a pretty crap way of doing that. And I think it's totally OK and good and maybe a bit more mature too, to conceptualize game universes in which unassailably correct deific authorities have not already determined universal morality with absolute clarity and certainty. More like the world we actually live in, where intelligent people in good faith can disagree on matters of ethics, and maybe you can't determine through experimentation whether passing up an invitation to help an old lady across the street is merely neutral, or actually evil, and whether if you help another lady across the street the next day, you've merely made up for the previous wrong, or what. Now that said, literary interest isn't the same as an actually fun RPG experience.
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May 20, 2020 03:23
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Nessus posted:In some ways this seems as constrained, almost more so, than the possibility space of "the unassailably correct godlike authorities have dispensed their Wisdom," because the godlike entities could have said whatever. Working out the permutations of a particular truth (like the one you described) seems as if it would have much more literary interest than "it's basically like real life, nobody really knows anything, nothing can be certain." Yeah. And I mean, you can totally throw in gods defining universal constants if you want, but if I were going to do that, I'd start with the gods, not with the constants. Characterize a deity, and then decide what that deity's edicts would be, and then apply them to your world... and then maybe with a pantheon, you can have conflicting definitions, and decide how that trickles out to normal people. I bet you don't wind up with an almost tediously boring equally-weighted two axis Theory of Everything.
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May 20, 2020 03:33
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Don’t do the heavy lifting for a text and just let it be bad
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May 20, 2020 03:34
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Leperflesh posted:Yeah. And I mean, you can totally throw in gods defining universal constants if you want, but if I were going to do that, I'd start with the gods, not with the constants. Characterize a deity, and then decide what that deity's edicts would be, and then apply them to your world... and then maybe with a pantheon, you can have conflicting definitions, and decide how that trickles out to normal people.
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May 20, 2020 03:52
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e: nm
Absurd Alhazred fucked around with this message at 19:41 on Jul 22, 2020 |
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May 20, 2020 04:27
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Doc Hawkins posted:brink back alignment languages imo Alignment stopped being cool or useful when alignment languages were dropped.
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May 20, 2020 05:30
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Nessus posted:In some ways this seems as constrained, almost more so, than the possibility space of "the unassailably correct godlike authorities have dispensed their Wisdom," because the godlike entities could have said whatever. Working out the permutations of a particular truth (like the one you described) seems as if it would have much more literary interest than "it's basically like real life, nobody really knows anything, nothing can be certain." I mean just off the top of the dome*, but rather than having gods that are "good" or "evil" or "lawful" or "chaotic", just having gods with multiple concrete tenants would be more interesting. Like having a god of education vs a god of learning, or a god of hospitality vs a god of self-reliance. Like the idea of people worshipping the god of rampant death pestilence skulls vs the god of happy fairy glade fun times is kind of silly, but the god of farming that lets me grow my crops vs the god of the forest that lets me feed my pigs is yeah a bit more mundane but also more personal and realistic. (Yeah I didn't appreciate how hard I was ripping off Glorantha until like halfway through typing that.) To put it in a really, really basic example that's totally over the top : a Paladin of Anarcho-Communism is an amazing character, much better than someone who serves Fantasy Legally Distinct From Jesus, and the alignment grid just totally fails that concept out of the gate. You don't have to have to put in giant elaborate efforts of anthropological world-building into your game, but stopping people from exploring that with lovely mechanics is much, much worse than nothing. *I'm ignoring axes for the moment but you could probably make one even if it's n-dimensional ; this is a toy example.
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May 20, 2020 05:31
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e: nm
Absurd Alhazred fucked around with this message at 19:41 on Jul 22, 2020 |
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May 20, 2020 05:43
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I actually had the paladin of communism come up while I was working on a character in a friend's game who was meant to be more an indirectly-inspired-by-Disco Elysium guy than, like, a guy with a Favored Enemy vs. kulaks and posting enemies. I actually went with Oath of the Crown on the theory that his focus would be on protecting others and that the 'crown' in this case represented the ideals he'd fought for in the Unfortunately Less Than Successful Recent War. I feel like a lot of the D&D games kind of have this strange yet deeply-ingrained approach to the topic of religion. It kind of has the worst of both worlds between classical "transactional, functional, maintain the favor of Zeus" religion and the more philosophical Abrahamic religions.
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May 20, 2020 06:22
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Absurd Alhazred posted:If it helps, 5E has abandoned Lawful Good as a requirement in favor of a list of oaths with specific tenets, depending on which one you choose. I think Oath of the Ancients or Oath of Vengeance might come close to Paladin of Anarcho-Communism, depending on how you play it. Thanks, fair point that there is a thing a I forgot they didn't back-slide on the earlier edition, but : 1) That doesn't have anything to do with my actual point and you're just saying that one of my examples is kind of possible. and 2) gently caress no they're never getting a cent of my money because they courted some of the most toxic people in the market possible. Hard pass. I don't like the game design but even if they made my ideal game I still wouldn't play on strictly moral grounds.
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May 20, 2020 06:30
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e: nm
Absurd Alhazred fucked around with this message at 19:42 on Jul 22, 2020 |
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May 20, 2020 14:26
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Once more, the fans step in to make gold out of D&D's dross. By which I mean, someone made a communism paladin. https://www.reddit.com/r/UnearthedArcana/comments/3g24o8/5e_the_oath_of_the_common_man_finally_the/
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May 20, 2020 22:05
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e: nm
Absurd Alhazred fucked around with this message at 19:42 on Jul 22, 2020 |
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May 20, 2020 22:14
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We're on week three of gaming with hyphz and he's totally a good dude who can improv like a pro and gave me some stellar ideas while we were playing. In true AW fashion I'm not so much running a game as saying "sure" to everything and going "O gently caress o gently caress ofuck I need a smoke break to figure out what this means". (Except not really, it usually is like 40 second staring into space). No but the the dude totally gets actual improv and can do it as good as anyone. He's a bro. I have I<3HYPHZ tattooed across my entire back, was that wrong?
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May 22, 2020 06:48
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I've been doing some reading to get my old-school druthers in time to run a couple of OSR modules and I'm fascinated by the 'problem' of Monty Haul campaigns and its implications in the design of later editions of D&D. Thanks to spotty DMG advice and AD&D's ridiculous training costs, a lot of groups ran into the problem of its players having more money and magic items than the game could reasonably account for, leading to a stark drop-off in challenge and the subsequent disintegration of campaigns due to player boredom. Obviously, a lot of the perception of this 'problem' was led by grumpy greybeards who treated their D&D games like they should be fantasy Vietnam, but an overly-charitable GM would definitely run into problems if they couldn't provide a tangible motivation for their players to engage with the core gameplay loop, which can be tricky when they're stinking rich and stomping around in +5 full plate. The solutions given were equal parts horrible and hilarious: quote:DMGR1 Campaign Sourcebook and Catacomb Guide (1990) suggests having all of the party's magic items flying together to form a magic item golem, which they must now fight. Defeating the creature would destroy most of the items. In later editions of D&D, it feels like the correction to this issue was making magic items core to PC advancement. This provides a tangible benefit to play in that it gives the same skinner box dopamine boost that loot games like Diablo give, where you explode the boss and a dope sword falls out. Maybe it's that set item I need!! It's also what you would spend your loot on, since generally encounter tables wouldn't give you everything you needed to maintain or beat parity with your enemies. This overcorrects into a new problem: the gear treadmill. You had to upgrade or buy new gear to maintain effectiveness. If you're a player who isn't interested in tracking enhancement bonuses, especially in a d20 game where each +1 is individually minor, having to constantly fiddle with your equipment is tiresome. It also undermines, to me, the satisfaction of finding magical gear. If a +4 longsword is required to maintain parity with monsters at your level, that reduces the sense that you've found something cool and meaningful for your character or the world. I don't generally believe you need to slavishly follow fantasy tropes to make a good fantasy TRPG, but I've always liked the idea that a character gets a couple of powerful, distinct artefacts. (Personally I don't even like enhancement 'levels' on items, and games like Godbound have a much better approach, but that's a more extreme position I'm not really discussing here.) So, to correct for the treadmill, 4e (and Pathfinder, eventually) instituted Inherent Bonuses for the player groups that didn't care for the treadmill; your stats just get upgraded as you level to keep you on par with the expected enhancement level of your equipment. This solves the problem item enhancement levels created by existing in the first place. While I'm not a 5e fan, I appreciate that they recognised the basic insanity here and just flattened the numbers, and reduced the emphasis of magic items on a character's stats. So far, so good. But this creates a final question: what the heck do you do with all that money you're finding? This came up earlier in this thread, and it's big question for me in the basic gameplay loop. I ran a 4e game for a couple of years using Inherent Bonuses and the players never spent a penny of their loot outside of travel supplies and costs I arbitrated (e.g. bribes for NPCs). They just didn't need to. This in turn eliminated the cost element of literally anything else the players wanted. A day's worth of supplies costs 5 gold, which meant a week of travel would cost maybe 140 gold; the party was sitting on something like 15,000 by the end of the campaign, and that was with me halving gold rewards. The answer to this was easy back in the day: money is your primary source of experience points. Getting out of the dungeon with as much gold as you can carry was the objective, rather than fighting everything that moves. Gold and XP was very quickly decoupled, however, and characters no longer have built-in gold sinks like the Fighter's barony. So it largely comes down to optional purchases. And if there's one thing an RPG player will instinctively do, it's hoard. The single solitary Monte Cook design principle I can get behind is placing more emphasis on limited-use items, which can be used to create an imperative to spend money to increase your versatility. The flip side of this, of course, is that as a general rule players hate using limited-use consumables. That said, I get the impression many players still enjoy collecting loot and getting the Money Number to go up, in the same way many players still like the discrete, granular progression given by XP. Is it okay that gold pieces in D&D have largely become the 'high score' for a campaign? Should design, moving forward, be trying to push players to spend their cash? If it did, is that creating a fun system, or an unpleasant obligation for a player to give up their hard-earned winnings to be allowed to keep playing?
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May 22, 2020 10:23
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The very long shadow cast by AD&D-era (really 80s-era) overequipped and hyper-paranoid parties is a fascinating one. I was browsing a very old copy of GURPS 2e Ultra-Tech recently, and while the book is total gear porn it spends an insane amount of wordcount on how the GM should monitor and control power levels. Items have to track battery levels or charges remaining, batteries themselves are loot and come in at least four incompatible types (a freaking multi-socket adaptor is a major high-end treasure item as a result), and the GM is given optional rules to introduce yet more incompatible battery and capacitor types if they wish. There is then an entirely separate section on product recalls and defective items, explicitly for GM use to shut down a PC's item that has grown too powerful - GMs are even encouraged to print newspapers as handouts to presumably draw the sting of telling a player they can't use their big toy anymore! Fear of PCs growing out of control and messing up the GM (or the publisher's) world drove Deadlands to include several invincible monsters solely for killing PCs before they disrupted the metaplot. At the other extreme we got the "shitfarming peasant" style of "daaaaaaark fantasy" where the PCs never see more for their pains than half a groat and some choice mud. Heck, even Rogue Trader (rather sarcastically) provided an extendable 10-foot pole in the exploration sourcebook, alongside a bunch of treasure generation tables. This seems to have seriously traumatised a whole generation of GMs. I'd be curious to hear from players from that era who did use things like the Fighter's barony and such; were they any fun to play around with? Did they come up at the table as a useful home base and something to spend money on?
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May 22, 2020 12:26
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e: nm
Absurd Alhazred fucked around with this message at 19:42 on Jul 22, 2020 |
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May 22, 2020 13:42
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How you deal with money (assuming you're taking a path of removing needing a +X to maintain your current level of effectiveness) depends on the fantasy level of the campaign, and what the players might be interested in. Rewarding them with a keep/castle or some sort of title and suddenly they've got various upkeeps, along with opportunities for improvements (rare herb gardens, wildlife preserve, wizard poo poo, spec ops quality trainings, etc) and plot hooks. If they're not really interested in that, maybe give them the opportunity to have powerful/artifact level gear crafted (cool+useful stuff and not like "slightly better damage"). Consumables are pretty neat, but if you want your players to leverage them more there needs to be a trust that using them up isn't going to screw them over at a bad time. Or that its a better use to try to sell them and get a better item marginally faster. I think something that actually helps is to make them fairly short-lived, so the choice becomes more "use it within this chunk of the adventure or its just gone" or "you can only carry 2 of these temporary charges at a time" to encourage players to use them. Then the GM needs to hold up their end of the bargain and make sure that using them doesn't screw them over or anything. Money is basically just a secondary power track (which is pretty effective, and something that people are very familiar with), so once you remove the "money makes you marginally better at the same things" you need to find other ways that spending improves their character's power. How that manifests really depends on what interests the group and how much fiddling the GM wants to do. A lot of people definitely enjoy having more than one way to increase their character's power, which is something that a lot of systems lack.
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May 22, 2020 14:30
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Absurd Alhazred posted:I've just been reading about the Gold Box games, and this problem came up there from a different direction: the interaction of the money as XP mechanic with the encumbrance mechanic. Pool of Radiance is expected to take you from level 1 to 5 or so. In a normal AD&D campaign, that could take months, and involve you going in and out of dungeons, traveling, etc. But you don't want that in a video game. So what do you do? Bombard your players with XP, meaning money. But money is heavy. It's very heavy. And each character can only carry so much, especially anyone other than fighters, and carrying more than a set amount slows you down even if you can carry it. In the beginning it's not a big deal because of how expensive staying at an inn is, and especially how expensive training to higher levels is, but at some point it gets ridiculous and you start throwing money away just to be able to move around. It's weird when you say it outright or put it in a video game or really even just think about it at all, but the actual game in AD&D-as-written boils down to trying to extract the maximum gp value out of a given hostile environment before it kills you. So figuring out whether it's optimal to carry out light sources and healing potions or more gold is supposed to be part of the game, yeah. There's even a mechanic for dropping treasure to distract pursuing monsters. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 15:17 on May 22, 2020 |
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May 22, 2020 15:15
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Absurd Alhazred fucked around with this message at 19:42 on Jul 22, 2020 |
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May 22, 2020 15:33
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ZypherIM posted:How you deal with money (assuming you're taking a path of removing needing a +X to maintain your current level of effectiveness) depends on the fantasy level of the campaign, and what the players might be interested in. Rewarding them with a keep/castle or some sort of title and suddenly they've got various upkeeps, along with opportunities for improvements (rare herb gardens, wildlife preserve, wizard poo poo, spec ops quality trainings, etc) and plot hooks. If they're not really interested in that, maybe give them the opportunity to have powerful/artifact level gear crafted (cool+useful stuff and not like "slightly better damage"). Yeah, and at first glance pre-3e AD&D had quite a few suggested ways of doing this. Recruiting hirelings and coming into land and fiscal responsibilities as you advanced was an expected factor, but that's largely removed or unsupported in modern editions. I ended up wrapping my 4e campaign up and moving it to another ruleset because the bookkeeping was getting me down, but my plan for Paragon tier was to have my players gain the opportunity to inherit / control institutions within their home city, which would've given mechanical and wider narrative benefits from investment of time / money. quote:Consumables are pretty neat, but if you want your players to leverage them more there needs to be a trust that using them up isn't going to screw them over at a bad time. Or that its a better use to try to sell them and get a better item marginally faster. I think something that actually helps is to make them fairly short-lived, so the choice becomes more "use it within this chunk of the adventure or its just gone" or "you can only carry 2 of these temporary charges at a time" to encourage players to use them. Then the GM needs to hold up their end of the bargain and make sure that using them doesn't screw them over or anything. That's definitely an issue in some groups, though thankfully, compared with videogame RPGs, a decent GM can make sure the use of a consumable is always meaningful, even if it's not optimal. I remember hearing Monte Cook did the time-limited thing, although he combined that with the dick move of not telling his players when the item would expire. I've struggled with limited-use items in my own game design, and for any combat model that uses discrete Encounters I would be inclined to make things encounter-limited, rather than full-stop limited.
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May 22, 2020 15:35
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Under the maxim of "experience is what you get when you didn't get what you wanted," I think it would be hilarious of treasure in D&D wasn't both money and experience, but either money (for the treasure you keep) or experience (1xp for every gp you leave behind because you couldn't figure out how to take it). So you either get the valuable treasure or you learn a valuable lesson ("poo poo, we shoulda brought a donkey with us"), and part of the fun is in balancing XP advancement with money advancement.ZypherIM posted:Consumables are pretty neat, but if you want your players to leverage them more there needs to be a trust that using them up isn't going to screw them over at a bad time. In many cases you can also spend extra charges to increase your chances of success on any given roll, so balancing short-term success vs long-term resource management is built into the game. I was really impressed with how it worked in play. Fair warning though - the mechanics are cool but god drat the subject matter is dark.
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May 22, 2020 16:41
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Loxbourne posted:Items have to track battery levels or charges remaining, batteries themselves are loot and come in at least four incompatible types
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May 22, 2020 17:34
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Ilor posted:Under the maxim of "experience is what you get when you didn't get what you wanted," I think it would be hilarious of treasure in D&D wasn't both money and experience, but either money (for the treasure you keep) or experience (1xp for every gp you leave behind because you couldn't figure out how to take it). So you either get the valuable treasure or you learn a valuable lesson ("poo poo, we shoulda brought a donkey with us"), and part of the fun is in balancing XP advancement with money advancement. Yea I'm a pretty big fan of Red Markets, and it does sort of run on "everything is consumable", but also with "you still need to eat at the end of the day, and you're trying to save up to get out of this hell too, and oh god I need to pay for maintenance on my gun so it works, and I owe Jim for a favor poo poo". It works well because its an integral design to the system and the style of story you tell with it I think. Another thing that is similar to a consumable would be will power in wild talents (or other similar systems). Essentially its a resource you can spend to get bonuses to rolls, and you get it by doing heroic stuff (its a super hero system), but its bad if you run completely out, and it slowly comes back over time as well. I think two reasons it works well is that the player knows how they'll get more, and that it doesn't enable them to do something completely different. Like in D&D a lot of consumables give you options you didn't have before, so you're sort of thinking "can I get by without using this, in case later I *need* to be able to do X". In general pseudo-consumable character resources are pretty interesting, like moxie in eclipse phase (reroll/mulligan stat), or luck in cthulu 7e (permanently burn your luck to make a roll now), or I guess anything in GUMSHOE. Depending on how harsh the system is designed to be they may or may not refresh, but the systems are pretty much always open about how and when that happens, letting the player make a fairly informed decision.
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May 22, 2020 17:58
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Xiahou Dun posted:We're on week three of gaming with hyphz and he's totally a good dude who can improv like a pro and gave me some stellar ideas while we were playing. Pretty strong evidence that hyphz's group is trash garbage, making a person with good improv skills question his ability to do anything right.
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May 22, 2020 18:21
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Ilor posted:Under the maxim of "experience is what you get when you didn't get what you wanted," I think it would be hilarious of treasure in D&D wasn't both money and experience, but either money (for the treasure you keep) or experience (1xp for every gp you leave behind because you couldn't figure out how to take it). So you either get the valuable treasure or you learn a valuable lesson ("poo poo, we shoulda brought a donkey with us"), and part of the fun is in balancing XP advancement with money advancement.
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May 22, 2020 18:34
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e: nm
Absurd Alhazred fucked around with this message at 19:42 on Jul 22, 2020 |
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May 22, 2020 18:41
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I love Xiahou's evolution into a Hyphz hype-man. Re: rich PCs, I have a thought, half-baked but that's good enough for a shitpost about it. I vaguely recall that back in the days of greek city-states, and then also during the times of the roman empire, and probably in many other times and places, there was a strong societal expectation that the wealthy would voluntarily spend chunks of their money on civic improvements. As opposed to the large central governments that tax everyone, raise huge amounts of funds, and then fund major infrastructure projects that we're familiar with today, back then central governments were much much smaller, had far less buying power, were saddled with more volatile and less reliable currency systems, etc. etc. The way you got a viaduct or a library or just some nice new paving in the city square, was that someone or a few someones in the community who had lots of money just fuckin' paid for it. And then everyone praised that person for their charity. Being a "miser" didn't mean necessarily that a person of means enjoyed no luxuries; it meant a person of means spent little or nothing on improvements for the commons. Or for the wealthier citizenry, at least. So one issue for your quasi-medieval murderhobo simulator is that the rich PCs are too frequently disconnected from any community on which they might be motivated to spend. But as a GM, you can manufacture that community anyway, via the PC's reputation; as they gain in power and accumulate deeds, people have heard of them even in places they are only just now arriving to. And part of that reputation, if it is deserved, is that while the heroes may have defeated the Dark Lord, driven the zombies from the Alabaster Shrine, and fought bravely at the Battle of the Three Shards... they're increasingly known for being miserly bastards, who are walking around with - or so it's told - hundreds of thousands of GP, bags full of glittering gems, etc. They haven't founded even one single orphanage, assisted with the construction of even a minor village church, or donated any magic Corucopias of Everfood to the Beggar's Guild. Another approach might be taxation of idle wealth. Depending on the political system in place, it'd maybe be totally reasonable for some emperor or council of wizards to determine that, clearly those who are so rich that they can't find a single useful, productive thing to do with their vaults of gold, can afford to give up a tenth of it annually. Players might feel pressure to spend their money if they know they'll gradually just lose it if they don't. Both of the above might not work in a campaign where the characters are traveling to places where they cannot plausibly have been heard of (plane-hopping? exploring the lost continent?), and they both put a fair amount of pressure on the GM to figure out a "fair" level of pressure to put on the players that isn't too onerous or punitive, feels reasonable within the context of the story, and isn't just completely aribtrary. Of course another option is to just not hand out loads of free cash. Who, really, leaves chests of gold behind when they abandon their underground labyrinths, anyway? Suppose upon slaying dragons, you discovered that in this world, dragons don't hoard money they're incapable of spending, given that swooping down to the bazaar in the human city with chests of gold gripped in one's mighty claws tends not to be conducive to a subsequent tough-but-fair bargaining session for some, I don't know, dragon-sized jewelry or a pen full of delicious cattle? Historically, hard currency has often been both horribly devalued and in very short supply, especially in larger denominations. You can find extremely lovely cheap bronze coinage all over europe, but many a roman emperor or european king devaluated their silver, mixed silver in with their gold, and shrunk the size of their tiny gold coins even further, and of course, clipping or filing bits of gold off the coins was a constant problem because of the fluctuating instability of both the face value of coins, and the market value of precious metals. It might be an unwelcome "realism" to throw into your fantasy game, and certainly doesn't support the fantasy trope of the hidden vaults piled high with heaps of gleaming gold that we're all familiar with, but... it might be interesting to just go ahead and have your game take place in a setting where it's just not practical or feasible to accumulate large amounts of liquid cash. There's enough currency for basic economic activity to take place, so people aren't stuck trying to trade furniture for chickens in the market, but if you want to save up enough to buy a manor or a galleon or a Vorpal Sword, you're going to have to accumulate valuables to trade or draw credit against. The Baroness commissions her fleet by drawing credit against the incomes from her lands and holdings with promissory notes, bleeding relatively small payments of cash into the hands of the shipwrights over a period of years, because simply showing up at the docs with 100,000 gold crowns to plonk down on the table is a practical impossibility. Satisfaction of the promissory notes might be accomplished via a later handshake deal to transmit the deed to a dockside warehouse, an agreement to supply 12k bushels of amaranth annually for three years, and the free use for no more than five days per month of the Baroness's house wizard for the next six months. Maybe your players don't want to engage in a minigame of favor-trading and contractural obligations, though. Maybe you can abstract that all out into a generic "wealth" stat, with (say) five or six tiers; when they find piles of gold in a dungeon, there's a chance that it increases someone's Wealth stat by one, or perhaps raises the minimum Wealth stat among the party to no less than 2, and otherwise just doesn't matter in the particular count of exact gold coins? Perhaps given the choice between the bizarre unrealism of a party of murderhobos gallavanting about the realms with a baggage train of carts hauling vast wealth minted in perfectly fungible universally-accepted identically sized disks of solid gold on the one hand, or the annoying difficulty of inventing and applying myriad difficult-to-balance and time-consuming-to-use spreadsheets and contracts and obligations to extract the excess currency from the pockets of your adventurers on the other, you can just dismiss both in favor of, you know, that thing that RPGs do in every other aspect of the adventure: use an abstraction mechanic to dump the un-fun bits of fantasy sim out of the game and let the players get on with the actually fun parts. Then again, maybe you're like me, and you just fuckin' love you some spreadsheets and pages of pseudofantasy contract language and complicated debt-obligation relationship diagrams. That's cool too.
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May 22, 2020 19:15
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Absurd Alhazred posted:That sounds more Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser than Conan. Conan ends up being a king, while those two never seem to amass anything other than enemies and trouble (and unaddressed pederasty). Conan didn't buy his kingdom by accumulating gold; he won it with his sword, and later, with his ability to lead men with swords.
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May 22, 2020 19:17
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Leperflesh posted:I love Xiahou's evolution into a Hyphz hype-man. A Hyphz-man? 
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May 22, 2020 19:21
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Leperflesh posted:Conan didn't buy his kingdom by accumulating gold; he won it with his sword, and later, with his ability to lead men with swords. Well, when he was a fighting man, the kettle drums they beat, and the people scattered gold dust before his horse’s feet. So there was gold being tossed around, he just wasn’t doing the tossing.
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May 22, 2020 19:29
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e: nm
Absurd Alhazred fucked around with this message at 19:42 on Jul 22, 2020 |
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May 22, 2020 19:37
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Yeah but the point is that he never kept a sack of gold and wisely invested it or even just carried it around; he caroused it away, and when he sobered up, he hopped on a horse and got busy with the adventure and maybe the crushing of enemy forces in a battle or whatever. Actually, IIRC Howard was quite vague about how exactly Conan seized his throne (well, he strangles the former king and seizes it, but: how did that work, exactly?) and since he hasn't got real political influence, his kingship is more or less immediately imperiled and lost (but then regained). In The Phoenix on the Sword, his very first published Conan story, Conan is already king. The story re-used chunks from an earlier King Kull draft, and it establishes a context for the later published stories (which most or all take place earlier in the chronology) of Conan's adventures; he is destined to become a King by his own hand. I think there's only one or two other Conan-as-King stories; The Scarlet Citadel was the second Conan story published, and he's still King in that one. And then The Hour of the Dragon, which I'll need to refresh my memory of, but IIRC is basically a retelling of the same plot as The Scarlet Citadel. The point is, at no point does Conan's possession of the crown imply that he's gotten better with money. He didn't exactly "accumulate" power, he just fell rear end-backwards into it at times because he slew the right dudes, and then pretty rapidly proves unsuited, brooding on his throne in his dark moods before galavanting off to war somewhere or getting harassed by a sorcerer or whatever. Definitely not wisely and prudently running economies. It's useful to understand that Howard's foundational thesis was that civilization was inherently corrupt and that barbarism was mankind's natural and most honest state. His Conan stories are all basically supportive of that theme; Conan succeeds when he embraces the purity of a life lived in the immediacy of combat, adventure, carousal, and travel. Basically everyone civilized is either helplessly weak, corrupt, vulnerable, or at best, confined and trapped by their circumstances; Conan's free lifestyle and uncomplicated ethics are the superior, natural, laudible way to live. So it's not just inaccurate but absurd to propose that Conan would ever not blow all his money on women and booze and maybe a good horse and some armor. Although I'm sure several of the hacks who wrote posthumous Conan stories probably failed to really understand or embrace that philosophy, so maybe there's some Carter or deCamp story to find where Conan gets a bank account and invests in an agriculture business or something. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 20:53 on May 22, 2020 |
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May 22, 2020 20:48
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e: nm
Absurd Alhazred fucked around with this message at 19:42 on Jul 22, 2020 |
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May 22, 2020 20:52
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Yeah I read the first novel (or collection of?) Fafhrd stories, and the grim fatalism of them turned me off, even though I generally enjoyed the writing style. It wasn't quite to the level of torture porn that so many later fantasy (and SF) writers seemed to revel in, but; those two dudes are just fated to always have a bad time, survive it, and just be glad to not be dead in the end. "What should we do with all this gold" doesn't seem like it'd come up very often?
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May 22, 2020 20:57
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e: nm
Absurd Alhazred fucked around with this message at 19:42 on Jul 22, 2020 |
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May 22, 2020 21:05
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| # ? Jun 8, 2024 23:32 |
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hype-man is my favorite improv game. person A (the reporter) asks person B (the star) "what do you like about yourself." person B gives whatever answer. person C (the hype-man (we'll work on a more inclusive name)) then hyperbolically extolls whatever person B said for as long as they can without stopping. or like 30 seconds, because you want to go around the group so everyone gets to be each role at least once. philosophy of role-playing: your games should have thematically appropriate opening rituals that help people get in a fun-having mood. if they don't, you can come up with one, like a very fast round of improv or even just a check-in round so everyone knows how everyone else is doing, and that everyone else cares how they're doing.
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May 22, 2020 21:13
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