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Piell posted:5e wasn't primarily designed to be good, it was primarily designed to "feel like D&D" (3.x in particular). The focus wasn't on making a good game.
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Jul 14, 2020 22:53
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In the case of Blades (and Agon), there are plenty of videos on YouTube of John Harper running the game. Same for both Scum & Villainy, and Band of Blades, Stras Asimovic has a channel full of APs of those games as well as Blades
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Jul 14, 2020 22:57
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Josef bugman posted:Again, actual plays with people who act and know the system would be a God send. I googled "blades in the dark actual play" and one of the top results is from John Harper, the writer of the game. It's pre-release, so it's not exactly one-to-one with the release version but the core is still there. It is also not the only result of that search, there are more recent ones.
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Jul 14, 2020 22:59
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Josef bugman posted:Again, actual plays with people who act and know the system would be a God send. Instructional podcasts don't have legs. Once the players learn the system they'll be bored with basic and patiently explained gameplay. There are shows that do sort of work this way (One Shot, Party of One) by changing systems often, but they don't have time to perfectly master all those systems on a podcast schedule so they smartly look for a few rules that showcase the system instead of trying to just do everything by the book. People always want this fictional "four funny but not too funny people play 5e and have a good flow but use all the rules right and the story doesn't get in the way of the rules and the rules don't get in the way of the story and you can learn to play from it" show, and the graveyard of podcasts that die in six episodes is filled with people who tried to make it themselves.
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Jul 14, 2020 22:59
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There is also a reason I said get people who act to do it. Often the people running the games are running it because they are particularly invested in creating games, not because they really know how to talk to folks/ get them interested. I don't dislike the videos. They are just not something I find particularly engaging. That is probably on my end, but it is something I've experienced a bit. Making something entertaining and then people getting invested seems like a better model than just trying to explain stuff. Josef bugman fucked around with this message at 23:09 on Jul 14, 2020 |
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Jul 14, 2020 23:01
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I would be pretty unimpressed if an RPG's breakdown of "what we're spending your Kickstarter money on" included paying a bunch of actors that I probably hate and/or will turn out to be horrible loving people to do a series of instructional videos. e: also watching actors play RPGs is the best way to get completely unrealistic expectations of what a game will be like to play with your friends, unless you met them all at improv workshop
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Jul 14, 2020 23:10
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Tarnop posted:Collaborative setting building doesn't require the players to tell the story themselves. It's typically about what their characters would reasonably be expected to know about the world which is good because it generates buy-in to the setting and avoids the problem of players creating adult characters who have just emerged from a time capsule and know nothing about the world (because players don't read rulebooks). It's not "what is going to happen", it's "what has already happened" This is something I wanted to talk about for a bit, not necessarily anything specific Tarnop said but the distinction between the experience of collaborative worldbuilding games and ones that rely entirely on the GM to do it. There is something to be said for the perspective that the information is coming from. There's a psychological difference. It's why mystery box stories are always better off if they don't try to conclusively answer the questions, or some horror movies don't show the monster. Being asked to help design the monster's look, behavior, motivations, etc for a piece of horror media might be fun and cool, but you'll probably never really be scared of it. If the GM says "oh this mansion belonged to the Archeforte family who have all mysteriously disappeared", that is a fact about the world you've just found out. You don't know for sure whether that's significant information, whether there's a big backstory to that or whether it's just a tidbit to make the world feel more real, whether there are major players involved or whether this will have a payoff later. Even if you hadn't found out that information, it still might have been relevant to the world or the story for other characters or in other scenes. There's potential for extrapolation and speculation specifically because you don't get to see the full depth of the information - you're free to imagine how deep it might go. And sometimes the GM takes that extrapolation and thinks "oh poo poo that's much cooler than what was written down, I'm gonna do that instead." And the players might be none the wiser, and might even feel vindicated for "making connections" even if the connections weren't really there to begin with. If you, as a player, say "oh this mansion belonged to the Archeforte family who have all mysteriously disappeared" to the group after being prompted. The group knows you don't have any more detail, unless you make it up. You know the exact depths of that information because you are the one who created it. If you hadn't said it, it wouldn't exist. You're more than free to elaborate on that information, and so are other people at the table, and there's a ton of fun to be had in "yes, and"-ing each other's ideas. It's got that hook and investment of contributing to a story, getting invested in the world by making some of it "yours". These are two different experiences, both compelling, but neither inherently superior or "better" ways of playing an RPG. The most common example of this perspective difference is after a campaign is done, the GM and the players discussing it retrospectively. There's probably going to be huge gaps in perception. The GM has been making poo poo up and filling in gaps and throwing out whatever they could come up with to keep things moving. The players are probably going to feel like the world and the story has coherence that it might not "really" have, because of their perspective - they were getting information as if it was fact, as if it had always been "true", as if they were just discovering it. All that might sound really dumb and irrelevant, but most people do process information differently based on the way it's being given to them. There's a psychological difference between deciding something about a fictional world and "finding something out" about it, even if the difference in play during a session of a tabletop RPG is incredibly minor and the actual information in question is identical. If you, the player, decide that information, that's it - you decided it right then and there, and you know that you could have said anything, and there's nothing "inherently true" about it. It might sound dumb and petty but human brains are dumb and we're in a thread talking about games. Games are all full of psychological tricks to make the brain light up in different ways and this is one of them. I like both kinds of RPG storytelling so I'm probably never gonna flip out when asked to play one way or the other and it's rude to do so, but I don't like when I get this vibe that people are dismissive of one over the other. "Oh what strange and incomprehensible fools to want the GM to tell them a story instead of contributing to it! Truly they are wrong and brain poisoned and we shall never understand them and why they are this way!" I don't think anyone was insinuating that in this thread exactly, but I've seen the attitude before when people have extolled the virtues of collaborative storytelling games. God that's a lot of words about elfgames. e: I know this doesn't touch on games like Fiasco where there isn't a GM and everyone's collaborating from the start, etc, but this post was already long. Rip_Van_Winkle fucked around with this message at 00:25 on Jul 15, 2020 |
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Jul 14, 2020 23:21
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Tarnop posted:I would be pretty unimpressed if an RPG's breakdown of "what we're spending your Kickstarter money on" included paying a bunch of actors that I probably hate and/or will turn out to be horrible loving people to do a series of instructional videos. Your contempt for an entire profession notwithstanding, I am getting very strong vibes of this particular comic from what you are saying:  Just see if folks at the local theatre are interested because they are better at talking to people than some random bod off the street who happens to like your game. It doesn't have to cost loads to do, just something to make people feel more immersed in the world than what currently exists. I am throwing ideas out to see what might be a good way of getting folks more interested, based on what I have observed. I am sorry if this is stupid. This is a really cool post. Thank you. Josef bugman fucked around with this message at 23:31 on Jul 14, 2020 |
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Jul 14, 2020 23:27
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I don't think there's any implication of that level of hostility. I think when Tarnop hears "actors" they think of people who are at least like, main character in a SyFy show or voice actor for an anime famous, not the ex-theater kids that make up half of all RPG groups anyways.
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Jul 14, 2020 23:44
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admanb posted:I don't think there's any implication of that level of hostility. I think when Tarnop hears "actors" they think of people who are at least like, main character in a SyFy show or voice actor for an anime famous, not the ex-theater kids that make up half of all RPG groups anyways. I suppose I need to be clear that I am not talking "Actors" but like, folks with a bit of stage presence who game.
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Jul 14, 2020 23:51
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admanb posted:I don't think there's any implication of that level of hostility. I think when Tarnop hears "actors" they think of people who are at least like, main character in a SyFy show or voice actor for an anime famous, not the ex-theater kids that make up half of all RPG groups anyways. It's this When I said "will probably turn out to be horrible" I was thinking that it seems like finding out an actor is actually a wife beater or a sex pest or a huge racist is a daily occurrence in this greatest of years, 2020. That said, John Harper's Blades video features one Adam Koebel so the success rate of picking someone in the RPG business isn't that great either. I do not hate all actors, I just worry overly about getting invested in liking them
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Jul 15, 2020 00:07
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Tarnop posted:I do not hate all actors, I just worry overly about getting invested in liking them Just treat them like people. Every day we are met with the cowardly, the wretched, the angry and the cruel but that doesn't mean they are not also capable of change. We cannot live our lives trying to prevent caring about other people in the belief that doing that will make us better. I understand the impulse, but it is (I think) a wrong one.
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Jul 15, 2020 00:14
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Man, "Blades in the Dark is high-crunch" is the kind of thing I would say as a joke about how biased towards rules-light games this forum is, I didn't expect to actually see people taking that position seriously. e: and I get how it is, relative to the average Fate or PBTA hack. it just makes me suspect some of y'all never tried and failed to learn Hero System as a teenager 
Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 00:22 on Jul 15, 2020 |
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Jul 15, 2020 00:16
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Man, "Blades in the Dark is high-crunch" is the kind of thing I would say as a joke about how biased towards rules-light games this forum is, I didn't expect to actually see people taking that position seriously. It’s just Absurd Alharazed, who is trolling us. I mean, dude said that 5e has better tactical combat than 4e.
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Jul 15, 2020 00:25
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This thread has gotten progressively more unpleasant for me to post in and a lot of people here piss me off, even some who don't in other threads, and I'm not sure if it's anybody else's fault other than my own but either way I'm going to disengage. Sorry for creating a worse experience for all of you.
Absurd Alhazred fucked around with this message at 20:09 on Jul 22, 2020 |
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Jul 15, 2020 00:36
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Man, "Blades in the Dark is high-crunch" is the kind of thing I would say as a joke about how biased towards rules-light games this forum is, I didn't expect to actually see people taking that position seriously. I would legitimately tell someone describing BitD as "rules light" that they're incorrect, and I think that people trying to sell games where the rules are actually pretty important and involved in the process as "oh it's rules light" contributes a lot to the feeling of "man this game is a pain in the rear end to learn, I'm just gonna stick with D&D." Like it's fine to say that compared to D&D Blades is a lot less crufty and full of 30 page spell lists and poo poo, but if you're going to recommend that someone play a game it helps to properly convey what it's like. Kemet may be vastly less complex and full of rules and poo poo than Argent: the Consortium but I wouldn't sell someone on Kemet by going "oh yeah it's rules light, sure."
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Jul 15, 2020 00:41
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Kai Tave posted:Like it's fine to say that compared to D&D Blades is a lot less crufty and full of 30 page spell lists and poo poo, but if you're going to recommend that someone play a game it helps to properly convey what it's like.
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Jul 15, 2020 00:47
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Kaiju15 posted:Is there a good deep dive on what makes the design of 5e so... meh? Ideally audio so that I can listen to someone complain about elf games while I work. OK. I'll give a quick summary. 5e is meh at combat and tactics for two reasons - that positioning doesn't really matter, and bullet-sponge design. The first leads to incredibly shallow combat, and the second leads to combat that takes a long time; the combination of the two is exceedingly meh. In 5e positioning doesn't really matter because the only real impact of positioning is how you can focus fire. There are, in most versions of D&D, two types of people who don't want to be in combat; spellcasters and archers. The penalty for both groups for being in melee is simple (other than letting the enemy get at you) - you take disadvantage on your attack rolls. This sounds like just what you want - archers and casters should actively avoid melee but it doesn't work that way in practice. Oh, and to add insult to injury they got rid of flanking, again weakening the impact of positioning. Unfortunately the majority of spellcaster combat spells don't make attack rolls but instead force saving throws. This means that a wizard who's stuck in melee can use the majority of their spells while stuck in melee combat with no penalty at all. They don't particularly want to be there but that's due to being fairly squishy and not wanting to take focus fire but they are still able to do almost everything offensively they could do if they weren't in melee unless specifically designed to not. Meanwhile they made a good choice for player characters in allowing finesse melee weapons (like daggers, shortswords, and rapiers) to use Dex for melee attack and damage rolls while thrown weapons use the same stat they use in melee. This is great for PCs because it both opens up agile rogues and rapier wielders in melee, and if your barbarian gets their feat glued to the ground their turn isn't entirely wasted by throwing a javelin. However this also means that when an enemy bowman is forced into melee and draws their shortsword they have the same attack roll and their damage roll drops from 1d8+dex damage to 1d6+dex damage. W00t! (In 3.5, for example, the attack roll would swap from the Dex of the agile archer to their Str, and probably lose the benefit of any feats). Meanwhile if you glue an orc's feet to the floor they pull out their javelin and throw it at you; a morningstar will use Str for attack rolls and do 1d8+str modifier damage. Their javelin has the same attack roll and does 1d6+Str modifier damage. Again W00t! It's technically better than nothing, but about as little better than nothing as it's possible to be - and therefore is not worth taking any risk at all of being focus fired. (There are precisely two exceptions I've found here - the Sentinel feat gives some measure of lockdown, and a monk with Stunning Fist forcing a Con save or lose on the next turn is normally well worth the risk). 5e has bullet sponge design. This applies across all of the WotC editions, with escalating attack rolls and hit points compared to TSR editions while the target numbers provided by your armour class remain more or less constant. In AD&D an ogre hits someone wearing full plate armour and carrying a shield on a 17, has an AC equivalent of 15, and has 4d8+1 (average 19) hit points. Meanwhile in 5e an ogre hits someone wearing full plate armour with a shield (AC20) on a 14, has an AC of 11, and has 59 hit points. They're meant to be about equally dangerous, but the AD&D fight against the ogre risks a dice spike while the fight against the 5e ogre is a very predictable fight of whittling away against the ogre's hit points until it drops. This bullet sponge design makes it slow. A game where positioning doesn't really matter (like Tunnels and Trolls) is fine - it enables you to do combat fast with more or less a single roll-off and a combat involving the entire party can be over in a couple of minutes. A game where there is bullet sponge design is fine when you've got a tense and tactical game where you're fighting for advantages; the combats may be long but they can be epic (4e springs to mind). But the combination of the two leads to combat that isn't fast, isn't tense, and isn't tactically interesting. The 5e skill system gives almost nothing. It's about as meh as it's possible to get. It's a simple "Roll 1d20, add your skill, and compare to the DM's target number measured on a simple pass/fail scale". The d20 is far, far too much variance for the range of skill levels on offer. But more importantly it's a simple pass/fail system with no success-with-consequences option and no scene framing mechanics (meaning that it's about as bland as it's possible to get). Finally due to the advantage/disadvantage system replacing modifiers the skill system actively prevents working out how to stack small advantages and modifiers to work out how to overcome actually hard single skill challenges. Except by magic of course. So it's about as bland as a skill system can be. The magic system is aggressively bland. Your magic has a huge impact on your setting. D&D 5e magic always works, and works reliably. There's never a drawback to casting spells other than that you might not have them available later that day (and it's a quasi spell point system so it's not about that specific spell). There's no hard choice to be made, for example by risking summoning something from the Dungeon Dimensions, there's no cost, and so the only hard choice you're ever making is resource management. Oh, and spells don't dramatically fail - they are always successfully cast. Like the skill system it's just fairly bland - but it also overwhelms the skill system by occasionally throwing round +10s and frequently making more mundane skill redundant (no need to be good at climbing if you can levitate). And that's basically it. Combat, skills, spells. There really isn't anything else to D&D. For example there are no hireling or domain management rules. There's no success with consequences. There's no social climbing. There's nothing in the way of incentivised interactions. The exploration rules are paper-thin. There's a very light virtues/flaws system. What it does right is that meh isn't a strong negative reaction and there's a lot that means anyone who wants something D&D flavoured gets something vaguely like what they want despite the fact they may have wildly different ideas of D&D.
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Jul 15, 2020 01:09
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Comrade Koba posted:the number of people who are extremely mad that System Mastery isn’t doing ~serious elfgame academic discourse~ never ceases to amaze I love System Mastery, I think Jef and Jon are hilarious and I think the "no research" approach is actually genuinely useful in a lot of respects (because it focuses things on the text of the game as it's presented, rather than the poo poo which "everyone knows" in a particular game's fandom you are meant to do differently or read into the game but which is not communicated at all by the actual product) but I also would probably quite enjoy a "high-research" alternative.
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Jul 15, 2020 01:15
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Gobbeldygook posted:Currently workshopping a rules light RPG alignment chart where the X axis is the complexity of the core resolution mechanic and Y is how much different Stuff there is to resolve, thus giving us a vocabulary for people who think d20 is rules light because the resolution mechanic is simpler than Earthdawn and those who think only The Adventures of Baron Munchausen is a rules light. Jenna Moran already did some of the work for this, you want the stats from Wisher Theurge Fatalist items and mechanical abilities.
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Jul 15, 2020 01:30
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neonchameleon posted:OK. I'll give a quick summary. This is a good summary.
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Jul 15, 2020 01:39
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Piell posted:Short story is 5e wasn't primarily designed to be good, it was primarily designed to "feel like D&D" (3.x in particular). The focus wasn't on making a good game. I strongly disagree with this. 5e does not feel remotely like 3.X to me. That's because when I bite into 3.5 I get one sensation above all others. Crunch. And lots of fiddly details. D&D's three main feelings are crunch, fiddly details, and having to plan out your builds. It also doesn't feel like 2e because when I bite into that I get THAC0 and NWPs as some of the things that make 2e distinctive. What "feels like D&D" means is taking 2e, 3.X, and even 4e, straining out all the parts that stood out from the other versions, and then running the whole thing through a blender. 4e fans like it the least because 4e fans like what made 4e stand out while the previous editions tried to work round it. Even if there's a surprising amount of 4e in there.
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Jul 15, 2020 01:57
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Favorite thing about the DMG is that there is just a long list of "Yeah this poo poo would probably make combat more interesting and probably should be baseline, use it if you want, I don't loving know here's flanking rules and marking rules 
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Jul 15, 2020 02:13
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Warthur posted:Does anyone on this thread have recommendations for a podcast which does that? We absolutely have to focus on text of just the book we're reading, and honestly I need to remember to include a quick description of that and why at the start of episodes. Without it, we just get buried by people saying "You can't possibly talk about this book without reading seven other books and this blog!" Also I think the key to find a show like ours that isn't us to go for shows that do interviews with designers, since they'll be more keyed in to mechanics that we can get to after a week of cramming in reading. Give Modifier by Meghan Dornbrock a try, see if that scratches the itch.
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Jul 15, 2020 02:25
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neonchameleon posted:I strongly disagree with this. That's a good assessment. And you're correct in that the final product does't feel like anything you enjoyed, but that's just something else they hosed up. The stated goal actually was to make a "feels like D&D" composite edition, they just fell really drat short. To this end, some playtest surveys included page after page of spell names and asked players to rate "How D&D the spells feel."
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Jul 15, 2020 02:26
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"Feels like D&D" just means "fighters don't get real powers". That's why both popular games made in reaction to 4E actually feel extremely like D&D.
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Jul 15, 2020 02:32
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Josef bugman posted:Your contempt for an entire profession notwithstanding, I am getting very strong vibes of this particular comic from what you are saying: I get where you're coming from, basically "Let's turn gameplay videos into professionally produced commercials by using actors." I don't know if your intent was that they still are actually playing the game or if the whole thing would be scripted, but each presents some interesting challenges. If they're actually playing you're now talking about an acting job that also requires improv skills and learning a whole game system, so it's gonna narrow your applicant field pretty considerably, and if it's scripted, well it's not an actual play anymore, it's just a regular play. And there is no one (outside of musicians, horse people, gun nuts, smokers, and people who love noticing if coffee cups are actually empty) more inclined to fine-tooth examine a production for signs of fakery than people evaluating an RPG production. One Shot Podcast actually sort of works the way you're describing though. James is a pro podcaster with improv experience, game experience, and a stable of friends that are also both, and he will glady talk to a designer about playing their game for the right price. So good news, I guess, it's already happening!
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Jul 15, 2020 03:01
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Dawgstar posted:Given GW just threw a Black Library writer under the bus for saying 'bigots are bad and don't send death threats' Arch really shouldn't see the need. 2 pages ago but gently caress it, who is Arch? I assume some flavor of chud, but what flavor?
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Jul 15, 2020 03:23
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Like I admit that board games and RPGs are different in a lot of ways but that there are video series' like Rodney Smith's How to Play has legitimately made it easier for me to not only learn how to play various boardgame but also helped me learn how to teach other people to play those same games. So I could definitely see the value in a How to Play esque series for RPGs that provide not just an overview of how it works but offers advice/a framework for how to easily teach that to others since a huge stumbling block seems to be "how can I teach my players this non-D&D game in a way that won't make them tune out completely?"Dexo posted:Favorite thing about the DMG is that there is just a long list of Ferrinus posted:"Feels like D&D" just means "fighters don't get real powers". That's why both popular games made in reaction to 4E actually feel extremely like D&D. 5E, at its heart, is a cowardly game. Yeah yeah I know someone's gonna roll their eyes at me saying that but I stand by it. 5E was largely made in reaction to the vocal outcry about 4E and Mearls is absolutely desperate to be loved, so all sorts of stuff in 5E is equivocating wishy-washy "do this, or don't, do whatever you like, ask your GM, fun is what you make it" garbage meant to provide the appearance of a robust toolkit while ultimately being too afraid of criticism to actually commit to anything. This is a frankly terrible way to design a game if you want to make it good, but I guess it's great if you want to pander to the Zak and Pundit crowd.
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Jul 15, 2020 03:29
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Baron Snow posted:2 pages ago but gently caress it, who is Arch? I assume some flavor of chud, but what flavor? Full-on alt-right.
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Jul 15, 2020 03:31
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Glazius posted:Okay, I'm going to be charitable here and assume you just have no idea that you've deliberately crippled your Blades example to create maximum confusion. That's understandable! D&D and Blades have two different philosophies of dice. Ah, I see your error. I don't think using the Blades mechanics is a nightmare at all. I've run and played a lot of Blades, and I enjoy it very much. Nonetheless, the core mechanic is complex. It absolutely does more than the core D&D mechanic! It definitely flows well once you get a handle on it. Understanding the importance of the story is part of getting a handle on it. But it is also more complex. Which is not a bad thing.
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Jul 15, 2020 03:31
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Baron Snow posted:2 pages ago but gently caress it, who is Arch? I assume some flavor of chud, but what flavor? "Ironic racist."
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Jul 15, 2020 03:32
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admanb posted:Actually, you need to start with Tier because Candlestick's fine hand weapon does not by default change Effect. If Candlestick and the toughs are the same tier (determined by Candlestick's crew and the tough's faction) then the fine weapon pushes Candlestick to Great and then being outnumbered pushes it back down. But if the toughs are one or more tier higher than Candlestick then all the fine weapon does is push them to the same level, which keeps it at Standard that gets pushed down to Limited by scale. loving... okay. Here's the rest of the story which, I must stress, is also not some kind of mystery to the GM. The crew wants to sneak into the curiosity shop and get the trinket with a minimum of fuss. So their plan is a stealth plan, and the detail they need to pull it off is a point of infiltration. They don't have it so they're going to gather information by, as previously stated, casing the joint. In order to introduce a bit of a complication so it isn't just Survey roll -> Engagement roll, the GM decides to introduce the street toughs, who are going to at least be a simple obstacle to the survey roll and may impede the engagement roll. The crew is a starting crew, so tier 0, and the street toughs aren't affiliated with any of the major players, so they're tier 0 also. This is what I meant by "there is no base difference in quality" earlier. Since the GM also doesn't intend for the street toughs to represent an obstacle complex enough to deal with to warrant a clock, the Skirmish roll (probably) represents the entirety of Candlestick dealing with the thugs. There is no "second Skirmish roll" to be made - either Ms. Nobody can Survey the place from the regular old risky position of somebody in the neighborhood catching onto it, or she makes it from a desperate position because she's got to do it while Candlestick's being a distraction. After which point, because Candlestick knows how to fight, he can just disengage and fall back without being pursued. (Now, if Candlestick decides not to pull his weapon and/or things go particularly badly, somebody's going to need to make a roll to get him out of the fight because he won't be able to just disengage and fall back.) The other reason Candlestick doesn't make a second Skirmish roll to fight the thugs again is because one of the best practices for running the game is to let skill checks ride - or as the game says, "don't make them roll for the same thing twice". Candlestick already knows how good he is at fighting the thugs - he can fight them to a standstill and get away. Unless something changes about the fight, that's just how the fight goes. Absurd Alhazred posted:Notice how "Everything up to this point has happened in the GM's head" and "Laying them out is just to confirm that the GM and Candlestick are looking at the story the same way" directly contradicts the guidance in the system book, as I copied down earlier: Yeah, you're thinking of them as three separate steps involving a lot of table talk, but that's just the debug procedure. The three questions of: what action is happening, what position is the actor in, what effect will they have, are all interrogating the story, and as such they're not independent answers - they depend on the story as each player at the table understands it. If you're not sure what action is happening at this dramatic point, you might want to talk out the action with the people at table before you start thinking about position and effect, but brawling with some thugs is what Skirmish was made for, so eh? And position and effect are really not that complicated, but it's easy to overthink them. Risky is the default position - if there's no clear operating upside or downside, it's risky. Standard is the default effect. There's a one-page table of standard modifiers that might apply to it, and again, you might clearly be set up to get a stronger or weaker effect. But that's all you have to worry about for judgment calls on position and effect - up, down, or even. It's not some tremendous amount of work, and when presented to the players it's not as some tremendous of work that ugh I guess I could redo if you really wanted. What they have to challenge is your call of action and your spin on position and effect, and they're not doing it for some philosophical ideal but because they don't understand your calls or have a conflicting idea of how you should have made them.
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Jul 15, 2020 03:48
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admanb posted:Full-on alt-right. Cessna posted:"Ironic racist." Ok, So... June 5th. I’m guessing timing wise that GW posted a BLM statement and this is this rear end in a top hat saying “no they don’t”?
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Jul 15, 2020 03:50
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Something people here might find interesting on the topic of getting people to play other systems, the Root: Tabletop Roleplaying Game kickstarter last year (I think) earned over $600,000 from 6,500 backers. The kicker here is that it's a PbtA-style game, and I'm sure a very large portion of the people who backed it did so off their love of the board game and setting/aesthetic moreso than any familiarity with PbtA. Now I'm not naive enough to think all 6,500 those people will play it, let alone introduce another 3-5 friends to it, but that's still going to be a bunch of people who have probably never looked through a non-D&D-like system! I'm not really sure what the takeaway here is, I guess "if you want people to play a thing, attach it to a licence they already like". Exciting.
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Jul 15, 2020 03:52
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Baron Snow posted:2 pages ago but gently caress it, who is Arch? I assume some flavor of chud, but what flavor? Full on alt-right/nazi, used to go by the name Arch Warhammer until recently when GW sent him a legal threat about it. Chuds have since rallied around him because "muh free speech  " even going so far as to call him "Warhammer Jesus" because reasons.Edit: Baron Snow posted:Ok, So... June 5th. I’m guessing timing wise that GW posted a BLM statement and this is this rear end in a top hat saying “no they don’t”? Not quite (while I'm sure that's part of it, it's not the main thing). The company behind World of Warships partnered with him for their 40k crossover, then had to very publicly walk it back when Games Workshop told them "Hey, we explicitly said he was one of the people you couldn't partner with". And then GW sent a legal threat to make him remove Warhammer from his name. senrath fucked around with this message at 03:55 on Jul 15, 2020 |
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Jul 15, 2020 03:53
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Ferrinus posted:"Feels like D&D" just means "fighters don't get real powers". That's why both popular games made in reaction to 4E actually feel extremely like D&D. Oh, that's hardly fair. "Feels like D&D" also means "win the game by winning the constant rules arguments you have because the rules are incomplete and unclear" and "the skill system is a bunch of tasks decoupled from any framework so you have no idea what, in total, they mean". Why, the example of play that opens 5E even includes as its only die roll our old friend The Perception Check That Does Nothing! Surely you remember good ol' TPCTDN? The players are convinced something is amiss, so they make a Perception check, and that's easy enough to adjudicate as a task, right? Even if there's nothing to find, why shouldn't they be able to make one? But there's nothing to find, so all you can say is that they don't notice anything special, which does nothing to convince them that nothing is amiss! Failure costs nothing, success rewards nothing! Why not do another?
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Jul 15, 2020 04:51
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Kai Tave posted:5E, at its heart, is a cowardly game. Yeah yeah I know someone's gonna roll their eyes at me saying that but I stand by it. 5E was largely made in reaction to the vocal outcry about 4E and Mearls is absolutely desperate to be loved, so all sorts of stuff in 5E is equivocating wishy-washy "do this, or don't, do whatever you like, ask your GM, fun is what you make it" garbage meant to provide the appearance of a robust toolkit while ultimately being too afraid of criticism to actually commit to anything. This is a frankly terrible way to design a game if you want to make it good, but I guess it's great if you want to pander to the Zak and Pundit crowd. This is it. It's not that 5e is ineptly designed or materially less fun to play than 2e or 3.5 (it's much less of a headache than 3.5/pathfinder imo); it's that so many mechanics are presented with obfuscating spin and so much of its design is unambitious and timid. Any quality of life improvement that came from 4e was carefully relabeled so as not to scare the grogs. Balance (to the laughable extent that it exists) is strictly limited to PHB + 1 supplement. The single page of battlemaster maneuvers is an insulting compromise between 4e fans of warlords and fighters vs grogs who wanted the jock analogs' powers to not compete with the casters' bloated chapter of spells. I'm running my first game of 4e now and it's such a different feeling to play a mature, developed line that delivers exactly what it promises. It's not perfect, but it's much much more ambitious in comparison. Octavo fucked around with this message at 04:59 on Jul 15, 2020 |
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Jul 15, 2020 04:57
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It's also the case that almost all of the variant rules in the 5e DMG are just straight copies of the same variant rules from 3.5's Arcana Unearthed. Not only could they not commit to picking specific rules to include that would accomplish whatever gameplay or theme or feel that they wanted to have and leave it up to the players to decide, they couldn't even make up new rules for it anyway.
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Jul 15, 2020 05:19
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Basically Arch was so bad he made the people who only sometimes are ironically fetishizing fascism say "we don't want your kind 'round here."
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Jul 15, 2020 05:48
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