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gradenko_2000 posted:Thank you for sharing this story! I enjoyed it a lot and the peek into the mechanics is really cool.
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May 21, 2020 16:24
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Tulip posted:Dogs In The Vineyard is way more explicit about it, what with the 'you can give up, or you can take on more consequences,' and it's a philosophy I really love. It's fairly common on reddit to have somebody come into DW with "how do I make combat more lethal" and really the issue is that lethality isn't the consequence your players should be worrying about. Dying is easy, living with alienating your family, betraying your movement, etc. is much harder. Yeah and meanwhile you'll also have players more used to the D&D model complaining about 'low blows,' like in my next session I'm directly opening with "We wrapped up last time with end of a big fight. You now have the chance to pursue the person who stole something character defining to the druid, or you can rest and let the cleric recover their magic and the injured ranger and fighter heal. There's a chance you can get it back if you chase. If not, you probably won't." With pursuit also opening up getting the result they were hoping for from that combat encounter but were cheated out of. I think the cleric and ranger will be especially miffed since they're used to more tactical games where they can puzzle out and 'solve' encounters with minimal losses and complications. The Cleric especially has been trying to minmax his casting and go for "Well, this power is situational I'll choose to expend it," or "I'll take -1 going forward because I think this the last encounter of the adventuring day," and this is potentially the first time that'll have real consequences for that. Hell the ranger already made a comment once about this being just the DM make believe show -unlike the crunchier games he prefers. It's interesting hosting a more narrative game with computer game devs, since they both look for optimal stuff and don't feel comfortable with descriptive tags or magical qualities not well defined on items they loot. But also these folks have been playing "It's Always Sunny" levels of sociopaths, so the whole group might just elect to go sleep and let the bird complain.
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May 21, 2020 16:29
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Coolness Averted posted:Hell the ranger already made a comment once about this being just the DM make believe show -unlike the crunchier games he prefers.
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May 21, 2020 16:42
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Zeerust posted:I think it was in one of this thread's iterations where someone ran a massive Shadowrun campaign with a rotating player group at their college, where whenever a character died their player was out and had to queue to re-enter the campaign with a new character. Because of the risk of death, the initial players all made combat monsters, who proceeded to chunk it and get killed off in short order, because even a good fighter can't beat the odds when everything comes down to a firefight. The group only stabilised once the players were canny enough to make characters without a combat focus and who avoided conflict as much as possible. Ilor posted:Yup, that was my game. The number of people wanting to play far exceeded the number of characters I was comfortable running at once (generally 6), so for most of my time running the campaign the wait-list to get in was bigger than the number of active players. But god drat if people didn't constantly try stupid poo poo (see above under, "I have a Body of 13, I can take it."), and combat in SR2/3 could be incredibly lethal, so the churn was pretty regular/constant until people figured out that scrupulously avoiding combat was the key to not getting killed. This reminds me of a podcast that once tried to review Phoenix Command, and they came across a "tip" in the book that said that you should avoid getting shot at all costs, and that struck them as counter-intuitive because why would you write a game that's pretty much purely about combat, and then tell the players that they shouldn't engage in it? I don't really accept that premise, but I've never quite been able to elucidate why it feels wrong to me.
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May 21, 2020 16:48
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gradenko_2000 posted:This reminds me of a podcast that once tried to review Phoenix Command, and they came across a "tip" in the book that said that you should avoid getting shot at all costs, and that struck them as counter-intuitive because why would you write a game that's pretty much purely about combat, and then tell the players that they shouldn't engage in it? As in you don't like the critique the podcasters made? Or you don't like games that dedicate the majority of rules to stuff they don't want you touching and the podcast finally summed it up to you?
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May 21, 2020 16:52
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Coolness Averted posted:As in you don't like the critique the podcasters made? This one. I don't think it's a waste for Shadowrun (or other games) to have a lot of rules for combat, even if the rules push people towards wanting to avoid it, because A. if it didn't have those rules, then the feeling of needing to avoid combat whenever possible wouldn't exist, and B. it still serves a purpose as far as letting the scenario play out as far as what would happen if combat breaks out anyway - it's like in a video game with a stealth section and you get spotted and you can still fight it out even if the odds are against you, as opposed to just sticking you a big GAME OVER once the guard is alerted Does that make sense?
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May 21, 2020 17:02
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Ilor posted:This attitude tells me that the player doesn't understand that GM Fiat lives somewhere in virtually all RPGs, and has essentially 100% bought into the idea that the rules (rather than the person behind them) are what drive the story. Oh yeah this is always really funny, though it's far, far from just a TTRPG problem. The most absurd is in fiction critique, where people will defend lovely parts of books with "that's just the way the world is," but "the world" here is a piece of fiction written by an author on purpose. The one way around GM Fiat is to not have a GM at all, which is really just moving around the problem, not solving it. Oddly my experience with 40k was that at the serious competition level, people were pretty on-board with "the game works this way because we, the players, consent to the rules." Though I suppose that's extremely hard to avoid when you're looking at "my army is good under these tournament rules, and bad under those tournament rules." Coolness Averted posted:The Cleric especially has been trying to minmax his casting and go for "Well, this power is situational I'll choose to expend it," or "I'll take -1 going forward because I think this the last encounter of the adventuring day," and this is potentially the first time that'll have real consequences for that. I don't know if this was already a thing in earlier hacks, but in Broken Worlds (based on the Kill Six Billion Demons webcomic which is really good and you should read it), the divide between a small break (Respite) and a big break (Rest) is that taking a big break necessarily means risking your opponents making progress against you. It's not a unit of time - you can take decades without taking a big break, or you can take a big break in a few hours - it's a narrative risk you're making to give up tempo in favor of regaining resources. This has its slight gamesmanship in that if one player has substantially more resources left than the others, they'll typically start blowing them pretty fast because hey, everybody else is going to need a rest anyway, but it's quite a bit smaller.
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May 21, 2020 17:02
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gradenko_2000 posted:This reminds me of a podcast that once tried to review Phoenix Command, and they came across a "tip" in the book that said that you should avoid getting shot at all costs, and that struck them as counter-intuitive because why would you write a game that's pretty much purely about combat, and then tell the players that they shouldn't engage in it? It might not be ideally phrased, but I think it's a valid critique. Lots of other games focus on combat but they're written with a more cinematic approach that makes combat a good risk-reward proposition for the PCs. Shadowrun will stone cold kill you if you take combat casually, but players who are familiar with all the ins and outs of the system and built their characters with an eye to a cohesive party can get into fights and win. Phoenix Command takes enormous pains to be entirely realistic, and realistically, getting into gunfights will kill you. Realistic criminals avoid fights. If you aren't going to have fights, why choose the RPG known for its combat system? Conclusion: Phoenix Command is a landmark in game design, but it's one of those landmarks you know to steer clear of.
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May 21, 2020 18:39
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You steer by the lighthouse, not for it.
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May 21, 2020 18:46
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I feel like a game where combat is crunchy, inevitable in the genre, and always a bad idea in character is not a terrible concept. That’s not Phoenix Command.
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May 21, 2020 18:48
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gradenko_2000 posted:This one. I'd argue it's also a very mixed message to say "Yeah avoid fighting, but here's all the cool combat toys you can get!" just like the old D&D "Here's reams of all sorts of interesting magic goodies that you're frankly a bad DM and/or player if you ever expect to see in a game" I personally would also complain if I sat down to play a game with Rambo man on the cover, or a book that teased chromed out street samurai and gangs fighting in the streets but was told actually being cool and copying the cover of the book or the pictures of the archetype I'm modeling and buying gear and stats built around that was setting me up for failure. Tulip posted:I don't know if this was already a thing in earlier hacks, but in Broken Worlds (based on the Kill Six Billion Demons webcomic which is really good and you should read it), the divide between a small break (Respite) and a big break (Rest) is that taking a big break necessarily means risking your opponents making progress against you. It's not a unit of time - you can take decades without taking a big break, or you can take a big break in a few hours - it's a narrative risk you're making to give up tempo in favor of regaining resources. Coolness Averted fucked around with this message at 19:33 on May 21, 2020 |
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May 21, 2020 19:30
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gradenko_2000 posted:This reminds me of a podcast that once tried to review Phoenix Command, and they came across a "tip" in the book that said that you should avoid getting shot at all costs, and that struck them as counter-intuitive because why would you write a game that's pretty much purely about combat, and then tell the players that they shouldn't engage in it? I think the one problem with the argument is that it assumes that the only way the rules can become relevant is if the players are shot, and the players getting shot is an inevitable consequence of getting into combat. As someone who's actually run Phoenix Command, I think this overlooks that the other use of ridiculously detailed and deadly wounding rules is to unleash them on NPCs. Players react positively to their enemies taking million-damage hits to the skull and knowing exactly which five organs were perforated by a burst of machine gun fire. It's a juvenile form of entertainment, in many ways, but not invalid. To this end, staying alive so you can gib more enemies is reasonable advice. You're supposed to engage in combat, but you're supposed to not get shot.
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May 21, 2020 20:07
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LatwPIAT posted:I think the one problem with the argument is that it assumes that the only way the rules can become relevant is if the players are shot, and the players getting shot is an inevitable consequence of getting into combat. As someone who's actually run Phoenix Command, I think this overlooks that the other use of ridiculously detailed and deadly wounding rules is to unleash them on NPCs. Players react positively to their enemies taking million-damage hits to the skull and knowing exactly which five organs were perforated by a burst of machine gun fire. It's a juvenile form of entertainment, in many ways, but not invalid. To this end, staying alive so you can gib more enemies is reasonable advice. You're supposed to engage in combat, but you're supposed to not get shot. Yeah and a game being pretty up front about its lethality is also a good thing, rather than just assuming players can crunch math on stuff. Heck sometimes devs can't even actually crunch the math on their games!
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May 21, 2020 20:52
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gradenko_2000 posted:This one. Splicer fucked around with this message at 20:55 on May 21, 2020 |
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May 21, 2020 20:53
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It's a kind of more general piece of writing advice that if you spend 75% of your text on a plot, then that plot should have corresponding emotional weight. People have played around with it, and for a pretty clear example of an RPG that is messes with this expectation to good effect there's The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen, but it's probably not best to try to be earnest, satirical, and experimental all at the same time.
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May 21, 2020 21:09
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gradenko_2000 posted:This reminds me of a podcast that once tried to review Phoenix Command, and they came across a "tip" in the book that said that you should avoid getting shot at all costs, and that struck them as counter-intuitive because why would you write a game that's pretty much purely about combat, and then tell the players that they shouldn't engage in it? With that general steeze of RPGs it’s trying to encourage you to stay out of the line of fire, fight from ambush or work around it, kinda like the OSR talks about. Of course there’s enough problems with that concept, nobody really gives their game stealth mechanics as in depth, it warps the narrative and the actual combat becomes way less interesting but that’s the philosophy.
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May 21, 2020 23:20
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Joe Slowboat posted:I feel like a game where combat is crunchy, inevitable in the genre, and always a bad idea in character is not a terrible concept. That’s not Phoenix Command. The introduction to the chapter on combat in Unknown Armies feels like it's heart is in the right place, seeing as the combat chaper begins with several ways to avoid the incredibly lethal combat system of UA.
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May 22, 2020 00:27
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Coolness Averted posted:I'd argue it's also a very mixed message to say "Yeah avoid fighting, but here's all the cool combat toys you can get!" just like the old D&D "Here's reams of all sorts of interesting magic goodies that you're frankly a bad DM and/or player if you ever expect to see in a game" I don't- what? D&D has never said that!
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May 22, 2020 00:33
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Are they talking about BoVD or something?
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May 22, 2020 00:46
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Leraika posted:Are they talking about BoVD or something? My guess is maybe they don't understand the magic item distribution in 1e/Basic and missed the context for the Monty Haul DM section?
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May 22, 2020 00:48
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That could easily just be years of bad DMs rattling people's brains. I know I spent the first 10 years of any D&D experience I had with people insisting that low-magic Ravenloft games were the only games that weren't daycare for babies. Took a while to break that mindset for me.
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May 22, 2020 01:32
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theironjef posted:That could easily just be years of bad DMs rattling people's brains. I know I spent the first 10 years of any D&D experience I had with people insisting that low-magic Ravenloft games were the only games that weren't daycare for babies. Took a while to break that mindset for me. People didn't just spontaneously all happen onto bad habits. Gary Gygax was writing in official TSR junk even in the 90's about how high level play is boring. He even started that dumb trope of comparing heroes with tons of magical gear to Christmas trees thing that grogs love. It doesn't matter if the 1st e DMG specifically defined Monty Haul as a glitch from using the wrong random loot tables the folks publishing the game were still putting out lists of cool new goodies and chastised people for giving out those goodies. Like if all the Monty Haul stuff was only the 1st e problem from loot = exp, then the devs would've shut up about it once d&d moved away from that mechanic. Also so much of the early iterations of the game were based on 'well we don't have full rules or they're hard to read let's ask the developers' so it's not quite fair to say 'Actually that's just a misreading of this one book' you gotta go by the stuff the writers said outside the main books. Coolness Averted fucked around with this message at 03:28 on May 22, 2020 |
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May 22, 2020 03:21
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Coolness Averted posted:People didn't just spontaneously all happen onto bad habits. Gary Gygax was writing in official TSR junk even in the 90's about how high level play is boring and started that comparing heroes with tons of magical gear to Christmas trees thing that grogs love. It doesn't matter if the 1st e DMG specifically defined Monty Haul as a glitch from using the wrong random loot tables the folks publishing the game were still putting out lists of cool new goodies and chastised people for giving out those goodies. I don't think Gygax wrote a single thing for TSR or WotC during the 90s. That was the middle of his persona non grata period. The discussion of Monty Haul/Killer DMs in the 1e DMG is in a larger section about organized play/compatibility for taking characters between different tables, which was really common back then. Characters with absurdly high or low power/treasure are a big problem for that kind of cross-table compatibility. OD&D expected you to have magical treasure, and so did AD&D. D&D doesn't chastise you for handing out treasure to the PCs, I genuinely have no idea where you'd get this from in the actual books as opposed to some sort of running joke you'd find in like Knights of the Dinner Table or something. e: I checked, the discussion of "too little/too much magic items" in my revised 2e DMG boils down to "too little magic and the players won't have fun because they don't receive rewards" and "too much magic and there's no challenge in things, which can get boring." But the whole thing is couched in a) do what's fun for you and your group first and b) you want to provide treasure, just watch out for signs you've possibly unbalanced things too much. Arivia fucked around with this message at 03:39 on May 22, 2020 |
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May 22, 2020 03:34
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Arivia posted:I don't- what? D&D has never said that! 
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May 22, 2020 03:39
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This is an argument for moderation, not that you're terrible if you ever let the PCs get a cool item like Coolness Averted (lol) was suggesting.
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May 22, 2020 03:42
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Arivia posted:This is an argument for moderation, not that you're terrible if you ever let the PCs get a cool item like Coolness Averted (lol) was suggesting. I will totally cop to the fact I was wrong about his comments regarding high level pointless wasn't from letters in mid 90's dragon, I just remembered folks writing for d&d used the statement to justify their stances and referenced it -so I assumed it was contemporary. But that still was a modern employee giving the official d&d answer that high level play was stupid while selling the splats for high level adventures.
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May 22, 2020 04:25
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Coolness Averted posted:I will totally cop to the fact I was wrong about his comments regarding high level pointless wasn't from letters in mid 90's dragon, I just remembered folks writing for d&d used the statement to justify their stances and referenced it -so I assumed it was contemporary. But that still was a modern employee giving the official d&d answer that high level play was stupid while selling the splats for high level adventures. You're not wrong in that it did influence players to the extent that it showed up in Dragon magazine letters to the editor, it just wasn't in the 90s, more like the 80s:    
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May 22, 2020 04:55
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The irony, of course, is that he was anything but cautious and moderate when placing items in his own published modules.
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May 22, 2020 04:58
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dwarf74 posted:The irony, of course, is that he was anything but cautious and moderate when placing items in his own published modules. Gygax was a land of contrasts. Dude loved shrugging his shoulders and saying 'do what works at your table' but then would also immediately turn around tell you that logically there was only one correct way to handle something like what a paladin should do to a villain who surrenders. Coolness Averted fucked around with this message at 05:48 on May 22, 2020 |
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May 22, 2020 05:43
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mllaneza posted:The one time I played Shadowrun was as a Face in Humbug's South African minj-campaign a few years bag. I never pulled a trigger, but if I could get a cell signal or even just a word in edgewise, things were going to go our way. Even when confronted with a, excuse me if I get the terminology wrong, Level 10 Toxic Spirit that had just disabled a Block II Arleigh Burke-class destroyer. That character kicked rear end, actually all the characters did, combat or not.
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May 22, 2020 05:48
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Bliss Authority posted:The introduction to the chapter on combat in Unknown Armies feels like it's heart is in the right place, seeing as the combat chaper begins with several ways to avoid the incredibly lethal combat system of UA. It also helps that the rules for combat don't take up much of the book, so they don't fall foul of the "Be careful not to end up doing this thing (that 75% of our word count focuses on explaining how to do)" problem that was being discussed above.
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May 22, 2020 09:01
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It is the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Twenty. Someone is publishing d20 Modern content. Shine on you crazy diamond.
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May 22, 2020 14:16
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Coolness Averted posted:I guess we just read that section differently, friend. Like I focus more on his mocking players for not reading his mind and saying one style of play is self evidently bad and for rookies. You focus more on the fact he couches it in words like 'moderation' and 'thinking logically.' Eh, I think your reading is fair too. The reasons AD&D were created were a little weird; Gygax wanted to clear up and formalize the rules for quality, for organized play, and because he was getting so many letters and calls asking for official rulings from fans. Reportedly he tried explaining to them that it was okay to come up with their own answers but he kept getting asked what would you do Mr. Gygax so AD&D in some ways is a FINE ILL SHOW YOU ALL HOW TO PLAY IT RIGHT. And picking up on that frustration and disdain in that passage isn’t unthinkable.
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May 22, 2020 14:57
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Pulling this out of the OSR thread:Halloween Jack posted:I took a look at In Dark Alleys, which seems like it set out to be a more accessible Unknown Armies. However...well, consider all the ways that UA was problematic in its depiction of marginalized people, and imagine it done by someone with less talent and zero tact. Like, the first magic class in the game is Magic Genderqueers who "initiate" via cruising, with the implication that being trans is some kind of Cronenbergian psychic disease that you catch. There's a lot to unpack, but I won't, because it's hot garbage and I just can't stand the smell. https://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/12/12624.phtml posted:Psychodynamics Oh BOY Parkreiner fucked around with this message at 19:03 on May 22, 2020 |
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May 22, 2020 18:56
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Parkreiner posted:Pulling this out of the OSR thread: All of Vajra Enterprises games are varying flavors of 'interesting, but badly executed.' There are reviews of Hoodoo Blues and KidWorld in the FATAL and Friends archives. I kind of like Seekers, which is basically Billy Jack the RPG, but I haven't read it closely nough to speak on pitfalls. They also have a game called Tibet, about opposing the Chinese occupation of Tibet in 1959, and I can only imagine the ways that might go wrong.
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May 22, 2020 19:17
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Oh god, I'd forgotten about KidWorld. Boy was that thing a mess.
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May 22, 2020 23:01
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IDA has exactly one idea worth stealing and it's the Cannibals.
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May 23, 2020 02:48
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 I've just published another game: Four Colour-Apocrypha, a world-building game of doubt, confusion, and storytelling against the unknown! It's somewhat Microscope-inspired, but flipped round—instead of you building a clear timeline out of reliable bits of truth, in FCA you:
It's on sale at 33% OFF for the next few days.
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May 24, 2020 15:15
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what systems would people recommend for a Pokemon game (either literally pokemon or a more generic monster/buddy theme)? i know that's pretty broad but the only systems i know of that are explicitly designed for something like that are a really lovely BESM spin-off and the PTU system which is probably more crunch than people would be interested in trying. same question for something Avatar: TLA-ish. for this i'd like something closer to PbtA levels of depth, but most of the PbtA style systems I've tried tend to operate on a much smaller power level than what skilled benders are shown to be able to do with relative ease - compared to something like putting a ritual together for a big magic spell. i think PbtA would be a good fit in terms of the openness it offers for describing how you interact with the world versus something like a spell list of "Water Whip", "Water Healing", etc., but of the few I've played i don't think the various playbooks offered would really work well at that power level.
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May 24, 2020 23:05
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I have no idea if it's any good, but MajiMonsters seems designed to be a Pokemon knock-off.
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May 24, 2020 23:13
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