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hyphz posted:Now, how about "can I defeat the Spider Mastermind?" You don't have a map of the distance between the Marine and the Spider. Now, how far the PC's going to go, and what's going to happen on the way, of course aren't binary. But, after each encounter, you still have to make a binary decision if the next encounter will be the Mastermind or not. And if we propagate your decision-making process on that back to the beginning of the game, then it will also resolve the "can.." question in all regards except dice rolls. No, you don't. There are lots of different ways to do this that don't involve the GM making any sort of decision.
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May 27, 2020 15:03
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hyphz posted:It's not so much that as that many of the times something appears non-binary, it's actually binary with a postponement; or binary after thinking is completed. absolutely untrue and its amazing that you still can't see that hyphz posted:Let's have a simple case. There's a red door and a blue door. One of the doors has $500 behind it, the other has nothing. i do like how in order to justify your views you make up increasingly stupid situations like this. you should hit up frank trollman and the two of you can write a whole book on quantum bears hyphz posted:There is other no difference between them and no context informing the decision. rpgs: well known for not including context to inform your decisions hyphz posted:if we have decided in advance that that the $500 is behind the red door, then the answer to "can we get the $500?" is yes. why would you decide this in advance? who says you have to? hyphz posted:They can get it, if they pick the red door. No problem. But if you have not yet decided which door it is behind, then at the moment when the PC chooses a door, you will either make up that it is behind that door or not. If you are going to make up that it is behind the door, then the answer to "can.." is yes; otherwise, it is no. There is no situation in which the PC can get the money but doesn't. i have eaten the cosmic mushroom and my soul vibrates with the wavelength of the general, your mentor and eternal tormenter: you didn't say it was a binary choice beforehand, so after having opened the blue door and finding nothing, i open the red door and find $500. you made up an additional door for no reason, you fool hyphz posted:Now, how about "can I defeat the Spider Mastermind?" You don't have a map of the distance between the Marine and the Spider. Now, how far the PC's going to go, and what's going to happen on the way, of course aren't binary. But, after each encounter, you still have to make a binary decision if the next encounter will be the Mastermind or not. if you don't want to make that decision based on the group's level of resource expenditure, the context of the hell environment around them, the general tension and fictional positioning of all that they have accomplished beforehand there are a multitude of tools out there that can make that decision for you. poo poo, roll a d10, and on a 10 you find the spider mastermind. i have solved your problems hyphz posted:And if we propagate your decision-making process on that back to the beginning of the game, then it will also resolve the "can.." question in all regards except dice rolls. no it can't, but the fact that you think it can is very revealing hyphz posted:I don't know it's that. ron howard voice: it is that hyphz posted:Here's the thing: I don't know if XD's game is affected by the tyranny of the wallclock or not. I'm enjoying it but furthermore, I'm not going to act out and kick off against that kind of thing because XD did me a huge favor by inviting me to join the game. so you're saying that in a different situation you would "act out" and be a whiny little rear end in a top hat about everything? weird hyphz posted:But if I run an indie game for a group that's normally used to D&D / PF.. or even if I ran the game for the same group.. then that's flipped around. They're doing me a favour by playing. So if they do object to stuff like that or call it out, I can't really complain much. no one is doing anyone a favor. gaming is not a transactional affair outside your abusive situation. people play games to have fun with one another, not because they're obligated to or because they pity them
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May 27, 2020 15:05
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Lord_Hambrose posted:Hyphz, have you considered just using something like a Pathfinder adventure path? They are generally good, and having everything be arbitrarily decided gives you a shield to cower behind. I have been playing the first one they have put out for Pathfinder 2E and that is a fun game with a very well defined system. They've done so previously but run into anxiety when improvising in a situation when the players think of something that the adventure path doesn't cover.
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May 27, 2020 15:05
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e: nm
Absurd Alhazred fucked around with this message at 19:42 on Jul 22, 2020 |
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May 27, 2020 15:10
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"I'm starting a clock. When you fill it up, you've found the mastermind". "I'm starting a clock. If it fills up, the mastermind's found you". (for example: as a possible consequence of a failed roll, as a devil's bargain) "I've shuffled 10 encounter cards into a pile, and then shuffled 5 more separately and placed them on the bottom. The mastermind's in the last 5, I don't know where". "I'm generating random halls and rooms from a table and drawing them on this piece of paper. If you reach the edge of the page, you've found the mastermind". "I'm rolling on this table of encounters. The mastermind's encounter 20. After 5 encounters, the mastermind is 20 and 19. After 6, it's 20, 19, 18. And so on." E: any or all of those at the same time. You can even combine 3 and 5 if you make 5 into a "wandering monster" type deal somehow. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 15:35 on May 27, 2020 |
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May 27, 2020 15:13
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hyphz posted:But if I run an indie game for a group that's normally used to D&D / PF.. or even if I ran the game for the same group.. then that's flipped around. They're doing me a favour by playing. So if they do object to stuff like that or call it out, I can't really complain much. This might be true in the very limited context of an existing group that likes their D&D/PF experience and wouldn't normally want to try things out. It's not true in general. You can't have a GM-based RPG without players and a GM. Sure, the GM has special obligations, but if they players show up thinking they're doing you a favor and now it's all on you, you're going to have lovely gameplay no matter what the system is. RPGs only work if everyone is engaged and pulling together to make them work. In my personal opinion, I'm the third-best GM in our six-person weekly gaming group. The difference between me and the better GMs isn't real subtle, either. Usually, if I get tagged in to GM, it's because I have some hippie game I want to try. Sure, they're doing me a favor by trying it, but I'm also doing them a favor by giving them a chance to do something different. I'm giving the guys who usually GM a chance to play instead. They spend a few hours and maybe it's a good night, maybe it's a bad one, but it's four hours spent hanging out with friends and trying to do something cool. Maybe we didn't succeed. So what? If there's good will among all the people at the table, it doesn't really matter.
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May 27, 2020 16:15
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Serf posted:no one is doing anyone a favor. gaming is not a transactional affair outside your abusive situation. people play games to have fun with one another, not because they're obligated to or because they pity them thisthisthis giving a game a chance and trying to have fun playing it is something they owe themselves, not anyone else.
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May 27, 2020 16:16
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imagine thinking the way hyphz thinks, but like, all the time. this thread is freakin' wild.
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May 27, 2020 16:49
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Doc Hawkins posted:thisthisthis Who says? Like, they're fine playing D&D 5e or Pathfinder forever. Anything new is going to have to prove itself. They have no duty to have fun playing it, if they aren't having fun they can cancel it and do 5e again next week. That's the case for like, 90% of gaming groups.
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May 27, 2020 16:50
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hyphz posted:Who says? Like, they're fine playing D&D 5e or Pathfinder forever. broken human beings hyphz posted:Anything new is going to have to prove itself. like, what's the criteria? because the assholes you play with wouldn't even look at strike. so it seems like they're unwilling to let the game have a chance hyphz posted:They have no duty to have fun playing it, no one said they did hyphz posted:if they aren't having fun they can cancel it and do 5e again next week. again, these are broken people you're describing, not normal human beings hyphz posted:That's the case for like, 90% of gaming groups. i like how you think your experience in ttrpg geohell applies universally. i've never encountered this. the people i first started gaming with got in through 4e, then moved on to 13th age, and a couple years later we were playing strike!, apocalypse world, fate and other stuff
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May 27, 2020 16:58
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Serf posted:i like how you think your experience in ttrpg geohell applies universally. i've never encountered this. the people i first started gaming with got in through 4e, then moved on to 13th age, and a couple years later we were playing strike!, apocalypse world, fate and other stuff Just look at any number of groups trying to do different things in 5e when there's other systems.. or the whole OSR and D&D movement.. or any number who are just too lazy to learn something new.. I can sit on my own and say they're broken while they're enjoying themselves, but I learned in school what that leads to.
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May 27, 2020 17:03
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Have you considered you’re not actually at school anymore and are ostensibly a drat adult with the amazing power to not engage with groups of people who are treating you like poo poo.
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May 27, 2020 17:05
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hyphz posted:Just look at any number of groups trying to do different things in 5e when there's other systems.. or the whole OSR and D&D movement.. or any number who are just too lazy to learn something new.. I can sit on my own and say they're broken while they're enjoying themselves, but I learned in school what that leads to. you could instead play with people who want to try other things. i'll also pull a statistic out of my rear end and say that 70% of gaming groups are open to all sorts of games if you're willing to engage in them. your group falls into the 30% that won't and into the even smaller 0.00001% of groups that are so toxic that they can break a person's brain just through bad elfgaming
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May 27, 2020 17:22
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hyphz posted:Just look at any number of groups trying to do different things in 5e when there's other systems.. or the whole OSR and D&D movement.. or any number who are just too lazy to learn something new.. I can sit on my own and say they're broken while they're enjoying themselves, but I learned in school what that leads to. Hey hyphz, I still think one of the core issues here is a disconnect between what you want and what they want. This discussion is tending towards emphasizing the former, because as other people have said I bet you can find a group that wants to play the stories you want to, but can you tell us more about what you think your gamers want? My read from all this is that they want a very old-school experience that's less about narratives and more about maximizing a number on their character sheets (either XP or GP or "number that represents supreme rear end-kicking power"). It sounds like they're not really into the "cunning plan" approach to gaming and want to get more to the hack-n-slash. Is that a fair read? If so, then the question is basically how do you design encounters that scratch their itch that are fun for you to run. Maybe approaching the design philosophy questions from that perspective would be helpful. Personally I massively prefer the way that game design has shifted to more of an emphasis on narrative, but there's got to be a way to design an old-school experience that doesn't suck.
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May 27, 2020 17:30
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Notahippie posted:My read from all this is that they want a very old-school experience that's less about narratives and more about maximizing a number on their character sheets (either XP or GP or "number that represents supreme rear end-kicking power"). It sounds like they're not really into the "cunning plan" approach to gaming and want to get more to the hack-n-slash. Is that a fair read? from earlier in the thread, they decided that rather than hack-and-slash in a pf2e adventure path they wanted to instead spend 30 person-hours of labor with an adamantine pick meticulously chewing through an impassable tunnel to avoid doing the adventure. and later on instead of doing a cool heist they went for hack-and-slash. so it seems their mode of operation is "the exact opposite of whatever the game wants us to do"
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May 27, 2020 17:53
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They seem very much the type of players that have the main goal of feeling like they outsmarted someone, be it the adventure writer or the GM, so avoiding the fighting in a fight module or the heist in the heist module are the same. There are games and groups this is fine for, but it clearly isn't for hyphz.
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May 27, 2020 18:05
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Can we more clearly define "tyrrany of the wall clock" here, for those of us following at home? --- I think that if you're looking for validation, permission, or instruction in how to run a game when there are some necessary points that ought be drawn out or have no set plan, then the onus of a DM to improv can be daunting, particularly when a given group is stringent about versimilitude for the sake of advantages. If there is such a group which argues and uses sophistry to break the fiction or stump the person running the game, then you have an adversarial group that is trying only to "win" with viewing a shared narrative as an obstacle for this. Most people in this thread would consider this an unhealthy approach, at least what has been discussed thus far. There isn't an easier way I have to explain this right now off the top of my head but the need to have a reasonably simulated world is not unhealthy. An adversarial group seeks a mode of play that people are not a fan of anymore due to the mindset it enforces. Is that unhealthy? Maybe. Rejecting narrative in favor of a simulation is an exercise in frustration for the purposes of the current discussion. Given narrative situation X, applying simulation in a rigid way without an explicit structure provided by rules Y will cause fun to equal zero. If you reduce the debate to this, then it is understandable this has turned more into an argument...
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May 27, 2020 18:52
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hyphz posted:A better way to think about it might be to say, if someone asked "Can I defeat a Fronkilora with a Zydibel?"  Look, well-written games like AW give you the tools to answer these questions. This falls squarely under the heading of "Always say what the rules demand, what the principles demand, what your prep demands, and what honesty demands." So you've prepped a Fronkilora for your group to face? Great! That probably means you've made some decisions of its capabilities or have some mental picture of what that is. Now convey that to your players honestly. Can they defeat it with a Zydibel? Well, if you've given the players an honest idea of just what a Zydibel is capable of, the answer will be as easy as the pistol/nuclear submarine case. "No, the Fronkilora is gigantic and for all its power you know full well that a Zydibel's effect is very localized. You might be able to exploit a specific point weakness if you can find one, but you'd have to figure out what that weakness might be and even then it would likely entail some risk regardless. Getting close enough to a Fronkilora to use such a short-ranged weapon as a Zydibel would be dangerous." Most times, the players are asking questions as a way to gauge what is possible/probable/likely, because they are trying to square their understanding of the fictional reality you're describing with what's in their heads - trying to get on the same page, as it were. So long as you answer honestly, it doesn't matter whether the answer to any specific question is "yes" or "no."
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May 27, 2020 21:13
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It seems like hyphz, and hyphz's group might be running into one of the actual differences that exist between traditional rpgs and more narrative games. In my experience, people who play more traditional games frequently run into this issue when approaching narrative games, because they come into things assuming this difference doesn't exist. In D&D or Pathfinder, the purpose of an obstacle is to challenge the players/characters to overcome it. A core activity of play is finding a way, using your own mind and your character's abilities, to overcome the obstacle as effectively as possible. It seems like hyphz is thinking of obstacles in that way, and it seems like that's what their players enjoy. There is pressure in this mode of play for there to be some kind of standard against which success at overcoming an obstacle can be judged as more or less effective. In a more narrative game, the purpose of an obstacle is to cause interesting things to happen in the fiction. Success or failure is less important than something engaging happening in the game world. Under this model, there doesn't need to be a way to prove that some other approach would have worked better, or that there were definite ways to succeed and fail, because that isn't what the people playing the game are supposed to find interesting. It's worth saying that plenty of people play D&D in the latter way, I just don't think that's what it was designed for.
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May 27, 2020 23:50
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Perhaps just tell them "are you guys ready to play a heist module?" when you've got a fighting module prepped, and vice versa.
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May 28, 2020 01:19
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Serf posted:you could instead play with people who want to try other things. i'll also pull a statistic out of my rear end and say that 70% of gaming groups are open to all sorts of games if you're willing to engage in them. your group falls into the 30% that won't and into the even smaller 0.00001% of groups that are so toxic that they can break a person's brain just through bad elfgaming I mean poo poo I have friends who I won't RP with even when I'm friends with them for other reasons. hyphz's commitment to snorting glass when there's perfectly good cocaine and also the option of not snorting is shakespearean.
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May 28, 2020 04:19
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e: nm
Absurd Alhazred fucked around with this message at 19:43 on Jul 22, 2020 |
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May 28, 2020 04:20
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D&D Session 1: GM: OK, so you're all brought before the king, and... Player1: I cut his head off. GM: I... really? OK, roll initiative. Player1: No. GM: Fair enough. The king says... Player1: No, I cut his head off. GM: OK, roll initiative and we'll start combat. Player1: I'm not rolling initiative. I want to cut his head off. Player2: Yeah, he wants to cut his head off. That's not initiative. GM: OK, so you surprise him? Sure, I can roll with that. Roll for attack. Player1: No. I'm not attacking, I'm cutting his head off. Players 2 and 3: Yeah. GM: But... that's how combat works in this game. You roll to attack, and add your bonuses, and if you beat his armor class... Player1: You never mentioned any armor. Players 2 and 3: Yeah you never said there was any armor. Player1: You're just making that up because you don't want to let me cut his head off. GM: It doesn't mean actual armor, it's the number that repr... Players 1, 2, and 3: AHA! Player2: Then why is it called armor class? This is ridiculous! He doesn't have armor, but he does have armor! Make up your mind! Player1: So are you telling me there's no rules for cutting his head off? This is stupid. GM: I... what do you want me to do here? Player1: Nothing, this is poo poo and you're poo poo, I'm just gonna piss in your linen closet on the way out. Player2: Yeah, me too. Player3: I already did that on the way in. -- Goon who's just started paying attention: I think the problem here is a disconnect between traditional non-narrative and nontraditional narrative expectations of... Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 05:10 on May 28, 2020 |
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May 28, 2020 05:07
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Right, if the objective here is to point out that the example gaming group in specific is a group which is out to have as little fun as possible, when put into that lens it's a crumby group. Shutting down conversations about the philosophy of why groups in general can experience this as well as other ways to overcome it short of overhauling or replacing a system, using different tools, or whatever seems to cause friction and debate. If that's missing the point of this thread or this specific sub topic then the stories about the specific group really ought to be shoveled into the cat piss thread. If as a discussion there is nothing further to be gleaned from this, it seems best to move on to other topics, or shut down someone attempting to seek further philosophical understanding. In short, if specific group bad, group bad and there is no redemption. See the entire rest of the thread. -- From a design and philosophy perspective I am curious to know which games that have a heavy amount of crunch and randomness also combine this with explicit narrative conversation cues similar to PBtA, FATE etc. Does the presence of a lot of rules take away from more focused narrative gaming, and is that a finality or an opportunity to reconcile the two things together? At what point does a game become wholly divorced from the narrative, such as in Lancer where the mech combat engine is almost completely isolated and suggests in the rules to slim down on narrative play the solution? Can you have your cake and eat it too without making another heartbreaker clone? One of the systems that I've seen attempt to reconcile this is the many interpretations of GURPS, which has more rules light variants but also ways to focus the core toolset for a specific experience. The How to be a GURPS GM splatbook goes very in depth for newer GMs on how to think systematically about structuring a campaign from scratch, which means a lot of heavy lifting and planning to have good answers for how a game runs at a specific table. I think there may be a lesson there (spoken from the designer's mouth during FnordCon a month or two ago, even!) that part of why GURPS came to be was because there should be some way to model things in a more crunchy fashion. I'm not sure it really provides the right tools up front though to have things like the very succinct moves that PBtA is known for. How does one design to give its audience and incoming GMs a clear, strong message about narrative and mechanical play that support each other?
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May 28, 2020 06:23
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As an example the most recent WoD games a pretty narrative but also very crunchy. I haven't gotten to play them as much as I'd like so I can't recommend them through ignorance, but they're at least trying in that vein. Edit : somehow typoed "crunchy" into "country". My shame shall live for generations. Xiahou Dun fucked around with this message at 07:31 on May 28, 2020 |
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May 28, 2020 06:26
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Xiahou Dun posted:As an example the most recent WoD games a pretty narrative but also very country. I haven't gotten to play them as much as I'd like so I can't recommend them through ignorance, but they're at least trying in that vein. In practical terms I'd compare Scion 2E with Savage Worlds, complexity-wise.
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May 28, 2020 06:42
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Elector_Nerdlingen posted:Goon who's just started paying attention: I think the problem here is a disconnect between traditional non-narrative and nontraditional narrative expectations of... Don't pretend that hyphz and his group are aberrations. They're outliers, sure, but they're out on the edge of a curve made from a common cause. That cause is that Pathfinder and D&D lied to them. They're games with rules primarily about tactical combat, but they pretend they can be games about anything you could find in a fantasy story! Stealth! Intrigue! Mystery! But there is little and less support in the rules for these aims, and as characters grow in power and gain capabilities that would fit a story told outside tactical combat, players and DMs alike find out there's nothing there to support that story. And the game's just sitting there uselessly, the smug fuckin' bastard, pretending nothing's wrong. At a loss for words are we? A good DM would know just what to say. A good DM like they wanted. Ooh, or maybe you are a good DM and those rascally ol' players are trying to pull a fast one on you! Well don't you let 'em! Slash! Stab! Thus, the focus shifts, from the game's own inadequacy in providing the rules for the things it tells you that it is about, to the inadequacy of the players and DM to derive the rules that surely must exist in the text somewhere, and "play correctly". On the surface, "we'll tunnel into the manor's basement to free the slaves! From the sewers! With magic! They'll never suspect it!" isn't a wrong thing to happen in a fantasy story. But we've seen how the game started pulling back from it - all its magic faces tactical combat. So to begin approaching how you deal with that story by the rules, you have to make a judgement call about the 3D tactical combat nature of a large part of the city, and suddenly all the worry focuses on that, instead of the more important things, like "did the PCs follow the map correctly through the tunnels", "what kind of place are the PCs going to come up in", and "did the slavers suspect it after all, considering they have a diviner on staff"? But okay, now you're in the manor basement. Sneakin' around! What a shame that the game supports exactly the kind of stealth needed for tactical combat and not any other kind at all. Tactical combat stealth doesn't worry about things like '"suspicion" or "alert levels", that's too complex for when you're just gonna jump out and get 'em next round. "Hidden" and "completely noticed by everybody" are the only two things tactical combat stealth needs! So yeah, when you're sneaking around in the story and you fail one single stealth-related roll, at any time, ever, well that's everything blown isn't it? You might have 120 hit points for the tactical combat but you've got exactly 1 hit point for stealth and you just lost it. In a similar fashion, while the game has a lot to say about what specifically its adversaries can do inside the tactical combat, it makes no provision for what they're capable of doing outside of it, because that would have to interact with all those stealth and intrigue and mystery systems that also only operate on a level that a six-second tactical combat round cares about. What's the end boss going to do when you take multiple days tunneling through what they thought was a sealed corridor? Send patrols around? Well, those patrols can only move how tactical combat says they can so you better make a tactical map of the entire overcastle! Maybe actually hear you coming as the sound of digging starts getting closer and make preparations? Oh, but that would require "suspicion", which as we know does not exist! Advance their evil plot? Heaven forfend! If there was an evil plot that came to fruition over, say, a certain number of days, the poor beleaguered magic-users would have no idea how to pace out their spell usage! No, they're just going to sit in the end boss encounter room waiting for the end boss encounter to happen, and if that means that the PCs pile in from a blind angle without having been worn down by the gauntlet of guards that was supposed to protect them, well, que sera. Glazius fucked around with this message at 07:09 on May 28, 2020 |
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May 28, 2020 07:01
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Elector_Nerdlingen posted:D&D Session 1: Part of why I'm just absolutely baffled is this is what I expected hyphz to do in my game and then he turned out to just be a really normal, pleasant person. He'll type thousands of words worrying about weird things that I've never seen happen in a game, but then given a good community of some randos he's a perfectly functioning and exciting member of the group. It honestly boggles my brain how he can spill all of this digital ink in order to "imrpove" whatever he thinks a game should be, but when presented with a normal, actual game he takes to it like a duck to water. If he ever feels like running something (no pressure, of course), I'd be down to see.
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May 28, 2020 07:42
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Hyphz, have you read F. Scott Fitzgerald? "An intellectual is someone who can hold two contradictory ideas in their head at the same time and still function" I've listened in for an hour or so to some of the sessions of XD's game you joined and it all went great! You fit in perfectly. You vibed with the other players and with XD really well. There was no awkwardness or misunderstandings. And everyone had fun! Including you! Then it seems you take some time to think about it, try to post-facto rationalise everything that *you already did perfectly well intuitively* and you enter this spiral of doubt and worry. All of a sudden everything in the session you enjoyed was a fluke, or because of a very specific circumstance, or because people were unreasonably generous, or "it was actually really hard even though it seemed easy and natural at the time but that's because of x reason which I didn't see then in the moment but now I am thinking about it deeply it shouldn't have worked or at least most of the time won't work because......" Maybe try thinking about things less and playing more. And if your current group aren't down for a more lowkey, intuitive approach, then that's ok. Play with some other people who are. tanglewood1420 fucked around with this message at 08:28 on May 28, 2020 |
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May 28, 2020 08:24
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Elector_Nerdlingen posted:Goon who's just started paying attention: I think the problem here is a disconnect between traditional non-narrative and nontraditional narrative expectations of... Yeah, I mean, wrongly assuming I haven't read this whole thread, and all the recent hyphz chat in the chat thread, and posted in previous hyphz chat in years gone by and then be a dick about it is something you could do I guess.
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May 28, 2020 08:26
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Yeah like there's two parallel plots in this thread: The Passion of the Hyphz and Theoretical Discussion of RPG Stuff.
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May 28, 2020 08:33
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thefakenews posted:Yeah, I mean, wrongly assuming I haven't read this whole thread, and all the recent hyphz chat in the chat thread, and posted in previous hyphz chat in years gone by and then be a dick about it is something you could do I guess. That was in no way directed at you though? e: Wait poo poo, I see why you thought so. Sorry. Xiahou Dun posted:Part of why I'm just absolutely baffled is this is what I expected hyphz to do in my game and then he turned out to just be a really normal, pleasant person. I have no idea what Hyphz the IRL person behind the keyboard is like when they're not posting, but Hyphz the SA poster is indistinguishable from a gimmick that pretends that games can't be played. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 09:27 on May 28, 2020 |
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May 28, 2020 09:18
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Elector_Nerdlingen posted:That was in no way directed at you though? Oh, ok. No worries then. Edit: 
thefakenews fucked around with this message at 09:37 on May 28, 2020 |
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May 28, 2020 09:34
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thefakenews posted:Oh, ok. No worries then. Nah, that one's on me, I read it back and it sounded just like what you thought it was.
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May 28, 2020 09:41
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Going back to the old-school D&D chat briefly, I've found two other subjects that have really caught my interest... Older editions have an extremely precise laser focus on dungeon delving and wilderness exploration. Almost every element of play involves a 'turn' structure, with the referee and players expected to track time in specific increments and the consumption of supplies and energy thereof. Your class features and ability scores were almost all built around the assumption that you would be exploring deathtrap mazes and either fighting or avoiding hostile creatures. The only proscribed use for the Charisma score outside of nebulous ability checks is to maintain retainer loyalty, which is important because hirelings were a lifeline for adventurers. Most classes got a 'stronghold' feature around Level 9-12, but this seems more proscribed as something a player uses when they want their character to retire and become an important NPC in a successor party's adventures. This kind of focused design is almost totally absent from later editions, which leads me to wonder what the prevailing attitudes were amongst the designers and (hypothetical) playtesters involved. I can say for sure that OD&D as-written isn't really suited to mythic high-fantasy stories - it's Conan and his hangers-on plundering deadly temples, or Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser cracking skulls in the desperate hope of a payday. Was it too narrow of a focus for a TRPG to retain mainstream appeal? D&D has become something of a game for being all things to all people via an extremely simple unified resolution system, but was this the result of a conscious decision to increase the scope of play, or just feature creep occurring because a player group would rather houserule an existing game than learn a new one? This kind of leads into my second point of interest - obfuscated rolls, and how that plays into conveying narrative events and player agency. For most of the perception or stealth-based rolls, it's stated that the referee makes the roll, not the player - if a player wants to Hide in Shadows, the referee rolls and doesn't share the result, because regardless of the result, the character thinks they've succeeded. This is the same for checking for secret doors - the player doesn't get to know if they made a successful check. This principle makes a lot of sense, particularly in terms of preventing tedious metagaming - if a player knows their character failed the Secret Doors check, they're going to hang out in that room and keep rolling til they get a 'successful' check. Without that knowledge, they can either decide to keep trying, or they can just move on. Similarly, if a PC is aware they've botched their stealth effort, they might modify their behaviour, rather than committing to their action. However, this troubles me as a GM because I don't think players should ever miss out on content unless they specifically choose to. If there's something dope behind a secret door, I want them to find it! It'll be fun for them, which is fun for me! Why would I want to leave a space on the map that the players won't find? More drama-driven games sidestep this dilemma quite neatly by only forcing a roll when there's stakes to play against, and the roll itself is an indicator of how the story progresses, rather than a snapshot of a particular action/result. But, these games don't capture the granularity or deliberation of a game like D&D, which IMO is one of the reasons Dungeon World isn't a very good D&D clone or PbtA game. The systems function at total cross purposes in conveying action and consequence.
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May 28, 2020 10:56
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Zeerust posted:This kind of focused design is almost totally absent from later editions, which leads me to wonder what the prevailing attitudes were amongst the designers and (hypothetical) playtesters involved. I can say for sure that OD&D as-written isn't really suited to mythic high-fantasy stories - it's Conan and his hangers-on plundering deadly temples, or Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser cracking skulls in the desperate hope of a payday. Was it too narrow of a focus for a TRPG to retain mainstream appeal? D&D has become something of a game for being all things to all people via an extremely simple unified resolution system, but was this the result of a conscious decision to increase the scope of play, or just feature creep occurring because a player group would rather houserule an existing game than learn a new one? I think this probably started with the natural consequences of D&D being picked up by people outside of the wargaming culture Gygax et al. were immersed in. D&D was heavily influenced by a particular gaming scene, but seems to have been bought (and probably sold) as a game of high fantasy adventure. As you note, it wasn’t really that. Fantasy adventure means different things to different people. So players naturally played the game in a way that was closer to what they wanted, and dropped a lot of the procedural rules. I think it’s evident from the games like Runequest, which quickly followed D&D (and started as house rules for D&D), that there was a pretty quick move to different play styles from various groups. I think the shift in the design of D&D was heavily influenced by how people were actually playing it out in the real world, and also by what the designers perceived to be popular aspects of games D&D competed with. See, for instance, the many ways that something like Planescape can be seen as a response to Vampire the Masquerade.
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May 28, 2020 11:09
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Glazius posted:Don't pretend that hyphz and his group are aberrations. They're outliers, sure, but they're out on the edge of a curve made from a common cause. I think there's an important point here, but there's a detail you didn't mention. I will mention that in that particular encounter in the Pathfinder 2e module, the support for doing it by tactical combat is kind of lacking, but unfortunately the support for doing it as a heist isn't great either - I think I previously posted the example of the mystic seer who is apparently still vulnerable to being poisoned but apparently nothing else. The detail in question is that from the GM's point of view, the tactical combat system is also made to resolve a bunch of the issues that I've clasically had:
Now that's not to say those things are impossible. You can have a T-rex spawn from nowhere to chase level 1 characters back on the road. You can react to the sneaky rogue coming in from the back by sticking an invisible dragon in the path. But assuming you don't do those, the rules do a good job of creating a mini-situation of explorable space in which the players can have agency while at least a modicum of fairness is guaranteed. It seems very hard to get that in other games, and appeal can change without it. The appeal of fighting or sneaking your way out of a mansion of angry gangsters is kind of reduced if those guarantees aren't there. Xiahou Dun posted:Part of why I'm just absolutely baffled is this is what I expected hyphz to do in my game and then he turned out to just be a really normal, pleasant person. He'll type thousands of words worrying about weird things that I've never seen happen in a game, but then given a good community of some randos he's a perfectly functioning and exciting member of the group. It honestly boggles my brain how he can spill all of this digital ink in order to "imrpove" whatever he thinks a game should be, but when presented with a normal, actual game he takes to it like a duck to water. If he ever feels like running something (no pressure, of course), I'd be down to see. Well, I haven't interest in being an rear end in a top hat and I do have interest in exploring how things run, and some of the things I'd notice haven't come up much. For example, one thing I noticed in our game is that the scope is wider and events faster than in a typical PF game - we don't explore the forest hex by hex, we just find things and then the interesting things happen when we get there. That's cool, and in line with what I expected and hoped for, and it also keeps the actions of the players at a larger scope where agency comes from knowledge of the world, not of the individual situation. That's why I was disappointed, not with Spire itself, but with that particular adventure. I can see how the stress mechanics and similar work if an action is "I intimidate the baker into putting this in the next cake for the Aelfir ceremony". I can't see it if an action is "I move 10' through a door, in a room full of angry gangsters" But the other thing is that it's easy to manage this as a player because I can suspend it out and doubly so because I'm still treating your game as a learning experience. For example, when Niccolo went off to explore a cave and found some markings that might be interesting, my radar went "uh-oh, potential Tyranny Of The Wallclock, the clues he's going to find are determined by the amount of time we've been playing, not by the particular cave he has found" but I didn't say that because I wasn't going to interrupt the game, and it doesn't necessarily matter when there wasn't any major tradeoff or cost to the character involved, and because maybe I'm wrong and Tyranny Of The Wallclock isn't really that big a deal, or maybe the context it's put in can mitigate it or change the interpretation of the effect it has, so I want to see how things go. But if I'm the GM, then I'd know absolutely if I was invoking the wallclock or not, and if there's any mitigation or reinterprative context to put it in then it's muggins who has to do it, and I don't know how. So I'm not making any objections now but am just making a note to see what effect it has and how XD manages it going forward. Bear in mind, by the way, that some of the behaviour of the players may actually be learned from similar things. Both myself, and The General who is the main group GM, tend to want to reward players for jumping off the rails because that usually involves having a neat idea. Perhaps less so when the neat idea is mass murder, but still. I mean, this is probably another matter completely, but if you're playing D&D or a d20 game and a player goes off and explores, gets jumped by a monster and has no way to heal, and all of that is improvised, then it's almost a cultural expectation that the players don't think "hey, this is a dangerous area so we'd better stick together", but instead think "the DM is punishing us for splitting the party so we shouldn't do it in any situation". hyphz fucked around with this message at 16:22 on May 28, 2020 |
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May 28, 2020 16:03
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Zeerust posted:This kind of leads into my second point of interest - obfuscated rolls, and how that plays into conveying narrative events and player agency. For most of the perception or stealth-based rolls, it's stated that the referee makes the roll, not the player - if a player wants to Hide in Shadows, the referee rolls and doesn't share the result, because regardless of the result, the character thinks they've succeeded. This is the same for checking for secret doors - the player doesn't get to know if they made a successful check. The problem can be solved just as well by rolling at the point that risk occurs for stealth rolls. Plus, it allows the referee to maintain their own suspense. You could obfuscate search for secret doors, but other than that you don't make perception checks in old school dungeoncrawls. Even obfuscating rolls for secret door searches isn't entirely necessary because you can give that action an inherent cost. You could argue that elves and possibly other folk get free secret door tests, but they only get those once. If your argument is that 'point of risk' doesn't matter for this style of play, than why even wait to roll for the automatic search? You could roll for every member of the party before hand and mark on the map who automatically sees the secret door when they walk past, before the session begins. e: So, to be clear the question is: "When is referee obfuscation of roll results appropriate and in what manner (in a dungeon crawl)?" I will see if I can answer this more clearly in a bit. DalaranJ fucked around with this message at 16:52 on May 28, 2020 |
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May 28, 2020 16:39
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hyphz posted:Tyranny of the wallclock Is this actually a thing? From what I've understood of your posts you're using this phrase to mean something along the lines of "This plot arc is scheduled to take 4 sessions. No matter what the players do, the GM will add or remove challenges to keep it at 4 sessions. The players decisions cannot change this." Maybe my groups are weird, or maybe I'm weird as a GM, never having run a pre-written module. But I've never seen this happen. In one campaign, the party were kidnapped by an AI the size of a planet, plus its subroutines, which wanted them to do its bidding. I'd figured I'd get 2 or 3 sessions worth of stuff out of that. About half an hour in, after the AI has made its morally questionable pitch, one of the players says "Hey, so my special ability is that once per session I can tell a machine to do exactly what I want. Can I just tell the entire planet to reboot?" Which, yes, yes she could. I didn't make them come up with 3 sessions worth of other stuff, the plot just moved on because a player did something cool which no one else could do, and they moved on to some other event. On the flip side, same campaign, the party went on a little excursion into the past. I'd planned this to be maybe 2 sessions of diversion. It took up 6, because they kept getting sidetracked and stopping to chat with NPCs. If I've understood Tyranny of the Wallclock correctly, I should have rushed them through in the assigned time? But, in a PBTA kind of way we just kept on playing to find out what would happen in the past. (And obviously these are both from a campaign with no fixed end point, so maybe the definition of time is a bit looser. But I also ran a sci-fi horror con game where the party were incredibly genre-savvy, side-stepped all possible threats, and got to the end of things very swiftly. We wrapped the game up 2 hours into a 4 hour time slot. They felt smug at having been so careful and didn't mind missing out on all the actual plot. Other groups threw themselves into the genre tropes with wild abandon and used the full time.)
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May 28, 2020 16:46
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hyphz posted:I mean, this is probably another matter completely, but if you're playing D&D or a d20 game and a player goes off and explores, gets jumped by a monster and has no way to heal, and all of that is improvised, then it's almost a cultural expectation that the players don't think "hey, this is a dangerous area so we'd better stick together", but instead think "the DM is punishing us for splitting the party so we shouldn't do it in any situation". This is another example of toxic poo poo that needs to be unlearned, if anyone's learned it. As a GM, if your players are moving faster than you can improv or otherwise pushing you out of your comfort zone, stop play and discuss the matter. Ask for prep time to adapt. Tell the players you have a planned adventure and it requires them to just go to the drat castle and quit exploring the million acre wood that has no planned content. Tell them to keep the party together because they need teamwork to live (or just because you don't like it). Don't punish their characters because the players didn't behave the way you expected. In the long run, that breeds mutual contempt.
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May 28, 2020 16:46
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