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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 30, 2020 22:05
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I'm catching up so some of this is a few days old. I'll try to comment on stuff that other people didn't really pick up on as muchSerf posted: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 Put another way, the 7-9 results in Apocalypse World are the most common results, and also the most interesting and best results. But I wouldn't want to play Apocalypse World where they were the only possible results. Splicer posted:If PC's are intended to be disposable then character creation needs to take 5 minutes. If the magnitude of your character's ability to affect the narrative is determined randomly then PC's need to be disposable. This is a great post. Very concise, but right on. Joe Slowboat posted:I really think we're burying the lede here in that Hyphz's players don't seem to care about the fiction at all. That's not tenable! I think it's totally tenable given the right kind of system! Like in D&D or Pathfinder or Strike!, you could totally just have some perfunctory flavor text and occasional traps or puzzles between combat encounters and chase scenes. Hell, that's how my first ever D&D campaign went more-or-less. We didn't know what we were doing, but the players puttered around in my setting full of dragons, succeeding at everything because of their min-maxed skills, and their successes served to allow them to essentially choose between the combat encounters I had prepped. It was 4e, and we went all the way to level 30, and in a 5 hour session we'd spend 4 hours doing combats. It was fun! And then we tried playing Burning Wheel and everything went badly at first because we weren't used to a system that actually pushes back on the players. Splicer posted:He did. It went well. His conclusion was that it only went well because it was a literal magical tea party and nothing of the experience crosses over to more serious games with more serious potential character consequences. You're right in that people keep trying to explain how games work to Hyphz but the real problem isn't his understanding of the games it's his understanding of how friend groups behave toward each other. I think maybe also that it went well but maybe Hyphz's assessment is that it would NOT have gone well with his usual group. That they would have objected, interpreted the GM following the rules as the GM being a railroading jerk because of their internalized D&D biases, and been dickheads about it. When Hyphz goes hyper-literal about rulebooks, I can imagine players in his group doing that to him when he GMs. Not that that would contradict anything this thread is saying: the problem is Hyphz's group. Hyphz, run Burning Wheel for your normal group, let them min-max their characters, then let the system grind them into dust when they refuse to adapt to failure. Laugh at them when they whine, then ghost them forever and play cool games with cool people.
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May 30, 2020 22:15
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Zereth posted:On the latter, apparently the first run of Tomb of Horrors with Gygax's home group had zero deaths, because they knew exactly where he'd be putting traps and secret doors. You don't even need to know where he'd put the traps and secret doors. It's really stupidly simple to beat Tomb of Horrors. Whenever the module gives you a choice, whether this door or that door, left or right both choices are wrong. Hunt around until you find the secret third option, and that secret third option will always be the correct one even if it's e.g. a secret door in the bottom of a pit trap.
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May 30, 2020 22:16
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Jimbozig posted:I agree with most of the rest of this post, but this part here? I'd care. If it's just one time, fine, I probably wouldn't even notice. But if every encounter is like that? gently caress that. If I not only can't lose, but also can't win big? I am guaranteed to win but pay a cost for it, and the magnitude of that cost is solely GM fiat? That's literally just illusionism/railroading. Jimbozig posted:Avoiding that is why *World games have clocks. Why games with tactical combat have HP tracks. Yeah, the GM should be free to fix things on the fly if they aren't working as intended. But if it's working as intended and the players are just kicking it's rear end with good tactics or good rolls? Let them! And if it's kicking their rear end? Let it! Any system worth a drat will make losing just as interesting as winning.
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May 30, 2020 22:39
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Serf posted:i suppose i've never played with you. i don't do it with every situation, but i definitely do it often. mostly because i do very little prep I totally get why you do it. I ran a LVL 1-30 D&D 4e game, and the amount of prep time was enormous (big enough that when that campaign ended I just put that prep time into writing Strike! and made a whole game pretty fast). If you are playing D&D or Pathfinder or some other game along those lines, and you don't have prep time, then you make up some cool enemies and just go with it. If you were to make up HP numbers and they ended up being too high, and the players actually lose the fight, those games can't handle that outcome. If I was playing in your game I wouldn't be like MAD about it. I'd just think that we should probably be playing a game that is actually suited to a low-prep style of GMing, and I'd bring that up in a friendly way. I wouldn't be a dick about it.
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May 30, 2020 23:31
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If the focus of your game is the challenge of combats, it's reasonable to think that your skill at attacking those challenges should result in increased success. So, if the GM is automatically pushing the difficulty up every time you succeed at a die roll, and similarly dropping the difficulty every time you fail a die roll, then it's true that your attempts to make good decisions and "play well" are effectively being thwarted. You could sleep through the combat and get the same result. However, if some amount of the focus of the game is having an adventure, like, encountering something weird or surprising or awe-inspiring, discovering things, having intense interactions with interesting people, being super angry about that terrible villain and then experiencing the triumph of defeating them once and for all, or solving the puzzling mystery, or preventing the war between the antagonistic states, all that kind of stuff? Why then, it makes a whole lot of sense that a) the cool interesting story you were having shouldn't get kneecapped because you and your party made a chain of bad tactical decisions in a random encounter that got three of you killed, or, b) what should have been a ramping up of dramatic tension reaching a climactic scene wound up being a series of trivialities and then a "master villain" who gets chumped easy peasy, because you and your fellow players happened to roll well and/or are just super skilled at the tactical combat engine the game uses. And one of the most important GM tools for providing a pathway to what I'd call the "success of the story" in that previous paragraph, is the willingness and flexibility to adjust enemies, encounters, maps, scenes, and even die rolls, to ensure that the game doesn't wind up a flop. So what game are you playing? Do you care about arriving at the climactic scene, ragged and strung out but not quite broken, so that it has dramatic impact? Or do you prefer to pit your team's tactical acumen against a series of thoroughly playtested and balanced encounters, such that success or failure hinges on your skill, plus the luck of the dice? Or maybe something in between?
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May 31, 2020 00:58
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Jimbozig posted:I totally get why you do it. I ran a LVL 1-30 D&D 4e game, and the amount of prep time was enormous (big enough that when that campaign ended I just put that prep time into writing Strike! and made a whole game pretty fast). If you are playing D&D or Pathfinder or some other game along those lines, and you don't have prep time, then you make up some cool enemies and just go with it. If you were to make up HP numbers and they ended up being too high, and the players actually lose the fight, those games can't handle that outcome. one thing i learned a long time before i read strike! is that everyone on the pc side falling down doesn't mean they have to die, so i'm rarely worried that they're going to get killed. i mostly wind up adjusting things against the player characters on the fly. generally i'll just lower hp and increase damage to keep the pressure up without turning things into a slog because there's nothing more boring than getting a combat scene set up and then one side just rolls over the other. other times i'll skip what should have been a combat because we're pressed for time or because setting one up would be a hassle. its really all about finding a good flow that keeps things moving along this of course only matters in a d&d-alike type game where combat is this whole other dimension broken out from the rest of the game. in stuff like bitd or monster of the week it was never an issue
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May 31, 2020 01:22
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Absurd Alhazred posted:Because "throw infinite draconians at them whenever they go off the rail" is bullshit for coward railroading DMs who aren't willing to say "no, you can't make that decision, it goes off my rails", and modules written to be ran that way. But (ok, I'm playing devil's advocate here), isn't saying that you make an encounter go on until PCs have taken a given amount of damage, in order to create tension, just the same kind of railroading but for an reaction instead of an action?
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May 31, 2020 01:32
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Jimbozig posted:II think maybe also that it went well but maybe Hyphz's assessment is that it would NOT have gone well with his usual group. That they would have objected, interpreted the GM following the rules as the GM being a railroading jerk because of their internalized D&D biases, and been dickheads about it. When Hyphz goes hyper-literal about rulebooks, I can imagine players in his group doing that to him when he GMs. Playing Costume Fairy Adventures would not have appealed to them at all (well, most of them). Heck, it's difficult to find any group where just the name doesn't turn people off, which is a shame, as it was a ton of fun and no, it didn't need any railroading (it's almost impossible anyway) But yea, I am cautious about reading rules literally, indeed I might be going to far in the other direction in XD's group. Like, when I was trying to use the Savvyhead ability Things Speak, I initially wasn't sure about using it on a scrimshawed bone we found on the grounds that I had previously described it as "something like tech empathy" and a bone is not tech. The rulebook doesn't say anything about that but I wasn't sure about the fiction fitting (XD did OK it)
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May 31, 2020 01:40
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This post makes me want to run Heroquest Glorantha more, I thought I'd suppressed that urge.
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May 31, 2020 01:50
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hyphz posted:But (ok, I'm playing devil's advocate here), isn't saying that you make an encounter go on until PCs have taken a given amount of damage, in order to create tension, just the same kind of railroading but for an reaction instead of an action? not at all, no
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May 31, 2020 01:54
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hyphz posted:Playing Costume Fairy Adventures would not have appealed to them at all (well, most of them). Heck, it's difficult to find any group where just the name doesn't turn people off, which is a shame, as it was a ton of fun and no, it didn't need any railroading (it's almost impossible anyway) Of course I did. It was really god drat cool. Use that on the air or the freaky bee kids, go to town. Absolute worst case is I might not have a good idea if you ask me something buck wild. Remember how this led to a whole discussion about maybe, if you wanted to, you literally could wind up knowing how to speak Lock and Door and Wagon and Tree in the fiction and it was awesome?
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May 31, 2020 02:06
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Leperflesh posted:If the focus of your game is the challenge of combats, it's reasonable to think that your skill at attacking those challenges should result in increased success. So, if the GM is automatically pushing the difficulty up every time you succeed at a die roll, and similarly dropping the difficulty every time you fail a die roll, then it's true that your attempts to make good decisions and "play well" are effectively being thwarted. You could sleep through the combat and get the same result. I disagree. I don't think it's about what the game's focus is. I think it's about what the combat mechanics are like. If combat is like "describe the cool thing your character does and then roll a die for damage." then yeah, the GM can do whatever because it's not like the GM's decisions are going to take away from my cool descriptions. But if the combat has me making tactical decisions (whether that's about positioning and powers like in D&D, or about how I spend my hold, like in *World), then I want those decisions to matter. The GM shouldn't invalidate those decisions, even if those types of decisions are not the focus of the game. Like in *World, if the GM had decided that this combat won't be over until my character has taken 5-harm, and then he'll win, that would be a problem for me. I'd wonder, if the outcome is already predetermined, why don't we just skip over it so we can get back to playing to find out what happens? From the perspective of creative agendas, the GM predetermining an outcome undermines both playing to win and playing to find out what happens.
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May 31, 2020 02:24
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A clarification is needed. When I said "If the focus of your game is...", I meant your game, e.g., the game being played at your table with your friends. I did not mean "your game system", e.g., what the people who wrote the game's mechanics focused on. That may or may not modify your response Jimbozig, I dunno. Jimbozig posted:From the perspective of creative agendas, the GM predetermining an outcome undermines both playing to win and playing to find out what happens. There is a difference between "predetermining outcomes" as a sort of absolute decision, and the GM having a goal of a dramatic arc which is served or resisted to varying degrees by a series of individual engagements with the game's mechanics that can, if they turn out to not have been well-balanced in design for what the players wound up doing, accumulate into a game-ruining overall outcome. To put that another way: the players and the GM carry the largest responsibility for making sure the game does what they want it to do. The GM's share of that responsibility includes pre-game prep and in-game decisions. If the pre-game prep, through accident or inexperience or just bad luck, is clearly leading to a destruction of the table's intentions, the GM is often the one best-equipped to make adjustments to what was prepared in order to compensate. This does not only mean making encounters harder or easier, but that's an easy example for everyone to grapple with. It could also mean, say, making an NPC friendlier or more hostile than was originally planned, or improvising a new, exotic and interesting non-combat scene to wake up a table that has started to get bored with the preplanned theme of the last few encounters in this location. The players can also contribute, in any system but especially in systems where they have some input into the setting details. For example, roleplaying a decision that one's character could plausibly make, that causes the current cakewalk encounter to suddenly be much more difficult. Or spending some tokens from the pool to announce that Angel Summoner has arrived on the scene to help out BMX Bandit with these unexpectedly lethal drug cartel thugs, in a game where players are empowered to do something like that. Have you ever seen a player do things like this at a table, not out of bloody-mindedness, but just in recognition that maybe this adventure's coming off a bit too easy and stirring things up could be fun, or the party is in deep trouble and it's time to give themselves a break, even though BMX Bandit hates it when Angel Summoner makes his abilities seem insignificant? Anyway leaving that aside, going back to the main point: I don't really care if the game's mechanics support a robust tactical combat sim, I'm still not letting the party get wiped and everyone go home sad because Bob is a newbie and didn't realize that unilaterally triggering combat with Lord Virulax who was really only there to threaten the characters before skeedaddling was gonna wipe the party. Nor do I feel particularly bad about watching the PCs wipe 80% of the enemies in the first round of combat and deciding on the spot to bring three more minions and a controller in by the side door just to keep things interesting. After all, the party's gonna get more XP, more loot, etc. since I just raised the DC of this encounter. I put a lot of effort into this cool room with the shifting floor tiles, but if the combat is over in round 2 the party will never even get to see what happens when the blue flagstones flip over! I don't think this undermines the players' agency. If I was just pre-determining that every encounter had to be a "moderate success" for the players no matter what, that'd be pretty crap, unless we'd decided as a table that that was what the players really wanted. But deciding that the players showed up for 3 hours of gaming tonight and adding something to the dungeon to ensure they get it, or deciding that the players spent three months of gaming building their characters up to this scene and not wanting to see them wiped before they get to at least try to thwart Virulax's Ultimate Form would just be anticlimactic and sad. Why not use the tools at my disposal to help the players get what they actually wanted out of this game experience? Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 06:50 on May 31, 2020 |
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May 31, 2020 06:42
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hyphz posted:Well, sorry, it's not just straight "Risk been ostracised" entirely; it's "risk having the game break down" as people decide it's not fun and they don't want to play. That may then have social results down the line. You're splitting hairs. You're concerned about the social cost of making decisions as a GM that could be accused of being arbitrary when you don't have either a granular, comprehensive ruleset to point to or a prewritten module to blame. Your critiques are based on the most catastrophised idea of a player group dynamic imaginable, and I'm surprised people are still putting this much effort into responding to you when it's clear that any positive experience or response you receive will be automatically discounted as an exception. quote:And I do sometimes think the Warrior had a bit of a point about character generation. What's the point in questing and adjusting your character to get them to AC 45 (or equivalent) if it just means that all the bad guys will mysteriously get +35 bonuses to hit? I feel like I missed an element of a conversation here. Are you questioning the idea of level-appropriate challenges, or the idea of a GM just scaling everything so that player characters can never exceed the normal difficulty curve for their level? The latter is self-evidently insane, the former is the entire reason a level scale exists in the first place.
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May 31, 2020 06:50
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Zeerust posted:I feel like I missed an element of a conversation here. Are you questioning the idea of level-appropriate challenges, or the idea of a GM just scaling everything so that player characters can never exceed the normal difficulty curve for their level? The latter is self-evidently insane, the former is the entire reason a level scale exists in the first place. Yeah this is just how D&D works. The difference, of course, is that when you had a +1 to hit, you were fighting kobolds and giant rats, and now that your enemies have +45 AC, you're smiting demigods. But yeah, uhh, you're still just trying to roll a 14+ on a D20, just like always. The numbers getting bigger on both sides of the mat are, in D&D anyway, just a pointlessly arbitrary scaling mechanism because number bigger feels like bigger stakes/more power. You could totally just pull all number scaling out of D&D and as long as the GM makes sure the descriptions and abilities of the enemies are suitably embiggened and more dramatically epic, it'd work just the same. More or less. There' still the bullshit wizard stuff, like casting Wish instead of Magic Missile, but the attack rolls and armor classes and stuff are all just an exercise in all the participants in battles just equally adding more to their dice rolls so you can still hit on a 16 but miss on a 14. Basically.
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May 31, 2020 06:53
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hyphz posted:Well, sorry, it's not just straight "Risk been ostracised" entirely; it's "risk having the game break down" as people decide it's not fun and they don't want to play. That may then have social results down the line. Sure, it may have consequences, all actions do. Changing nothing will have it's own social results down the line, as well. Your current situation doesn't seem to suit you entirely, where will you be in a year or a couple of years if you decide to not change tack now?
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May 31, 2020 14:10
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Leperflesh posted:I don't think this undermines the players' agency. If I was just pre-determining that every encounter had to be a "moderate success" for the players no matter what, that'd be pretty crap, unless we'd decided as a table that that was what the players really wanted. But deciding that the players showed up for 3 hours of gaming tonight and adding something to the dungeon to ensure they get it, or deciding that the players spent three months of gaming building their characters up to this scene and not wanting to see them wiped before they get to at least try to thwart Virulax's Ultimate Form would just be anticlimactic and sad. Why not use the tools at my disposal to help the players get what they actually wanted out of this game experience? I think this is important, because I find it almost impossible to draw the line between the two - because inevitably one decays into the other at some point. The "three hours of gaming" thing is exactly what I mean by Tyranny of the Wallclock, for example. This is doubly the case in games where resource management is a factor. For example, say you throw in some encounters along the way, but when the party get to Virulax, the mage is tapped for spell slots and will basically have to spend the encounter hiding in the corner. Do you throw in a rest for them outside Virulax's chamber, no matter how little sense that makes? (Plenty of actual d20 modules basically do that, but it's awkward.) It's always tempting, but wasn't spending all those slots supposed to be a trade-off? ovenboy posted:Sure, it may have consequences, all actions do. Changing nothing will have it's own social results down the line, as well. Your current situation doesn't seem to suit you entirely, where will you be in a year or a couple of years if you decide to not change tack now? We saw from the Strike incident what happens if I ask the group to play a game they do not want to play. There was no attempt to kick me out of the group. I could stop gaming with them, but then I would stop meeting them. That is not them ostracising me, that is me choosing to leave the group. So, yea, I will still be meeting up with friends regularly and maybe not playing the games I would prefer, but social stuff is about compromise and most people aren't at the front of the pecking order.
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May 31, 2020 16:27
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hyphz posted:most people aren't at the front of the pecking order.
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May 31, 2020 17:06
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hyphz posted:We saw from the Strike incident what happens if I ask the group to play a game they do not want to play. There was no attempt to kick me out of the group. I could stop gaming with them, but then I would stop meeting them. That is not them ostracising me, that is me choosing to leave the group. So, yea, I will still be meeting up with friends regularly and maybe not playing the games I would prefer, but social stuff is about compromise and most people aren't at the front of the pecking order. Ignoring you is kicking you from the group. It's a total bullshit move. Saying nothing before you turn up all hyped to run Strike! (which presumably they'd agreed to in principle, or at least agreed to try something new, or you wouldn't have brought it) and then ignoring you? Bullshit. If they really didn't want to play something different they should have said "Hey, this game doesn't really interest us." when you first suggested it rather than presumably agreeing then treating you like that.
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May 31, 2020 17:14
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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 31, 2020 17:15
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hyphz posted:I think this is important, because I find it almost impossible to draw the line between the two - because inevitably one decays into the other at some point. The "three hours of gaming" thing is exactly what I mean by Tyranny of the Wallclock, for example. hyphz posted:This is doubly the case in games where resource management is a factor. For example, say you throw in some encounters along the way, but when the party get to Virulax, the mage is tapped for spell slots and will basically have to spend the encounter hiding in the corner. Do you throw in a rest for them outside Virulax's chamber, no matter how little sense that makes? (Plenty of actual d20 modules basically do that, but it's awkward.) It's always tempting, but wasn't spending all those slots supposed to be a trade-off? hyphz posted:We saw from the Strike incident what happens if I ask the group to play a game they do not want to play. There was no attempt to kick me out of the group. I could stop gaming with them, but then I would stop meeting them. That is not them ostracising me, that is me choosing to leave the group. So, yea, I will still be meeting up with friends regularly and maybe not playing the games I would prefer, but social stuff is about compromise and most people aren't at the front of the pecking order.
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May 31, 2020 17:28
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hyphz posted:We saw from the Strike incident what happens if I ask the group to play a game they do not want to play. There was no attempt to kick me out of the group. I could stop gaming with them, but then I would stop meeting them. That is not them ostracising me, that is me choosing to leave the group. So, yea, I will still be meeting up with friends regularly and maybe not playing the games I would prefer, but social stuff is about compromise and most people aren't at the front of the pecking order. I'm gonna say it too cos goddamn it needs to be said one thousand times: healthy friendships don't have pecking orders. One of the ways of removing someone from a group is to ignore them. And, one more time: healthy friendships don't have pecking orders.
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May 31, 2020 17:41
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Angrymog posted:Ignoring you is kicking you from the group. It's a total bullshit move. How? Like, if all my friends want to go swimming, and I don't want to go swimming so I don't go with them, I can then turn around and say they've kicked me from the group? If they decided not to go swimming, wouldn't they just be ignoring everyone else who wanted to go? quote:If they really didn't want to play something different they should have said "Hey, this game doesn't really interest us." when you first suggested it rather than presumably agreeing then treating you like that. They'll mostly say "I don't really mind that much what we play," which is just politeness. Honestly, I probably just committed the equivalent of buying the cashier flowers because they smiled at me. EthanSteele posted:'m gonna say it too cos goddamn it needs to be said one thousand times: healthy friendships don't have pecking orders. Any group which doesn't have every single member homogenized in thought about every single thing has a pecking order. It's just cultural to hide it in various ways.
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May 31, 2020 18:36
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what the gently caress, no
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May 31, 2020 18:56
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hyphz posted:How? Like, if all my friends want to go swimming, and I don't want to go swimming so I don't go with them, I can then turn around and say they've kicked me from the group? Dude, in this analogy your friends didn't just not go swimming with you. They didn't even say "nah, hyphz, we don't feel like going swimming today." They agreed to try out your new pool, let you spend however many hours cleaning it and getting it all ready for a nice pool party, then when the fau came the motherfuckers went across the street and played racquetball. That's the swimming pool analogy version of your Strike! story, and it is, in fact, a massive dick move.
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May 31, 2020 19:01
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GimpInBlack posted:Dude, in this analogy your friends didn't just not go swimming with you. They didn't even say "nah, hyphz, we don't feel like going swimming today." They agreed to try out your new pool, let you spend however many hours cleaning it and getting it all ready for a nice pool party, then when the fau came the motherfuckers went across the street and played racquetball. That's the swimming pool analogy version of your Strike! story, and it is, in fact, a massive dick move. Or they got tired of me asking them to do something they didn't want to do, agreed to shut me up then bottled out when i wanted actual commitment. Maybe I'm Ash here.
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May 31, 2020 19:07
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hyphz posted:How? Like, if all my friends want to go swimming, and I don't want to go swimming so I don't go with them, I can then turn around and say they've kicked me from the group? That's not the situation at all. You've talked about say going roller-skating, everyone says they're okay with Roller-skating. But when you get to the rink, they all decide to do bowling instead. The polite thing to do would be to say "Hey, we'd rather go bowling" rather than let you think you were going to go roller-skating. quote:If they decided not to go swimming, wouldn't they just be ignoring everyone else who wanted to go? That depends on if they'd agreed to go swimming first. We've had this conversation before; it's okay for not everyone in the same group to do the same thing all the time, but not if they've already agreed to do thing A and then proceed to do it grudgingly or not at all. I had my birthday last year at the beach. Of the various people I invited one half of a couple didn't come because he doesn't like the beach, and half of a different couple didn't come because she needed to stay home and look after the dogs*; What would have been rude would have been if bloke had come and just whinged all the time, or if the wife had come with the dogs and we had to move to a non-lifeguarded beach. At the same time, the people who didn't come didn't begrudge me having my birthday on the beach. quote:They'll mostly say "I don't really mind that much what we play," which is just politeness. Honestly, I probably just committed the equivalent of buying the cashier flowers because they smiled at me. It's not politeness if they clearly are then shown to be lying; politeness is respecting your time. * Dogs aren't allowed on our beaches during the season, and as there were some smallish but mobile children present, their parents preferred to be on a lifeguarded beach
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May 31, 2020 19:07
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hyphz posted:Or they got tired of me asking them to do something they didn't want to do, agreed to shut me up then bottled out when i wanted actual commitment. Maybe I'm Ash here. They should just loving say, "Hey dude, we don't like the sound of this strike game." or even, "Dude, we just want to play Pathfinder." As you have described the Strike! situation, it was an absolutely lovely thing to do you.
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May 31, 2020 19:09
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this is why none of the advice given to hyphz matters. he has a lovely group of people around him who have broken him down with toxic behaviors. no game or advice can fix that, which is why step loving 0 of improving hyphz's situation involves severing from this lovely group. but he refuses to do that
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May 31, 2020 19:37
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hyphz posted:How? Like, if all my friends want to go swimming, and I don't want to go swimming so I don't go with them, I can then turn around and say they've kicked me from the group? If they go swimming when you never want to go swimming and they never make allowances for that then yes, you can turn around and say they've kicked you because they are exclusively doing activities which exclude you or encourage you to not participate. It is also an indicator that your wants don't align with theirs and you should find a different group for doing that sort of activity with. You don't have to ghost the swim team, just do things that aren't swimming with them when they do things that aren't swimming. For your pecking order bullshit, how about this: every social group has an informal hierarchy of who could beat up who in a fight, this is a fact. If that ever comes up then something has gone wrong. You are right that informal hierarchies exist, you are wrong that they always make it impossible to do things and that they always exert their influence in ways that, as has been described accurately by the thread several times, are abusive. Yeah, joining a new group will make you the new guy and being the new guy can have a bunch of problems and anxieties. Being the new guy doesn't automatically get you shot with a gun if you cough and say "I don't like that" and one of the things you can do when you join a new group is mention that being the new guy means it can be tough to raise issues because it can sometimes feel like the Existing Group are all on the same wavelength and you'll get 'outvoted', even when you know logically that they'll listen to your request and ask if they can help with that. hyphz posted:Or they got tired of me asking them to do something they didn't want to do, agreed to shut me up then bottled out when i wanted actual commitment. Maybe I'm Ash here. This is not a defence? That's still a bad thing to do instead of just saying "we don't want to do it, sorry dude"
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May 31, 2020 19:47
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I realize this is in many ways a quarantine zone for hyphzposting but if folks want to keep steering into e/n territory instead of actually talking about RPGs please do it in e/n.
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May 31, 2020 20:13
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hyphz posted:I think this is important, because I find it almost impossible to draw the line between the two - because inevitably one decays into the other at some point. The "three hours of gaming" thing is exactly what I mean by Tyranny of the Wallclock, for example. Comes down to system. Are you playing a game where the mage can do something fun, even if the lack of resources means they're taking greater risks? If so then you let them charge right on in. They made their choices, they live with the risk. If you're playing a game where a lack of resources means the mage has to sit at the back with a crossbow, minimally participating? Then you let them rest. And yes, that means the encounters along the way have been kind of wasted. And that's a problem of the system, not the GM. Play something which isn't derived from D&D, because D&D casters have two settings: stars of the show, or boring as poo poo. Find a game which doesn't do that. (And yes, I know your group is toxic and won't play anything else, this advice is aimed more generally.)
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May 31, 2020 20:25
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Reene posted:I realize this is in many ways a quarantine zone for hyphzposting but if folks want to keep steering into e/n territory instead of actually talking about RPGs please do it in e/n. Fair enough. My contention on this with relation to RPGs is that the key point to the success of 5e - and one that most indie games don't allow for - is that it was specifically made, not to be the game everyone wants to play, but to be the game to compromise on (on the grounds that most actual groups are compromising all the time). Once you think of it that way, a lot of the "bits of design taken out" of 5e compared to 3e make a ton more sense, as do the choices. For example, there's no collaborative worldbuilding because nobody wants to have be asked to contribute to a world they never actually liked in the first place.
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May 31, 2020 20:28
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Exculpatrix posted:Comes down to system. Are you playing a game where the mage can do something fun, even if the lack of resources means they're taking greater risks? If so then you let them charge right on in. They made their choices, they live with the risk. Yeah, it's all about system here. It could also be that the wizard spent all their spells as a deliberate strat to let other people not expend whatever powers they have, so they would be fresh for the big fight, which affects the decision just as much as a wizard using all 15 spells on fireballing a single target every turn is a waste of spells and they should get punished for wasting them, if that's the system.
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May 31, 2020 20:33
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hyphz posted:Fair enough. My contention on this with relation to RPGs is that the key point to the success of 5e - and one that most indie games don't allow for - is that it was specifically made, not to be the game everyone wants to play, but to be the game to compromise on (on the grounds that most actual groups are compromising all the time). Once you think of it that way, a lot of the "bits of design taken out" of 5e compared to 3e make a ton more sense, as do the choices. For example, there's no collaborative worldbuilding because nobody wants to have be asked to contribute to a world they never actually liked in the first place. I don't want to overpost in this thread, but poo poo, stop compromising on a game. Does that sound fun? Because it doesn't seem like it from what you've described. Find a game that makes you excited. And if it doesn't make your current group excited, find a new group. I'm not saying you have to just drop your current friends, but maybe hang out with them for boardgames or something instead of RPGs, because you seem to have very different wants from RPGs. And that's fine, but you shouldn't be grudgingly settling on the least-bad option, because that's going to lead to... well, to this thread.
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May 31, 2020 20:39
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hyphz posted:Fair enough. My contention on this with relation to RPGs is that the key point to the success of 5e - and one that most indie games don't allow for - is that it was specifically made, not to be the game everyone wants to play, but to be the game to compromise on (on the grounds that most actual groups are compromising all the time). Once you think of it that way, a lot of the "bits of design taken out" of 5e compared to 3e make a ton more sense, as do the choices. For example, there's no collaborative worldbuilding because nobody wants to have be asked to contribute to a world they never actually liked in the first place. The 'success' of 5E is based on brand name, and a general increase in interest and table top gaming becomes more mainstream. The "not liking worldbuilding" is inaccurate, because everyone, even in settings that come with a system, have their own way they view things. There is no collaborative worldbuilding because that wasn't a thing in the old D&D rules, and 5E was all about walking back from 4E and maybe doing one or two minor improvements to 3E (that didn't really fix any of the inherent problems). If the players never actually liked the world, or found it interesting, why are you playing in that world? The magic of table top games is that if you don't like a world, you can make your own. With blackjack, and hookers. Or whatever you want. The aim of collaborative worldbuilding is to make a world that players do like or find interesting, and become more invested in a story taking place in it.
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May 31, 2020 21:00
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hyphz posted:Fair enough. My contention on this with relation to RPGs is that the key point to the success of 5e - and one that most indie games don't allow for - is that it was specifically made, not to be the game everyone wants to play, but to be the game to compromise on (on the grounds that most actual groups are compromising all the time). Once you think of it that way, a lot of the "bits of design taken out" of 5e compared to 3e make a ton more sense, as do the choices. For example, there's no collaborative worldbuilding because nobody wants to have be asked to contribute to a world they never actually liked in the first place.
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May 31, 2020 21:09
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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 31, 2020 21:46
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hyphz posted:I think this is important, because I find it almost impossible to draw the line between the two - because inevitably one decays into the other at some point. The "three hours of gaming" thing is exactly what I mean by Tyranny of the Wallclock, for example. With the reminder and understanding that "telling a story" via a roleplaying game often produces "stories" with different (typically inferior quality) structures compared to what individual authors with the luxury of time and editing: the "tyranny of the wallclock" as you've conceptualized it here is really no different from the tyranny of the television time slot, the maximum length of time an audience will sit in a theater, and the maximum pagecount a publisher sets for a novelist. That is, we game, and we write tv shows, and we watch movies, and we read books, all within constraints. In the rare case that the funding powers choose to withdraw all constraints and let the author just go as long as they want, the results are usually poor. The players at the game table often have an expectation or constraint on their time. And, the story, again not identically to a novel but comparatively, is best if it has structure to it. In the classic five act play, you have five structured parts: quote:
There are other structures but this serves as a reasonable example. As a GM, it's reasonable for me to try to build an adventure with some kind of structure to it. Let's look at the rising action part a little. Suppose I want to begin with some kind of crisis or call to action or introduction that provides a motivation. The players might provide this themselves during character creation, or we might collaborate on it, or I might simply present it by fiat, especially if I'm running a module. Then I want a rising action, in which the players start out feeling confident or at least competent, but there is a setback, a raising of stakes, something to present urgency or worry or at least excitement over a period of time, both in-game and in real-life time. Ideally, I'd love for each gaming session to reach some sort of climactic scene or discovery or conflict, with enough time for the characters/players to react to that before we have to pack up for the night (again, react both in-character and as players at the table). It could be that we wrap up a whole adventure in one session, with the climax occurring with enough time left for a falling action and denouement, or it could be that we end on a cliffhanger, or it could be that we chain together several sessions each with its own rising action peaking a bit higher than the previous sessions'. It's best not to rely on the dramatic tension of a single moment to be sustained across several weeks of downtime, so for a gaming group that is only meeting monthly I'd avoid cliffhangers and try to resolve at least some part of a campaign or adventure before the end of each session, but it depends on the game and the players and other factors exactly how I might try to structure this. Again, it doesn't have to be this specific five-point classical structure, there are other narrative structures that are modeled that you can use, or you can put together your own. And, of course, the players may have a little or a lot or all of the agency to essentially dictate a structure themselves; maybe after three encounters but before a climactic moment, they decide to leave the dungeon and head back to the bunk for some shut-eye, even though Lord Virulax hasn't been found yet and this will probably give him a chance to react to the players' assault on his fortress by beefing up security, maybe even send out assassins to track them down or something; I might raise an eyebrow and ask the players "are you sure you want to go rest now? Your characters know that this could give Lord Virulax more time to plot against them..." but I'm not gonna just tell them "no". So maybe there's no climax this session, that's not a disaster necessarily. I might try to do something in the next session to help the players find a more satisfying climax to the session, though? The point here is that as a GM I have some structure to a session, an adventure, a campaign, in mind. And if the players, unintentionally or by cleverness or a string of good or bad luck on the dice or whatever, unknowingly undermine the plans I put together, it's reasonable and cool and good for me to immediately make adjustments to my plans. Both for in-game and meta-game reasons, I might adjust difficulty of encounters current or future, add or remove scenes, shift the layout of the fortress or the location of Lord Virulax, conjure up a neutral NPC whose plans confound the situation, etc., all in the name of helping the players experience a better story. Is this just a wall clock being a tyrant? Call it the tyranny of dramatic narrative structure if you want, in some games and with some groups, it's not just OK, it's good GMing and doesn't deserve a pejorative descriptor. I'll note that this isn't just the plain old classic "railroad", where the GM has a whole story written out and the PCs are just along for the ride, with no agency. An important assumption here is that the GM and players have already agreed on what level of narrative agency they want to have, which can range anywhere from "we really just want to walk through the story you wrote and enjoy it" all the way to "the players are entirely responsible for creating the plot, the GM should just provide an open-world sandbox and otherwise do nothing at all to decide what happens for us." Those extremes and everything between are legitimate ways to play RPGs. Anywhere besides the extremes on that continuum, the GM has some responsibility, since they know things the players don't about the map, the movements of off-screen pieces on it, the motivations and activities of the antagonists and NPCs, the statblocks of the enemies and the locations of the treasure, to move and adjust those in order to help a good story happen. Not necessarily a specific story they wrote out to happen, but a good story, one that is entertaining for the players. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 23:07 on May 31, 2020 |
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May 31, 2020 23:01
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