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Coolness Averted posted:My Heart game imploded tonight. I'll post a more in depth post mortem of the Heart specific stuff in The Spire Thread tomorrow, now that it's at least not gonna be me triple posting in a dead thread. Good post- yeah, i can see how people kinda have trouble with it. Fiction-first games really don't work, IMO, if people aren't ok with complications coming up a lot, because the lack of crunch and engagement on the crunch level means there's not that interesting a feeling if things go off without a hitch, since it just doesn't feel earned. That's in addition to people just kinda struggling to think beyond strict identification with their character(I had a traveller game blow up for that, a story i'll post.. sometime). Also my hot take is that pretty much everybody will tell you they want a sandbox, but few people really do when the rubber hits the road because it asks a lot more of the players to bring direction. I'm finding Band of Blades to be one of the best blades-ish games because you switch between characters a lot- you're more likely to accept their failures and even death, because it's war, and you're not this character forever. It's vital that players use the resources, though- get stressed out, take the harm, traumas, etc. Panzeh fucked around with this message at 11:58 on Feb 11, 2022 |
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Feb 11, 2022 11:55
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Coolness Averted posted:"Everything is just a slow inevitable march towards failure, so it's hard to stay engaged." To be fair, he's right. Behind the splatterpunk visuals Heart is a gothic horror game: you're doing something you shouldn't be doing, and it's going to gently caress you up real bad. If you (or anybody else) are looking for something In The Dark and you want a more positive spin on what's possible, I like to recommend Songs For The Dusk -- it's a science-fantasy post-apoc setting meant to be about a community and how they grow. I'm not super sure the mechanics support that particularly well, but they don't fight it and I like the tone otherwise. Actually CitizenKeen, if you like Blades better than PbtA maybe this could scratch your post-apoc rebuilding itch too?
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Feb 11, 2022 12:26
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Coolness Averted posted:The players lost a fight that was optional, against an avatar of unreality known as an angel and as I transitioned to waking up to the consequences I couldn't get anyone to contribute or add story stuff and visuals, which has been a constant problem when not on rails with them. At that point a player suggested we take a 10 minute break, so we did, and that player spent the break laying out that he had crunched the math and just in general felt disheartened, since he felt mathematically more likely to fail rolls than succeed, and that "Everything is just a slow inevitable march towards failure, so it's hard to stay engaged." The maths thing is a fair comment as it's completely YMMV; as pointed out, Heart is a horror game, and not everyone wants to slowly fail until they die. That said, if your players are struggling to contribute to the shared fiction, make sure it really was because they weren't thematically/aesthetically interested in Heart. If it's because they just don't get what's expected of them in a fiction-first framework, they're not going to magically fare better in S&V and you're going to have to break them out of their bad elfgame habits first. Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 15:39 on Feb 11, 2022 |
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Feb 11, 2022 15:27
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If people don't like Heart or Spire, I totally get it. I can see people bouncing off of the mechanics or the themes or whatnot. But jumping from Heart to a Forged in the Dark game feels... a little out of the frying pan... to me. The core mechanics are basically the same (though how stress/fallout is handled is different). Forged in the Dark just adds some cruft. There's less of an intended death-as-endgame in a FitD game, but I think Blades, at least, still expects the inevitable downfall of some of the PCs. Maybe S&V is better. But if they're struggling with rails and creating narrative and so forth... The problems you describe don't sound like they'll be much improved by FitD. potatocubed posted:To be fair, he's right. Behind the splatterpunk visuals Heart is a gothic horror game: you're doing something you shouldn't be doing, and it's going to gently caress you up real bad. I had already switched over to itch.io, then came back to finish the thread and there I was! Thanks for bringing this to my attention.
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Feb 11, 2022 16:28
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I don't know a ton about Heart, but the Zenith Beats gave me the impression is that this is a game where the PCs are supposed to be marching toward a defined Win Condition--even if the win condition is usually suicidal.
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Feb 11, 2022 16:42
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Halloween Jack posted:It would be worth it to get to see him spin the giant wheel that determines what "dice that aren't successes" are called in this game I've always assumed if you were to play a game with Crane and uttered the word "failure" in his presence it would result in an immediate screaming fit.
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Feb 11, 2022 16:53
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For Luke people who use the word failure are cowards and traitors.
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Feb 11, 2022 16:59
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Silence, worm! I don't buy Crane's stuff, so my only complaint about his wizard act is that it's not actually a good act. If any of it was funny or well-written, I'd have a hearty chuckle at the people who keep giving this guy money to gently caress with them. But it's a solidly third-rate posting gimmick. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 17:28 on Feb 11, 2022 |
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Feb 11, 2022 17:18
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Halloween Jack posted:I don't know a ton about Heart, but the Zenith Beats gave me the impression is that this is a game where the PCs are supposed to be marching toward a defined Win Condition--even if the win condition is usually suicidal. Yeah. In Heart, you're almost certainly going to die or be so changed that you're unrecognizable (and unplayable). The question is: do you achieve what you want to do before that happens?
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Feb 11, 2022 17:20
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Going out in a blaze of glory is my favorite way to retire a character, so Heart resonated well with me. Shame about Delves feeling so lovely though
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Feb 11, 2022 17:38
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CitizenKeen posted:If people don't like Heart or Spire, I totally get it. I can see people bouncing off of the mechanics or the themes or whatnot. Not the OP but what is a game people would recommend for a group like this? I’m starting to cast my eye for what’s next after my 5E campaign ends. Three out of four of my players are very reactive rather than proactive and I’m wondering what systems might ease them into a little more narrative contribution (every time we check in they at least say they want to engage more with the fiction).
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Feb 11, 2022 18:01
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Chaosium (of Call of Cthulhu fame) has gotten into NFTs. https://twitter.com/DarkForestPress/status/1491906050106314755?t=lHcQDF1Y-GHg2rTAfsr_xg&s=19 A true moment of cosmic horror.
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Feb 11, 2022 20:14
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There's a bit more discussion about this on reddit, and it was mentioned in the Industry Thread:PST posted:Seems like Chaosium decided they wanted that sweet, sweet NFT money This started in July, but they were pretty coy about it. Wanting their cake and to eat it, too.
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Feb 11, 2022 20:40
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.. So Go Chain is literally a block chain that depends on large, rich companies being prepared to sign blocks, and they can be trusted because they are large and rich. The blockchain idea has finally disappeared up its own rear end.
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Feb 11, 2022 20:48
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Yeah. It's a write-only ledger handled by a company or companies, which is basically like if they just had "a database" and set up access controls over who can write to it, since you have to trust the custodian of the database anyway. The only difference is that you don't have to trust the custodian not to modify the database, because you can validate the entire thing at any time due to the public cryptographic hash. But you have to trust them not to like, abandon the thing, or delete it, or clone it, etc. And they're using it to try to cash into the NFT grift by selling useless poo poo to people who are too gullible to know better. So it's nice that they're not also destroying the environment in the process, but that doesn't make it great. Just, moderately less evil.
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Feb 11, 2022 21:04
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Eggnogium posted:Not the OP but what is a game people would recommend for a group like this? I’m starting to cast my eye for what’s next after my 5E campaign ends. Three out of four of my players are very reactive rather than proactive and I’m wondering what systems might ease them into a little more narrative contribution (every time we check in they at least say they want to engage more with the fiction). If that's the case, I think what they need is an Apocalypse World style of GMing: it's your job to constantly throw problems at the PCs, but that's okay because the PCs are badass and you're basically rooting for them. You don't have to actually use AW. You can do this in lots of systems, you can even do it in D&D, but it really helps to have a system where succeeding on rolls isn't an either/or thing. It doesn't occur to most people running D&D that they can ever delegate describing bits of the world to the players. I think the problem with doing this in 5e (and several dozen other versions of D&D) specifically is that it gives you a set of tools that are incoherent. You have price lists of stuff that costs copper coins, while AW doesn't bother with that poo poo unless it costs at least 1-barter (enough for a peasant to live on for a month). You have rules for the passage of time but no rules saying bad things happen if you spend 3 hours picking a lock; AW has clocks ticking down to bad stuff happening in the world. You have precise measurements of distance and blast radii in combat but ¿maybe no battlemap? AW has abstract ranges and tags.
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Feb 11, 2022 21:34
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Eggnogium posted:Not the OP but what is a game people would recommend for a group like this? I’m starting to cast my eye for what’s next after my 5E campaign ends. Three out of four of my players are very reactive rather than proactive and I’m wondering what systems might ease them into a little more narrative contribution (every time we check in they at least say they want to engage more with the fiction).
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Feb 11, 2022 21:51
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D&D 3.5: Silly question regarding the imbued summoning feat in PHB II: it reads like the feat is meant for buffs only but doesn't explicitly state it. It says a summoned creature or creatures(wotc errata fix) get the "benefit" of a spell when they're summoned. Would summoning 1d4+1 small vipers all imbued with explosive runes on their underside so that they can slither up to an enemy and raise their heads as to expose their underside work out with hilarious results? More to the point: Can I apply non buff spells that meet the touch range requirements of the imbued summoning feat? edit: on second reading it looks like I can't put explosive runes on creatures Lamebot fucked around with this message at 23:06 on Feb 11, 2022 |
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Feb 11, 2022 23:02
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Basically, if the players don't want to change their style it's not really possible to try to change them, even if it would make GMing easier. You have to know what's in it for them. They also have to know that there's a tradeoff involved. A well-written story will hide the narrative logic that's driving the story and make it look like the main characters are independent of it. When it fails, we notice (why did they land on the one planet where Spock is?). When it succeeds we might not notice but it's still there (why were literally the first friends Harry made, the girl who can cover all his weaknesses and the boy whose pet is secretly a critical character?) In an RPG it's much harder to hide that because it's possible to think about what would have happened if the characters had made different choices. In fact thinking about what might happen based on your different choices for your character is something everyone's going to do. So having to accept the certain amount of inevitability that comes with the narrative can be restrictive, but if they want to take over part of the narrative, it doesn't make the inevitability disappear, it just means they have to contribute to it.
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Feb 11, 2022 23:22
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Lamebot posted:D&D 3.5: ahaha that's amazing
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Feb 11, 2022 23:57
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Lamebot posted:edit: on second reading it looks like I can't put explosive runes on creatures And that's why 3.5 sucks!
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Feb 11, 2022 23:59
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dwarf74 posted:Still unclear but it involves Vengeance and Beauty and Trickery! Here's one. Notice how vengeful, tricky, and beautiful it is. 
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Feb 12, 2022 00:07
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Halloween Jack posted:Stop me if this sounds off-base, but it sounds like they want their PCs to have actual stories and character arcs and stuff but don't know how to take the initiative. I read and ran DW quite a few years back but it was literally my first TTRPG experience and we (not the same players as now) totally floundered at the improv required. But I agree that taking the lesson to make (and telegraph) consequences for passivity is a good one. Splicer posted:Any kind of genre preference? Keeping in fantasy mainly. Alternatively I think they have enjoyed mystery adventures most of all but I'm not really interested in running a horror game which is often what those are packaged in. hyphz posted:Basically, if the players don't want to change their style it's not really possible to try to change them, even if it would make GMing easier. You have to know what's in it for them. I'm pretty sure all of them would like to be more active and spend more of their playtime defining the story rather than looking at their spell list. This is what they say when I ask them how the campaign could be improved. But we only are able to play two hours a week and I think they (and me) have just gotten into the habit of sitting down for a roller coaster ride and seeing where the tracks take them. Like if they're planning a heist they would never even ask me open ended questions. "Is there a local thieves guild that we could hire a pro from? Does the city hall have floor plans of the mansion? I have the orphan background, would I maybe be familiar with the sewers in that area?" I would have to specifically mention a thieves guild, the blueprint repository, or the sewers before they would ever incorporate those into their plan. But I have kind of lost the thread on how much of that bothers me versus bothers them.
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Feb 12, 2022 00:09
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Drakyn posted:It's a bit extremely late for this but your shark god sounds like a wobbegong, which sit on the ocean floor hiding (Trickery) by pretending to be gorgeous piles of coral and sand (Beauty) and then react to people stepping on them by biting their feet off (Vengeance with a side of rear end in a top hat). Speaking of, one player had to drop last-minute (the chef bard  ) so I'm down to 4 players. She'll rejoin at a later date, at least. So - The other four and I had our first session this past Wednesday. They did awesome, and a good time was had by all. Nothing about 13A is revolutionary anymore, but everything worked more than well enough for us! I made a rather big oops - I let Holy damage do double to zombies automatically - but it actually sped the first combat along nicely so I'm not even upset I did that. It's going to be difficult to learn all the 13A quirks - it's so close to other d20 games but so weird in others. But it went well. I'm happy with that.
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Feb 12, 2022 00:34
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dwarf74 posted:Oh I love it! I'll send that to the players. it might be worth doing some research to find good ways to use icon benefits - in particular rolling them at the end of the session not the beginning is a good idea, so you can think of ways to embody them between games. Also having a list of things that a benefit will get you might be helpful if you find you struggle with coming up with stuff.
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Feb 12, 2022 00:37
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sebmojo posted:it might be worth doing some research to find good ways to use icon benefits - in particular rolling them at the end of the session not the beginning is a good idea, so you can think of ways to embody them between games. Also having a list of things that a benefit will get you might be helpful if you find you struggle with coming up with stuff.
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Feb 12, 2022 00:44
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Eggnogium, fyi, DW’s MC section is very anemic and basically assumes you know AW’s section cold, so it’s not as helpful. This is a known problem with DW, up there with”god drat it, 6 stats”, “god drat, Defy Danger is a terrible bit of design space” and “the fan-made playbooks are better across the board”.
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Feb 12, 2022 00:45
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Eggnogium posted:I read and ran DW quite a few years back but it was literally my first TTRPG experience and we (not the same players as now) totally floundered at the improv required. But I agree that taking the lesson to make (and telegraph) consequences for passivity is a good one. One of the things I've found helps when I'm running PbtA systems like Dungeon World is to think of it this way: you're not obliged to come up with something clever. If the game asks you "What are dwarves like?" it's 100% fine for you to say "they're short and have beards and like beer and gold", because it only takes one player sitting around the table to say "and also they're physically made of stone, and they have class warfare based on what kind of stone they're carved from!" to make them interesting. And if it's your turn to be that player then grand, but if you're out of ideas about dwarves then fine, you'll pay it back next session when you have a cool idea about how the duke is actually that other player's brother.
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Feb 12, 2022 00:54
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Eggnogium posted:Keeping in fantasy mainly. Alternatively I think they have enjoyed mystery adventures most of all but I'm not really interested in running a horror game which is often what those are packaged in. https://pelgranepress.com/product/swords-of-the-serpentine/
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Feb 12, 2022 01:04
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Whybird posted:One of the things I've found helps when I'm running PbtA systems like Dungeon World is to think of it this way: you're not obliged to come up with something clever. If the game asks you "What are dwarves like?" it's 100% fine for you to say "they're short and have beards and like beer and gold", because it only takes one player sitting around the table to say "and also they're physically made of stone, and they have class warfare based on what kind of stone they're carved from!" to make them interesting.
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Feb 12, 2022 02:35
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Eggnogium posted:Not the OP but what is a game people would recommend for a group like this? I’m starting to cast my eye for what’s next after my 5E campaign ends. Three out of four of my players are very reactive rather than proactive and I’m wondering what systems might ease them into a little more narrative contribution (every time we check in they at least say they want to engage more with the fiction). Fiasco as an icebreaker, then a frank and open conversation with your players that they are expected to actively make things up because the MC/GM in fiction-first games is not there to decide everything for them. Tell them to treat it like a creative writing exercise, avoid outright saying no, and make sure you frequently push decisions about the world back onto the players or the table. Give them examples of what you expect, push back on them if they stand around waiting for you to describe everything, and don't hesitate to re-explain the basic social contract of fiction-first games to them on a regular basis until they get it. I would also very strongly recommend you pick a game that they can all relate to and are excited by on a theme/setting level. Don't play Blades in the Dark before making sure they've watched Peaky Blinders or played Dishonored; don't play SCUP if they've never seen Game of Thrones; don't play AW until they've seen Mad Max and maybe a CW series; etc. Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 04:22 on Feb 12, 2022 |
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Feb 12, 2022 04:16
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Lurks With Wolves posted:Indie game design is built on a lot of people looking at other people's work and iterating on it. Games like Apocalypse World and Blades in the Dark presented themselves in a way that made them very easy to work with, and thus the PBTA/FitD communities have done a monumental amount of work with these mechanics. Burning Wheel Gold has a ton of really interesting mechanics that you'd want future RPG designers to read and fiddle with and implement versions of in their own game. It's also an intentionally obscure game that you can only get legally by sending Luke Crane $35 plus shipping and handling and having a literal book mailed to you. Thus, all of these interesting mechanics are going to fade away like tears in the rain, because you need to be such a huge RPG nerd to even know that they're there and you should put the effort into looking at them in the first place. What you're describing in terms of the work being built upon is actually exactly what happened with Burning Wheel. Those interesting mechanics didn't completely fade away, because many of them live on in Blades in the Dark! John Harper is a Burning Wheel fan going waaaaay back and a part of that social circle of indie game design that consists of Luke Crane, Meg & Vincent Baker, and a couple others who like a degree of crunch in their systems. You can see some of that in the DNA of Blades, here and there. The fact that it doesn't have much of a legacy elsewhere comes down less to "not being developed anymore" than it does to, IMO: 1) Being an intricate Swiss watch of a system that is notoriously difficult to hack until you've played way more of it than most people play any game that isn't The One Thing Their Table Plays Over and Over. 2) Being big, crunchy, and campaign-centric in a design space where the overwhelming majority of designers prefer to make and play small, light, one-shot / short-series-centric games. In short, there just weren't (and still aren't) very many designers worth a drat who wanted to carry on work in that vein - and I can't say I blame them, because it is a lot of work. I love me some tiny hyper-focused indie one-shots, don't get me wrong, but it's been very refreshing to see weightier offerings like Blades, Ironsworn/Starforged, and all the Free League stuff take off in the last few years.
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Feb 12, 2022 04:41
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Kestral posted:In short, there just weren't (and still aren't) very many designers worth a drat who wanted to carry on work in that vein - and I can't say I blame them, because it is a lot of work. I love me some tiny hyper-focused indie one-shots, don't get me wrong, but it's been very refreshing to see weightier offerings like Blades, Ironsworn/Starforged, and all the Free League stuff take off in the last few years. I mean, we'll never know, because closed systems don't often get developed.
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Feb 12, 2022 05:58
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What a tragedy.
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Feb 12, 2022 06:41
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Going back all of three pages:Xiahou Dun posted:Is "play a system that supports this" not acceptable? There were a lot of responses going off of this, but the short answer is "probably not". Individually, some of us know PBTA or FITD games that would probably be a better fit since the setting is a sort of fantasy mid-apocalypse. As a group, there's two people who want the D&D crunch, two who don't mind it as a framework for the story we're telling, and a DM who hates DMing because you can't improvise a whole combat like everything else (me). Changing systems would start an argument about what system we actually want to play, which will kill the game. It's probably more ethical to do that rather than let a perfectly good story waste away on life support, but we haven't met in weeks and I'm already invested in the world even though we've met maybe five times. I have the uncanny ability to ensure a game's untimely death by merely joining it, and in the last twelve years I've started eight campaigns that are now dead. I don't have room for another notch on my belt, which is pretty impressive considering I'm a goon and you can probably imagine the size of my belt. No gaming is better than bad gaming, but worse than gaming that's working for everyone but the useless DM, by the same amount.
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Feb 12, 2022 08:43
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Play games you actually enjoy, my dude. If the D&D players want to play D&D, let them learn to DM. Anyway speaking of hacking 20-year-old games, have there been any Fate games in ages? I noticed Evil Hat's released a new, shorter version of the Core called Condensed, but is anyone still making full games on that engine?
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Feb 12, 2022 09:59
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Tachyon Squadron is a Star Wars inspired version of Fate Condensed with some neat dogfighting mechanics. I just wrapped a two year campaign using Fate Condensed, and I'm feeling a lot of emotions. We ran until three in the morning, talking about all the other routes the story could have taken, our favourite moments, and getting brief epilogues on beloved npcs. I've never had a group that clicks together so strongly, and I'm going to miss running this game for them. What's really exciting to me is that one of the players is going to take over the world and run their first-ever campaign for us! My game was an Escaflowne-inspired feudal mecha epic, where the players were heroic pilots called to serve a collapsing empire. During the campaign, one player's nation invaded another's, and that war was raging in the background of the final few sessions. The new DM's game is going to be Attack-on-Titan inspired, with players as scrappy mech-killer partisans resisting the occupying army. I can't wait to be a tiny squishy saboteur, trying to figure out how to assassinate a hundred tons of bipedal raging iron.
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Feb 12, 2022 11:30
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Captain Walker posted:There were a lot of responses going off of this, but the short answer is "probably not". You're not going to get what you want out of a system that's diametrically opposed to the things that you want. You can either keep playing it, or you can switch to something that actually matches what you want; those are your only two options (well, you can also just stop playing). You are also a player at the table. Have an actual conversation with your players and explain to them why you don't enjoy playing this game, and that you would rather play [insert other games here] (make sure you do the homework first, with prepared pitches and having figured out how you would support going from the current system to the new one if you want to keep using the setting). If they're not interested, one of them can step up and GM the game themselves. Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 13:34 on Feb 12, 2022 |
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Feb 12, 2022 12:53
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Squidster posted:I just wrapped a two year campaign using Fate Condensed, and I'm feeling a lot of emotions. We ran until three in the morning, talking about all the other routes the story could have taken, our favourite moments, and getting brief epilogues on beloved npcs. I've never had a group that clicks together so strongly, and I'm going to miss running this game for them.
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Feb 12, 2022 12:58
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Kestral posted:What you're describing in terms of the work being built upon is actually exactly what happened with Burning Wheel. Those interesting mechanics didn't completely fade away, because many of them live on in Blades in the Dark! John Harper is a Burning Wheel fan going waaaaay back and a part of that social circle of indie game design that consists of Luke Crane, Meg & Vincent Baker, and a couple others who like a degree of crunch in their systems. You can see some of that in the DNA of Blades, here and there. The fact that it doesn't have much of a legacy elsewhere comes down less to "not being developed anymore" than it does to, IMO: Yeah, and add Strike! to that in terms of both being directly inspired by Burning Wheel and in terms of being big and crunchy. It's just harder to write those sorts of games. Which is not a slight against those who are writing other games. I love the lighter games too, and just published one myself. When I wrote Strike!, I was a childless grad student avoiding working on my research, so I had tons of time. Trying to replicate that effort while having a full time job and 3 kids is turning out to be very slow going.
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Feb 12, 2022 16:00
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