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Absurd Alhazred posted:It does seem a bit sparse in terms of telling the GM what to do if they have no idea what they're doing. PbtA systems usually have explicit GM moves to avert that, and FATE Core has all those "GM, you do X" statements. Does the Spire main game have more in that line of things? It has guidance on setting up heists, how to run scenarios like that, and an extensive setting document that provides a lot of surroundings. The Spire adventures tend to be intentionally sparse, and I certainly agree they could provide more than they do, but hyphz is presenting it ridiculously.
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May 26, 2020 02:14
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Joe Slowboat posted:Why would they be able to sneak out with a single roll? Why on earth would you do that as a GM? If you know something won’t be fun, why let it happen? This is the action granularity problem. If they can’t do it with a single roll (and the door is right there) then how many rolls?
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May 26, 2020 03:29
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hyphz posted:This is the action granularity problem. If they can’t do it with a single roll (and the door is right there) then how many rolls? I'm not very experienced running PbtA games, though I'm getting ready to run something soon myself, so take my answer with a grain of salt. I think the answer here is as many rolls as it takes to make the session feel high intensity and high stakes. If the whole thing up to this point has taken up all the time you allotted for the session then a single roll is probably fine to top it off, but if you're only halfway through your usual time then maybe extend the scenes out a bit longer to bring up opportunities for more actions.
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May 26, 2020 04:10
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hyphz posted:This is the action granularity problem. If they can’t do it with a single roll (and the door is right there) then how many rolls? You've had this answered for you over and over again. Just re-read any of those.
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May 26, 2020 04:11
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hyphz posted:This is the action granularity problem. If they can’t do it with a single roll (and the door is right there) then how many rolls? Think through a list of the obstacles that have already been established in the fiction. There are the man's assistants, who want them dead (not to mention, they'd have gotten between the players and the shot without significantly more effort to actually set it up; the players should at least need to roll against them or take penalties on the shot). Secondly, why do you assume the players have guns? The other people in the building are gangsters Mr. Winters wants to get themselves killed and his guards, so how the players snuck in will do a lot to establish whether and how they're armed. But, even assuming the players have guns, don't get jumped as they draw and start the riot... There's a bunch of gangsters who are going to pull out weapons immediately. There's the assistants who just saw you pull a gun and shoot him, since you'd need a clear shot. There's the locked doors of the building, since the goal was to trap everyone inside. There's the other guards around the perimeter who will be on high alert. There's the locked gates of the perimeter. Every one of these have been established even in the bare bones of the fiction you just outlined. Every one of them is pre-existing, and needs to be dealt with, and giving every one at least one roll would help flesh out the story and make it actually feel like you've engaged with the fiction literally at all, rather than ignoring it. Every one of those you can point to and say 'you walked past that coming in, did you really think you wouldn't need to deal with it somehow?' Plus doing that would be a Shadow stress of like... 6, immediately. You shot a powerful gangster in full view of his entire staff and the entire room full of people. You would be doing every one of the rolls above taking Blood and Shadow stress from the hail of bullets, the knives, and the getting-your-face-seen-by-people you'd be dealing with. Again, these are all established dangers in the fiction and in the scene. The fact that you don't recognize them, and don't want to invoke them, isn't you sticking to the module, it's you paring the module down to avoid having to GM.
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May 26, 2020 04:16
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Next hyphz is going to post that if the answer is more than 1, he still needs to know what exactly the answer is, or else he's just imposing some arbitrary level of difficulty by GM fiat, which is wrongbad. This is just another iteration of hyphz refusing to engage with the fundamental premise of RPGs, that the GM - and not just someone who writes a module for the GM - has both a responsibility and a privilege to pull difficulty right out of their rear end and shove it at the players, and the players have a concomitant responsibility to not be assholes to the GM if the GM's attempt to challenge them reasonably, misses the mark somewhat of what they were hoping or expecting, sometimes.
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May 26, 2020 04:21
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Leperflesh posted:Next hyphz is going to post that if the answer is more than 1, he still needs to know what exactly the answer is, or else he's just imposing some arbitrary level of difficulty by GM fiat, which is wrongbad. otoh you could start using the term "referee" exclusively when going full throwback as an admission that the GM is not formally 'in control.' I wonder how things might have developed if the tournament aspect of D&D was its more enduring legacy
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May 26, 2020 04:28
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hyphz posted:Especially if "Miyazaki" was mentioned during the campaign set up because someone would be instantly pointing out that Eboshi absolutely does shoot the Deer God in canon (ok, it doesn't have good results, but..). I'm not touching the rest but both of these are straight up untrue. It being based off of Mononoke wasn't "mentioned" it's literally half of the established theming from before the game started. It's entire emotional framing of the whole game. Also Eboshi does shoot the Forest Spirit, right in the head. At close range. And nothing happens. It's only later when things have changed in the fiction that it can be shot. And then it still doesn't actually die, it getting shot motivates the entire third act of the movie, in the opposite of a good outcome.
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May 26, 2020 04:32
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hyphz posted:This is the action granularity problem. If they can’t do it with a single roll (and the door is right there) then how many rolls? As many or as few as seems dramatically appropriate and interesting. In the Indiana Jones films sometimes they spend 8 minutes on a chase sequence which takes place over maybe 800 metres, but when he travels from LA to Nepal they just draw a red line in the map and it takes 20 seconds. It's exactly the same principle. This all applies to D&D/Pathfinder GMing too of course. Are you asking players to make Dex rolls everytime they walk up some stairs?
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May 26, 2020 04:45
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I admit there was a misunderstanding there. Spire p10 states that Stress is taken by the Curse, by magic, or “when you act and something goes wrong”. Which would mean that if you did shoot a gang leader in front of his staff and roll high, there could be no Shadow stress because the shooting did not go wrong. My assumption was that negative side effects of successful deliberate actions were purely fiat and didn’t use the stress system, but if that’s not the case things change a bit (although it doesn’t help that “take no stress” appears on the success entry of the dice chart) On the other hand a Bound can screw the whole thing by using Surprise Infiltration and/or The Secret Of The Crowd, and while that process is very Batman, it’s a bit short. God knows what you do if a Shadow Agent shows up.
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May 26, 2020 04:48
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Mister Olympus posted:otoh you could start using the term "referee" exclusively when going full throwback as an admission that the GM is not formally 'in control.' I wonder how things might have developed if the tournament aspect of D&D was its more enduring legacy Coincidentally, I'm trying to write a game that answers that question! A simple dungeon crawler with hard rules about resources (including in-game time) and for what the Adversary (gm) may do during their turn. Characters are not expected to survive. Points are scored based on loot extracted. Notionally, the game could be played as a race with groups trading Adversaries and a neutral referee or referees to resolve rules disputes. Ideally, the turn structure would work well enough that it could be used to play literally head-to-head, with each team's Adversary getting to perform dungeon actions in their group's controlled territory. The hard part seems to be getting the turn structure / time-resource game right, and communicating to the reader that it's actually super duper important that those rules are followed.
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May 26, 2020 04:53
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hyphz posted:I admit there was a misunderstanding there. Spire p10 states that Stress is taken by the Curse, by magic, or “when you act and something goes wrong”. Which would mean that if you did shoot a gang leader in front of his staff and roll high, there could be no Shadow stress because the shooting did not go wrong. My assumption was that negative side effects of successful deliberate actions were purely fiat and didn’t use the stress system, but if that’s not the case things change a bit (although it doesn’t help that “take no stress” appears on the success entry of the dice chart) By that argument, if you intend to get your arm cut off by a giant metal shear, and you succeed, you don't take Blood stress, because nothing went wrong as long as you rolled high. It's nonsensical - when the fiction makes the mechanics ridiculous, go with the fiction. I mean, maybe you don't want to do it as Stress, that's up to you - but they just shot someone in full view of a bunch of people. All those people know they did that. On page nine, we have: "Sometimes you’re just rolling to avoid taking harm and not trying to achieve anything else in particular – you test to see if you can hang onto your mind after seeing something horrific, to avoid damage from someone taking a swing at you, or to escape from a burning building. On a 6-7 result on such an action, you still take stress, but it’s one dice type lower than usual. The same rules apply when you’re trying to buy something for cheap." You're going to want at least one of those rolls from the players to avoid being made by the crowd, and that's a big AT LEAST. You're also ignoring Difficulty: You're not fighting Winters alone in his office, since that would have required significantly more effort up front. So you skipped a step earlier: you're not just rolling at his combat difficulty, you're rolling against his bodyguards who are trying to prevent you from killing him. So, they're going to inflict at least one Difficulty on that shot, and staying hidden while pulling it off would be more. Again, this follows from the fiction at play. You also ignored any of the complexities of getting into the party - getting an invitation, faking your way in, whatever. All of which should be rolls as well, because that's the whole point. So you've been making compromises, bribing people, and so on. You've also been talking to NPCs who might be able to identify you later as a Minister, if you get made. So there's a lot of rolls you'd have had to made accumulating Stress in small ways, and creating plot threads. But assume your players are just rolling wildly well: 10, 10, 10, bang bang he's dead and you're not made yet. Now you start various rolls to get out of there. If they keep rolling 10 pluses, then yes, by sheer chance they might make it out easily, but again they have at least 8 rolls by my count, all of which need to be 10+ to avoid creating more rolls because this is a complex powderkeg of a situation they set off. You can run a whole session of the aftermath of something like that. Now, let's address 'surprise infiltration and/or the secret of the crowd' - these only get the character in. They don't help you hide afterwards. That's kind of the point - you can vanish into the crowd with the Secret and you can infiltrate (but only you, not your team) with Surprise Infiltration, so that only solves the question of 'how do we get Drow Batman and their weapons into the party' and nothing else. Plus, you're Drow Batman, you stand out in a crowd once you do something, and the something you did was kill Winters and get literally everyone on your case. All of these are in the rules or in the fiction you outlined. The fiction is the important part, and the rules are there to help it along, and all the rules and fiction say this should be a chaotic, potentially stressful situation. With enough good rolls the players will make it out unscathed but, well, that's inevitable to any game with dice. Every dice roll is a risk of story happening, so make sure each fictional element that they want to get rid of or bypass requires a roll, or else you'll run out of fiction to do anything with.
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May 26, 2020 05:10
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The PC's plan was "I walk up to the boss and cap him right there in front of his whole crew", the fiction allows for this plan, and they rolled high enough to execute said plan? That's a loving cool scene. I can hear the soundtrack even, it's the Shangri-Las singing The Dum Dum Ditty while the PC walks up, and then at the end of the first chorus when they should sing "boom boom", just loving BLAM on the second boom, and everyone freezes with blood and brains on them, there's a beat of silence and high pitched whine which continues as the rest of the crew dive for cover and pull their gats in a series of confused jump cuts and distant muffled shouts and someone pulling the trigger way too fast as they panic... So what are you doing, guy who rolled that beautiful high roll and got exactly what you wanted? Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 05:55 on May 26, 2020 |
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May 26, 2020 05:33
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Mister Olympus posted:otoh you could start using the term "referee" exclusively when going full throwback as an admission that the GM is not formally 'in control.' I wonder how things might have developed if the tournament aspect of D&D was its more enduring legacy Elector_Nerdlingen posted:Coincidentally, I'm trying to write a game that answers that question! Nice! This is definitely an underexplored RPG concept... Agon 1st edition dabbled in it with GM as arbiter of players jockeying against each other for a PvE “high score” (I don’t know if 2e has gone in harder or dialed it back), but Rune is the only game I know of that specifically focused on it, with things like binding the GM to a strict encounter budget for their dungeon that they could stretch out by giving treasure and other bennies for the players to find, and the intention that players were supposed to take turns playing the delvers and playing the GM role challenging the rest of the group. Lot of interesting ideas in that one but I don’t think it ever found an audience. Probably at least in part because it came out right as D20 mania was ramping up. Parkreiner fucked around with this message at 06:14 on May 26, 2020 |
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May 26, 2020 06:09
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Parkreiner posted:Nice! This is definitely an underexplored RPG concept. That's because the obvious way to do it - take a bunch of D&D-isms like gridded movement in 6 (10, whatever) second turns and apply them to the explore mode instead of just the combat mode, ends up indistinguishable from a board game - Tap your Lockpicks card to ignore doors while you move 6 squares type stuff. Descent. I'm trying to go the other way - more structured/detailed exploration without move-and-action type rules, combat at the same level of detail.
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May 26, 2020 06:41
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Xiahou Dun posted:I'm not touching the rest but both of these are straight up untrue. Also rewatching the movie for fun but direct quote from the dub : "He's a god. It'll take more than one shot to kill him." Like, overtly in the source material we're riffing off of because we decided it would be fun.
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May 26, 2020 07:09
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I'm very interested in how to resolve high-stakes, dramatic situations. for my Traveller hack I decided to tackle the "tense standoff situation". Consider if you will the case of two groups, say the PCs and an NPC gang, everyone's armed, guns are drawn, some are pointed. One of the PCs has a bead on the enemy boss. They pull the trigger. How do you resolve that. I wrote a basic move called Grand Entrance that triggers when a player does something to absolutely steal the spotlight. Roll GE +cool and get anywhere from a fictional beat in which to act, some consequence, or well, pretty much "deal harm as established" is what happens next. It came up once in playtest and worked out, it turned what was arguably a really stupid idea (Hi Fax !) into a masterstroke. The move might be too powerful, but I'm trying to encourage +cool characters.
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May 26, 2020 07:15
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mllaneza posted:I'm very interested in how to resolve high-stakes, dramatic situations. for my Traveller hack I decided to tackle the "tense standoff situation". Consider if you will the case of two groups, say the PCs and an NPC gang, everyone's armed, guns are drawn, some are pointed. One of the PCs has a bead on the enemy boss. They pull the trigger. How do you resolve that. I wrote a basic move called Grand Entrance that triggers when a player does something to absolutely steal the spotlight. Roll GE +cool and get anywhere from a fictional beat in which to act, some consequence, or well, pretty much "deal harm as established" is what happens next. It came up once in playtest and worked out, it turned what was arguably a really stupid idea (Hi Fax !) into a masterstroke. The move might be too powerful, but I'm trying to encourage +cool characters. My first question (and literally just a question) is what you're trying to do differently from Go Aggro, cause that's going to shape what the answer should be like a lot.
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May 26, 2020 07:29
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Pistols are drawn and pointed and fingers are on triggers. It's a standoff, so presumably negotiations have already failed. A player has described their target and said they're pulling the trigger. Start here: What's in question that we need a move at all?
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May 26, 2020 08:01
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Xiahou Dun posted:My first question (and literally just a question) is what you're trying to do differently from Go Aggro, cause that's going to shape what the answer should be like a lot. This is my Go Aggro and I'm trying to give the players narrative control over the whole situation, not just on the one focus of the move. I'm still fishing for the best possible results on 7-9, and 10+ but I definitely want this as a way for once player to re-shape the entire scene by doing someone super cool.
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May 26, 2020 08:09
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mllaneza posted:a way for once player to re-shape the entire scene by doing someone super cool. "Your action reshapes the scene" sounds like guidance on when you'd want to use a move, not a move itself. Is there a particular genre thing with traveller that you're trying to emulate?
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May 26, 2020 09:25
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mllaneza posted:I'm very interested in how to resolve high-stakes, dramatic situations. for my Traveller hack I decided to tackle the "tense standoff situation". Consider if you will the case of two groups, say the PCs and an NPC gang, everyone's armed, guns are drawn, some are pointed. One of the PCs has a bead on the enemy boss. They pull the trigger. How do you resolve that. I wrote a basic move called Grand Entrance that triggers when a player does something to absolutely steal the spotlight. Roll GE +cool and get anywhere from a fictional beat in which to act, some consequence, or well, pretty much "deal harm as established" is what happens next. It came up once in playtest and worked out, it turned what was arguably a really stupid idea (Hi Fax !) into a masterstroke. The move might be too powerful, but I'm trying to encourage +cool characters. As with everything, I think how a GM resolves it depends on whether you want a Tarantino-style bloodbath that might end up with everyone dying or something more one-sided and heroic. If you want to leave the door open for the former then I think Two-Hour Wargames has some interesting reaction mechanics for things like this, since their games are designed mostly for solo play. Their western one Six Gun Sound has rules for the classic staredown in the street where there's a battle of wills first that gives a bonus/malus to the second roll with the actual draw/shooting outcomes. I like that idea both thematically and as a way of providing a narrative reason to make it slightly more likely that the heroes get the drop on the villains.
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May 26, 2020 16:07
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Joe Slowboat posted:On page nine, we have: "Sometimes you’re just rolling to avoid taking harm and not trying to achieve anything else in particular – you test to see if you can hang onto your mind after seeing something horrific, to avoid damage from someone taking a swing at you, or to escape from a burning building. On a 6-7 result on such an action, you still take stress, but it’s one dice type lower than usual. The same rules apply when you’re trying to buy something for cheap." I did note that, but I assumed it applied only to reducing harm after something else had gone wrong. Again, I can acknowledge that I was wrong on that, but the text is not ideally worded. Nothing in the book actually says that stress can be inflicted arbitrarily (that bit about "you act and something goes wrong..." is the only context in which the book mentions inflicting Stress), and as mentioned, the success results on the dice roll specifically mention that the PC "take(s) no stress" as a result of the action (although within the reasonable assumption that "what if the action was sticking their hand in a blender" is a moot question since no PC would do that) In fact, nothing in the "running the game" section says anything about it either; it does however have the "say yes" instruction. And for people who are saying that doing this is a basic part of GMing, it's worth mentioning that in all the GM advice books I read through on the F&F series a while back, none of them said anything about that. Literally the only one I've seen that says anything like that is Play Dirty, and that tries to represents it as good but actually makes it seem ludicrous and assholish. This seems like a significant omission! (Actually, the literal text is that "when a player asks a question, it's an indication they want the game to go in a certain way." Which actually hits a lot of my problem on this matter, as in what came up in the Shadowrun game and also in another GM's example game I saw on Reddit which kicked off some unusual distinction. Player: "Can I just walk in, shoot Mr Winters, and walk out?" GM: (following the rule) "Yes." Player: "I do that." GM: "You win." Player: "That wasn't much of an adventure." GM: "No, but it was what you wanted." Player: "No it wasn't." GM: "Then why did you ask for it?") quote:You're going to want at least one of those rolls from the players to avoid being made by the crowd, and that's a big AT LEAST. Why? The whole point of the twist of the adventure is that the majority of the crowd are either scheming against or actively dislike Mr Winters, which is why he's set a trap for them. The only ones who'd unquestionably not just cheer are Sal and the guards, and they have just lost their employer, so is it even worth going ahead when Elizabeth or Devlin might be their only next hope for not ending up in the Red Row gutters? Granted, Sal isn't going to get another Head of Security gig if it gets out that she let her employer get aced in the most obvious way possible, but if she can't peg every single witness in the room, the attempt will get out too.. Plus, I'm not sure if this doesn't run into a problem with it being a one-shot. The resonant question for the players will be "do we manage to kill Mr Winters?". Escaping from the party afterwards is far less appealing as the focus of the adventure (after all, the PCs are never being played again, so who cares?) quote:You're also ignoring Difficulty: You're not fighting Winters alone in his office, since that would have required significantly more effort up front. So you skipped a step earlier: you're not just rolling at his combat difficulty, you're rolling against his bodyguards who are trying to prevent you from killing him. So, they're going to inflict at least one Difficulty on that shot, and staying hidden while pulling it off would be more. Again, this follows from the fiction at play. The Merchant archetype has listed Difficulty 0. And it doesn't have bodyguards listed - which The Queen on the same page does, so the omission is meaningful. That said, there is scope in the guidance chapter for increasing the difficulty based on circumstances so this is probably fair enough. The real risk here is that the PCs fail and Winters flees or goes to ground, which potentially also ends the story or takes it far outside the remit of the one-shot. quote:You also ignored any of the complexities of getting into the party - getting an invitation, faking your way in, whatever. All of which should be rolls as well, because that's the whole point. So you've been making compromises, bribing people, and so on. You've also been talking to NPCs who might be able to identify you later as a Minister, if you get made. So there's a lot of rolls you'd have had to made accumulating Stress in small ways, and creating plot threads. The intro section of the one shot states that the PCs are already inside and they just fill in details on how they did it without rolling (specifically, it says "ask how the player characters got inside"; note past tense) Now it's possible that they'll create plot threads in doing that, and there is a sort of "Hx phase", but it's equally possible that they won't or that the threads they do create will not be relevant. quote:Now, let's address 'surprise infiltration and/or the secret of the crowd' - these only get the character in. They don't help you hide afterwards. That's kind of the point - you can vanish into the crowd with the Secret and you can infiltrate (but only you, not your team) with Surprise Infiltration, so that only solves the question of 'how do we get Drow Batman and their weapons into the party' and nothing else. Plus, you're Drow Batman, you stand out in a crowd once you do something, and the something you did was kill Winters and get literally everyone on your case. Again, this comes down very much to rule wording. Per RAW, if the Bound can get in without using Surprise Infiltration, they can kill Mr Winters then Surprise Infiltrate somewhere else to get out. Even I presume this isn't the intention, but it would be difficult if it came down to a conflict with a player, especially if their plan depended on it. Perhaps more reasonably, though, is that if the PC entered Mr Winters' Office via Surprise Infiltration then they will likely want to go out the way they came in, which becomes a right pain to adjudicate, since they either already bypassed high security on the way in or we have to somehow come up with a way they got in that only worked once or one way. With Secret of the Crowd, it would be invoked after killing Mr Winters, meaning that they would need to do something else out of the ordinary afterwards to break it. And while that also seems a bit pedantic, it's difficult to argue, because immediately after doing something dramatic is exactly the moment at which you would want to make yourself lost in a crowd. To say the Advance just lets you hide in a crowd but only if you haven't done anything to make anyone look for you isn't much of a special power! hyphz fucked around with this message at 17:15 on May 26, 2020 |
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May 26, 2020 17:11
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Dude, you’re trying really hard to interpret every rule in the worst possible way to make this scene unworkable. And then insisting those are natural interpretations so the game is bound to result in them, rather than your edge case approach. Also, you’re ignoring that the secret of the crowd explicitly doesn’t work if you’ve done something noticeable but does work no matter what you’re carrying, so what it’s really good for is being able to walk around with illegal weapons, covered in blood, etc. It just takes a tiny amount of creativity to, for example, do a murder around the corner and then walk out and vanish into the crowd; only the people who witness you murdering will be able to distinguish the blood-covered Batman with a hatchet on their shoulders. And ‘surprise infiltration’ will, it’s true, allow the Bound to pop up at a scene with the other players once they make it out. But only if they’re not established as being mid-scene somewhere else, because that’s how that power works, so if the whole party are in the estate they’re only going to be able to pull the Bound to them. So maybe they made a plan to hide in the back rooms and the Bound will appear all bloody when it’s done, but now they need to get out of the house. Exfiltration is absolutely part of a good story about an assassination, and if your players don’t care about their characters enough to get into that they’re not going to care about anything involved here so why are you running it? ...finally, what kind of psychology are you operating on where a bunch of paranoid, heavily armed gangsters will be perfectly ok with one of their number (even someone they dislike or who secretly wants them gone) has been shot by a nameless flunky in the middle of a party? Every single one will want to know who did this and why, and also want to make sure it doesn’t happen to them. If you shout that this is for opposing the Ministry, some of them will want to side with you out of fear, some out of genuine political position... but a lot will want you dead to show that the Ministry can’t just stick its hands into crime like this. They could be next if they crossed the line for profit like Mr. Winters, and they also don’t want to be accused of alliance with the ministry by the Solar Guard. I could go on, and on, and on. At every single turn you’re interpreting things in the flattest and least interesting way, and interpreting ‘players will ask for what they want’ as a license to just say ‘that happens and there are no consequences or further events’ because you’re terrified of introducing anything that isn’t drawn onto a dungeon map, even when it’s outlined in the text. Joe Slowboat fucked around with this message at 17:32 on May 26, 2020 |
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May 26, 2020 17:30
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hyphz posted:the success results on the dice roll specifically mention that the PC "take(s) no stress" as a result of the action (although within the reasonable assumption that "what if the action was sticking their hand in a blender" is a moot question since no PC would do that) hyphz posted:(Actually, the literal text is that "when a player asks a question, it's an indication they want the game to go in a certain way." Which actually hits a lot of my problem on this matter, as in what came up in the Shadowrun game and also in another GM's example game I saw on Reddit which kicked off some unusual distinction. hyphz posted:Why? The whole point of the twist of the adventure is that the majority of the crowd are either scheming against or actively dislike Mr Winters, which is why he's set a trap for them. The only ones who'd unquestionably not just cheer are Sal and the guards, and they have just lost their employer, so is it even worth going ahead when Elizabeth or Devlin might be their only next hope for not ending up in the Red Row gutters? Granted, Sal isn't going to get another Head of Security gig if it gets out that she let her employer get aced in the most obvious way possible, but if she can't peg every single witness in the room, the attempt will get out too.. hyphz posted:Plus, I'm not sure if this doesn't run into a problem with it being a one-shot. The resonant question for the players will be "do we manage to kill Mr Winters?". Escaping from the party afterwards is far less appealing as the focus of the adventure (after all, the PCs are never being played again, so who cares?) Take the video game Hitman as an analogy. The mission doesn't end when you kill the target; you still have to get out. And it would be weird if you didn't, since potentially you can eliminate the target in a highly public and very direct way which makes getting out the main challenge of the level. Otherwise you could just bring a gun, run to the target and shoot them.
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May 26, 2020 17:41
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Joe Slowboat posted:Dude, you’re trying really hard to interpret every rule in the worst possible way to make this scene unworkable. I am reading the rules very literally, probably too literally, that's true. I don't argue that it's a good idea. But, almost every older RPG claimed that the reason to have rules was to ease conflicts between the players, or between the players and GM. If the rules do not do that job, because conflict simply moves on to their interpretation, then that's a weakness. quote:Also, you’re ignoring that the secret of the crowd explicitly doesn’t work if you’ve done something noticeable but does work no matter what you’re carrying, so what it’s really good for is being able to walk around with illegal weapons, covered in blood, etc. It just takes a tiny amount of creativity to, for example, do a murder around the corner and then walk out and vanish into the crowd; only the people who witness you murdering will be able to distinguish the blood-covered Batman with a hatchet on their shoulders. "When you wear your mask and stand in a crowd, you will blend into the background (though not become invisible) unless you do something out of the ordinary to attract attention." "Do". Not "have done". quote:And ‘surprise infiltration’ will, it’s true, allow the Bound to pop up at a scene with the other players once they make it out. But only if they’re not established as being mid-scene somewhere else, because that’s how that power works, so if the whole party are in the estate they’re only going to be able to pull the Bound to them. "Once per session, insert yourself into a situation where you are not currently present." I am not currently present in the Last Leg Inn and there is some situation there right now. I insert myself there. Therefore I am no longer in Mr Winters' estate. Done! Again, the assumption seems to be that the rules are "insert yourself into a situation that the group is playing out" but that's not there, and it dramatically changes the power. I can accept it was what was intended, but it's the kind of thing that'd need clarification to a player, especially if they're using it as part of an infiltration plan and therefore want to know what cut-scenes etc. the GM might play out. Tiggum posted:What the player is actually asking in this scenario is "Can I attempt to just walk in, shoot Mr Winters, and walk out?". The GM's "yes" means "Yes, you can certainly try to do that. Is that the plan you're going with?" and what follows is the consequences of that attempt. The role of the GM is to set the parameters, which includes the likelihood of any particular plan the players propose being successful and what potential consequences occur should they fail. If the players come up with a plan that you didn't anticipate and therefore didn't prepare any counters to, that's when you need to improvise. That's quite reasonable. But it's not what the book says. The book says, "if you can say yes to a question, do". And the GM can always say yes. The Reddit post in question gave another good example. Apparently they were setting up for a Pokemon game where the PCs were going to be members of a Team Rocket-esque criminal organization and the aim was to take over that organization. One of the PCs took a Porygon as a starting monster, essentially a Pokemon that exists within computers, and used it to hack the organization's computer system. They immediately found a ton of incriminating and critical information and went straight to the boss, threatening to blackmail them with it if they didn't hand over control of the organization to them. They did, and the campaign which had been months in the setup ended in 10 minutes. Which triggered a debate over whether a player should actually be taking actions that they do not want to work, just to show that they do not work. (Heck, this even goes through to vidya game design too - many games have hidden adaptations to the player, but does a stealth game have to make rushing in always fail? Does the player deliberately detecting and triggering those adaptations itself have to be responded to?) quote:I'm not seeing why one of these questions is more appealing than the other. The only reason the players have to care about either one is because the characters care, and that applies equally to both. Or perhaps even more to the second than the first since the characters probably value their own lives more than their mission objectives. Because you are forced to retry if you do not escape, which doesn't apply here. If you don't kill Mr Winters, then the story is of a bunch of people who failed an important mission. That's unpleasant and something the players would probably want to avoid. If you kill him but then are killed before escaping, the story is of a group who gave their lives for the Ministry. That's nowhere near as obviously undesirable, especially when - as I mentioned - the characters are not going to be used again anyway.
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May 26, 2020 18:24
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I think once your hypothesis on a game's ruleset flaws assumes an certain extraordinary level of ill-will, laziness, contempt, and malevolence from your players (and an equal total inability of the GM to do anything at all to work with them to reduce this) it ceases to be a criticism of the game, in much the same way as if the hypothesized problem was 'what if one of my players is a trained hypnotist and they trick me into saying 'the game is over and you won?' or 'what if one of my players is the chief of police and he says he'll shoot me and plant a gun on my corpse if I don't do what he says?' You can't fix those problems with rules. If people are determined to mess with you, they are going to mess with you, and no amount of careful wording, clearly-formatted paragraphs, and helpfully bolded text is going to ever stop them. Ever. They can load dice, shark cards, tie up your loved ones on railroad tracks, use third-party hacking programs, sneak money from the bank, and willfully and obtusely refuse to engage with your plot, and the only way to solve any of that is to stop playing with them. Or call the police if they did the railroad thing. Drakyn fucked around with this message at 19:09 on May 26, 2020 |
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May 26, 2020 19:00
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Your interpretation of The Secret of the Crowd is incoherent, because in that case, you could vanish into the crowd, do something that stands out (like shooting someone) then immediately use Secret of the Crowd again as soon as you stop pulling the trigger. The Secret is clearly not intended to turn you invisible when people are keeping track of you, because it specifies that it doesn't actually do that, it just helps you blend into crowds. It's not a perfect 'cannot be the subject of actions while there is a crowd in the room' magic field. You really need to try to read rules for how they make the game more interesting, and then stand by that interpretation because that's literally the role of the GM. That is what a GM is for, to establish the system of rules, interpret them to facilitate an interesting and pleasant game, and arrange the game. If another player knows more about the rules as written than the GM, the GM still has the social contract role to declare 'that may be technically correct but it results in bad outcomes, so.' And Spire doesn't even need that much massaging, it just needs a recognition that the rules are there to facilitate the fiction, not undermine it. E: Drakyn is talking about the more important side of this, I'm just aghast at the degree to which the Spire rules are being taken in bad faith. They're not perfect rules, but the way they're being put forward by hyphz is just deeply unfair to them. Joe Slowboat fucked around with this message at 19:06 on May 26, 2020 |
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May 26, 2020 19:02
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hyphz posted:summary from page 28 To point A, I'm with you there - I think the validation/feedback mechanisms are a two way street, and players ought to have some kind of more immediate reward. When I was first learning Lancer, my question was, "what do players get for advancement or encouragement to go play this game or do certain things in it", the response I got from the rules and other people who run it is "the activity itself is the reward and the friends made and robots you crushed along the way", which rang a bit hollow to me, but was serviceable given the way I ended up tuning the game. Regarding point B, absolutely. Adjacent to D&D but Shut Up and Sit Down did a fantastic video about how to introduce a new board game to people, which is highly useful for people that have that one shot of selling a game to others. There's a lot that goes into learning a new system and playing a game, and many indie systems pride themselves on not being D&D, some overtly but others in subtle ways (Strike! was called Sacred BBQ back in that old era of forums D&D design challenges since it tried to have a go at abandoning as many of D&D's sacred cows as possible, iIRC). I had a deep beef with 4th Edition D&D because the introduction module that they put on the back of the book was really poorly balanced and we as a group didn't know any better at the time. The mechanics and challenges were not well thought out, and it left a sour taste in our mouths to the point where we didn't really play 4th edition for quite awhile. For people who are well-seasoned gamesfolk like the erudites who post in a comedy internet forum's subforum about the philosophy of role playing games, the wider world of "everything that isn't D&D" shows quite a lot of things that D&D is poor at. That said, for the majority of people, D&D is 'good enough' for them because of a lot of reasons. I forgot what I was going to say on the rest of this topic, but most people will claim D&D is not the best at what it does, or isn't great at all. However, the majority of new folks that are looking for adventure know D&D like people who don't know motorcycles know Harley Davidson - it has a certain mystique about it that has been glorified through adjacent spectator media (Critical Role, Acquisitions Incorporated, and so on) that it has formulated people's taste for RPGs, and that's enough. When D&D was around and then it got pulled out a market (see: Japan) it still had its influence left over but people went in very different directions of play (2d6 roll or choice mechanisms, Sword World, things designed to play at a coffee shop, etc). When viewing D&D and its direct descendants (of which I will consider Pathfinder 2e to be one of them) through a need to simulate a magical realism world where the mechanics are more important than the narrative, the arguments and discussions listed about things like fighting a golem or demilich become quite relevant and are somewhat common, especially when mechanics take priority at a given table over the narrative. hyphz posted:spire adventure beef I see where hyphz is going with this, or at least, will make an attempt to do so. A new adventure to game masters, referees, judges, dungeon masters, spire lords, whatever you want to call them should provide some deeper instructive text and not assume the person reading the adventure can or will intuit what potential outcomes there are and how to achieve them. The Hitman example is a good one, as 'going loud' and murdering a prominent figure in a public place is only one part of the intro adventure. If the adventure does not have anything surrounding structuring this mission which is effectively a conceptual heist, then it has missed a key point in providing an introduction to people running Spire. How may the characters succeed? It seems like this was directly addressed in the text, which lists things going on for players to interact with. However, it falls short in that it does not directly tie those nuggets of info back to the main verb of the mission, "to make an example of Mister Winters". I am taking a bit of creative license here since making an example of said character, to some referees, may not actually require killing him - they could maim him or put him into a coma or, I dunno, make him politically irrelevant by running a smear campaign on him. What could be used to get away? Saying that a single roll solves the problem may be a valid solution on a good roll - the "wow, big number, guess it's true now" mentality. However, that is taking the mechanics at face value without explaining in the adventure text why it wouldn't be so easy to walk away because you're real good at stealth. Rules aside, walking up to someone and doing a violence on them in real life in most fiction is dangerous and also boring. Should the characters walk away from this? Spire's rulebook implies that the lives of characters are short and messy. The outcome is generally certain (Mr. Winters will die, or else the next adventure doesn't make as much sense as written), but it does not mean the characters will get out unscathed. It does imply that there are many, many armed individuals and that accomplishing the task is not only highly risky, but probably lethal if it goes pear shaped. Spire is structured to be a game of desperate vigilates, and if the narrative is not driving towards this or directly telling adventure runners to do so, then the message is a bit muddled. I will say that if you put on the hat of someone: "I am new to games but this Spire thing looks cool, but I don't know how to run it, can someone show me an example of how to run it well"; an adventure should provide enough meat on its bones from a design perspective to accomplish this. I'll reference Keep on the Borderlands again here, but specifically the 5e remaster of it by Goodman Games which preserves the original text. That has tons of instruction about how to run D&D, from how to structure a party, handouts, map stocking and generation, a huge map by Janelle Jaquays, tactics, NPCs in detail, and so on. It assumes you also don't know about running a game! It gives you more than enough information to account for these things. "Doing more with less" is a good idea once you are shifted into the right mindset. I am also observing that from the responses about this that making the leap from rules interpretations to what the module frames out but does not explicitly state is a point of friction. Joe Slowboat posted:Dude, you’re trying really hard to interpret every rule in the worst possible way to make this scene unworkable. I think from a play perspective us seasoned gamefolk can come together to have different interpretations and that's okay, but from a design perspective there is always motivation to deliver a message as clear as possible to your audience, including an actual play or examples of how an adventure might turn out, if possible! I think you could do these things for an adventure in a page or two, especially one that sounds as straightforward as "kill an elf".
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May 26, 2020 19:06
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hyphz posted:That's quite reasonable. But it's not what the book says. The book says, "if you can say yes to a question, do". And the GM can always say yes. Player: "Can I just win the whole thing without rolling any dice?" GM: "Welp. My hands are tied, the book says I have to say yes to literally any question the players ask, no matter what. So yes." Player: "What a disappointingly stupid way to end this game before it starts. Can we play anything else?" OR Player: "Can I just win the whole thing without rolling any dice?" GM: "No. This is a game, you're supposed to engage with it and play. You can make a plan, and then we'll Play to Find Out what happens." Player: "What about that thing on that page where it says you have to say yes to my question?" GM: "It says 'if you can', but the intent is 'if you can do it within the context of the adventure we're having, in a way that doesn't break the game, etc.' That's the only reasonable interpretation. It's supposed to be a prompt for the GM to not just blanketly shut down player ideas without giving them a chance to try playing them to find out what happens." Player: "Ah, as a reasonable player I understand, that makes sense. I'm glad we haven't decided that the precise wording of one sentence in the rulebook just invalidates the entire concept of playing a game." Hyphz: you can choose one of these two ways to engage with game rules. One approach results in playing a game, the other results in confusion and bad feelings for everyone.
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May 26, 2020 19:24
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I mean, you also have to remember this thread started because hyphz claimed it was conceptually impossible to run Spire. We have seen hyphz' interpretation of the adventure, and also the main book, but not the actual text for the most part. The main Spire book also lays out 'how to run a heist' as a GM, so there's also some explicit advice there. The adventures are sparse but hyphz is shaving them down further.
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May 26, 2020 19:26
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hyphz posted:That's quite reasonable. But it's not what the book says. The book says, "if you can say yes to a question, do". And the GM can always say yes. hyphz posted:The Reddit post in question gave another good example. Apparently they were setting up for a Pokemon game where the PCs were going to be members of a Team Rocket-esque criminal organization and the aim was to take over that organization. One of the PCs took a Porygon as a starting monster, essentially a Pokemon that exists within computers, and used it to hack the organization's computer system. They immediately found a ton of incriminating and critical information and went straight to the boss, threatening to blackmail them with it if they didn't hand over control of the organization to them. They did, and the campaign which had been months in the setup ended in 10 minutes. My second question would be, why wouldn't the boss just have them killed for making such a brazen attempt at a coup? Surely the leader of a criminal organisation has trusted lieutenants who could take care of that and also make sure the incriminating information never went public. If, as a player, you're going to step straight up and challenge the person you know to be the end boss of the game then you should expect to find yourself immediately in an extremely dire situation. hyphz posted:Because you are forced to retry if you do not escape, which doesn't apply here. If you don't kill Mr Winters, then the story is of a bunch of people who failed an important mission. That's unpleasant and something the players would probably want to avoid. If you kill him but then are killed before escaping, the story is of a group who gave their lives for the Ministry. That's nowhere near as obviously undesirable, especially when - as I mentioned - the characters are not going to be used again anyway. Tiggum fucked around with this message at 19:43 on May 26, 2020 |
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May 26, 2020 19:37
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I dunno. You could totally conceptualize some characters who genuinely are willing to die for their cause, if they think it's important enough. But you'd need to work with them on why their characters are willing to die, just to take out this one crime boss guy. It is, generally and broadly, a minor issue with one-shots, though: players not feeling committed to their characters' long-term welfare, because we all know this game is a one-off. At a con or something, maybe a bigger issue; with your gaming group, maybe you can offer the potential to do more games with these characters in the future, even if we're treating tonight's session as potentially a one-off. But yeah, part of gaming in good faith, is accepting and not intentionally subverting the premise of the adventure as-presented. If you tell them their goal for today's game is to defeat this gangster guy and escape alive, any reasonable player will be happy to play that way.
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May 26, 2020 19:42
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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 26, 2020 19:47
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Leperflesh posted:At a con or something, maybe a bigger issue; with your gaming group, maybe you can offer the potential to do more games with these characters in the future, even if we're treating tonight's session as potentially a one-off. Settings yes (one Blades group set an entire district of Duskwall on fire when a distraction got out of hand, another group in a sci-fi game blew up half a casino space station), but not characters.
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May 26, 2020 19:55
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Uh. I wonder why. They must know that they're not going to see those characters anymore... I guess seeing the guy you're playing as die an ignominous death isn't fun, even if you're never going to play as him again.
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May 26, 2020 20:25
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My own con experience is that people are more willing to die historic on the fury road at the climax of the game, you see a lot less paralysis and people will rise to the challenge of incredibly risky events that I think might cause some degree of paralysis or dismay in a long-running campaign. The worst behavior I ever got in a con game was one guy complaining I was "obviously running for my friends" when he sat two seats away from everyone else and I was trying to give approximately equal attention to everyone in the group.
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May 26, 2020 20:25
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aldantefax posted:How may the characters succeed? It seems like this was directly addressed in the text, which lists things going on for players to interact with. However, it falls short in that it does not directly tie those nuggets of info back to the main verb of the mission, "to make an example of Mister Winters". I am taking a bit of creative license here since making an example of said character, to some referees, may not actually require killing him - they could maim him or put him into a coma or, I dunno, make him politically irrelevant by running a smear campaign on him. I snickered at this because in my play group, if the mission explicitly calls for us to make an example of someone, death would be the best they could hope for. If the need is to encourage the others, we can get downright twisted. To engage vacuously with the larger discussion, Hyphz's points are more interesting to me as criticism of where Strike! and this intro adventure book could be better sausage machines than as indictments of the idea of gaming. The GM absolutely has to take responsibility for using fiat intelligently, but there's still room to keep improving rule books to make sure everyone's reading things the same way. Edit: regarding one shots, I try to play pretty recklessly, just to promote a fast pace of play. Knowing I'll never play this character again makes ball-of-fire endings a lot more appealing, especially if I can take the entire setting with me. Zorak of Michigan fucked around with this message at 20:31 on May 26, 2020 |
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May 26, 2020 20:28
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Drakyn posted:I think once your hypothesis on a game's ruleset flaws assumes an certain extraordinary level of ill-will, laziness, contempt, and malevolence from your players (and an equal total inability of the GM to do anything at all to work with them to reduce this) it ceases to be a criticism of the game, in much the same way as if the hypothesized problem was 'what if one of my players is a trained hypnotist and they trick me into saying 'the game is over and you won?' or 'what if one of my players is the chief of police and he says he'll shoot me and plant a gun on my corpse if I don't do what he says?' To some extent, yes; but there's other interpretations too. I mean, in the case of the Bound and Sudden Infiltration, the argument is that is an ability that the PC has. They know they have that ability and can decide to use it. If they use it to get into Mr Winters' Office, the character would know how they got there, because they just did it. And if you knew that you had that power, you might well think to try using it to escape from things. Joe Slowboat posted:You really need to try to read rules for how they make the game more interesting, and then stand by that interpretation because that's literally the role of the GM. That's very difficult to deal with when there's plenty of different definitions of interesting, and when "interesting" for the players can tie in to mechanical agency. Leperflesh posted:Hyphz: you can choose one of these two ways to engage with game rules. One approach results in playing a game, the other results in confusion and bad feelings for everyone. My interpretation was extreme, yes. But I think the point I'm trying to make is sliding by: I have never found any section in an RPG or GMing book which actually says anything about doing this kind of thing. How many times have you seen "Don't say No, say Yes But?". But you do have to say No; you have to say No, you can't shoot the immortal spirit of forests dead, No, you can't sneak out in one roll. That's obvious to someone who already knows how to run the games, but GMing sections are not for those people. It's very closely aligned to the fallacy of metaphorical teaching, aka Mr Miyagi's fallacy. Here's the intro from Spire's GMing section: quote:As gamesmaster, you have an important job in Spire – you’re in charge of everything that isn’t a player character. That means non-player characters, but also the pacing of the game, describing the imaginary world of the city, moderating arguments at the table, knowing the rules, making sure everyone has fun and arranging when and where the game itself happens. Challenging the players or telling them that they fail is never mentioned. This is followed by a section of bullet pointed paragraphs on "The Basics: Making the Game Fun". The points are: "Talk to each other", "Use lines and veils", "Use the X Card". All good points. Nothing about refusing things or making them hard. Next is "General GM advice." The points are: "You never roll dice." "Don't make players roll dice unless they have to." "Say yes." "Fail forward." "Re-use before you invent." "Ask questions and listen to the answers." "Don't be afraid to change stuff." Ditto. "Say yes," "Fail forward," and "Don't make players roll dice unless they have to" all argue against making things hard. There is then the following section on running heists. Let's have a few samples: quote:As the GM, it’s your duty to present items, structures, organisations and people that can be subverted; to provide weak links when the players look for them, to offer them weapons that they can turn against their oppressors. It is our duty to present things that can be subverted. Sometimes presenting things that cannot be is not part of our duty. When the players look for weak links, our duty is to provide them - apparently wherever they look - not to ever deem that none are available. The tradeoff appears to be that these things may be morally unpleasant to use, but they are there. From the point of view of a naive GM, what part of that paragraph tells them that if the PCs look for a "weak link" in the Solar Guard, they shouldn't find one immediately? Here's a later relevant paragraph: quote:What are people prepared to endanger for the sake of the revolution? Find multiple problems for the characters to tackle at once; have them pulled in many different directions, and have there be no right answer. Have a villain flee and leave an ally injured and bleeding out on the street, and push them into splitting the party or making a difficult choice. Have the police garrison they firebomb be staffed by a skeleton crew, as the remainder of the guard has been sent to crack down on their neighbourhood following reports of rebellious activity. At no point do they not drive the villain away, or fail to firebomb the garrison. And worse of all: quote:Difficulty is the one tool you have in your arsenal to use against the player characters Your one tool; so not the setting. Now, again, this is an overcorrection but I hope what's coming across is clear. Too many games seem to follow a style of GMing advice that's a bit like Mr Garrison in South Park advising Butters that he'll be popular with the other kinds if he's "unconditionally nice to them". Nothing about anything else. hyphz fucked around with this message at 20:33 on May 26, 2020 |
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May 26, 2020 20:30
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Tiggum posted:What the player is actually asking in this scenario is "Can I attempt to just walk in, shoot Mr Winters, and walk out?". The GM's "yes" means "Yes, you can certainly try to do that. Is that the plan you're going with?" and what follows is the consequences of that attempt. The role of the GM is to set the parameters, which includes the likelihood of any particular plan the players propose being successful and what potential consequences occur should they fail. If the players come up with a plan that you didn't anticipate and therefore didn't prepare any counters to, that's when you need to improvise. I had this scenario the other day in my Unknown Armies campaign. The party are attempting to get on board a boat and steal some poo poo. They've followed two people who got off the boat and discovered they work for the Old Firm, who are essentially a trading firm of embodied demons. The party gets them alone in an alley, where the Entropomancer says "I have a spell which lets me exert control over summoned demons? We didn't summon them from the spirit world, but we did summon them outside from that restaurant? Also there are two of them, can I control two demons at once?" My response was basically "You can try, but if you gently caress up it's going to be worse than it would be if you weren't pulling some semantic fuckery over the word 'summoned'." He rolls, succeeds, ends up with tenuous control over two demons (who will explicitly function as Dick Genies and take the worst interpretation of any commands given to them). He commands them to stay there in the alley until tomorrow, and do nothing except think about their mistakes. "Okay, it's 10pm, so you have until midnight to pull off this heist before they call in and tip off everyone on board the boat. You took them out of the frame for 2 hours exactly." Except I guess if I were running for Hyphz's group I'd have had to say "Yes. The demons are yours now. They are no longer complications in this game."
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May 26, 2020 20:33
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