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homullus posted:Pretty strong evidence that hyphz's group is trash garbage, making a person with good improv skills question his ability to do anything right. Eh, it's a mixture of things, and improvising as a player is different from as a GM. I mean, take an example. Last session, we ended up getting noticed by a pack of wolves, and an over-enthusiastic Gunlugger shot at the forest spirit (a Rübezahl to be exact) who appeared to be gathering them together. What followed was a panicked series of close shaves and rescues and a hurried retreat when we realized that shooting at a creature that embodies the concept of forest isn't too smart an idea, especially when you are in the forest at the time. Now in this game this went fine, and everyone enjoyed what happened, and we came out of it with some interesting developments. And I want to make clear that I have no criticism at all of XD's GMing at all. But if I'd been running it, that's _exactly_ the kind of thing I would have felt very awkward about including. If someone had complained about what happened I don't know how it would have resolved - no-one did, and I don't get the feeling anyone wanted to, but as a GM I'd feel the need to be ready that they might do. What if someone had argued that I had set up an unwinnable encounter, that from the moment the shot was fired I was just messing with the PCs for amusement? It's easy to argue the setting - that the Rübezahl is incredibly powerful and would not be vulnerable to being shot. But the counterargument would be that, that property of the Rübezahl is just something I made up and I could not have done so, or changed it. After all, wasn't I supposed to "say yes rather than no"? If the PCs want to be able to shoot the Rübezahl - and obviously they do, because they just did it - shouldn't they be allowed to? The first action the Rübezahl took was to extend a hand over several metres and grab the member of the party who tried to shoot it with a sniper rifle, inflicting 4-harm on them. What if he'd objected? The MC move is "inflict harm as established", had it really been established that the Rübezahl had a ranged attack, or that its hand was as damaging is "serious f****** automatic fire"? Again I have to reiterate that I am not making these complaints, and nobody had any problem with what happened in the session - it was fun! But any player could have, and that's what makes me very nervous of running for crunchier groups or even strangers - that any situation like that could end up with me on the spot with no defense.
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May 22, 2020 21:18
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Hyphz, this is why we say mutual trust with players is so important. You’re right, this went well and nobody complained, and the reason for that is that both sides of the equation clearly trusted each other and we’re mutually supportive. I’m really glad XD’s group has that trust! That’s really great, and I’m glad you’ve found it possible to trust XD and that group.
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May 22, 2020 21:22
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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 21:32
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You are catastrophizing, hyphz.
ovenboy fucked around with this message at 22:00 on May 22, 2020 |
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May 22, 2020 21:56
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Leperflesh posted: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? Amusingly, Glen Cook's Fafhrd/Conan expy, Bragi Ragnar, starts the second book of the original trilogy having settled down on a frontier land grant and has to deal with grain futures and harvest schedules as well as wolves and bandits. He's doing okay at it. hyphz posted:Again I have to reiterate that I am not making these complaints, and nobody had any problem with what happened in the session - it was fun! But any player could have, and that's what makes me very nervous of running for crunchier groups or even strangers - that any situation like that could end up with me on the spot with no defense. Time to learn to trust your gaming group - XD's, not the broken assholes you usually play with. Time to take the plunge and GM for people who don't suck. Maybe not now, but soon !
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May 22, 2020 22:31
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Zeerust posted: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? Money as experience relates to the idea that once you get your fantabulous items that can be converted into money, you are usually in a remote part of the world and getting back to town to fence off your hard-won gains is a challenge in and of itself (referencing Outdoor Survival and the like). I like to think of money and experience as the same types of reward tool that helps give players and their characters some validation that what they're doing is worthwhile in the moment, particularly useful for newer players. There are other ways of doing this. Final Fantasy RPG 3rd Edition and other games had progression tables but the levels were stretched between 1 to 65 instead of 1 to 20 or 1 to 30. You could just as easily have characters that get to the next well-defined tier of equipment without awarding them money because their characters have a favorite weapon that gets better over time (also has some narrative significance there). 3.5e D&D toyed around with this using "Weapons of Legacy" and "Anointed Weapons" that generally got better over time, and 4e sort of eschewed it. I guess the question comes down to, do your players like paperwork and tracking things, like Leperflesh does? Some do (see other posts regarding experience earlier in this thread, pgs 21-23 or so). Previously the most reductive way of playing D&D specifically was the dungeon crawl and getting out with the loot and getting more powerful on the treadmill as a very basic way of playing the game before people started extending the context out from not just dungeons and dragons but kingdoms and calamity. In real life (bear with me here) money pervades everything in modern society, so getting a bunch of money would make sense because it has direct cultural reference since you can spend money on everything and need to spend money to survive. The amount of choices that need to be made with money reflects some amount of agency (or lack thereof - bills to pay?) and there's some bits of fun in spending money (time to go on a vacation!). However, in RPGs, money is an abstraction and usually just a roadblock to more fun. Red Markets and Torchbearer handle this type of resourcing in a different way. The idea of broke-rear end adventurers came about since money in general is just hard to come by in D&D if you aren't a peasant worried only about their own subsistence, or a feudal lord or merchant that skims off the fat of the land. As a lesson of my tables and also because I've been playing Amazing Cultivation Simulator recently (great game for ideas, by the by), money is only a means to some goals, but true power and abilities are well beyond such mundane things. I think the need to catalogue and slap a price on everything causing the laundry list of arms, equipment, spell, and magic item costs has ultimately caused a somewhat poor image of money having to always matter at every scale in D&D. To me, getting money is not going to really propel you forward in a campaign or get you on a high score board. I generally just say that money can't buy stuff like magic swords or spells after a certain point, and that truly powerful things must be quested for. Alternately, you can change the currency from gold pieces to quatloos or ducats or spirit stones or some such, there's some kind of exchange of resources going on. How can you make money fun? As with anything in roleplaying games, talking to a table gets the best results, but from a design standpoint, putting money sinks in are fine, since it's expected that players will use their money to buy cool stuff and fund armies and castles and the like if they're interested in power creep. Otherwise, they can spend their moneys to do something narrative in the game world like that Unknown Armies story about the copper bathtub. Money doesn't have to be spent to be narratively interesting. Doc Hawkins posted: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. I took the opportunity for last night's game with the Thursday D&D group to introduce to them the concept of a Caller (aka, your Party cat-herder) as well as the "ready sheet" where everybody gave a readout of their stats and the like. I figured out in Roll20 a decent enough way to do it, still hate the UI and all, but at least I gave them something to look at and collaborate over while they also crawl around in a dungeon. I also gave them a fun prompt (favorite food) which had some minor narrative relevance in that night's session. There's a concept of a 'magic circle' that might be used in cinema and other things that reflects the transition from one horrible reality to another, slightly more heroic one. These can be subtle or overt, and they are great for all players to get comfortable and settle in, particularly after a long week of real world worries. -- I'm grappling with a bit of an obnoxious problem in that I'm currently up to running five games a week but I'm finding that I have want or need of more tabletop RPG time. I'm wondering if this is because there's something in those games that I'm running right now that I'm not actually getting in terms of satisfaction, or that I'm using it as a surrogate for being able to go outside safely to socialize with other people? I think that if I tried to run five in-person game nights, things would get pretty exhausting for me, but running online seems to remove that exhausting portion enough that I have a curious abundance of gaming energy, one that I'm not sure what to do with, exactly. Hence, the dilemma: Do I run a sixth game to try and scratch that itch further? Find another game that fits my specific schedule (which, thus far, has not worked out that well)? Or maybe just chill out and try doing something else with my time? Am I turning into the tradgames equivalent of a barfly?
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May 22, 2020 23:34
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aldantefax posted:Hence, the dilemma: Do I run a sixth game to try and scratch that itch further? Find another game that fits my specific schedule (which, thus far, has not worked out that well)? Or maybe just chill out and try doing something else with my time? Am I turning into the tradgames equivalent of a barfly? Are you playing in any games, or only running them? Could that be a source of the rabbit starvation you're experiencing?
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May 22, 2020 23:42
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Leperflesh posted:Are you playing in any games, or only running them? Could that be a source of the rabbit starvation you're experiencing? Currently I am running those 5 games and playing in a fortnightly D&D game, so I am perhaps seeking the actual playing portion rather than running right now. I do think it's good for most DMs, particularly ones that run games all the time, to have at least some time on the other side of the screen on a regular basis.
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May 22, 2020 23:46
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On the topic of money, I always literally fall asleep like that meme of a cockatiel when the discussion of gold piece mechanics comes up and it's more than "hey, that guy has a ruby the size of a chicken breast, maybe we can steal that for money." The idea of an economics game of that depth seems like it could be a fun computer game but I have to play the "make a modest sum last/produce results" game in real life. The Call of Cthulhu "credit rating" system, where you basically have a number that reflects your general socioeconomic status/ready cash, seems like a solid one - I think a lot of other games have tried to reinvent the wheel and have added some kind of preposterous quantities of sums that have no narrative impact, or are trying to huff Batman's farts by saying if you just HAPPEN to have eleventyjillion dollars than of COURSE you can fist fight Superman! etc.
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May 22, 2020 23:57
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poo poo man, I'm running 1 game and playing 0 and it's stressing me out. Running a 10:1 ratio over 2 weeks is crazy to me.
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May 23, 2020 00:21
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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 23, 2020 01:45
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hyphz posted:What if someone had argued that I had set up an unwinnable encounter, that from the moment the shot was fired I was just messing with the PCs for amusement? It's easy to argue the setting - that the Rübezahl is incredibly powerful and would not be vulnerable to being shot. But the counterargument would be that, that property of the Rübezahl is just something I made up and I could not have done so, or changed it. After all, wasn't I supposed to "say yes rather than no"? If the PCs want to be able to shoot the Rübezahl - and obviously they do, because they just did it - shouldn't they be allowed to? And anyone who gets their knickers in a twist that the GM is being somehow "unfair" by having their attempted action fail - especially if it is fictionally/narratively appropriate - either has bad opinions or is arguing in bad faith. In neither case is GM the problem.
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May 23, 2020 03:09
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Leperflesh posted:Re: rich PCs, I have a thought, half-baked but that's good enough for a shitpost about it. I've always wanted a game where the PCs were lawyers for a hard-bitten space or fantasy mercenary operation, and have to negotiate all the contracts and bonds and such that get taken for granted in those settings. Oh you want salvage rights for giant mechs? Whose crane you gonna risk then? And so on. I firmly agree with the idea that bonding the PCs to an area and letting them put down roots could be lots of fun. Funding an Athenian trireme is excellent, funding a fishing fleet even better (dip into the classics here - no seriously the actual classics, a lot of Greek comedy revolves around fish and fishing fleets, it was a keystone of their diet). Giving the players transport options is always good. Some groups may like the aqueduct option, especially if it gives local bonuses. Others will really get into castle design. I once ages ago saw some decently-thought-out rules on how to handle runaway status levels in Traveller (it was alarmingly easy to get yourself into the nobility and climb the ranks until you were technically equal, statuswise, with the Emperor) and some suggestions were that the PCs be adopted into a noble house and now have a LOT of expectations, or a great idea with funding their own army unit. Yes the 372nd Murderhobos' Own were now yours to...well...not command, since the army does that. But you do get to ride out with them, get a shiny uniform, host regimental balls and do intrigue-y things, and if the players can pacify the sector then great, NOW they can free up some troops to come adventure with them at a dramatic moment. This does mean a complex subsystem, but complex subsystems can be a lot of fun when they enhance player choice.
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May 23, 2020 12:08
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hyphz posted:What if someone had argued that I had set up an unwinnable encounter, that from the moment the shot was fired
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May 23, 2020 12:14
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Ilor posted:"Yes, and..." is about building on someone's improvisation. So yeah, when Jonathan said "I shoot the Rübezahl!" then XD responded with, "Yes, and... it looks like that just really pissed it off! Well, that's the trick. It's typically pedantic to interpret "can" do something as meaning that it is possible but with only negative consequences - like someone says "You can't just kill people in the US" and a neckbeardy type corrects with "Technically you can, you just go to jail afterwards". It didn't really strike to me that "Yes, and.." Splicer posted:The moment a party member chose to fire the shot, you mean. Thing is, this is a party member (a Gunlugger in this case) who has made a character devoted to shooting, not very good at things which are not shooting, and who has indicated they want to resolve this by shooting. This is very similar to what happened in the Shadowrun game I ran where The Warrior also made a massively min-maxed gun user and shot everything. If I decide, out of hold cloth, that no amount of shooting can work on this target then I'm essentially just outright excluding that party member from the encounter - essentially "rocks fall you collpase" on that individual. hyphz fucked around with this message at 17:57 on May 23, 2020 |
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May 23, 2020 17:53
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Would that character have tried to shoot the sun to make it night? What's possible flows from the fiction. I think the big idea here is that RPGs as shared storytelling experiences rely on everyone trusting each other and acting in food faith. Your players lack trust which is what's producing bad experiences.
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May 23, 2020 18:05
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Mr. Prokosch posted:Would that character have tried to shoot the sun to make it night? That's in a different category because it's obviously true. The fact that the sun cannot be shot is not something I'm making up (unless the character is using some bizarre kind of fictional gun about which there might be doubt about ability to shoot the sun)
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May 23, 2020 18:23
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i made a nobilis character once who was quite vulnerable and impotent except they had aspect 7 thievery and could steal the sun from the sky i just wanted to share that hyphz posted:Thing is, this is a party member (a Gunlugger in this case) who has made a character devoted to shooting, not very good at things which are not shooting, and who has indicated they want to resolve this by shooting. This is very similar to what happened in the Shadowrun game I ran where The Warrior also made a massively min-maxed gun user and shot everything. If I decide, out of hold cloth, that no amount of shooting can work on this target then I'm essentially just outright excluding that party member from the encounter - essentially "rocks fall you collpase" on that individual. first, if you're playing apocalypse world, there are a million problems that cannot be fixed by gunfire and that's good, announce badness to the gunlugger that they can't shoot like "mom's dying" or "there's not enough loving water" and they'll do your job for you running around getting in trouble and debt. if instead you're playing a game like d&d, which presumes and in practice forces all players to solve problems together as a group, then don't describe any big challenges which deny the contributions of any player. challenges can deny player contributions in two ways:
for every big challenge, every player character be able to use Their Thing, and, victory should depend on every character doing their thing. you want challenges that can only be beaten by all the heroes heroically heroing together. there's an entire world of difference between "shooting this guy doesn't work" and "you can't take this guy out alone". Doc Hawkins fucked around with this message at 23:44 on May 23, 2020 |
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May 23, 2020 18:53
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Honestly that guy seems like a perfect fellow to introduce to a scenario where Not Shooting is clearly a Good Idea that'll benefit the group, and Shooting is a Bad Idea that will get them in trouble. Not as a gotcha trap or something, more in order to challenge his character's world view. Fighting for what you believe in (Shooting Things, in this case) is of course a worthy endevour, but so is making the hard choice to set aside personal beliefs for the greater good. What will he do when presented with two worthy options with interesting consequences?
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May 23, 2020 19:01
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ovenboy posted:Honestly that guy seems like a perfect fellow to introduce to a scenario where Not Shooting is clearly a Good Idea that'll benefit the group, and Shooting is a Bad Idea that will get them in trouble. Not as a gotcha trap or something, more in order to challenge his character's world view. Fighting for what you believe in (Shooting Things, in this case) is of course a worthy endevour, but so is making the hard choice to set aside personal beliefs for the greater good. What will he do when presented with two worthy options with interesting consequences? He will take the greater good option after spotting the obvious trope. There's very little interest in those decisions in practice.
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May 23, 2020 19:04
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hyphz posted:He will take the greater good option after spotting the obvious trope. There's very little interest in those decisions in practice. To be clear, you mean 'in my group, there's very little interest in those decisions in practice.' I've had players go all in on the bad option and grin all the way through it, or who get immense joy out of their characters struggling to overcome their own limitations that way. A key part of trust is that players are willing to pick up what you're putting down, and you're willing to engage with their characters theatrically (whether in author mode or actor mode). Trust can include 'I trust you to care about the world of this fiction' going both ways. Joe Slowboat fucked around with this message at 19:13 on May 23, 2020 |
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May 23, 2020 19:08
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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 23, 2020 19:10
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The Gunlugger who decides to shoot it out against a large group of heavily armed, very angry people can't complain if one or more PCs or friendly NPCs eat a bullet. That's just the GM inflicting Harm as established; it's a legit GM move. Maybe they should have let someone else have the spotlight that scene. Maybe they should have tried talking or handing over the Maguffin and tried to recover it later - which they can't do if everyone is bleeding or dead. Players are allowed to make mistakes. GMs are allowed to provide consequences, and RAW PbtA are almost required to. The "Look through crosshairs" principle can start a short trip to someone making a new character. Players who can't handle hearing "well what did you think would happen ?" need to grow up a bit. The GM also has tools to head this situation off. Asking "are you sure ? there's a lot of people with guns" is a universal signal across game systems and genre's that bad things are going to happen if they persist. In PbtA this is a chance to 'Tell them the possible consequences and ask' or 'Offer an opportunity, with or without a cost'. "Sure, you can headshot the Humungus, but you're going to immediately roll the Harm move against a very large number, and if you're still on your feet you'll be exposed and surrounded. Want to go for it ?" As a fan of the PCs there's room to maneuver even when they try to pull off something stupid. But sometimes it means giving them a chance to go out in a blaze of glory. The Gunlugger just doming the Humungus means a lieutenant will step up. The Gunlugger taking cover in a tent that happens to be the gang's armory or fuel dump can do enough damage on their way out that the status quo might change.
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May 23, 2020 19:18
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At a certain point you have to know what the players are hoping to get out of the game. It's totally valid to want to play a power fantasy, where you know exactly what you can do and everything you try will succeed. I'm not sure what game would provide that experience, however.
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May 23, 2020 22:58
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Bongo Bill posted:At a certain point you have to know what the players are hoping to get out of the game. It's totally valid to want to play a power fantasy, where you know exactly what you can do and everything you try will succeed. I'm not sure what game would provide that experience, however. Something PBTA but overtuned for the players could work; just have fun smashing together move powers that let you be super cool, and have 6- be nerfed and your numbers grow constantly.
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May 23, 2020 23:35
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hyphz posted:That's in a different category because it's obviously true. The fact that the sun cannot be shot is not something I'm making up (unless the character is using some bizarre kind of fictional gun about which there might be doubt about ability to shoot the sun) He was shooting a Dark Eldritch God that represented the concept of the forest and had been established as being a hundred+ feet tall that was holding a concert for magic wolves made out of plants. And he still hurt it but 1) the harm clock on that thing is loving enormous, I'm basically treating it as a building, and 2) he rolled incredibly lovely. You'll remember that a bit after that you managed to shoot its hand off and Balthasar broke its harp. You guys were hardly doing nothing while I cackled about rocks falls everyone dies. You picked a fight with something that was shown to be a huge and scary god and then all rolled like 4s ; no poo poo it went loving bad. No amount of "yes and" is gonna let someone take out a tank by throwing a spoon at it, especially not if they rolled for poo poo.
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May 24, 2020 01:50
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Xiahou Dun posted:He was shooting a Dark Eldritch God that represented the concept of the forest and had been established as being a hundred+ feet tall that was holding a concert for magic wolves made out of plants. wow, all i hear is choo choo choo, mr railroad quote:No amount of "yes and" is gonna let someone take out a tank by throwing a spoon at it, especially not if they rolled for poo poo.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QnX_mQ9apu8&t=62s (obviously, sounds like it was a fun game  )
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May 24, 2020 02:16
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Xiahou Dun posted:He was shooting a Dark Eldritch God that represented the concept of the forest and had been established as being a hundred+ feet tall that was holding a concert for magic wolves made out of plants. Um. You sound defensive and that's what I'm trying to avoid, because I don't want to criticise you. I don't want to criticise you because it worked in play, it was fun, I was fine with it, but especially because it's exactly the kind of thing I'd be afraid of being criticised for if I was running and I of all people don't want to be that guy ("I must not become the thing I feared..."). Fictional justification doesn't defuse that kind of criticism if there's no external source for the fiction. The god of the forest didn't have to specifically be immune to bullets (unlike throwing a spoon at a tank, because everyone understands what a tank as and why a spoon won't hurt it, but nobody knows what forest gods are and so that property is just made up), and even if we grant that the enemy didn't have to be the god of the forest in the first place.... There doesn't really seem to be much of a response to that if it comes up other than calling it out as social contract and that's a social standing thing.
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May 24, 2020 02:29
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Nah I ain't feeling put upon. I'm just using the example. I've even talked to the player and they were like, "No I didn't think it'd work it's the god drat Ruebezahl, I just thought it was good fiction and what my character would do." It's not like it's immune to bullets, you saw bullets hurt it. It's just not gonna go down to two shots and it's gonna hit you like a train full of bricks because that was established in the fiction. It's a timeless magical being from beyond space and time that's the size of a castle. It's like trying to start a boxing match with an elephant : who would think that just shooting it once would kill it? That character knew what they were doing and then they rolled god-drat clown shoes on top of it so it went badly. And no one objected because that's the exact thing we all came to the game to play. Like, I literally don't understand what these hypothetical problems could be assuming the players actually wanted to play this kind of game.
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May 24, 2020 02:49
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hyphz posted:There doesn't really seem to be much of a response to that if it comes up other than calling it out as social contract and that's a social standing thing. Similarly given the example of "I shoot the sun" as a move in a PBTA game of something: I don't know all the ritual words, phrases and codes of conduct of this particular tribe, but this seems to go "against the fiction" unless you're playing Mythic Western Heroes or Pogo the Possum or something. If you just try to shoot your pistol at the sun in the sky, "OK, you pop off a couple rounds. Nothing happens." Nessus fucked around with this message at 03:29 on May 24, 2020 |
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May 24, 2020 03:25
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Nessus posted:If somebody does that poo poo to you on the regular (once in a great while as a joke, or as an occasional "OK that kind of broke my immersion, gimme a moment" thing) they're being an rear end in a top hat. If you feel you are in a situation where your social standing is such that people are able to be assholes to you freely and you have to go along with it, you should leave that situation, because you've pre-emptively defined it as a conflict and put you in the situation of defeat. If I leave I can never join another situation because “the new guy” is exactly a position with that standing. The people in the group may not be assholes to me but they would be able to. quote:Similarly given the example of "I shoot the sun" as a move in a PBTA game of something: I don't know all the ritual words, phrases and codes of conduct of this particular tribe, but this seems to go "against the fiction" unless you're playing Mythic Western Heroes or Pogo the Possum or something. If you just try to shoot your pistol at the sun in the sky, "OK, you pop off a couple rounds. Nothing happens." All these examples have the problem that they refer to things that have obvious real world analogies which make the properties predictable. It is obvious that you can’t shoot the sun with a mundane pistol unless there is some very unusual difference in the fictional world. But if it’s a supernatural creature with no reference? Any properties it has are just made up and that making up can be assigned responsibility and motivation.
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May 24, 2020 03:47
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Just leave hyphz to his bad gaming in peace, it's obvious he doesn't want to change and will refuse to listen to anyone telling him 90+% of his problem is because his group members suck. It's been 27 pages of this same exact argument that boils down to people saying "if the players arent assholes then this isnt a problem" and hyphz repeating "but this is a problem" without listening to a drat thing, even playing in a game where a situation that hyphz constantly worries about happened and there wasn't an issue because the players werent rear end in a top hat - even that cant stop hyphz insisting that this is a problem and that's theres no solution This is just goon_in_a_well.txt all over again Piell fucked around with this message at 04:03 on May 24, 2020 |
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May 24, 2020 03:56
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Don't be lovely. He's good in my group and is actually quite decent at improv, he's just been broken by playing with terrible, toxic people. I'm hoping that constant examples of the things he worries about not at all being a problem will help him along. No need to disparage the progress made so far.
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May 24, 2020 04:44
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hyphz posted:If I leave I can never join another situation because “the new guy” is exactly a position with that standing. The people in the group may not be assholes to me but they would be able to.
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May 24, 2020 05:08
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hyphz posted:If I leave I can never join another situation because “the new guy” is exactly a position with that standing. The people in the group may not be assholes to me but they would be able to. It seems like your answer to every idea or hypothtical presented in this thread is "No, this thing might happen which would be catastrophic." It is like me deciding not to go to the gym because I might get struck by a bolt of lightning on the walk over there, and saying that the recommendations that homo sapiens get regular exercise seems wrong to me. Sure, I might get struck by lightning, but the decision to go to the gym would still on balance be a sound one. Weren't you very recently "the new guy" in a roleplaying group anyway? How did they treat you and how did that feel? Looking over my phone post for typos I realize I sound pretty grumpy! I am sorry about that, I'm probably just being reminded of some IRL discussions I've had recently.
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May 24, 2020 07:33
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I think the crux of the problem is that it's impossible for any game to account for the attitudes and actions of a bad-faith player. You can't account for the possibility of someone being lovely at the table, because TRPGs rely on communication and cooperation between the players. If that isn't there, of course a session will go south. The only real solution is to avoid playing with the kinds of people who bring that kind of behaviour to a game.
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May 24, 2020 08:21
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hyphz posted:Um. You sound defensive and that's what I'm trying to avoid, because I don't want to criticise you. I don't want to criticise you because it worked in play, it was fun, I was fine with it, but especially because it's exactly the kind of thing I'd be afraid of being criticised for if I was running and I of all people don't want to be that guy ("I must not become the thing I feared..."). hyphz posted:If I leave I can never join another situation because “the new guy” is exactly a position with that standing. The people in the group may not be assholes to me but they would be able to. Splicer fucked around with this message at 12:44 on May 24, 2020 |
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May 24, 2020 09:35
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No more abuse than being the unpopular kid for 30 years. 
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May 24, 2020 16:01
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hyphz posted:No more abuse than being the unpopular kid for 30 years. That counts. I’m a 40+ year old popular married guy doing well for himself personally and professionally, and I still do some of the same things you’re doing - expecting rejection, constantly assessing group relationships, being willing to tolerate bad behavior, etc - just because I had a lovely school experience. It’s taken me 20+ years of more positive social relationships to realize how much that affected me. You should listen to the advice you’re getting here, and I promise there are people out there in the world who you’ll connect with as positive and supportive friends. You just have to go looking.
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May 24, 2020 17:18
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| # ? Jun 7, 2024 21:57 |
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hyphz posted:No more abuse than being the unpopular kid for 30 years. Glad you agree that it is abuse, hyphz. Like Notahippie says, that counts.
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May 24, 2020 17:28
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