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hyphz posted:I think I'm getting lost in examples. The issue is that it's almost impossible for an RPG to come up with any system of tactics that makes every tactical situation interesting. I just don't consider that a valuable design goal.
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# ? Mar 15, 2022 22:52 |
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# ? May 25, 2024 14:52 |
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hyphz posted:I think I'm getting lost in examples. The issue is that it's almost impossible for an RPG to come up with any system of tactics that makes every tactical situation interesting. I am the GM for your hypothetical example group. I do not allow them to engage in a lengthy combat scenario unless it is interesting, purely by fiat. If they refuse to do anything but fight on the most advantageous, cool, they get a brief description of their plan working and we don't engage with the combat engine beyond a few cursory rolls. If they keep refusing to do anything, while they waste time they get out maneuvered strategically and get pushed into an interesting, decisive fight. This solves the problem.
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# ? Mar 15, 2022 22:59 |
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hyphz posted:But in an RPG where the players can affect the world and choose their battles, and aren't constrained to set-piece combat, they could fight in any situation. And most of the time, they'll choose an uninteresting situation where they win over an interesting one In a game where you can affect the world and pick your battles, it doesn't logically follow that you can choose any situation. A band of 3-6 people can only do so much; the "optimal" setting for a battle isn't always going to be available. If the PCs' goal is to help protect a town from an invading army, they might be able to pick a point on the map that's between the army and the town to engage, and that might give them some advantages and disadvantages in the fight. But if there's only flat scrublands and a small forest in between those two points, they can't make a plan that relies on rolling boulders down a mountain or whatever. If the enemy's only a few days away, the party can't carry out a massive engineering project to make the town's walls impenetrable. And so on. grassy gnoll posted:I am the GM for your hypothetical example group. I do not allow them to engage in a lengthy combat scenario unless it is interesting, purely by fiat. Also yeah, this.
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# ? Mar 15, 2022 23:09 |
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mellonbread posted:The advice given in the handler book for making a mystery scenario is actually quite good. It seems useless at first because it builds backwards from how you'd expect - you start with an exciting inciting incident, then work out what's going on behind the scenes after you've got the intro nailed down. You link those up with clues that serve as connective tissue between the different plot elements, then add some reactivity in the form of interfering NPCs and additional incidents that show the threat progressing (and give the Agents a chance to get back on track if they get stuck).
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# ? Mar 16, 2022 08:25 |
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Whybird posted:This is one of the reasons why comic horror works way better when your primary opposition comes from other human beings who are wielding cosmic horror, wittingly or unwittingly, and whose reasons for doing so are more fleshed out than "I would like to unleash some cosmic horror".
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# ? Mar 16, 2022 09:46 |
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PurpleXVI posted:If you're short on stuff for a session, introducing PC's to a merchant caravan, a shopping district, a weird store selling curiosities or, in a pinch, just a single farmer trying to offload an old cow on someone, is a guaranteed recipe for bogging down the players for at least one session while you rush to prep for the next one. There would always be a huge dragon sleeping in whatever impossible spot he picked this time, too. It was implicitly understood that any attempt at theft would be met with the dragon's awakening. I never provided any sort of explanation and in fact never even had one worked out in my head. This may have driven my more mechanically-minded players slightly around the bend.
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# ? Mar 16, 2022 10:18 |
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grassy gnoll posted:If they refuse to do anything but fight on the most advantageous, cool, they get a brief description of their plan working and we don't engage with the combat engine beyond a few cursory rolls. If they keep refusing to do anything, while they waste time they get out maneuvered strategically and get pushed into an interesting, decisive fight. I am very impressed that you can improvise an "interesting, decisive fight" on demand but this seems extremely difficult from my POV.
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# ? Mar 16, 2022 10:56 |
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Probably not on the fly per se. I imagine the strategic maneuvering would instead happen over time, so that gives you time to figure out where to go from there. If the "easy win" situation lasts one session, then have the big counterattack ready next session. You could also have the pieces of a big battle pre-assembled and only put them together in a way that makes sense when it comes time to actually throw down.
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# ? Mar 16, 2022 11:29 |
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hyphz posted:I am very impressed that you can improvise an "interesting, decisive fight" on demand but this seems extremely difficult from my POV. I've played a lot of combat-heavy games over the years, so I have a good back catalog to plagiarize, but an interesting combat boils down to a couple factors. 1) Does it interrupt the player's assumptions? As you note, the players are going to prefer to fight only on their own terms whenever and wherever possible, in ways that put them at minimal risk with maximal benefit, like an ambush. Put them at a disadvantage - they get ambushed, they have to fight with improvised gear, they have to defend one place while the opponent can maneuver around them, etc. Don't do this all the time, since that makes the novelty wear off and it's irritating to have the GM go "ha ha, you didn't sleep in your armor, now you get stabbed to death by goblins," but every now and then it'll keep them on their toes. They'll also feel pretty accomplished when they either beat your challenge fairly, or you discreetly put your thumb on the scales so they squeak by despite the odds. As GM, ask yourself what you can do to put the players off balance in a given context. 2) Is the combat itself unique? A fight with a pack of kobolds/squad of corporate security in a fifty-by-fifty room is bog standard and not very interesting. Consider what you can do to change the mechanisms of the fight beyond "kill the other guys." This could be as simple as adding pitfall traps the PCs and the kobolds have to maneuver around (or for your PCs to knock the kobolds into, which they will love), or fighting in an enclosed space where there's no real room to maneuver, or it could be as elaborate as the classic fight on top of a moving train, or hanging off the side of the war rig as it barrels through the desert, or on top of a crumbling cliff face. There's also setting victory conditions that aren't murdering everyone - each side is trying to retrieve an object, or they're trying to keep each other from getting to the last escape pod, and so on. In general you want things that make the players have to maneuver and consider their approach instead of just rolling their preferred attack method. Ask yourself what you can do in a given fight to make the players adapt to changes in the field, whether they want to or not. 3) Is the combat flavorful? This is the easiest option when you can't be assed to come up with a clever gimmick for the fight itself. Put the fight somewhere interesting - inside a crashing airliner, inside their home tavern, or the classic example of a shootout at the convenience store. You can do this entirely with flavorful narration - the goblin and the thief are jumping between tables and swinging from lantern posts, the candy display erupts in a multicolored spray as machine gun fire hits it, etc. Weird and vivid details sell well, and you'd be astonished what insignificant details players will latch onto. Ask yourself what would be cool to see in a comparable action movie or video game. Above all else, you are playing a roleplaying game and you can make poo poo up. It's playing pretend with some mechanics to maintain a semblance of fairness, as long as it's entertaining nobody will care if it's original or against the rules.
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# ? Mar 16, 2022 14:50 |
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Make a set of combat encounters, and then strip all the identifying stuff from it, so unit names, spell descriptions and the like, then just CTRL+SHIFT+H and replace them all with whatever lore is good for your setting. A swarm of rats can become a swarm of peasants, or a swarm of soldiers easily enough.
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# ? Mar 16, 2022 17:43 |
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Boba Pearl posted:Make a set of combat encounters, and then strip all the identifying stuff from it, so unit names, spell descriptions and the like, then just CTRL+SHIFT+H and replace them all with whatever lore is good for your setting. A swarm of rats can become a swarm of peasants, or a swarm of soldiers easily enough. There's a 3rd party 5E supplement, Tools of War, that attempts to do just that (one of the options is to just use swarm rules for big armies, there's a bit of a guide how to convert "regular" D&D units into them). I'm not sure it's really usable, I know I gave up on using it because I didn't end up doing mass combat quite that way.
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# ? Mar 16, 2022 17:49 |
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It is also totally acceptable two hours into a three-hour session, where the PCs are insisting that they are going to turn what you were sure was a noncombat encounter into a combat encounter, to announce "OK, I wasn't prepped for this to be a fight, and prepping it will take some time. We're going to have to wrap this session early, and we'll roll for initiative next week." This also provides an aside to the players that turning peaceful encounters into violent ones has to be a "sometimes food" because the GM actually has to do work to make tactically-interesting encounters. This isn't the only approach, as others have said, but its an option. It also does not undermine the notion that RPGs can consistently present tactically interesting combat. The premise was not "RPGs can consistently present tactically interesting improvised encounters" so that's a goalpost shift.
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# ? Mar 16, 2022 17:54 |
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my players in promethean are heading up to stab a powerful guy who's been stalking a PC and they did all the stuff I had prepped for and I said "OK, so you guys have a night at a restaurant in Reno to process how you feel about the fact that you're going somewhere very dangerous to quite possibly murder somebody, how do you feel about this?" and they had an extended conversation about this over nachos though that's just an aside about pacing campaigns, the chance that they're going to have tactically interesting combat is functionally 0 lol
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# ? Mar 16, 2022 18:02 |
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Leperflesh posted:It is also totally acceptable two hours into a three-hour session, where the PCs are insisting that they are going to turn what you were sure was a noncombat encounter into a combat encounter, to announce "OK, I wasn't prepped for this to be a fight, and prepping it will take some time. We're going to have to wrap this session early, and we'll roll for initiative next week." I have absolutely done that before. "Alright, if you're going into this dungeon/picking this fight, we're holding an hour early so we A) don't have to break in the middle of something tense and B) I can be prepared."
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# ? Mar 16, 2022 18:36 |
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Boba Pearl posted:Make a set of combat encounters, and then strip all the identifying stuff from it, so unit names, spell descriptions and the like, then just CTRL+SHIFT+H and replace them all with whatever lore is good for your setting. A swarm of rats can become a swarm of peasants, or a swarm of soldiers easily enough. That was a core idea of the Flame Pomerium series of articles over on the Coins & Scrolls blog about how through changing the scale you could use an OSR system to run a fantasy Mecha campaign with little in the way of changed rules, in one of the articles this is demonstrated through changing the fluff of a Beholder into a corrupted sun turned eldritch abomination, with added descriptions for how it's various eyestalk beams would be appropriately scaled up(for example their central eye that normally just fires an anti-magic ray is now an "Apocalypse Ray" with the idea that a Kaiju scaled anti-magic effect would cause matter itself to fall apart), though the author Skerples does a much better job describing all this than I could
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# ? Mar 17, 2022 02:32 |
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Leperflesh posted:It also does not undermine the notion that RPGs can consistently present tactically interesting combat. The premise was not "RPGs can consistently present tactically interesting improvised encounters" so that's a goalpost shift. I don't really see that as a goalpost shift. If combat encounters are not romeroaded then there is always the possibility of a combat taking place somewhere where it was not scripted to happen and having to be improvised. If the system can't present tactically interesting improvised encounters, and there is no guarantee that there will ever be a non-improvised encounter, then it can't present combat consistently at all. And while I know that the "walk away from the table and think about it" suggestion has come up before, I don't think there's been any address of the following: a) examples always describe things like "we can end an hour early", but there's nothing to stop one of these happening in the first five minutes; b) there's no guarantee that simply taking extra time will yield a successful result. Also, every gaming society is dominated by tyranny of structurelessness and it can sod right off.
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# ? Mar 18, 2022 00:53 |
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hyphz posted:If the system can't present tactically interesting improvised encounters, and there is no guarantee that there will ever be a non-improvised encounter, then it can't present combat consistently at all. This is an incredibly slippery slope here. As in, you made a running jump into a waterslide.
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# ? Mar 18, 2022 01:09 |
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We're not obligated to confirm your interpretation of things, hyphz. If you want to make an argument, you have to justify your position. Do you like playing tabletop games? If so, why are you hell-bent on inventing excuses to never do so? E: and it's totally okay to not want to actually play a game! People don't have to like everything, and sometimes that can be due to the thing itself, or because of a bad experience surrounding the thing. Imagine you have gone to the Yahtzee subforum, where people talk about all the ways they like Yahtzee, and you make a post about how you like to play a game yourself from time to time. Someone offers to host a game for you, and you immediately respond "oh god no, sometimes you might roll more than one mismatch, or get a papercut on the board, and I don't like the look of those single-pip sides on the dice, they remind me of rat eyes." You would be entirely within your rights to hold every one of those opinions, but then it defies reason to continue to subject yourself to the subject. grassy gnoll fucked around with this message at 02:34 on Mar 18, 2022 |
# ? Mar 18, 2022 02:29 |
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I mean, I do like playing TTRPGs. I also like running them as getting to do something imaginative and artistic while also enabling others to enjoy themselves is very satisfying. I do not enjoy it when I try my best to describe a scary creature in a clearing and the players’ first question is “how far away from it are we when we see it?” and I know that a wrong answer will result in a hideously dull encounter as the PCs beat it from a distance before it can reach them, but at the same time they did spend feats on being able to do that so they should be able to sometimes, and there is no map to fall back on to have an objective answer, and I cannot depend on the rules to make the combat fun no matter what.
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# ? Mar 18, 2022 03:52 |
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drrockso20 posted:That was a core idea of the Flame Pomerium series of articles over on the Coins & Scrolls blog about how through changing the scale you could use an OSR system to run a fantasy Mecha campaign with little in the way of changed rules, in one of the articles this is demonstrated through changing the fluff of a Beholder into a corrupted sun turned eldritch abomination, with added descriptions for how it's various eyestalk beams would be appropriately scaled up(for example their central eye that normally just fires an anti-magic ray is now an "Apocalypse Ray" with the idea that a Kaiju scaled anti-magic effect would cause matter itself to fall apart), though the author Skerples does a much better job describing all this than I could It's the only way I can GM, I can never remember what is supposed to happen until I get to my notes, and I forget half the notes through out the game, so having a packet of level appropriate encounters makes it incredibly simple to just drop in a tactically interesting fight into my game.
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# ? Mar 18, 2022 04:03 |
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hyphz posted:I mean, I do like playing TTRPGs. I also like running them as getting to do something imaginative and artistic while also enabling others to enjoy themselves is very satisfying.
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# ? Mar 18, 2022 04:14 |
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hyphz posted:I do not enjoy it when I try my best to describe a scary creature in a clearing and the players’ first question is “how far away from it are we when we see it?” and I know that a wrong answer will result in a hideously dull encounter as the PCs beat it from a distance before it can reach them, but at the same time they did spend feats on being able to do that so they should be able to sometimes, and there is no map to fall back on to have an objective answer, and I cannot depend on the rules to make the combat fun no matter what. These things are so well crafted. The urge to respond with like fifty answers all "It's within range of your bows but the magma surrounding the monster is shrouding it in heat mirages that will render your shots less effective" or whatever but that of course doesn't actually matter, any response is just a new invitation for a barrage of defeatist hypotheticals. You should look into just youtubing yourself responding to spam emails, at least constantly stonewall and frustrate people that have it coming. Please note that this isn't just an insult, my other screen is currently on a youtube video of a guy messing with spam emails.
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# ? Mar 18, 2022 07:09 |
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It's fascinating because I can see the general shape of the argument and I broadly agree, but in this specific case I'm starting to think the core problem is that hyphz has read way too much GM advice and collapsed into a posting singularity. Anyway hyphz I mean this as gently as possible: If you find yourself going "I do enjoy X, I just don't enjoy the subset of X that is all the X I have", you're not actually enjoying X. Or at least it doesn't matter how good the hypothetical X is, the actual lived X sucks. (The inverse is also true, and it has been difficult to admit that I enjoy D&D 5E.) Taking breaks from things is good, actually, they will still be there when you come back.
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# ? Mar 18, 2022 08:10 |
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hyphz posted:I do not enjoy it when I try my best to describe a scary creature in a clearing and the players’ first question is “how far away from it are we when we see it?” and I know that a wrong answer will result in a hideously dull encounter as the PCs beat it from a distance before it can reach them, but at the same time they did spend feats on being able to do that so they should be able to sometimes, and there is no map to fall back on to have an objective answer, and I cannot depend on the rules to make the combat fun no matter what.
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# ? Mar 18, 2022 10:17 |
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Alright folks: who here has run a scenario (ideally in a fantasy setting, but I'll take any) set in a fancy party? How did it go? I'm currently running a score for my Blades in the Dark group and I could use some stories for inspiration.
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# ? Mar 18, 2022 11:14 |
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Ettin posted:Alright folks: who here has run a scenario (ideally in a fantasy setting, but I'll take any) set in a fancy party? How did it go? I'm currently running a score for my Blades in the Dark group and I could use some stories for inspiration. Recently played one as a robot butler on a starfinder-like Strike! game, was pretty fun to juggle a lot of complications between the guests and the like but the party got interrupted by an attempt to kidnap the owner of the house and things then got really downhill.
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# ? Mar 18, 2022 11:40 |
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hyphz posted:I mean, I do like playing TTRPGs. I also like running them as getting to do something imaginative and artistic while also enabling others to enjoy themselves is very satisfying. I am going to be a bit more upbeat than other posters here but to me this sounds like you're not asking an informed RPG question so much as looking for an avenue to solve the question of human judgment, to have a mathematically precise avenue to avoid risk in social situations. This is an understandable thing to want but I do not think it is a good thing to want, and it is absolutely asking way, way, way too much of an elfgame. My broader advice is that you are ruminating excessively on the potential damage caused by incredibly minor failures. My elfgame specific advice: if getting bogged down in incredibly tedious questions about minor advantages that prevent any action from happening is a failure state to you and you think your players are very badly susceptible to that, play games that don't reward that at all. Instead of hunting for more tactically complex games, play/run less tactically complex games. BITD is the other part of my post and as much as BITD is a game about maneuver and complex schemes, fundamental to its gameplay loop is that you can only get at most 2 advantages on a given roll and you start each heist in media res. Ettin posted:Alright folks: who here has run a scenario (ideally in a fantasy setting, but I'll take any) set in a fancy party? How did it go? I'm currently running a score for my Blades in the Dark group and I could use some stories for inspiration. I've had quite a few! Including like 3 in BITD lol. The one I remember best had 2 members working the room for gossip and as a distraction while the other two rappelled into the attached greenhouse to steal as much fruit as they could, having to time what they were doing with the actions of the party team. Dances are a critical element, gotta have a dance. Great opportunity to pull in NPCs from a character's backstory, 'estranged wife' was a particularly good one. Make the players describe what they're wearing in great detail. Really helps set the atmosphere. A good thing about a fancy party is that it feels incredibly natural to split the party up, which gives you a good chance to drag players into rolling bad stats. I don't watch as many period/costume dramas as I think I could, but Little Women had some really great fancy party scenes that I think could help get you in a good headspace, and The Favorite is functionally all fancy party scenes and is pretty intense, and both of them are pretty great movies if you've got a few hours to kill. Tulip fucked around with this message at 13:04 on Mar 18, 2022 |
# ? Mar 18, 2022 12:57 |
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I'm increasingly convinced that "the Dark" that the blades are in refers to inside bodices and under tophats, what with all the fancy parties that seem to go down in BitD games.
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# ? Mar 18, 2022 14:07 |
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Siivola posted:It's fascinating because I can see the general shape of the argument and I broadly agree, but in this specific case I'm starting to think the core problem is that hyphz has read way too much GM advice and collapsed into a posting singularity. i had a weird slope of "this system is cool" to "actually its pretty limiting and poorly thought out" back around to "this system is a hot mess but somehow the most fun i have had with any ttrpg system" so i relate for the dnd 5e thing a lot here. one system i despised was pathfinder 1st edition, i had no fun with it at all and the only fun i had was trying to use the rules as little as possible. making encounters was a chore and it was miserable to run them too. i had similar views to hyphz and even considered quitting tabletop rpgs entirely because even though i have been playing for a decade i tried everything for like 2 years and never once enjoyed it. but then i stopped playing pathfinder and everything was better from there
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# ? Mar 18, 2022 14:09 |
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CitizenKeen posted:I'm increasingly convinced that "the Dark" that the blades are in refers to inside bodices and under tophats, what with all the fancy parties that seem to go down in BitD games. it's a victorian setting with a heavy dose of Leverage it'd be insane not to! pog boyfriend posted:i had a weird slope of "this system is cool" to "actually its pretty limiting and poorly thought out" back around to "this system is a hot mess but somehow the most fun i have had with any ttrpg system" so i relate for the dnd 5e thing a lot here. Many such cases. Sad!
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# ? Mar 18, 2022 14:21 |
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Watching leverage would also probably be good inspiration.
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# ? Mar 18, 2022 14:25 |
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Ettin posted:Alright folks: who here has run a scenario (ideally in a fantasy setting, but I'll take any) set in a fancy party? How did it go? I'm currently running a score for my Blades in the Dark group and I could use some stories for inspiration. It is important to emphasize the clothing of both the party and any NPCs they interact with, and GRRM-level obsession over the food, though usually less emphasis on music than you might expect. Ideally someone will be cornered by a complete boor for an inescapable conversation and someone else will be asked to dance when it is the thing they want least in the world. Probably someone's debutante experience will be ruined by an unshaved lout farting in the punch bowl. Players who volunteer exhaustive detail about their outfits or manners should be rewarded, along with anyone engaging in Dune-style narration about how their slightly raised eyebrow indicates they have seen their opponent's veiled threat and have accounted for this turn in their pre-party-planning, and furthermore want their opponent to know they know, and... Watch all the Regency dramas and then edit the players shouting "EXCUSE ME I HAVE TO GO REFILL MY GLASS" to no one when they want to engage in subterfuge.
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# ? Mar 18, 2022 15:09 |
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My favourite thing is for them to run into another party of adventurers who are almost as poorly-disguised as they are, and watch them dance around one another trying to figure out what the other is trying to heist and if it will get in the way of their own heist. Also, the partygoer who hired the other party of adventurers to kidnap them should get the two parties mixed up.
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# ? Mar 18, 2022 15:27 |
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Whybird posted:My favourite thing is for them to run into another party of adventurers who are almost as poorly-disguised as they are, and watch them dance around one another trying to figure out what the other is trying to heist and if it will get in the way of their own heist. Especially good if it can tie into any of the characters friends/rivals
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# ? Mar 18, 2022 15:36 |
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I'm not sure how familiar you are with hyphzposting but based in his previous posts his players appear to be sociopaths whose primary hobby is destroying hyphz ability to function as a social being under the guise of playing RPGs
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# ? Mar 18, 2022 15:40 |
Maybe I'm too cynical but I feel like you can't ever depend on the rules to make the combat fun no matter what, or really to make any aspect of the game fun no matter what. That seems like a pipe dream, and is putting a lot of reliance on the system to basically run the experience, and all its social and interpersonal requirements, for you. Even pretty well-designed systems will, at best, just take the headache out of combat or skill resolution and maybe offer a limited set interesting tactical choices, but I've never seen one that's going to guarantee a fun combat no matter what combination of planned scenario, improvised maps, or lovely players you might get. I think that's neither possible nor even all that intended with TTRPG systems, but again, maybe I'm just cynical or have too limited a scope of experience. I feel like you have to go into any system asking yourself "how can I use these levers and gears to craft something fun for my players." And sometimes fun for your players means plinking at the big monster from a distance, or maybe there's a different way to construct that scenario that forces them to engage in a different way or think outside the box.
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# ? Mar 18, 2022 15:55 |
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Whybird posted:My favourite thing is for them to run into another party of adventurers who are almost as poorly-disguised as they are, and watch them dance around one another trying to figure out what the other is trying to heist and if it will get in the way of their own heist. I'm absolutely stealing that for the next fancy party scenario I run. That's great. When I've done fantasy parties in the past I've always just had several factions present with things that they want and some vague ideas about how they'd react to PC shenanigans, and winged it from there.
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# ? Mar 18, 2022 16:00 |
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Splicer posted:I'm not sure how familiar you are with hyphzposting but based in his previous posts his players appear to be sociopaths whose primary hobby is destroying hyphz ability to function as a social being under the guise of playing RPGs I mean, they're obviously playing a game, just not the game hyphz is
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# ? Mar 18, 2022 16:03 |
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MockingQuantum posted:Even pretty well-designed systems will, at best, just take the headache out of combat or skill resolution and maybe offer a limited set interesting tactical choices, but I've never seen one that's going to guarantee a fun combat no matter what combination of planned scenario, improvised maps, or lovely players you might get. I think that's neither possible nor even all that intended with TTRPG systems, but again, maybe I'm just cynical or have too limited a scope of experience. Or Phoenix Command.
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# ? Mar 18, 2022 16:19 |
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# ? May 25, 2024 14:52 |
Siivola posted:Just use GURPS. Again, it might be an experience unique to me, but I found that GURPS was pretty much the antithesis of "guaranteed fun," lol
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# ? Mar 18, 2022 16:29 |