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Xiahou Dun posted:Blinding, controlled questions, normalized data, not hanging out with jerks, controlling for observer effects, a sufficiently large sample size. I’m not sure how you mean this to work, because within one group those methods don’t seem to stop Abilene, and anything that formal will mostly get “wtf, dude, chill” as a reason.
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Sep 26, 2021 06:58
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bewilderment posted:Get people who pride themselves on 'brutal honesty'. As for hyphz's question I just assume people aren't going to lie to me in the sense of "telling me something which is just plain not true." I try to infer where they are being polite (and I appreciate politeness, especially if they recognize I worked hard to GM something, say, and they just didn't feel it that much) and take strong positive feedback into consideration as well. If they said "Oh I had a great time," and then do not accept future invitations without contextual information such as "I got a new schedule" etc. eventually I stop inviting them; and perhaps later they try again.
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Sep 26, 2021 09:54
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hyphz posted:I’m not sure how you mean this to work, because within one group those methods don’t seem to stop Abilene, and anything that formal will mostly get “wtf, dude, chill” as a reason.
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Sep 26, 2021 11:10
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Fill Baptismal posted:Thanks for the recommendations. One of the mean reason that we picked those three is that they all seem to have a decent library of pre-written stuff, which seemed like a good idea until I at least (I’ll be the one running it) got a little more of an idea of what I was doing and felt confident enough to branch out on my own. Are there good fear itself pre-mades you could recommend?
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Sep 26, 2021 13:29
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Didn't we have a 50 page thread dedicated to how hyphz's gaming group has a toxic group dynamic? Anyway if the question is, how do I avoid getting useless feedback from my friend group, part of this is slightly insoluble: people aren't actually that articulate about what they want. Being articulate enough about what does or does not work with a given piece of art is the full time career of editors. It's a little much to expect your friends to all be professionals! There are obviously two other factors that you're going to get that will mess with feedback - groupthink and reporting bias. Standard social science finding is that groupthink corrupted feedback is best defeated by asking for individual feedback - even just something as simple as passing out some notes and being like "hey just write your thoughts down on these before talking" (fyi this is a restaurants finding - people tend to not order food other people already ordered, so customers are more likely to order what they actually want if they just write it down first and don't even say it). For reporting bias you've got both courtesy bias and acquiescence bias to worry about - first, these are notionally you're friends so they're not going to tell you "yo that was DOGSHIT," and second people jsut tend to say "yeah sure that was all fine." Specific questions is the technique here but there are obvious big limitations, mostly limited by your own ability to come up with questions that will get people to answer in clear specific ways.
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Sep 26, 2021 14:18
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hyphz posted:Is there any way to get honest feedback on games without hitting the Abilene Paradox? Move out of the UK?
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Sep 26, 2021 15:24
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In case anyone else was wondering what the Abilene Paradox isquote:On a hot afternoon visiting in Coleman, Texas, the family is comfortably playing dominoes on a porch, until the father-in-law suggests that they take a [50-mile] trip to Abilene for dinner. The wife says, "Sounds like a great idea." The husband, despite having reservations because the drive is long and hot, thinks that his preferences must be out-of-step with the group and says, "Sounds good to me. I just hope your mother wants to go." The mother-in-law then says, "Of course I want to go. I haven't been to Abilene in a long time."
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Sep 26, 2021 22:50
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I admit I don't really like that original statement, because the family had no way of knowing how the drive or food would be at the time they made the decision. If the food and drive had turned out to be really enjoyable, chances are the conversation would never have come up or people would alter their reason for joining in. But yea, I mean the tendency for players to seem to be very "meh" or disengaged in play, but to assert that everything's great when asked in order to not offend anyone or disrupt what everyone else might like.
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Sep 26, 2021 23:22
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SO I recently finished Box One, which is basically a ARG/escape room in a box that Neil Patrick Harris put out. It starts with a series of trivia questions and then expands from there. Your tearing the box apart, there's websites and other small trinkets in the box you have to use. I enjoyed it but the one big drawback was theres a point where the game tells you you have to stop for 24 hours and come back. That just gives me time to realize how to break the sequence and kills the surprise for whats next. Its overall good, I just wish it was longer. I love these kind of experiences and games where your discovering new things to open and puzzles. Any suggestions?
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Sep 27, 2021 03:32
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hyphz posted:Is there any way to get honest feedback on games without hitting the Abilene Paradox? Watch for engagement and excitement. If they're browsing their phones, they're disengaged. If they're obviously having fun, serve more of that. Don't interrupt their fun if they're having fun in a way you didn't expect! Be flexible here.
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Sep 27, 2021 03:50
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I guess my joke was too subtle. Xiahou Dun posted:Blinding, controlled questions, normalized data, not hanging out with jerks, controlling for observer effects, a sufficiently large sample size. Because that’s the real issue.
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Sep 27, 2021 04:39
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Xiahou Dun posted:I guess my joke was too subtle. If they're not giving good feedback to avoid hurting your feelings, they're not jerks. They're just bad at communication and probably insecure.
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Sep 27, 2021 05:38
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moths posted:If they're not giving good feedback to avoid hurting your feelings, they're not jerks. They're just bad at communication and probably insecure. Yeah, but if it's the same group that they were playing with when they first started posting here, they were playing with jerks. Like the bolded part isn't "someone is a jerk if they won't be brutally honest." It's "I remember you telling me abput your group, they're jerks. Fix that before worrying about good feedback"
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Sep 27, 2021 06:32
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Oh damnit, I forgot the deal with their group.
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Sep 27, 2021 09:42
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There isn't really a lot you can do if the people around you are amazing actors dedicated to making you feel like they're having a great time when they're not. But then again, I don't think it's very likely you'd be in that situation - it's far more likely there would be some tells, like people making excuses not to show up to the game, or getting snarky during the game, or whatever. If you're having a good time, and by all indications those around you are having a good time, just accept that everyone's having a good time until you have some other data to go on.
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Sep 27, 2021 12:00
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dwarf74 posted:How has 13th Age held up? Megazver posted:https://forum.rpg.net/index.php?threads/with-some-perspective-what-are-peoples-thoughts-on-13th-age.880519/ Oh hey, I started that thread! And I have some thoughts. Sorry I'm late to the party - I was busy prepping to run my 13th Age session one. (Funnily enough, my group was deciding between Heart and 13th Age as well.) (I've only run one full session of 13th Age, so take my thoughts with a grain of salt, but I've read almost all of the line, listened to a lot of podcasts, watched actual plays...) I am increasingly convinced that 13th Age's biggest failure was that of marketing. I remember when it first came out, and I heard it described by many as Like D&D 4E, but better. Which is bullshit, and as a big fan of 4E, I was sorely disappointed and stopped caring about it. Since then, I have often heard it described as D&D, but with lots of modern narrative mechanics! Which is a terrible description, and if you go into it looking for that, you'll be really disappointed. Because the "narrative mechanics" in 13th Age are minimalist: they're more codified GM advice than rules for a game framework. So that's awful. I think the proper pitch for 13th Age is: Are you a narrative GM who has been roped into playing D&D? And by that standard, I think it's the best option on the table. If you want to play D&D, 13th Age gives the GM a bunch of rules cover to just make poo poo up, "be a fan of players", fail forward, etc. It brings quantum bears to d20 D&D. It's still d20 D&D, but it plays fast and easy. Like it or not, D&D has transcended "brand" to become a cultural touchstone. And people want to partake in that brand. I had four players at my game yesterday: Paladin, a total newbie who needed a handout to remember which dice were which, and Necromancer, a Goon who has been at this for 20+ years playing everything from GURPS and Fragged Empire to Fellowship and Blades. I'm not going to talk about them much. My other two players, Rogue and Chaos Mage, have been playing RPGs for 2 and 7 years, respectively. The Chaos Mage has played Genesys, Blades, two flavors of Cortex Prime, Spectaculars, Sentinel Comics, and Age of Sigmar. The Rogue and Chaos Mage are good players, who don't have "broken brains". I'm incredibly fortunate to have a table of fantastic role players. Clever, funny, invested, and willing to suffer mechanically and/or narratively if it leads to awesome stories. They will volunteer for anything and are great role players. But the real drain on our table isn't rules, it's narrative mechanics. When my players are on their game with something like Cortex Prime or Blades, the game sings. The stories are great. But when players aren't feeling it, it's rough. It's a little bland. And if the narrative is bland and the mechanics are simple, that's rough. We all have big kid, high stress jobs, families, houses in need of repair, and other hobbies. Game time is beloved but the energy is not always high. Back in April, Chaos Mage and Rogue came to me (edit: independently) and broached the subject of changing the game. (We were in the middle of a year-long Cortex Prime supers game and we were entering a Chris Claremont-style mutant/racial tension arc.) The phrases used were "something more like D&D" and "a game like D&D". The Rogue's never played D&D, but they know the memes. They absorb nerd culture. They wanted to go into dungeons, avoid traps, kill monsters, steal treasure. They wanted roll twenty-sided dice, and critical hit, and fight beholders, and do sneak attacks, and seduce dragons, and all the other things YouTube and Reddit and Twitter have told them is part of the fun. They didn't want to play Heart (mostly because the premise of a short, brutal life where half the party dies sounded equally exhausting to the other options on the table). They wanted an adolescent power fantasy. So I'm a GM, whose favorite three games are Legacy: Life Among the Ruins, Lancer, and Cortex Prime, and I've got to go get some D&D for my table. I don't want to engage with OSR. 3rd Edition is out. Pathfinder has never appealed to me (and now with the Paizo news, doubly so, but that wasn't a factor). 4E without the digital tools, playing online, with players who don't know 4E at all? No thank you. 5th Edition - never again. The only real contenders, other than 13th Age, were Shadow of the Demon Lord and Worlds Without Number. WWN's power level wasn't where I wanted it to be, and I knew some of my players would want a little more mechanical depth. If I could have played Shadow of the Weird Wizard or whatever, I probably would have, but the aforementioned Paladin is new to all of this and I wasn't really inclined to play with SotDL's flavor or power level. So, 13th Age. A winner by default. I think the ecosystem has grown a lot. It's still not a perfect game, but a lot of the supplementary materials expand on ideas better than the core did (how to use Icons, how to build your own Icon sets, how to fail forward with backgrounds, how to add tactical zaniness to combat, etc.). The F&F of 13th Age is really unfair and has aged poorly, I think. It's good, but it's not great. I think there are a lot of better games. But I think for smart, creative, experienced role players who want a beer and pretzels D&D experience (an ask that I think is more popular than its narrow phrasing would suggest), I think it's the state of the art. I think Eyes of the Stone Thief is the coolest adventure I've ever read, and I'm probably going to F&F it when my group gets closer (I'd prefer to F&F it with some insight into how it runs). Yesterday, in five hours of game time, I introduced players to the rules, characters to each other, set up the adventure, allowed for some free-form role play, sent them into a dungeon with traps and exploration, and had three dynamic fights. I consider that a win. Thanks for coming to my TED talk. Also, this offends me to my very core: 
CitizenKeen fucked around with this message at 17:16 on Sep 27, 2021 |
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Sep 27, 2021 16:44
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That sounds quite a lot like where my group is. They prefer fantasy, want to do some high fantasy, love D&D stuff... but some people love mechanics and some love narrative. I don't want to run any D&D, and given this list PF2 is untenable, as are OSR games. So basically it's 13th Age by way of compromise and I think I am going to be okay with that.
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Sep 27, 2021 17:03
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Thirteenth Age is the ceiling for what a 5e/PF/3x exclusive group will enjoy. That ends up counting more than every innovative mechanics in every system I can't get past an elevator pitch. It's not a perfect world, but I like my friends and 13A is actually an enjoyable compromise.
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Sep 27, 2021 17:03
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hyphz posted:I admit I don't really like that original statement, because the family had no way of knowing how the drive or food would be at the time they made the decision. If the food and drive had turned out to be really enjoyable, chances are the conversation would never have come up or people would alter their reason for joining in. Cultural context. Abiline, TX is a small city, 125k now and probably under 100k when the paradox was coined. A cafeteria in rural Texas in the early 70s is gonna suck. The drive is gonna suck both ways. You're in Abiline. This is what there is to do in Abiline today, https://www.abilenevisitors.com/Things-to-Do edit: 13th Age also has the virtue of its Bestiary, which is a really excellent monster manual. It has a collection of 40 monsters, from classic D&D critters like chromatic dragons, orcs, and basilisks to some really bizarre new stuff. Each creature's entry is jam packed with story hooks, different options to fit them to your style of play, and material you can actually use in your game. I have a full review written for a now defunct website, I should drop that in the F&F thread. mllaneza fucked around with this message at 17:25 on Sep 27, 2021 |
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Sep 27, 2021 17:17
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. Doubleposting during meetings.
mllaneza fucked around with this message at 17:25 on Sep 27, 2021 |
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Sep 27, 2021 17:22
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Gort posted:There isn't really a lot you can do if the people around you are amazing actors dedicated to making you feel like they're having a great time when they're not. But then again, I don't think it's very likely you'd be in that situation - it's far more likely there would be some tells, like people making excuses not to show up to the game, or getting snarky during the game, or whatever. The problem is when play is obviously lugubrious (ie, slow and sad) but nobody will say anything is wrong, and nobody seems to want to change anything. I've seen this in multiple groups, including even some of the more candid streams! I mean, it's perfectly possible that people are just miserable because of RL right now, but it makes it harder to tell if the game is exascerbating it or not.
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Sep 27, 2021 17:42
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CitizenKeen posted:Good Post
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Sep 27, 2021 18:10
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Oh - I also considered SotDL briefly. But I ran a campaign in it and found it way less enjoyable than I wanted it to be. It needed a good single source for rules bits, a solid character builder of some kind, and... I dunno, some way to fix wizards I guess? It was drat hard to figure out exactly how many dice to roll for attack or damage even on a warrior kind of character. Great ideas, but I fell out of love - hard - with the system. So yeah looks like 13A is a solid compromise after Lancer. Thanks, everyone. I do wish a local shop carried the books so I could read into supplements before buying them, though. I think I got the core books in pdf from a bundle or something.
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Sep 27, 2021 19:00
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One of the things I like about 13A is that it is legitimately simplified and streamlined in a more consistent way than 5e ended up being. It's not quite as finely balanced as 4e was but it's easier to tweak, I think. Also while it's nowhere near a storygame, the narrative mechanics encourage some player buy-in to the setting and do help steer the game to being about more than murderhoboing (though I'm sure you could run a perfectly fine murderhobo game with it). Like it's the version I'd use if I were focused on a heroic fantasy adventure and didn't want to dig too much into the tactical side.
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Sep 27, 2021 23:50
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Maxwell Lord posted:One of the things I like about 13A is that it is legitimately simplified and streamlined in a more consistent way than 5e ended up being. It's not quite as finely balanced as 4e was but it's easier to tweak, I think. Yeah this, to the point my sales pitch for 13th Age is "5e but by a much more competent designer".
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Sep 28, 2021 00:25
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I pitched 13th Age to my group as "Dungeons and Dragons, but with blackjack and hookers".
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Sep 28, 2021 00:57
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CitizenKeen posted:I pitched 13th Age to my group as "Dungeons and Dragons, but with blackjack and hookers". how did I miss they brought back the random harlot table?
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Sep 28, 2021 01:01
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fool of sound posted:Gamifying boundaries because having an adult conversation is too difficult I guess. If you tap out they "win" and you "lose", that incentivizes gross edgelord poo poo. No wonder nordlarp has the reputation it does.
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Sep 28, 2021 02:04
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13th Age is a 7/10 game, but Eyes of the Stone Thief is a 9.5/10 adventure*. When the time comes that I want to run a EotST campaign (and it will come one day) I'm not going to spend weeks figuring out how to port it to Strike! or Fellowship or something. 13th Age will do the job just fine. *Disclaimer: I have not personally ran or played EotST. Rating based on me reading it and really digging it, plus feedback from two different groups I know who have played it and say it's awesome.
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Sep 28, 2021 03:14
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D&D 5e, 13th Age, and Pathfinder 2e are basically the same game with varying levels of care applied to different elements that happened to interest the designers.
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Sep 28, 2021 05:33
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Ferrinus posted:D&D 5e, 13th Age, and Pathfinder 2e are basically the same game with varying levels of care applied to different elements that happened to interest the designers. I'm curious as to what elements you think were a product of designer care in 5e?
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Sep 28, 2021 05:35
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fool of sound posted:I'm curious as to what elements you think were a product of designer care in 5e? A lot of stuff, actually, like action economy and bonus stacking, along with a deliberately minimalistic approach to character building (i.e. you pick a single subclass rather than a dozen modular class feats). Mearls claimed that 5e was taking a lot from 4e and wasn't lying - a lot of decision streamlining and QoL carried over, albeit deliberately obfuscated under extremely legalistic "natural language" rules.
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Sep 28, 2021 05:38
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For people considering 13th Age, I'll have an F&F review of the Bestiary up in a day or two. I've got images picked out, but I want to hit the text for a third draft before I post.
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Sep 28, 2021 07:30
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Is anyone in the thread going to the Origins Game Fair this weekend? I didn't think I was going to be able to go, but the universe worked some magic and now I'm able to, but don't have a hotel etc.
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Sep 28, 2021 21:27
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This seems like the most relevant thread for this question. I got the steam version of Sentinels of the Multiverse as a way to shuffle cards and play one game before bed. Recently they came out with workshop support. Any fan made mods you would recommend from when the game was solely paper based?
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Sep 28, 2021 21:30
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habituallyred posted:This seems like the most relevant thread for this question. I got the steam version of Sentinels of the Multiverse as a way to shuffle cards and play one game before bed. Recently they came out with workshop support. Any fan made mods you would recommend from when the game was solely paper based? JazzFlight posted:Since Sentinels of the Multiverse stuff has been kickstarted occasionally, I figure I’d mention that if you have the Steam version, it just updated to support Workshop content. This means the entire Cauldron fan-made set is available to add in the game for free!
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Sep 29, 2021 02:15
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Thanks!
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Sep 29, 2021 10:08
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Are they still doing the thing where you can't use characters you've bought unless everyone in the game has also bought that character?
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Sep 29, 2021 13:22
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Has anyone else played Die? It launched as a tie-in with the Kieron Gillen comic about people getting Jumanji'ed into their D&D game and now they're officially launching a Kickstarter to realize the full game: https://rowanrookanddecard.com/die-rpg-launches-in-november-and-were-making-it/ One of my 5e campaign players is really into it, he's DMed like 2 one-shots for us that were fun.
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Sep 29, 2021 16:59
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Splicer posted:Are they still doing the thing where you can't use characters you've bought unless everyone in the game has also bought that character? I'd be surprised if they fixed that since it would require a pretty big code rewrite and candelabra mostly just inserts ads for their newer stuff in older games if they can't sell something new. At least that's how it's been in their android ports.
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Sep 29, 2021 17:09
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