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Ghost Leviathan posted:I think the bigger issue with RPG flakes is the ol Geek Social Fallacies in play where nerds are used to putting up with drat near anything just to have company where more confident people would have drawn a line a long time ago. Also the apparent inability to have an adult conversation about expectations and how ones behavior affects other people.
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Oct 10, 2021 16:30
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hyphz posted:It can’t just be me, surely? Almost every “RPG horror story” or online flaked group seems in that category? (Surely not ALL those are made up?)
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Oct 10, 2021 17:15
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Both my IRL group (friends) and the one I found on Roll20 (strangers) only flake occasionally, usually because of depression or natural disasters. It's totally not normal for your group to cancel regularly, and if it is, drop them imo
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Oct 10, 2021 17:21
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hyphz posted:It can’t just be me, surely? Almost every “RPG horror story” or online flaked group seems in that category? (Surely not ALL those are made up?) "RPG horror stories" are a pretty broad category. Some involve one person entering an established group and experiencing bullshit from one or more players or the GM, who everyone else in the group is fine with. Usually the new person suffers through a session or maybe 2 or 3 before dropping it if things don't change. Sometimes they involve a new group forming and the GM or or a player is lovely/creepy, and if that person isn't booted those games don't usually last very long. Sometimes they involve a one-shot at a con or game store where an odd-smelling man shows up at the table (may or may not be the GM.) The only time I could say the stories I've seen involve someone sticking around for years is because they were new and didn't know better, or something else forced them to attend, like a toxic relationship where they were expected to participate. And those stories also involve people saying there were "highs and lows" that made them enjoy the game sometimes, when the problems didn't crop up. Like personally, I realized the D&D group I was playing with starting at the age of 12 sucked, but it was a realization in retrospect after years of growing up. So I cut contact with them after a certain point. I had fun moment-to-moment in those games but sometimes there would be incidents that in hindsight (and with contact with other people online) I realized were awful. Flaking out on an obligation, like what happened to FMGuru, isn't really the same thing. Like on a very basic level I guess the prospective players weren't enthusiastic or invested enough in trying the game out to show up at the scheduled time, but that's not "suffering though something they hate" they haven't even started a game to suffer through. I've been in games that skipped weeks due to obligations or people not feeling well enough to play, but as far as I know everyone still enjoyed playing them. I've also been in games where people didn't enjoy them. So they said "we aren't enjoying the game anymore so we'd like to stop."
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Oct 10, 2021 17:34
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fool of sound posted:Also the apparent inability to have an adult conversation about expectations and how ones behavior affects other people. Three of my four players are three of my best friends, but I make it very clear to them that this is not cosmic bowling, this is league night and they better loving suit up. I'm always there for them for beers or brunch or to move a couch, but Thursday nights are my hobby time, not my friend time, and the fact I get to hobby with my friends is a very appreciated bonus. I once put together a group of disparate friends (I was the only common link) for RPGs, and the group slowly became best buds all around. The tenor of the group slowly shifted from "play RPGs" to "hang out with friends", only in that frog in a frying pan way I didn't notice. I called them out for getting lax on expectations and attendance, and they called me out for being a lovely friend. Never again. Excessive communication, crystal clear expectations, every time.
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Oct 10, 2021 17:48
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In a very real sense, I consider myself responsible for the quality of time spent at a table I'm running. Maybe that's putting too much pressure on myself - but it's like a party and I'm the host. I get pretty bummed out when it doesn't work out, like in a Lancer game a few weeks ago, but that got resolved in about as healthy a way possible - and I'm really glad my friend bowed out rather than power through a game he wasn't enjoying.
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Oct 10, 2021 18:11
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CitizenKeen posted:Three of my four players are three of my best friends, but I make it very clear to them that this is not cosmic bowling, this is league night and they better loving suit up. I'm always there for them for beers or brunch or to move a couch, but Thursday nights are my hobby time, not my friend time, and the fact I get to hobby with my friends is a very appreciated bonus. This is a good point, but one I dealt with very differently and didn’t even realize it until you said this. My last group that met in person were all good friends first who just started playing RPGs and it had a “problem” because we were friends and also wanted to just hang out and catch up, even if we did also want to play. The eventual solution that evolved organically was we were already doing games + a meal : it was three couples who were all neighbors, each with one person who was a cook/co-GM, so it just turned into a rotating brunch where three of the guys would drink beer and share a kitchen while the girls and remaining guy drank mimosas and watched Buffy*. Between that and eating we got normal socializing first so we were all set to just play by the end. Plus it was lighter, sillier fare so it set a good mood. *NYC apartments, so we were still all together in shared living room/kitchen combos. And the gender split was random chance, as was us eventually getting through seven seasons of Buffy. But whatever, it’s booze and a four course brunch ; it was a good way to do Sundays.
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Oct 10, 2021 18:12
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tanglewood1420 posted:I played a few sessions of D&D with a group of three other players and a GM in London when I was living there that played every fortnight in the same pub on Saturday afternoons. They would play their existing campaign but anyone who rocked up could create a character and join them for one session and the GM would work them into the ongoing campaign - even if they had just finished a mega boss fight deep at the end of a dungeon in a parallel dimension, as was the case when I first joined them - and play as an equal member of the party. Then if they didn't come back the GM would write them out and move on. Sounds like what's called an open table. I tried that for a bit, but with the wrong system. Creating a character that can meaningfully contribute needs to be quick and easy, and the game needs a structure that wraps up something interesting within a session.
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Oct 10, 2021 18:58
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Ghost Leviathan posted:I think the bigger issue with RPG flakes is the ol Geek Social Fallacies in play where nerds are used to putting up with drat near anything just to have company where more confident people would have drawn a line a long time ago. Well, that and having company who will put up with you pretending to be a barbarian / sage / badass spy etc. which is pretty rare.
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Oct 10, 2021 20:00
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My group has been gaming together for over twenty years and a few of the players in it I've been playing D&D with for over forty. Games get canceled whenever real life pops up, but we've been playing reliably once or twice a week for over two decades.
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Oct 10, 2021 20:03
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Ettin posted:
Honestly I'd rather he just stop posting entirely
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Oct 10, 2021 20:28
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drrockso20 posted:Honestly I'd rather he just stop posting entirely I think it's valuable to get his perspective. Makes me feel downright happy about my own game.
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Oct 10, 2021 20:34
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Ettin posted:
And give up their Knights of the Dinner Table-esque table dynamic? Madness.
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Oct 10, 2021 20:48
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dwarf74 posted:Not your call. I don't really mind periodically reminding him that the people he hangs out with sound like miserable assholes (by all accounts) whom have given him very strange complexes around tabletop gaming social dynamics. I think it's gradually gotten through to him in some ways at least. But I don't know if there's a practical solution to the times where he digs in and just starts arguing in circles because he can't move past certain axioms he's formed when other people point out their flaws.
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Oct 10, 2021 20:59
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My group is pretty solid about sticking to a date barring emergencies, but dates themselves are growing further and further apart. A whopping six weeks between second-to-last and last time and four until next. We'd initially agreed on shooting for games every 2-3 weeks, which would enable us to go for a continuous plot, and pulling dates apart isn't good for either that nor for the newer players who forget half the mechanics between sessions. The guy whose job demands are chiefly responsible has made it quite clear that no discussion will be had on scheduling or trying for a different point in the week.
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Oct 10, 2021 21:30
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Nuns with Guns posted:I don't really mind periodically reminding him that the people he hangs out with sound like miserable assholes (by all accounts) whom have given him very strange complexes around tabletop gaming social dynamics. I think it's gradually gotten through to him in some ways at least. But I don't know if there's a practical solution to the times where he digs in and just starts arguing in circles because he can't move past certain axioms he's formed when other people point out their flaws. Let's be honest though, it's been at least a year if not longer since anything like that really happened with him. At this point I'd say the way whenever hyphz posts their opinions or experiences people bellyaching about it is more annoying. I think he's been pretty good about dropping a topic if it looks like it's going in circles of everyone saying "That's just your unhealthy group dynamic, and we've never seen or heard of that problem in a healthy group."
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Oct 10, 2021 21:49
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change my name posted:Both my IRL group (friends) and the one I found on Roll20 (strangers) only flake occasionally, usually because of depression or natural disasters. It's totally not normal for your group to cancel regularly, and if it is, drop them imo Lol I wrote this and then tonight our DM for the weekly 5e Frostmaiden campaign put the game on "permanent hiatus" because of work stuff. We're in the last chapter and probably only a few weeks from finishing...
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Oct 11, 2021 00:55
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Is there any rpg that doesn't irreversibly snowball into total chaos? I'm burning out on that in D&D.
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Oct 11, 2021 00:56
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Nehru the Damaja posted:Is there any rpg that doesn't irreversibly snowball into total chaos? I'm burning out on that in D&D. My first D&D campaign ended pretty soundly, albeit with a lot of loose ends that could be tied up in the future, potentially. But I did actively telegraph that I was building up to an ending, and I guess I did kind of build a reasonable arc to work into, or rather, one was built by a combination of planning and extremely poor rolls by their antagonists which made a quicker finish more plausible.
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Oct 11, 2021 01:09
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Nehru the Damaja posted:Is there any rpg that doesn't irreversibly snowball into total chaos? I'm burning out on that in D&D. There are plenty. My advice is to look for a game that has a dedicated core gameplay loop and mechanics that enforce it (i.e not D&D). Games based on the Powered by the Apocalypse (Apocalypse World, Masks, many others)and Forged in the Dark (Blades in the Dark, Copperhead County) are particularly good at this. If you want something in this vein that does D&D style high fantasy, I highly recommend Fellowship (a PbtA game). Barring that, I found the best way to “close the loop” with D&D 5e and ensure a campaign doesn’t spiral into too much chaos is capping the game at level 10, to avoid the power and number bloat that is high level D&D.
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Oct 11, 2021 01:14
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I feel like what I mean by spiraling into chaos is not what you folks mean by it. I'm talking about like how literally every plan breaks and chaos ensues because the flow of everything is determined by your least careful, most aggressive, worst memoried player.
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Oct 11, 2021 01:30
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Nehru the Damaja posted:I feel like what I mean by spiraling into chaos is not what you folks mean by it. This hasn't happened in any of my D&D games and I'm coming up on year 4 of the one I DM. Maybe talk to the person about it?
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Oct 11, 2021 01:32
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change my name posted:This hasn't happened in any of my D&D games and I'm coming up on year 4 of the one I DM. Maybe talk to the person about it? It's not just one guy is the thing. I feel like this is the story of every D&D group I've been a player in, maybe ever.
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Oct 11, 2021 01:48
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Nehru the Damaja posted:I feel like what I mean by spiraling into chaos is not what you folks mean by it. Do you mean as in the logistics angles surrounding the game? Or like the actual in game stories descending into murderhobo hijinks or the game being a constant trail of dead-ends and storyhooks that go nowhere?
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Oct 11, 2021 02:01
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Coolness Averted posted:Do you mean as in the logistics angles surrounding the game? Or like the actual in game stories descending into murderhobo hijinks or the game being a constant trail of dead-ends and storyhooks that go nowhere? Murderhobo hijinks take over because plans can't possibly anticipate how complicated a scenario is, DMs forget to try to "yes and" player plans, and/or a player gets frustrated or bored and blows up an outhouse to get action moving.
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Oct 11, 2021 02:13
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Nehru the Damaja posted:Murderhobo hijinks take over because plans can't possibly anticipate how complicated a scenario is, DMs forget to try to "yes and" player plans, and/or a player gets frustrated or bored and blows up an outhouse to get action moving. I mean, those are just systemic problems with D&D that you can remedy with experience, but most people jumping on the current D&D bandwagon that are new players aren’t going to be aware of those problems and the system will enable them. When you have a game that encourages “kill monsters, get loot, level up” without decent advice to resolve situations beyond that, murderhobos are going to take the reins because the game as written rewards them for their behavior.
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Oct 11, 2021 02:17
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A lot of campaigns in in tend to get violent-comedy. I think that tends to happen because as a way of hanging out with friends, it's a bit of a local minima. The main things that have stopped campaigns from doing that in my experience has been 1) clear expectations early on 2) having a clear campaign arc. I find that players (me included) start turning to low brow comedy when we lose the thread of what we're doing. A clear end point is a huge assistance.
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Oct 11, 2021 03:07
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Dawgstar posted:And give up their Knights of the Dinner Table-esque table dynamic? Madness. Since someone mentioned this in the context of RPG horror stories I have to feel the need to mention that even the early KoDT stories, where they were supposed to be exaggeratedly bad players (whereas in the more recent ones they're generally good), carefully elide most of the actual endemic issues that seem to frustrate people. For example, every member of the group always speaks and is aware of what's happening; turns in combat go quickly, usually in a single panel of calls and responses; and the fundamental bases of the campaign world can be changed and BA seems to have no problem improvising around them. If they were a real bad group, Brian would be constantly quarterbacking, Dave would be on his phone and Sara would have left after 3-4 sessions. This struck me also with the CLUE files, the old Shadowrun goofs site, which was supposed to be real but was obviously made up as it skip all of the things actually wrong with Shadowrun in favour of goofy funny stories that could/should never happen at an actual table without someone getting a slap, like "you never said you were disarming the bomb so it explodes on the ground."
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Oct 11, 2021 03:43
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Yes, it's fiction.
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Oct 11, 2021 03:50
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Just read through all of DIE and it was definitely a really well made comic but it's honestly too depressing and stuck up it's own rear end for it's own good, particularly since it resolves in a way that made it feel somewhat pointless in the end I will say it definitely sold me on the actual RPG they're making for it even though I haven't yet read the Beta for it, and they'll probably be getting money from me when they do the Kickstarter for it
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Oct 11, 2021 04:23
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Nehru the Damaja posted:Murderhobo hijinks take over because plans can't possibly anticipate how complicated a scenario is, DMs forget to try to "yes and" player plans, and/or a player gets frustrated or bored and blows up an outhouse to get action moving. Play a fiction-first game where "yes, and" is baked into the game at a core, mechanical level, harm-as-established nips random murder hijinks in the bud, and the action is always moving.
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Oct 11, 2021 09:05
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Regarding the violent-comedy side of games like D&D, it's pretty much baked into the system. The solution and failure state to most situations is violence and by default the player characters rack up a truly absurd bodycount in the average campaign. It's hard to remain totally serious about situations after the party beheads their thousandth orc. There are systems that don't have that level of violence (I'm currently playing Hard Wired Island and violence - certainly lethal violence - is mostly frowned upon in that setting as something the bad guys do) so they likely wouldn't have the same violent comedy aesthetic as more combat-focused systems like D&D.
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Oct 11, 2021 11:40
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Nehru the Damaja posted:I feel like what I mean by spiraling into chaos is not what you folks mean by it. You can try to shift to another game, but if the issue is “I don’t remember what we’re doing… gently caress it let’s punch our way through." And this is not a game where you want them to always do that, then that’s a player problem and that won’t be solved with a system change. You need to talk to the players about what their expectations are, maybe give them all note pads, sticky notes, or scratch paper to help them keep track of stuff (or perhaps a group google doc or other shared notes space in an online game.) If one person specifically is the only one going unga-bunga-caveman-mode then you should talk to them privately about the issue and see if they can dial that back some. I’d also talk to the group as a whole about what kind of game they want. Do they want to be roving marauders or do they want to explore non-violent options or games more? If one player won’t change they might not be a good fit for the group. If the whole group wants to club every problem away and you don’t then maybe say you’re getting burnt out on that and ask if someone else can step in?
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Oct 11, 2021 15:14
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https://www.dicebreaker.com/games/cowboy-bebop-the-roleplaying-game/news/cowboy-bebop-rpg-announcement Finally, my chance to play as either a Cowboy or a Bebop
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Oct 11, 2021 15:15
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Gort posted:Regarding the violent-comedy side of games like D&D, it's pretty much baked into the system. The solution and failure state to most situations is violence and by default the player characters rack up a truly absurd bodycount in the average campaign. It's hard to remain totally serious about situations after the party beheads their thousandth orc. The problem is that players with a D&D background are trained to expect and engage in that violent comedy aesthetic. You can't dump D&D players into something like HWI unsupervised because they'll just try to turn it into D&D comedy hyperviolence. You have to break them out of their harmful assumptions first, and make sure they understand the game's authorial intent. That said, even putting aside the fact that D&D is harmful, not every player wants to engage in RPGs where comedy hyperviolence isn't supported/intended. Some players just don't care for "serious" roleplaying, and not every game can be run with every group for that reason.
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Oct 11, 2021 15:25
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change my name posted:https://www.dicebreaker.com/games/cowboy-bebop-the-roleplaying-game/news/cowboy-bebop-rpg-announcement What if I wanna play as a Rocksteady though?
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Oct 11, 2021 16:02
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Gort posted:Regarding the violent-comedy side of games like D&D, it's pretty much baked into the system. The solution and failure state to most situations is violence and by default the player characters rack up a truly absurd bodycount in the average campaign. It's hard to remain totally serious about situations after the party beheads their thousandth orc. It's a ton of stuff beyond D&D's wargame origins. * Plenty of systems have many more "degrees of success/failure" in combat than they do in anything else, and their effect is easier to manage. * Combat is an agreed upon shared factor and thus table time management is much easier in combat. * It's easier to mentally abstract combat into a roll than it is to do so with conversation or other solutions. * As from the popularity of hero shooters and one-on-one fighting video games, combat (when defanged by not being real) can act as a visceral assertion of a character's traits.
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Oct 11, 2021 16:57
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In games like D&D combat is also the core mechanic so people want to engage with it, and GMs should center their campaign around combat being the main problem solving tool. It's like how the solution for basically every problem in Dragon Quest involves completely the local dungeon. That's the gameplay they're going for.
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Oct 11, 2021 17:04
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Fiction first games really take the sting out of players really not wanting or paying attention to the adventure you had planned ahead. Its a huge relief to not plan anything ahead and still have a fun time. Nothing can be ruined because you had nothing set up.
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Oct 11, 2021 18:23
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If I wanted to buy the best available edition of Paranoia, that would be Service Pack 1?
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Oct 11, 2021 19:13
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