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hyphz posted:[*]There's no problem with pacing management. There's a pre-provided clock, in the form of Hit Points, on every creature. The value is set in the book, so the players can never complain that you're funneling them by choosing difficulty. what if the book is bad at it? i mean, i know that's good for you because as you've mentioned before you can shield yourself with the module, but like, why is this an issue? why are they assuming that you're "funneling" them at all? it seems like this situation is predicated on an adversarial or bad-faith gming approach, or the assumption of that by the players. again, at each turn you reveal that you're not so much elfgaming as you are locked in psychic combat with your players and they just keep owning you. stop being owned and play with people who want to have fun hyphz posted:The amount it goes down by is set deterministically in the book, and varies based on player actions (or at least on weapon choice), so the players can never complain that you're actually just waiting for a certain condition to be true, or that as long as an action that achieves a certain degree of success it doesn't matter what action it was. what if an encounter is inherently unfair? what if there is a specific weakness the creature has, or a condition they need to meet before it becomes vulnerable? will they complain about that too? or ignoring all that, let's say you throw out stats entirely and you are just waiting for them to have expended the right amount of resources or taken enough damage before the creature dies or the enemies flee? i've done this plenty of times and no one has ever complained or demanded to see the stats from the book or my notes. most players don't care hyphz posted:[*]All of the mechanisms to provide informed player agency are already in place, and their exceptions are defined too. If the monster is 35' away and you know it has a speed of 20' then it will not hit you this turn and you can make decisions based on that. If the monster in fact can charge an extra 20' once per encounter then that was in the book before you made any decision. The players will never feel that you moved the goalposts in reaction to their actions. what if i decide that the pressure of the fight isn't in line with what was expected and i decide that the creature can move farther to get in an attack? i didn't write it down beforehand, and i won't do so afterwards. i made that choice on the fly because it would accomplish my goals. even if it misses that's still applying pressure because now its within striking distance. on the flip side, what if i decide that a creature has less hit points than i originally wrote down because the fight is turning into a slog or because i've realized that i messed up and made them too beefy? or what if i lower damage, have the creatures make different decisions or bring in unexpected backup for the players? if it keeps up the tension and everyone is having fun with it, is that a bad thing because i didn't write it down beforehand? hyphz posted: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. so the rules can't protect you from a bad gm? you mean it takes actual trust? its almost like everything you've said so far is meaningless because someone participating in bad faith can always overcome these supposed safety measures you're describing. hyphz posted: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. now that we've determined these guarantees you were talking about don't actually exist because you admitted it just before this, would you care to revisit this sweeping and inaccurate statement? hyphz posted: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" what does it matter? seriously, if the clues are found in a cave because the character went into a cave and the gm wants to present you with the next bit of direction along, who cares if it was written down beforehand or improvised on the fly? i'm serious, i do this all the time and it has never been an issue because the people i'm running the game for understand that i have not detailed every bit of the environment down to its subatomic structure. i haven't written the full backstory of every bandit or the geological history of every cave. the players are wandering around so i put a clue in front of them. i say yes, and complicate. i follow where they lead because they're telling me what they're interested in also for the love of god define "tyranny of the wallclock" because you keep using it like you expect us to know what it means and we don't. you tried to define it earlier and it was incoherent nonsense, so please try again. hyphz posted: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. you already described the general running an absolute shitshow game where he was unable to modify even the most basic expectations to compensate for your group's decisions so he's probably someone you should make an effort to forget about emulating 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". well the problem there is that d&d and its derivatives handle solo missions like absolute dogshit. i had this situation come up in sotdl once where a player going off on their own triggered an encounter and eventually i just had the other players arrive on the scene because it was boring for everyone else. conversely, i've had the opposite experience in blades in the dark where one player can be having a tense brawl by themselves in the middle of a packed warehouse while the rest of the crew is off setting fire to crates and stealing things. different games do different things well. but i do think that the latter way of thinking that you've outlined is once again predicated on the idea that the gm is your enemy and that's just not true for most groups
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May 28, 2020 17:02
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Absurd Alhazred fucked around with this message at 19:43 on Jul 22, 2020 |
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May 28, 2020 17:12
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hyphz posted:The value is set in the book, so Stop generalizing from your group. They are outliers and assholes.
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May 28, 2020 17:26
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I have never once had players complain something was too hard or too easy, for the record, and I’ve never once used a module. Good players don’t complain about the fiction being the fiction, only about the fiction being bad or unpleasant, which is very different from ‘hard’ or ‘easy.’
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May 28, 2020 17:36
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Joe Slowboat posted:I have never once had players complain something was too hard or too easy, for the record, and I’ve never once used a module. Good players don’t complain about the fiction being the fiction, only about the fiction being bad or unpleasant, which is very different from ‘hard’ or ‘easy.’ I've seen 'That seemed kinda over/undertuned' or 'There seemed to be too many steps to get too little information, can we get more per investigating scene' and stuff like that about gameplay challenges but it's usually in a context of trying to re calibrate and adjust things so everyone's abilities and arcs get spotlight time. If you're doing a crunch heavy system or a game with tactical combat, discussing how the crunch is working out and whether it's providing the tone the players and GM want is important. But as with all things that's a matter of open discussion and cooperation.
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May 28, 2020 17:51
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hyphz posted:The value is set in the book, so the players can never complain that you're funneling them by choosing difficulty. We can really just ignore all of the rest of the handwringing, because it all boils down to this. My players only ever complained to me about things like "this game seems to be dragging, can we pick the pace up a bit" or "we're a bit confused about what to do or what's going on", things that were issues with my actual Game Management. Players, in general, do not complain about the GM "choosing difficulty" because that's the GM's job. Anyone who ever challenges you, Hyphz, on the grounds that you're "choosing difficulty" needs to be told clearly and as politely as you can manage, to gently caress off with that poo poo, that's what a GM is supposed to do. And no, referring to a module doesn't help or hinder that argument one iota, because GMs are supposed to adjust what's in the module to suit their table, not slavishly follow the module. If players as a group very broadly want to have an abstract conversation about how difficult or easy they want their games to be, that's very cool and good; it can inform your decisions about difficulty as GM. This is categorically different from players accusing you, the GM, of being "unfair" because you're making decisions about the game content that have an effect on difficulty. Or timing. The wall clock thing belongs here too. Your job as a GM is to adjust pacing using all the tools at your disposal, to get some kind of "this feels about right" result. If that means adding or deleting encounters, shifting clues around, chopping an adversary's hit points in half, or having an NPC burst into the scene to tell the PCs the answer to the problem they've been struggling too long with, that's all OK and good and part of the GM's job. If you are disagreeing with the above because you can't find text telling you this is OK in your rule books, then well, you can write a letter to the rule book authors I guess, but we here in this thread are unanimously telling you that irrespective of what's written in the book, this is the GM's job in basically all pen-and-paper RPGs. You can accept what we are all telling you, or you can refuse to, but the endless debate in which you give zero ground on this particular subject is pointless.
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May 28, 2020 18:14
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Serf posted:what if the book is bad at it? i mean, i know that's good for you because as you've mentioned before you can shield yourself with the module, but like, why is this an issue? why are they assuming that you're "funneling" them at all? it seems like this situation is predicated on an adversarial or bad-faith gming approach, or the assumption of that by the players. again, at each turn you reveal that you're not so much elfgaming as you are locked in psychic combat with your players and they just keep owning you. stop being owned and play with people who want to have fun If the book is bad at it then it's the book's fault and we move on to a different book. Bear in mind, the default assumption is that the book is better than anything I'd come up with, otherwise I would be being paid to write books. Ok, concrete example. In the current campaign the enemies the players fear most are golems, because they make heavy use of critical hit maximisation and Intimidation effects and neither of them work on golems. So when golems show up in the module, they groan a bit, because it's going to be a difficult and possibly tedious fight. But that's ok, because it's in the module, and it's been playtested, and hundreds of other groups who play the same module will be meeting the same golems. Now, if it's just me improvising and I have golems show up, then those groans still happen, but now they're directed at me. I'm the one who's chosen to put them in a situation where their abilities don't work. And the fact that it might make 100% sense for the golems to be there, because they're infiltrating an evil artificer's lab or something, doesn't help because it was still me who chose to set the adventure in an evil artificer's lab. quote:what if an encounter is inherently unfair? what if there is a specific weakness the creature has, or a condition they need to meet before it becomes vulnerable? will they complain about that too? or ignoring all that, let's say you throw out stats entirely and you are just waiting for them to have expended the right amount of resources or taken enough damage before the creature dies or the enemies flee? i've done this plenty of times and no one has ever complained or demanded to see the stats from the book or my notes. most players don't care Well, then that condition or weakness was in the book from the beginning. Again, if the players have gone heavily into fire and then they meet a monster that's vulnerable only to ice in a module, that's planned to be there, and hundreds of other groups will have faced it, some of whom will have gone heavily into ice. But if it's just me making it up, then they'll be wondering if it's really a contextual thing or if they had specced ice then they'd be now facing something that could only be hurt by fire. And the above? Well, I'd be really uncomfortable doing that and I'd be interested how that worked in context. I mean, if it was Spire the idea that it was impossible to escape without reaching a minimum Stress level seems fundamentally wrong to me in a whole bunch of levels. In a game like Red Markets it could potentially break the whole basis of the system. quote:so the rules can't protect you from a bad gm? you mean it takes actual trust? its almost like everything you've said so far is meaningless because someone participating in bad faith can always overcome these supposed safety measures you're describing. All of those things are overt - you can immediately tell there's something up with a dragon spawning in the middle of the room. Most of the "safety measures" are against covert ones. quote:what does it matter? seriously, if the clues are found in a cave because the character went into a cave and the gm wants to present you with the next bit of direction along, who cares if it was written down beforehand or improvised on the fly? i'm serious, i do this all the time and it has never been an issue because the people i'm running the game for understand that i have not detailed every bit of the environment down to its subatomic structure. i haven't written the full backstory of every bandit or the geological history of every cave. the players are wandering around so i put a clue in front of them. i say yes, and complicate. i follow where they lead because they're telling me what they're interested in. also for the love of god define "tyranny of the wallclock" because you keep using it like you expect us to know what it means and we don't. you tried to define it earlier and it was incoherent nonsense, so please try again. The tyranny of the wallclock is when important parts of progress, that the players would like to have agency over, instead are tied to a minimum amount of real time passing. Excapulatrix's example, where the players were able to defeat the AI much more quickly that they had expected, is a great example of avoiding it. But if, say, the actual goal of the players was to get to Alpha Centauri, and the AI kidnapping them was supposed to be part of that; and when the players quickly defeated the AI, all that means is that something else will happen before they reach Alpha Centauri, such that they will not actually reach it until a certain number of sessions have passed; then the Tyranny of the Wallclock is creeping in. Now, again this might not apply if the players know that reaching Alpha Centauri is a fluff goal and it's merely the background over which we've agreed that other things are happening, like the Red Dwarf trying to reach Earth or the Lost In Space crew trying to escape. But if it's the next step in their mission it's a different matter. quote:you already described the general running an absolute shitshow game where he was unable to modify even the most basic expectations to compensate for your group's decisions so he's probably someone you should make an effort to forget about emulating Not sure which one you mean by that.
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May 28, 2020 18:28
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Night10194 posted:I've seen 'That seemed kinda over/undertuned' or 'There seemed to be too many steps to get too little information, can we get more per investigating scene' and stuff like that about gameplay challenges but it's usually in a context of trying to re calibrate and adjust things so everyone's abilities and arcs get spotlight time. Oh sure - I just wouldn’t have classed those as ‘complaints’ - for me, players complaining means pure pushback, which I’ve only seen when the story fiction wasn’t working for them. Tuning the mechanics happens but there isn’t that accusatory/complaining edge Hyphz is so worried about in my experience with good players.
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May 28, 2020 18:29
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hyphz posted:The tyranny of the wallclock is when important parts of progress, that the players would like to have agency over, instead are tied to a minimum amount of real time passing. Excapulatrix's example, where the players were able to defeat the AI much more quickly that they had expected, is a great example of avoiding it. But if, say, the actual goal of the players was to get to Alpha Centauri, and the AI kidnapping them was supposed to be part of that; and when the players quickly defeated the AI, all that means is that something else will happen before they reach Alpha Centauri, such that they will not actually reach it until a certain number of sessions have passed; then the Tyranny of the Wallclock is creeping in.
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May 28, 2020 18:41
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Angrymog posted:Why would that be the case. They need to reach AC, they've suprise dealt with the main obstacle stopping them getting there, you just montage them to AC. If there's something else that's supposed to happen enroute, you just go "About two weeks into your journey, Thing! happens" To give some more conceptual context to this example, in the actual game the players were some spacefaring rebels whose goal was "Overthrow the space-monarchy". They told me wha ttheir guerrilla plans were for achieving that, and I threw various obstacles at them for as long as the game felt fun. Being captured by the AI planet was one such obstacle, but they overcame it quicker than I thought, so their rebellion got a bit of a boost. Then they told me what they wanted to do next, and we went and did that.
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May 28, 2020 19:39
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hyphz posted:If the book is bad at it then it's the book's fault and we move on to a different book. hyphz posted:Bear in mind, the default assumption is that the book is better than anything I'd come up with, otherwise I would be being paid to write books. hyphz posted:Ok, concrete example. In the current campaign the enemies the players fear most are golems, because they make heavy use of critical hit maximisation and Intimidation effects and neither of them work on golems. So when golems show up in the module, they groan a bit, because it's going to be a difficult and possibly tedious fight. But that's ok, because it's in the module, and it's been playtested, and hundreds of other groups who play the same module will be meeting the same golems. hyphz posted:Now, if it's just me improvising and I have golems show up, then those groans still happen, but now they're directed at me. hyphz posted:I'm the one who's chosen to put them in a situation where their abilities don't work. And the fact that it might make 100% sense for the golems to be there, because they're infiltrating an evil artificer's lab or something, doesn't help because it was still me who chose to set the adventure in an evil artificer's lab. hyphz posted:Well, then that condition or weakness was in the book from the beginning. hyphz posted:Again, if the players have gone heavily into fire and then they meet a monster that's vulnerable only to ice in a module, that's planned to be there, hyphz posted:and hundreds of other groups will have faced it, hyphz posted:some of whom will have gone heavily into ice. But if it's just me making it up, then they'll be wondering if it's really a contextual thing or if they had specced ice then they'd be now facing something that could only be hurt by fire. hyphz posted:And the above? Well, I'd be really uncomfortable doing that and I'd be interested how that worked in context. I mean, if it was Spire the idea that it was impossible to escape without reaching a minimum Stress level seems fundamentally wrong to me in a whole bunch of levels. In a game like Red Markets it could potentially break the whole basis of the system. hyphz posted:All of those things are overt - you can immediately tell there's something up with a dragon spawning in the middle of the room. Most of the "safety measures" are against covert ones. hyphz posted:The tyranny of the wallclock is when important parts of progress, that the players would like to have agency over, instead are tied to a minimum amount of real time passing. Excapulatrix's example, where the players were able to defeat the AI much more quickly that they had expected, is a great example of avoiding it. But if, say, the actual goal of the players was to get to Alpha Centauri, and the AI kidnapping them was supposed to be part of that; and when the players quickly defeated the AI, all that means is that something else will happen before they reach Alpha Centauri, such that they will not actually reach it until a certain number of sessions have passed; then the Tyranny of the Wallclock is creeping in. hyphz posted:Not sure which one you mean by that. hyphz posted:But, yea, forcing the players to carry out the heist as written would feel a bit like railroading to me. I didn't mention before that The General is the guy who actually got me into RPGs running AD&D 2e way back in the day, and I know he's a big fan of the "sandbox dungeon" approach where every inhabitant of the dungeon is active at once and responds to anything happening anywhere. When it works it creates a lot of fun organic interactions. When it doesn't work it means that every dungeon comes down to entering the first rooms, getting into a fight, the noise provoking everyone else in the dungeon, the PCs fighting until they're worn down and then fleeing and this repeating until they eventually wear the dungeon population down by attrition. That actually happened when he ran Princes of the Apocalypse in 5e and that was what made it apparent that almost everyone in the group will sit playing disengaged even if they don't like the game.
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May 28, 2020 20:06
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if the golems are in the book and your party doesn't like them, what kind of gm are you if you don't adjust the book to remove the golems and replace them with a similar enemy? how dare you not adjust any challenge to your partys taste? its in your power, why don't you do it? you have the book as a shield, but you have absolute power over the book,. any challenge from the book is equally as arbitrary as any challenge you homebrew, because your players can still say "well if you knew then why didn't you change it?" the problem is your players. your players are dogshit. the people you play games with suck. they are bad.
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May 28, 2020 20:51
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Serf posted:this is a bad assumption to make because the people getting paid to write the books are generally not better than you and they're earning starvation wages to do it Well, yes, I'm aware that Paizo doesn't pay writers well and has the attitude "any number of fans will do what you do for free". But on the other hand, they still did choose them instead of publishing something the fans wrote. quote:its cute that you think/have been brainwashed into thinking that these modules are tested by hundreds of groups. also even if it were true why should that matter? I don't think they're testing by hundreds of groups before publication but I think they are played by hundreds of groups over the course of their release. And it makes a difference because if the group has a problematic fight against the golems, they go post on a fan group and they find 10 groups who had no problem with the same golem encounter and so they know it was a problem with their character builds. Whereas if I just made the golems up then there's no such yardstick and they can just say that their DM could see their builds were bad against golems and so made them fight golems. quote:again, so what? they chose to go to the evil artificer's lab where they ought to know their cute gimmick builds will be less useful. are they up for that challenge? or do they want to whine because things are a little tougher? i thought that your group thrived on alternative solutions, why have they not gotten out a chemistry textbook and browbeaten you into letting them invent dynamite so they can blow up the lab's foundations and cancel all your prep work with hours of arguing instead? Well, they didn't choose to go there if it was the adventure setting. They're not quite at the point of "it's an evil dragon that's killed hundreds of adventurers before? We don't go." quote:unless every single encounter you throw at them is resistant to fire, i don't understand why they would assume anything. you're framing this from your group's toxic perspective and it really shows Well then how often is the correct number of resistent encounters? And even more so, why bother with fire/ice at that point? Why not just say "whatever you made, this encounter is resistent to it" and let the rest just be played out? quote:the general is as lovely at running games as he is at playing them. he has d&d brain damage and he's trying to spread it to you. like for all his bullshit about an organic approach to the dungeon, he apparently just lets your group run away and rest, then come back and keep fighting like you're clearing trash in an mmo. he sucks lmao Well, resting is kind of the elephant in the room for all of the d20 games, but he acknowleged that was a bad module. Essentially the dungeon denizens do start to act and launch attacks on the PCs home village, but they only do it when one of the dungeons is completely cleared out, and since we never did that (we kept switching between them) it never triggered.
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May 28, 2020 21:03
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hyphz posted:Well, yes, I'm aware that Paizo doesn't pay writers well and has the attitude "any number of fans will do what you do for free". But on the other hand, they still did choose them instead of publishing something the fans wrote. hyphz posted:I don't think they're testing by hundreds of groups before publication but I think they are played by hundreds of groups over the course of their release. hyphz posted:And it makes a difference because if the group has a problematic fight against the golems, they go post on a fan group and they find 10 groups who had no problem with the same golem encounter and so they know it was a problem with their character builds. hyphz posted:Whereas if I just made the golems up then there's no such yardstick and they can just say that their DM could see their builds were bad against golems and so made them fight golems. hyphz posted:Well, they didn't choose to go there if it was the adventure setting. They're not quite at the point of "it's an evil dragon that's killed hundreds of adventurers before? We don't go." hyphz posted:Well then how often is the correct number of resistent encounters? And even more so, why bother with fire/ice at that point? Why not just say "whatever you made, this encounter is resistent to it" and let the rest just be played out? hyphz posted:Well, resting is kind of the elephant in the room for all of the d20 games, but he acknowleged that was a bad module. Essentially the dungeon denizens do start to act and launch attacks on the PCs home village, but they only do it when one of the dungeons is completely cleared out, and since we never did that (we kept switching between them) it never triggered.
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May 28, 2020 21:17
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Absurd Alhazred fucked around with this message at 19:43 on Jul 22, 2020 |
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May 28, 2020 21:27
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Why are you putting such a huge amount of meta-cognition into these players? Are these things rooted in actual events, ideally ones that happened in different situations rather than "Once Bill bitched that it was boring to fight these golems, because even if they were winning it was taking forever"?
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May 28, 2020 21:37
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hyphz posted:The tyranny of the wallclock is when important parts of progress, that the players would like to have agency over, instead are tied to a minimum amount of real time passing. Excapulatrix's example, where the players were able to defeat the AI much more quickly that they had expected, is a great example of avoiding it. But if, say, the actual goal of the players was to get to Alpha Centauri, and the AI kidnapping them was supposed to be part of that; and when the players quickly defeated the AI, all that means is that something else will happen before they reach Alpha Centauri, such that they will not actually reach it until a certain number of sessions have passed; then the Tyranny of the Wallclock is creeping in. If the purpose of play is to see what cool events spin out of confronting the obstacles, and not simply to efficiently overcome them, then why does it matter? Spire, since we've been talking about it, is not designed to be a game where the core gameplay is overcoming challenges. It's a game designed for you to frame a bunch of cool scenes about rebel drow doing cool resistance poo poo and finding out what happens. This is why the detail you think is lacking in the one-shot you've referenced doesn't matter. It isn't presenting a tactical scenario to be overcome with careful application of game mechanics. It's just the information required for the GM to frame some cool scenes and see what the players do.
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May 28, 2020 23:05
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Joe Slowboat posted:I have never once had players complain something was too hard or too easy, for the record, and I’ve never once used a module. Good players don’t complain about the fiction being the fiction, only about the fiction being bad or unpleasant, which is very different from ‘hard’ or ‘easy.’ We take 10 minutes every couple of sessions to talk about whether everyone's still having fun and is the tone of the game still where we want it to be, which includes "does this feel too easy or too hard?"
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May 29, 2020 00:41
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Elector_Nerdlingen posted:We take 10 minutes every couple of sessions to talk about whether everyone's still having fun and is the tone of the game still where we want it to be, which includes "does this feel too easy or too hard?" That's very fair; I don't mean to say that those can't be concerns. Just that 'complain' to me sounds so intense - like, something you stop mid-game to argue about. As opposed to talking afterwards about how to keep things fun.
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May 29, 2020 01:11
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I never want my players to be frustrated or angry, but I do sometimes want them to be like that bit in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid : "Who are those guys?" Does that make sense as a tonal difference? Obviously I'm also trying my best to read the room, asking players directly if everything's okay, keeping in mind people's boundaries, mentioning that the X-card exists, etc., but when I think of a "tough" scene that's the kind of feeling I want them to get*. *Outside of horror games which obviously have their own discussion and tone and agency and stuff, because at least in my view if you aren't pushing your boundaries and losing some agency (in a fun way that everyone is down for) then it's not what I'd semantically call a horror game. (Not that I disagree with other definitions but that's my personal one and when I run those games I make sure that's what everyone wants explicitly yadda yadda this is a tangent.)
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May 29, 2020 01:11
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Absurd Alhazred posted:I have often had to hold back on encounters as written in modules or I would have had TPKs and I was frankly not in the mood to, say, kill the whole party on hour one of the campaign because one of them made a dumb mistake before they even got to the actual entrance to the dungeon. when i first started running shadow of the demon lord adventures as one-shots to get people into the system i quickly identified stuff that was overtuned and excised or modified it. no one wants to tpk in an intro adventure, and avoiding that is pretty drat easy.
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May 29, 2020 02:14
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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". I am not as experienced as many people in this thread who have been playing and running rpgs for decades, but I can't think of a single group that I have either GM'd or been a player in over the years that would have reacted in the latter way to this situation. Just straight up jumping to the conclusion that the GM is punishing the group in some way is such a bizarre thought process I almost can't understand it. To me it seems a symptom of refusing to engage in the fiction and looking at everything through some twisted meta-narrative lens. When James Bond is trying to infiltrate a secret mountain base and sees there are twenty armed guards and a moat filled with sharks does he think "Hmmm, this is going to tough, I'm going to have to pull out all the stops" or is it "drat those screenwriters for making this so difficult! Why can't they write an easier third act for me?"
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May 29, 2020 03:28
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Also uh. Not to tell stories out of school, but that part was improvised because that player was dealing with some serious life stuff so he couldn't be part of the main group and was just dipping in and out. Which was super salient in the game, so making the analogy to punishing anyone is more than a stretch. Like, the player literally said "Hey I have a bit and then I need to go back to [serious real world problem], is that okay?" and I rolled with it cause I wanted to be inclusive. If anything was a problem it's my failing cause I had to pause the rest of the game to give them 20 minutes of spotlight cause that's all they'd get for the night. But regardless it's antithetical to the point since if anything I was rewarding the player and gave him tons of sweet clues and as much cool atmospheric stuff as I could cram into a few minutes.
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May 29, 2020 03:36
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Xiahou Dun posted:But regardless it's antithetical to the point since if anything I was rewarding the player and gave him tons of sweet clues and as much cool atmospheric stuff as I could cram into a few minutes. It's also important to note XD admitted that virtually all of that encounter with the blood-thirsty tree and the cave was on-the-spot improv, but like a good GM he's tied it back into the story (as now we know that it's the source of the badness - which could not have been true previously). It's all about weaving disparate elements together to create an interesting and compelling story.
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May 29, 2020 07:34
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Also, double posting but gently caress it : Another really good session with hyphz. He did world-building collaboratively, and when I used a hold on a failed move an hour later on a mixed success to add some extra complications, he was a total bro about it. I'm honestly confused by the hyphz I get in this thread and then when he rolls up into my group he's just a totally cool dude who can just improv what seems cool but sometimes rarely chokes (like, you know, what happens to everyone) and needs 3 minutes or a discussion or whatever. We even had his most dreaded, The GM Forgot a Thing*. And I went, "Hey o poo poo I forgot that, can we talk about it later/off mic, I'm in the middle of narrating a move here? Sorry." And then we narrated it back into the fiction (well the player did most of the heavy lifting but that just makes the point stronger), we talked about it briefly afterwards to make sure we both were cool with it and that was it. Although, because it's a teaching game I have been emphasizing the phrase "in the fiction", it has apparently now lost all meaning and is just a collection of syllables lol. PS when I gently caress up it's because I'm giving teachable moments. Yeah. That's the ticket. *One character had mind-melded with the forest spirit and I just plumb forgot cause I'm dumb and this was like 4 sessions ago.
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May 29, 2020 07:42
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Based on this report more evidence is emerging that Hyphz is a gimmick posting artisan. Bravo. Some of the best work I have seen in years.
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May 29, 2020 12:16
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hyphz posted:So many words
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May 29, 2020 13:17
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Lord_Hambrose posted:Based on this report more evidence is emerging that Hyphz is a gimmick posting artisan. Bravo. Some of the best work I have seen in years. I'm not sure why it's contradictory to be a) worried about how particular players and/or strangers might react to certain things; b) uncomfortable with certain what-are-apparently-standards for running a game; c) not reacting in a negative way to them myself as a player and not being an rear end about it when I do. Some of the things that came up in XD's game, in particular a rules wording argument about "stable" and "persistent", would be close to things that would happen with my group but much more frequently.
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May 29, 2020 16:38
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hyphz posted:I'm not sure why it's contradictory to be Stop getting caught up in what players are going to think of your decisions. Your group is toxic and has basically abused you into not presenting them with anything remotely resembling a challenge. So the players aren't optimized against golems. That doesn't mean you have to take golems out of your toolbox. Throw a golem in there every once in a while, make them sweat, that's your job as a GM. If they're so petulant about it that they don't want to play anymore, that's on them, not you.
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May 29, 2020 16:47
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I've always wondered to what extent the 'player skill' you hear of in a lot of old adversarial stuff was 'I'm really good at browbeating the GM', come to think of it.
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May 29, 2020 16:51
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Night10194 posted:I've always wondered to what extent the 'player skill' you hear of in a lot of old adversarial stuff was 'I'm really good at browbeating the GM', come to think of it. 50% that and 50% 'I'm good at reading my GM's mind'.
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May 29, 2020 18:15
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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 29, 2020 18:21
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Oh, yeah, there's a reason OD&D has such a simple character creation method. 3d6 down the line, choose your class, and Berthold The Brave II is ready to catch up with the party on the back of the tragic death of Berthold I.
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May 29, 2020 19:46
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If a game's PC creation is randomized it needs to be doable in 5 minutes. It is a rule.
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May 29, 2020 20:15
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Nah, if a PC is intended to be replaceable at the drop of a hat you need to have the char creation proccess take like 5 minutes. You can have some pretty neat random character creation, and if your guys aren't having to do it a ton its fine to take a while.
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May 29, 2020 20:18
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Serf posted:this is as bullshit an excuse as anything you've posted so far. its an appeal to authority for elfgaming and it doesn't fly. why is paizo the arbiter of what is good and what isn't? who died and made them king of rpgs? Several thousand sales, an Ennie and an Origin? quote:they're not tested at all, and i doubt there are hundreds of groups playing this poo poo, even less so are doing it raw There are 26 reviews on Amazon for the first part of Age of Ashes. Given the low proportion of customers who post reviews, that indicates quite a few players. Many more than just my one group. quote:what exactly are you defining as a "problem" here? are you talking about a tpk? some characters went down in the fight? were there deaths? or was it just that they didn't effortlessly win? Possibly a TPK. Possibly a character going down. Possibly a tedious HP sink grind. Possibly a PC unable to participate because all their choices are countered too well (in most minmaxed parties any challenge is synonymous with this, which is a problem in itself). quote:Again, this is assuming a toxic relationship where the gm is out to get the players and their only defense is that some stranger wrote down a thing that says "pls don't murder everyone" in the magic book If no-one else specified that I had to include enemies that they are specifically weak and limited against, why else would I be doing it? quote:why are they not choosing where to go? are they being railroaded? There is, at least, the reasonable expectation of participation in the adventure; such that if the adventure is set in Katapesh their first action isn't to leave and head for the other side of the world. quote:There is no "correct number" i'm sorry to tell you this. there isn't one and there doesn't need to be, because most people can play a game and have faith that both sides are acting to make things fun and engaging for each other and not because they want to dick people over. when i make things harder/easier on the fly its not because i want to punish/reward the players, its because i want to ratchet up the tension if it feels like the challenge isn't enough or i want to tone things down if stuff has gotten unexpectedly rough. And that's the tricky bit, because what I've found is that as soon as the players know the GM is just doing something "to increase the tension", there is no tension. quote:so the iron law of the module prevented anything interesting from happening, and so the general's mighty brain was restrained by the words on the page. do you not see how loving pathetic that is? I'm actually very surprised he didn't edit it, because he has edited modules a fair bit before (most notably way back we played The Witchfire Trilogy without Alexia showing up because he realized she was a dumb NPC-protagonist!)
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May 29, 2020 20:38
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Hyphz, this doesn't respond to every issue you're having, but it keeps sort of slipping out of the discussion. Does your group see any value in the fiction of a TTRPG? Do they want to find out what new and interesting things they'll be interacting with, have questions about the setting, or want to figure out how their characters fit in? You keep acting like the only reason your players can imagine for having golems is 'ah, it's GM murder!' rather than 'ah, the GM wanted to put an artificer in this story, and golems are a thing an artificer can do that makes sense and provides an interesting combat opportunity.' Similarly, a lot of TTRPGs don't have rigid combat encounters like D&D (Spire, for example) and there's no assumption that 'fight them' is the right answer to a situation. The difficulty of a combat is based on the fiction that the players are engaging with, but it sounds like your players don't care about that at all. And, well, it's beating a dead horse, but if your players don't actually care about the actual fiction of the game, and they don't actually want challenging encounters, then what they want isn't really a fun game to run. They don't want to engage with your work, they want to bypass or defeat it.
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May 29, 2020 20:49
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Apologies for tardiness, I'm just catching up to the most recent ~25 posts, but I want to discuss this a little bit more because I think a key factor is being missed that might be important:hyphz posted:If the book is bad at it then it's the book's fault and we move on to a different book. Bear in mind, the default assumption is that the book is better than anything I'd come up with, otherwise I would be being paid to write books. I'm paid to write books. Well, not any more, because in software documentation, the book is dying; I'm paid to write smaller chunks of technical information for developers and administrators to design and implement cross-cloud integrations using enterprise software products. This job has several sometimes surprising parallels to the job of writing materials for tabletop roleplaying games. Specifically, we publish a combination of conceptual, instructive, tutorial, and reference information, and we need to convey technical information to exactly the right level of detail for the reader to accomplish their tasks, without being overwhelmed or distracted or asked to pore through volumes of irrelevant stuff. But a key difference is that we're paid decently well. Not as well as software engineers (even though I'd argue we're just as qualified, and our jobs are just as difficult), but far, far better than the writers of TG game materials. Like probably two to five times as much as a typical income for a TG game material writer. Despite this much higher pay - and despite very high standards and requirements, with much more serious consequences for error, there is NO SUCH THING as error-free documentation. I have in the past worked on documents that involved two to five writers, two to ten engineers, multiple project managers, and two years of development, on which hinged the success or failure of many multi-million-dollar software deals; despite all the highly professional and capable people spending all those people-hours attempting to ensure quality, we still had bug reports and errors found by customers within days of release, and we were still receiving reports and fixing things a year later, too. Nobody got in trouble about any of it because we were absolutely expecting errors to be found. It's just a fact of life; technical documentation contains errors, some critical, some minor, and while you can spend more and more money for diminishing-returns rates of error fixing, at some point it becomes unfeasible to do so (usually because the product has been versioned or made obsolete and it's time to move on to the next product). Meanwhile, poor suckers trad game enthusiasts are cranking out TG game materials that not only need to be technically accurate, but also need to appeal on artistic merits, to a discerning and chaotic audience, who apparently is only willing to pay a few pennies per word for it. Even the top companies publishing the most polished game materials in the industry are still paying their writers something on the order of five to ten dollars an hour for their work. The time and money put into editing is perhaps even more laughably inadequate. Essentially, it is absurd to think for one second that any of the games or game supplements we talk about in this thread are going to be faultless. Your basic assumption when you buy a game supplement should be that you will run into some problem with it that you'll need to work around or deal with. So what does it mean, to think that the module is going to be "better than" what you could come with? If you're lucky, the person writing the module might have a better grasp of the game's mechanics and/or themes and/or adventure design than you do, so it could be the case that it'll also be qualitatively better. But if that happens, it's a happy bonus. It may also be the case that the writer of the supplement has a better grasp of the themes and details of the fiction, or even is "better" at writing chunks of flavor and fiction than you are... sure, that's possible too. But really, the #1 feature of adventure modules is to save yourself some time. That's the primary function of modules. Not to be higher quality, or "better" in terms of mechanics or balance or whatever; just, as a GM, a module can save you all the time you'd have had to spend making an adventure (or campaign) from scratch. Secondarily, a novice GM might be able to hope for a module that hits some higher quality points in terms of mechanics, balance, etc., but those are definitely secondary. And what you totally should never assume is that the module's going to be "better" in the specifics for your table, than anything you'd have homebrewed. That's too much to ask. It's crazy to think that the module-writer can anticipate that, at your table, golems have been done and aren't interesting any more and also set off your whiny General player who hates having his characters' vulnerabilties in combat challenged. But even if you had a totally normal group that doesn't habitually attack the GM, even if the author of the module was a top-notch game designer with excellent grasp of the game's rules and some really creative and interesting approaches to its fiction, even then, you ought not to assume that the module will be absent of serious mistakes. There's no such thing as perfect technical documentation. You get what you pay for. All game publishers pay garbage wages to the creators of all currently published game materials. The best of them pay merely garbage, the average pay less than minimum wage, and the worst basically pay nothing, demanding volunteer work or even just straight-up failing to pay what they agreed to. It's not a knock on those writers, it's not disparaging their competence at all, to point this out; even my well-paid professional colleagues, given very generous deadlines and multi-million-dollar development budgets, cannot produce error-free technical content. So. "Otherwise I would be being paid to write books" is a really mistaken way to approach your game materials. You ought to view them as what you actually paid for: a collection of ideas, stat blocks, maps, encounter flows, etc., all of which are potentially useable at the table, but none of which can be fully trusted without scrutiny and adjustment to fit what you and your players actually want and will find entertaining or suitable or even just acceptably functional. And any one piece of which has some relatively low but definitely non-zero chance of being broken or stupid or boring or internally inconsistent or otherwise badly flawed.
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May 29, 2020 21:30
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hyphz posted:Several thousand sales, an Ennie and an Origin?
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May 29, 2020 21:32
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hyphz posted:Several thousand sales, an Ennie and an Origin? hyphz posted:There are 26 reviews on Amazon for the first part of Age of Ashes. Given the low proportion of customers who post reviews, that indicates quite a few players. Many more than just my one group. hyphz posted:Possibly a TPK. Possibly a character going down. Possibly a tedious HP sink grind. Possibly a PC unable to participate because all their choices are countered too well (in most minmaxed parties any challenge is synonymous with this, which is a problem in itself). hyphz posted:If no-one else specified that I had to include enemies that they are specifically weak and limited against, why else would I be doing it? hyphz posted:There is, at least, the reasonable expectation of participation in the adventure; such that if the adventure is set in Katapesh their first action isn't to leave and head for the other side of the world. hyphz posted:And that's the tricky bit, because what I've found is that as soon as the players know the GM is just doing something "to increase the tension", there is no tension. hyphz posted:I'm actually very surprised he didn't edit it, because he has edited modules a fair bit before (most notably way back we played The Witchfire Trilogy without Alexia showing up because he realized she was a dumb NPC-protagonist!)
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May 29, 2020 21:42
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