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The core idea is a strong one (The Running Man but with D&D dungeons) and yet 90% of the material concentrates on the part that isn't actual dungeon adventuring, including a huge wad of who-cares background material about the alt-history 1980s setting. So goddamn strange.
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Mar 24, 2021 17:21
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SkyeAuroline posted:hello Spire, you called
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Mar 24, 2021 17:27
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Terrible Opinions posted:The answer keeps coming back to the ideal RPG game being a party of terrorists blowing up specific bad guys. Zorro and Robin Hood, don't need hordes of bad guys to mow down. Just the corrupt authority figure and those that directly serve them. You could have a catch acronym for the last bit
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Mar 24, 2021 17:27
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To be fair, Maximum XCrawl cuts way, way, way down on the amount of setting info that isn't immediately relevant to the PCs (like deity options for clerics). There are 6 classes and no prestige classes. The most useless mechanics are probably the handful of NPC classes.
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Mar 24, 2021 17:29
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Terrible Opinions posted:Personally I never found it hard in 4th ed or even older types of D&D. The only mechanical incentive to kill scores of orcs is combat exp, and switching to a milestone system of "you level when you successfully raid the baron's vault" removes that. Add onto that combat with a small number of powerful combatants always being more interesting than fighting a ton of weak guys. Ah, we're talking different "writing a game" here (and a different style of game after all, for that matter). Yeah, just adjusting that sort of thing is straightforward enough.
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Mar 24, 2021 17:30
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Splicer posted:What if the bad guys were being supported by some form of organization with such entrenched institutional corruption that you could comfortably state that anyone you encountered from that organization was either evil for having done evil acts or evil for enabling the institution that allowed said acts to continue?
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Mar 24, 2021 17:32
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Terrible Opinions posted:The answer keeps coming back to the ideal RPG game being a party of terrorists blowing up specific bad guys. Zorro and Robin Hood, don't need hordes of bad guys to mow down. Just the corrupt authority figure and those that directly serve them. The Gang Take Out Lord Mountbatten in Phoenix Command 
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Mar 24, 2021 17:33
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I think the nice thing about X-Crawl is despite how larded up it is with pointless alt-history and social commentary, the actual core concept of "D&D is gladiatorial theater and people do it in front of cameras for prizes" is incredibly good and very easy to steal, since all that other stuff shakes off so dang easy.
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Mar 24, 2021 17:34
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Halloween Jack posted:In this case, pretty much like you said, the PCs are some crazy Dancers at the End of Time--they could be exploring the Deciplane of Cotton Candy or flying to the moon or loving dryads or whatever, but they want to spend their free time disemboweling someone with a glaive-guisarme. Yeah, and of course that's not going to work for every campaign, it requires a very specific tone. Like you have to be into Boffer Battle Tournaments With Magic, which could be a good game but certainly doesn't describe every good game. That said, I was mostly just presenting it to point out how far you have to go if you really want violence against other intelligent creatures to be non-problematic. Even with something like Spire, where your opponents are absolutely deserving, the goal is not to escape from a consideration of the effects of violence; I think it's pretty clear that Spire is aware of the toll that resisting takes, the damage imperialism inflicts on people and societies even if you win, etc. And with something like Robin Hood or the like, some of the Sheriff's underlings probably had totally human and sympathetic reasons for ending up where they are, etc. I'd say it's a strength of TTRPGs that you get to engage with the narrative so fully that you can really treat these characters like people. After all, if I'm playing a CRPG, I can side-eye their treatment of orcs or the local equivalent all I want, but I'm going to reach a point where the game makes me fight the orcs, and I can either quit, or withdraw from the fiction and roll my eyes and engage with the fight mechanically. Obviously with TTRPGs we are not faced with such limited options at the point of play, which makes it even more frustrating and sad that the industry leader is so poor about recognizing that engaging with this topic is going to be incredibly common in their game, and providing better guidance for it (or any explicit guidance). And making monsters that are at least aware of the issue is a really low bar. I've seen a lot of bad play experiences with people really playing into the "murder" part of the classic term, to the discomfort of all. Having some rules guidance about it would be a big help to a certain kind of unaware nerd (and to the people trying to keep order at a table without having to digress into a long discussion).
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Mar 24, 2021 17:37
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gradenko_2000 posted:The Gang Take Out Lord Mountbatten Pathfinder Advanced Squad Leader-Maker
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Mar 24, 2021 17:49
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The twin lines of conversation have now fused XCOM and X-Crawl in my brain. "Hello commander, we've evaluated your performance so far and feel it can still be improved. Your thief-acrobat keeps flubbing his lines and the Sorcerer keeps antagonizing the crowd even though he's supposed to be a Face."
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Mar 24, 2021 17:54
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theironjef posted:I think the nice thing about X-Crawl is despite how larded up it is with pointless alt-history and social commentary, the actual core concept of "D&D is gladiatorial theater and people do it in front of cameras for prizes" is incredibly good and very easy to steal, since all that other stuff shakes off so dang easy.
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Mar 24, 2021 17:55
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I did an AP of an X-Crawl lift run in 7e Gamma World, and honestly the wrestling parallel stuff was the best part. Faces, heels, intro music, having brief whispered conversations with the foes about how to make a fall look particularly good, all that poo poo was fun.
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Mar 24, 2021 17:56
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Tibalt posted:I contend that XCrawl is set in the Bright cinematic universe, their incoherent world vision mesh together damningly well. That movie pissed me off so much, since apparently the lord of the rings trilogy happened in 12,000 BCE, but somehow The Alamo still happened and California exists.
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Mar 24, 2021 17:59
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The way I'm handling it in my current game is establishing in the setting that (a) the ubiquity of healing magic makes most fights nonlethal, even if you're using swords and fireballs and things, unless you really want to go out of your way to murder your enemy (b) the majority of fighting is done between adventuring parties hired by opposing sides, who've opted-in to a life of fighting people for money, and who have a culture of not taking peoples' lives just because they're being paid by different people. It doesn't completely take away all of the issues surrounding a game that is at its heart about solving your problems with violence, but I feel it ameliorates them enough for me.
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Mar 24, 2021 18:28
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This is probably a topic for Chat or its own thread (Violence in Roleplaying?), since it has a lot of meat on its bones. My two cents: if violence in fiction troubles you enough not to want to engage with the premise that, in a fantasy world, some beings can be Objectively Evil and it is a moral act to destroy them, there are a host of roleplaying games that are better suited to your tastes. You can have long, satisfying campaigns where violence just isn't part of the genre, or is the rare spice used carefully and by consent of the players. I can highly recommend the Bakers' Under Hollow Hills as an exemplar of the style.
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Mar 24, 2021 19:49
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I brought this up in the chat thread a while back but I'm always shocked to learn that most people mentally default to "yes obviously we killed those bandits, what else would we have done?" Decades of shounen as my basis for fight scenes have taught me that even the most brutal fights end in scrapes, spitting blood, and changed morals, not dead bodies.
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Mar 24, 2021 20:10
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wizzardstaff posted:The players would be a group of tourists escorted through a mock dungeon of illusions and constructs, finally reaching the display of the evil lich king who was defeated by the heroes of legend. Then bam, reality shifts when they touch the lich king’s cursed jewel. The dungeon is real, the players have class levels, and it’s time for them to fight their way out. Each room they exit into is a lethally scaled up version of the museum diorama they previously walked through. The final set piece is a fight against the dragon which used to grace the lobby as a statue, like the T-Rex in Jurassic Park. So the D&D 80s cartoon? 
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Mar 24, 2021 20:14
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Countblanc posted:I brought this up in the chat thread a while back but I'm always shocked to learn that most people mentally default to "yes obviously we killed those bandits, what else would we have done?" Decades of shounen as my basis for fight scenes have taught me that even the most brutal fights end in scrapes, spitting blood, and changed morals, not dead bodies. It's video games, outside of fighting or stealth games enemies are either threats or dead, even the ones based on TTRPGs where that's not the case.
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Mar 24, 2021 20:23
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Kestral posted:This is probably a topic for Chat or its own thread (Violence in Roleplaying?), since it has a lot of meat on its bones. I mean there's an extent to which that's true, but it's also in some ways orthogonal. I think it's worth remembering that the discussion started not around people being bothered by violence but about the problems with labeling people as Objectively Evil and lethal violence against them as being justified. There's actually a much narrower range than "violence in general" there: a situation where you are fighting actual people, but also don't want to have to feel at all guilty about killing them. If you diverge just a little from that, the situation becomes dramatically less problematic. If you're fighting non-people, like the elemental constructs of a wizard you plan to capture, or whatever, then a lot of those problems go away. If you don't mind having a little nuance in the portrayal, "well, those dudes were trying to kill us, wish we could have not killed them but welp," or even just going out of your way to offer and take nonlethal options, then a lot of the problems are mitigated. If you just don't make the indicator of who is Objectively Evil and okay to kill a race/species distinction but a voluntary one the situation gets dramatically better. These are all things that people involved in the designing of games could do. They play in with the rules, too. D&D has rules for death and dying, and while 5e is loathe to have outright rules for anything, it explicitly says that most DMs have "monsters" die immediately upon hitting 0 health, a situation in which lethality is assumed to be a desired or at least unavoidable outcome. And while calling out "most" DMs as preferring this implies other options, it gives none of those except by implication, which is to say that the supported alternative appears to be using the PC death and dying rules, which are way too complicated to want to routinely use for minor encounters. Again, while the idea of violence being always problematic on some level is broadly accurate, what's specific to the critique of the D&D-adjacent parts of the industry is how frequently these games fail to acknowledge it and by doing so make it worse. Just setting a tone in which the expectation is set, up front, that for the most part heroic character are not eager to kill but rather do so to advance goals, and that the expectation should be that most struggles will be over an objective, with many or all of the losers surrendering or withdrawing, makes the situation dramatically better. Instead we have the D&D situation, where you have frequent violence, frequently against other people (using this broadly in the sense of creatures capable of making their own choices), and that violence is assumed to be generally lethal and generally expected to be lethal, even by protagonists. I don't think you end up with this situation because the current D&D creators actively support genocidal race war, but well, Gygax apparently did. And by being so terrified of revising the core ideas for fear of breaking genre, we are still writing things that very easily encourage that mindset. I realize I'm partially responsible for derailing into the general violence talk, but I think it's worth remembering the original problem, in this case manifested by WOTC's ongoing mistreatment of the gnolls, is not with glorification of violence in general - it's pretty easy for media like this to have a balanced view of violence. (Tolkien, for example, keenly feels it, and the aftermath of a battle is never triumphant but instead mourning the losses and damage.) The point that this is not entirely unproblematic is fine, and worth being aware of, but it's also important that much of RPG history, and nerd culture in general, is not at the "maybe we should be sadder about having to resort to violence" stage, but rather the "wait, this is literally just race war" stage (in which, of course, Tolkien is much more complicit - his problem in this regard is specifically not a general glorification of violence, but his denial of the dignity of personhood to the orcs). And the conclusion is that while we in the industry should be aware of the complex problems of the glorification of violence, we should also definitely not fail at the basic hurdle of "don't create entire species/ethnic groups of people who are denied the dignity of personhood."
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Mar 24, 2021 20:32
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Countblanc posted:I brought this up in the chat thread a while back but I'm always shocked to learn that most people mentally default to "yes obviously we killed those bandits, what else would we have done?" Decades of shounen as my basis for fight scenes have taught me that even the most brutal fights end in scrapes, spitting blood, and changed morals, not dead bodies. Those are expectations that can be set at the start of the campaign. In my experience, largely thanks to the way some rulebooks are written, people often don't realise that they can choose to tell those types of stories if they want.
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Mar 24, 2021 20:33
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FMguru posted:The core idea is a strong one (The Running Man but with D&D dungeons) and yet 90% of the material concentrates on the part that isn't actual dungeon adventuring, including a huge wad of who-cares background material about the alt-history 1980s setting. So goddamn strange. Is there any detail on why this is? Was it just wanting to be the next judge dredd, re social commentary through schlock entertainment? Or an ideological thing?
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Mar 24, 2021 21:06
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Tarnop posted:Those are expectations that can be set at the start of the campaign. In my experience, largely thanks to the way some rulebooks are written, people often don't realise that they can choose to tell those types of stories if they want. I remember a digimon TTRPG I reviewed once where being able to attack things non-lethally was something you had to explicitly opt into and spend points on, which was a really baffling decision for a game based on a media property that leans pretty hard into defeat being friendship for all but the top brass evil guys. Not really refuting your point or anything, just musing on what games can/should allow non-lethal solutions even when fights happen.
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Mar 24, 2021 21:33
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Leraika posted:I remember a digimon TTRPG I reviewed once where being able to attack things non-lethally was something you had to explicitly opt into and spend points on, which was a really baffling decision for a game based on a media property that leans pretty hard into defeat being friendship for all but the top brass evil guys. Not really refuting your point or anything, just musing on what games can/should allow non-lethal solutions even when fights happen. Yeah I think this is really important, so many games want to set "lethal" as the default. And I get it from a GM ease perspective, honestly. If you have enemies default to running away, lots of players will think this is because you plan to have them come back and screw with them later, and will try to hunt them down, derailing everything. If you have defeat mean friendship, you add that element to what might be supposed to be a quick combat, let alone the worry about players accumulating this ever-growing train of helpful NPCs and suddenly your scale has gotten out of hand. But of course the price you pay for "nah just kill everyone w/e" is also pretty heavy even if it's subtler, so seems like another case where rules and session 0 expectations need to just be really clear about what you're doing and why.
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Mar 24, 2021 21:49
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This is technically TG as an Industry, I think: Has anyone here actually trying GM-for-Pay-ing? Or hired one I guess? I am curious about your experience.
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Mar 24, 2021 22:06
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I used to occasionally guest DM for D&D nights at a board game bar in Philadelphia. I used a modified version of Fiasco's relationship system to quickly establish party dynamics ("you're the Monk's brother, you don't trust the Wizard, etc") before running randos through a one-shot. Longer-form I'm not sure I'd be comfortable with. I've gotten offers before, but it's a little too close to "paying someone to be your friend" for my comfort. The work I do on the campaigns I run is a labor of love, and making the transition of "labor of love" to "labor" sounds awful.
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Mar 24, 2021 22:23
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Tarnop posted:Those are expectations that can be set at the start of the campaign. In my experience, largely thanks to the way some rulebooks are written, people often don't realise that they can choose to tell those types of stories if they want. I just highlighted this to a bitd group by playing a character for about 8 sessions and then saying, in character, "you all kill a lot of people who don't need to be killed", and when they said "you do, too" I just responded with "when?" because until that point I had killed nobody at all. Then someone said "I don't think I've killed anyone either..." and was immediately told by someone else "yeah, you did, you've killed like ten people..." and after a brief argument about whether or not my guy had killed anyone, most of the players were slightly horrified at how casually they'd been doing murders because hey, that's how RPGs go, right?
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Mar 24, 2021 22:44
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Froghammer posted:I used to occasionally guest DM for D&D nights at a board game bar in Philadelphia. I used a modified version of Fiasco's relationship system to quickly establish party dynamics ("you're the Monk's brother, you don't trust the Wizard, etc") before running randos through a one-shot. I don't think it's weird to pay somebody to DM; it's a skill not all possess, and not all who possess it want to do it. I have had good experiences with some DMs and would pay to have those experiences again. I can't tell you how to feel, but if you are good at it and others are eager to trade money (earned with their time and expertise) for some of your time and expertise after knowing what they'd be getting, then I see an opportunity and not a problem. If they start not liking what they're getting, they can stop, you know? Then again I don't see a problem with paying somebody to be your friend, either. If you're happy with the arrangement and they are too, then what's the problem? The obvious caveat for any kind of human interaction for pay is the list of circumstances where the person being compensated wants to pass up an opportunity but cannot, or wants to end the agreement but cannot, for fear of the consequences.
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Mar 24, 2021 22:49
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Elector_Nerdlingen posted:I just highlighted this to a bitd group by playing a character for about 8 sessions and then saying, in character, "you all kill a lot of people who don't need to be killed", and when they said "you do, too" I just responded with "when?" because until that point I had killed nobody at all. Strong Power Kill energies.
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Mar 24, 2021 23:34
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Megazver posted:This is technically TG as an Industry, I think: I worked at an afterschool program/summer camp for over three years where I GMed for children. The children ranged in age from 6 to 16 depending on the day. I mostly ran 5E, but nearer to the end of my time there I was running other systems like Voidheart Symphony and Fiasco. I also managed a program that used various TTRPGs specifically to build social skills for neurodiverse kids. I'd do it again in a heartbeat but I hate the company I worked for and how they treated me this past September.
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Mar 24, 2021 23:52
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Countblanc posted:I brought this up in the chat thread a while back but I'm always shocked to learn that most people mentally default to "yes obviously we killed those bandits, what else would we have done?" Decades of shounen as my basis for fight scenes have taught me that even the most brutal fights end in scrapes, spitting blood, and changed morals, not dead bodies. I think a lot of that is the result of games like D&D owning most of the mindshare. There are only two states in D&D based games: Dead or Not Dead, and no real way of reliably incapacitating enemies that isn't making them Dead until mid to late game. Artifact of wargame roots. Models are fine until they turn off like a switch at 0HP.
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Mar 25, 2021 00:27
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Elector_Nerdlingen posted:I just highlighted this to a bitd group by playing a character for about 8 sessions and then saying, in character, "you all kill a lot of people who don't need to be killed", and when they said "you do, too" I just responded with "when?" because until that point I had killed nobody at all. That’s strange because BitD is supposed to have significant mechanical and narrative penalties for killing people.
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Mar 25, 2021 00:32
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Liquid Communism posted:I think a lot of that is the result of games like D&D owning most of the mindshare. To be fair to wargames, D&D did strip out stuff like morale rules over time that did give them an implicit end state besides Dead for being clunky. (Which they were, but it's still on the designers for not replacing them with a better alternative.)
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Mar 25, 2021 00:51
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DalaranJ posted:That’s strange because BitD is supposed to have significant mechanical and narrative penalties for killing people. There's a Crew ability that removes the mechanical penalty for killing people, and if you're good at otherwise keeping Heat low then you might be fine even if you're killing a lot of people without it over the course of the game. It'll depend on the PCs and the type of crew they are but you can absolutely use lethal violence in Blades and get away with it.
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Mar 25, 2021 00:52
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I'll point out that D&D 4E explicitly stated that players who reduce enemies to 0 HP are in full control of whether that means dead or simply incapacitated, there aren't any hoops to jump through to deal "subdual damage" if you want to not kill someone. Bringing someone to 0 HP with a sword can be you laying them out with the flat of the blade or doing the Zorro thing and they surrender, you can lightning bolt someone unconscious rather than turning them into a pair of smoking boots, whatever.
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Mar 25, 2021 01:00
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Megazver posted:This is technically TG as an Industry, I think: I've payed for two different games. One was probably the best online with randos game I've played in lasted like 1 year and a half, until it wasn't lol, because some drama happened and the DM was completely unable to read the room got defensive, along with some other weird poo poo. It seems like it's a cool gig if it's something you want to do. From a player's perspective it's not much different to me than like paying a wow sub, or paying to go see a movie. I'm paying for someone who's talented to find and curate a group that will play elfgames with, and for someone to put in the prep-work to help provide me with entertainment and fun. I get as a DM not ever wanting to do it if it triggers a job vs fun hobby crisis for you. I don't think I would ever want to DM a game for money, as that level of expectation seems stressful.
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Mar 25, 2021 01:02
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Kai Tave posted:I'll point out that D&D 4E explicitly stated that players who reduce enemies to 0 HP are in full control of whether that means dead or simply incapacitated, there aren't any hoops to jump through to deal "subdual damage" if you want to not kill someone. Bringing someone to 0 HP with a sword can be you laying them out with the flat of the blade or doing the Zorro thing and they surrender, you can lightning bolt someone unconscious rather than turning them into a pair of smoking boots, whatever. In 5e, you can do this with any melee attack, natively. Just declare it. Ranged/spells are lethal, though, because it's narratively much harder to justify (you may or may not agree).
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Mar 25, 2021 01:07
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I tend to make it a thing in any system I'm running that if you want to kill someone, you need to specifically say so. Makes players stop and think about what they're doing a bit more.
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Mar 25, 2021 01:27
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Toshimo posted:In 5e, you can do this with any melee attack, natively. Just declare it. Ranged/spells are lethal, though, because it's narratively much harder to justify (you may or may not agree).
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Mar 25, 2021 01:29
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Kai Tave posted:I'll point out that D&D 4E explicitly stated that players who reduce enemies to 0 HP are in full control of whether that means dead or simply incapacitated, there aren't any hoops to jump through to deal "subdual damage" if you want to not kill someone. Bringing someone to 0 HP with a sword can be you laying them out with the flat of the blade or doing the Zorro thing and they surrender, you can lightning bolt someone unconscious rather than turning them into a pair of smoking boots, whatever. not to overstate the point, but what's kind of going on here is that 3e already assumed that everyone, NPCs included, would still go through the death save process, and you could as a PC inflict subdual damage if you wanted to, just with a penalty 4e just cut out the mechanical middle-man and made it much more convenient to go non-lethal at the drop of a hat (in yet another example of 4e simply being an improvement and iteration of what 3e was already trying to do)
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Mar 25, 2021 01:48
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