|
ShallNoiseUpon posted:This is going to be somewhat of me just bragging about someone being nice to me, one of the players in the Pathfinder game I run told me my game is the most fun they've ever had role playing and it's been a legit boost to my mental health and general well-being to hear that something I've worked so hard to make fun is actually landing with my friends. Traditional games....are good. Congrats! It feels pretty great when you run a game and people like it. For all the jokes of DMs having to do a lot of work and constantly wrestling with their players and all I think it's fairly non-controversial to say for those of us who do it the post game 'hey that was fun, can't wait to do it again' genuinely feels very good.
|
#
?
Mar 23, 2022 19:54
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 25, 2024 23:01 |
|
|
In absence of a dedicated thread appropriate to it: did anyone here actually play Dogs in the Vineyard? It's one of those games where APs basically don't exist (found all of two) and reviews are sparse on mentioning how the mechanics actually worked in practice. I've been interested for a long time & ran it briefly years back, was hoping to get some insight from people who managed more than "character creation and one session" (like me) on how the mechanics held up in play. Despite the reaction last time I mentioned wanting to do a western, I have the brain itch again and I'm wondering how salvageable the dice system is.
|
|
#
?
Mar 23, 2022 22:03
|
|
|
SkyeAuroline posted:In absence of a dedicated thread appropriate to it: did anyone here actually play Dogs in the Vineyard? It's one of those games where APs basically don't exist (found all of two) and reviews are sparse on mentioning how the mechanics actually worked in practice. I've been interested for a long time & ran it briefly years back, was hoping to get some insight from people who managed more than "character creation and one session" (like me) on how the mechanics held up in play. I've played a couple of full campaigns and a lot of one shots. I felt like the mechanics held up very well in play, might still be the reigning champion of dice based systems I've played. One rule that was never formally discussed that every group I've been on converged on independently was that you have to do something in fiction to use any dice. A thing that was experimented with but not broadly adopted was not revealing your rolled but unused dice, added a spicy element of bluffing and baiting. Worst element was the "I'm a Dog." Just set a cap on that or on skills in general cuz it's a power gamer weak point and may as well nip it in the bud.
|
|
#
?
Mar 23, 2022 22:18
|
|
|
SkyeAuroline posted:In absence of a dedicated thread appropriate to it: did anyone here actually play Dogs in the Vineyard? It's one of those games where APs basically don't exist (found all of two) and reviews are sparse on mentioning how the mechanics actually worked in practice. I've been interested for a long time & ran it briefly years back, was hoping to get some insight from people who managed more than "character creation and one session" (like me) on how the mechanics held up in play. There's a new, settingless version (fully approved by Vincent Baker) that might be worth a look. Might be easier to add in the Western flavour to this than to take out the weird Mormon stuff in the original.
|
|
#
?
Mar 23, 2022 22:49
|
|
|
BinaryDoubts posted:There's a new, settingless version (fully approved by Vincent Baker) that might be worth a look. Might be easier to add in the Western flavour to this than to take out the weird Mormon stuff in the original. I bought it the day it released, but thanks. I also actually like the Mormon flavor of Dogs in the Vineyard, and would likely not have given it a second glance originally if it didn't have that. Just thinking on what can be done with the mechanics, since no one ever iterated on the design besides for DOGS (and that wasn't motivated as much by design challenges as by Baker taking it out of print, though there are some updates to flawed design in the original). SkyeAuroline fucked around with this message at 22:59 on Mar 23, 2022 |
|
#
?
Mar 23, 2022 22:55
|
|
|
Isn't Baker making a Star Wars Dogs in the Vineyard? (sans serial numbers, obviously)
|
|
#
?
Mar 23, 2022 23:30
|
|
|
SkyeAuroline posted:I bought it the day it released, but thanks. There was some iteration before AW came out. Once AW came out it basically just outcompeted the gently caress out of anybody wanting to do a "Persons in the Location" hack. FWIW I did a very simple Swords & Sorcery type of hack, very Conan inspired. Really the only change was that "guns" was now "magic." Frankly ran great. If the GM has a sense of what the setting and goal are, then the mechanics are incredibly portable.
|
|
#
?
Mar 24, 2022 00:37
|
|
|
I've run a few DiTV one-shots and enjoyed them. I played in one and it was pretty weak, because the GM didn't bother reading the GM advice. It's frustrating because I think Dogs has the most direct and straightforward advice of any game I've played.
|
|
#
?
Mar 24, 2022 01:16
|
|
|
SkyeAuroline posted:In absence of a dedicated thread appropriate to it: did anyone here actually play Dogs in the Vineyard? It's one of those games where APs basically don't exist (found all of two) and reviews are sparse on mentioning how the mechanics actually worked in practice. I've been interested for a long time & ran it briefly years back, was hoping to get some insight from people who managed more than "character creation and one session" (like me) on how the mechanics held up in play. There's two mechanics issues I remember. Having to come up with/keep track of NPC's stats was a bit of pain - I personally prefer Vincent's simplified rules for NPCs, located here. The gist is that you give an NPC one of those arrays, and they get more dice when things are escalated. You have to have consequences as part of your Raises but I find it's much easier then the default rules. His Star Wars inspired hack even uses these. I did talk to him about it a while ago and he mentioned that you might have to add more dice to them if you want to challenge your PCs later on. The second big one is helping. Helping is really really powerful. If your PCs are always together and working on the same side, your NPC has to deal with multiple Raises before they get to their turn. Again, the Star Wars hack modifies helping to be a bit less of an advantage. BinaryDoubts posted:There's a new, settingless version (fully approved by Vincent Baker) that might be worth a look. Might be easier to add in the Western flavour to this than to take out the weird Mormon stuff in the original. The big problem I have with this is that it makes it so that the 8+ Fallout are all negative - you can't add to or gain d4 Traits or make a d4 relationship and instead you lose dice from any non d4 Trait/Power. Those options are in DITV specifically to encourage players to Take The Blow, and this does the opposite. Heliotrope fucked around with this message at 03:50 on Mar 24, 2022 |
|
#
?
Mar 24, 2022 01:52
|
|
|
I mentioned earlier in this thread that one of my players was taking over my campaign world for her first-ever campaign, and I'm happy to report she's doing fantastic! She's a natural storyteller, and has done a great job rolling with the unpredictable insanities of live players. We're playing scrappy mercenary infantry hired by a corrupt priesthood to protect the besieged Punican capital against invading mecha. We are completely hosed. I'd forgotten how fun it is to be surprised playing in a campaign. All my familiar characters have become strangers to me, with new mysteries and unexpected character growth. One of the party's beloved NPCs from my campaign was the exiled saint Septima, pilot of the divine weapon Wilful Justice. She started out as a tragic villain intended to die in a few sessions, but the party moved heaven and earth to save her. After she embarrassed her homeland by losing a public duel to a PC, her theocratic nation marked her killed in action and clandestinely sold her as a slave pilot to the Romans. She had no one to love or value her. Over the course of two years of gameplay, the party helped her outgrow her blazing self-hatred and desperate need for vengeance. In the campaign climax, at enormous personal cost, she saved her fellow saint pilots from their cruel fate. She even came to forgive the party member who ruined her life. One player character saw herself as Septima's adoptive mother, another feels unbearable guilt for failing her sister saint, and the last became Septima's fiancee. This random NPC became the whole heart of the campaign. Now, in the new campaign? She's our main antagonist, leading a fleet of coalition warships burning the coastline as she returns to seize control of her home nation. Her mecha has been joined by two new unknown Armours, the Hydra and the Sovereign. None of us know what they're capable of, except that they leave barely even ruins in their wake. Septima was born to be sacrificed to the Goddess in glorious battle, and now she's returned to topple every temple. She embodies all of Punica's sins come home to roost, and we have to stop her somehow. As former DM, I am PUMPED to finally get a second chance to kill one of my darlings
|
|
#
?
Mar 24, 2022 06:19
|
|
|
Awesome. Love to hear stories like this.
|
|
#
?
Mar 24, 2022 06:36
|
|
|
https://twitter.com/LapisLunaris/status/1506622547521163268?t=1MkTOxTCQ8Fi0C3GTULiGg&s=19
|
|
#
?
Mar 24, 2022 10:25
|
|
|
How did Eclipse Phase 2E turn out anyway?
|
|
#
?
Mar 24, 2022 13:42
|
|
|
ZearothK posted:How did Eclipse Phase 2E turn out anyway? As long as you like metacurrencies, it's mechanically a pretty straight improvement over the original. If you're like me and don't like metacurrencies much, it'll fall flat fast.
|
|
#
?
Mar 24, 2022 13:46
|
|
|
ZearothK posted:How did Eclipse Phase 2E turn out anyway? https://writeups.letsyouandhimfight.com/purplexvi/eclipse-phase-second-edition/ In my incredibly verbose opinion: pretty loving badly. It did very little to fix issues with EP 1.0 and introduced some fresh new issues as well.
|
|
#
?
Mar 24, 2022 14:13
|
|
|
Didn't they make getting new Morphs/etc. more complicated?
|
|
#
?
Mar 24, 2022 16:48
|
|
|
Dawgstar posted:Didn't they make getting new Morphs/etc. more complicated?
|
|
#
?
Mar 24, 2022 18:00
|
|
|
Yeah there's some neat ideas in there, but it's still running into the fundamental issue of trying to mesh being a gear porn game and being a game where you're supposed to re-make your character on the regular. e: like once you get past character creation I found actually playing the game to be pretty breezy, but the sticking point of it being a game where you're expected to do character creation a lot remains. Doctor Zaius fucked around with this message at 23:59 on Mar 24, 2022 |
|
#
?
Mar 24, 2022 23:56
|
|
|
So how's the Fate version?
|
|
#
?
Mar 25, 2022 00:54
|
|
|
I've only read, not played it, but my impression was pretty similar to the base game. It's very hard to square "your body is disposable and doesn't matter, you can change it whenever you want" with "your body is infinitely customizable and gives you a wide array of special powers" no matter what system you're using.
|
|
#
?
Mar 25, 2022 00:59
|
|
|
CitizenKeen posted:Isn't Baker making a Star Wars Dogs in the Vineyard? (sans serial numbers, obviously) Anybody know what this is called?
|
|
#
?
Mar 25, 2022 01:57
|
|
|
PerniciousKnid posted:Anybody know what this is called? Droids in the Cantina 
|
|
#
?
Mar 25, 2022 02:07
|
|
|
PerniciousKnid posted:Anybody know what this is called? Before the Rebellion is the current working title. What's done is on his Patreon, although I think he mentioned it being on pause for now.
|
|
#
?
Mar 25, 2022 02:15
|
|
|
We have made Mayveena an IK for the Board Games thread. You should see her name in the subforum IK/Mod list now. Thanks for being willing to take on this lovely volunteer task, Mayveena!
|
|
#
?
Mar 25, 2022 19:28
|
|
|
Related to DitV, Vincent Baker also released a brief preview of another hack. It's called The Deseret Affair. The PCs are detectives hired by a rich banker in Chicago to rescue his daughter, who along with 22 other teen girls was kidnapped and taken into the Utah territories. The idea is that there will be 8 or 9 towns created as part of the campaign. The PCs will visit 5 or 6 of them in their pursuit of the kidnappers. If you want to take a look at it, it's on his Patreon. There's not a lot of mechanics given yet but it seems like instead of stats NPCs have arenas they can escalate to as part of a conflict - things like rage, self-defense, faith, hospitality, etc.
|
|
#
?
Mar 26, 2022 02:12
|
|
|
SkyeAuroline posted:I bought it the day it released, but thanks. There were a few qualities to Dogs that lead to it not catching on the way AW did besides the Mormon flavor. "Mormon Western" itself was definitely a factor though. The dice pools are definitely a barrier, for instance. The 2d6 basis for Apocalypse World is such a simple system for most people to wrap their heads around, both for understanding odds in play and in designing new moves, playbooks. etc. around those odds. There's a visceral delight in grabbing a fistful of dice, rattling them around, and throwing them on the table, but in play you're tallying them up and isolating out the "most important" ones for any instance and it's a lot of ticky-tacky time consumption. It's also harder to parse the underlying odds and design new content around. It's a lot of labor for a "light" system. Being a decent, simple, Mad Max-style post apocalypse game helped AW for sure. There's were other post-apocalypse games out there but there wasn't a dominant game like D&D for fantasy or Pendragon for Arthurian stuff or I'd say LANCER is now occupying for mecha. AW's commitment to a broad genre also made it very easy to picture how it could be reflavored or reworked into other genres, settings, periods, whatever. Dogs is a very narrow simulation of... I don't know I suppose there must be a sub-sub-sub genre it's pulling from? It's a way narrower experience in any case. Certainly Dogs can and has been reworked to sever it from "examining the hypocrisies of Mormon tenants of faith" and "rough Western setting," but they are anchored in the base rules in a way that requires a lot more lifting to extract. And this does assume you're intrigued enough by the premise to even look at the game's rules to try them out. Like personally, I've got no ties to Mormonism, and for a lot of reasons I have no interest in exploring it and never wanted to play Dogs. The escalating nature of the conflict resolution is intriguing, but not enough to engage with the game even before it was taken out of formal circulation. Apocalypse World is substantially more accessible, relatable, and exciting to me. Nuns with Guns fucked around with this message at 19:57 on Mar 26, 2022 |
|
#
?
Mar 26, 2022 19:22
|
|
|
As a springboard for future development, I think Dogs suffers from the way it links mechanics to the fiction. You have the stakes of the conflict, and then the need to keep the fiction aligned with the way you're using the dice with each exchange, and then you have the fallout. You end up having to have a certain amount of side conversation just to keep things running. AW's more straightforward concept of moves and "to do it, do it" just flow better. That doesn't mean AW is better than DITV, but I think choosing Dogs only makes sense if you really want to spend a lot of time thinking about escalation and fallout. I think Vincent once said something about how DITV is a game about the social consequences of violence. I've also heard people say the game really shows peak potential if you save copies of the original character sheets, and then compare them to the final versions of your characters after five or six towns' worth of fallout. Those are very cool ideas but much more specialized than AW, which in turn is itself more specialized than some other story games.
|
|
#
?
Mar 26, 2022 20:30
|
|
|
TBH I mostly think a lot of it came down to luck and initial momentum. KPFS & Poison'd are both too in your face and too...gross I guess for somebody to want to play as more than a gimmick. DITV is considerably more contemplative and thoughtful and really oriented to campaign play. AW was designed ground up to be *for* cons. Can't really speak to what RPG cons were like at the time but AW was purpose built to be played at a con with people who had never heard of it - Baker has said for example that the reason you only have one of each playbook in a game is so that you only have to print out one of each playbook per con session maximum. Plus everybody already has clear and thoughtful ideas about Road Warrior by the time the game came out, it's an absurdly resonant aesthetic. Still incredible to me that the game is older than Fury Road.
|
|
#
?
Mar 26, 2022 20:44
|
|
|
What other parts of AW are designed for cons? Its tools for running campaigns and character advancement were downright groundbreaking.
|
|
#
?
Mar 26, 2022 20:55
|
|
|
Siivola posted:What other parts of AW are designed for cons? Its tools for running campaigns and character advancement were downright groundbreaking. i feel like AW basically systematised Being a Good DM in a brisk, commanding sort of way and didn't lean on 'all of these rules are simply suggestions!' which has been a mainstay of the hobby since day one.
|
|
#
?
Mar 26, 2022 21:06
|
|
|
Siivola posted:What other parts of AW are designed for cons? Its tools for running campaigns and character advancement were downright groundbreaking. some of it's just stuff that would fall under "keeping it simple and streamlined" but that is part and parcel of "I want this game to get people from 0 to 60 in under 20 minutes" -using a uniform die pool -using only commonly available dice -having all mechanics resolve in a uniform way -'the gm should never roll' means that there is *radically* less at table adjudication -'when in doubt, roll for act under fire' means that instead of having to look things up from the rules on a 'how do i do this,' if you can't remember you have an easy universal fall back, again reducing at table adjudication radically -perhaps most importantly and most groundbreaking imo: the hx moves at character creation. you can see fingerprints of this in bakers' earlier games, most obviously in KPFS
|
|
#
?
Mar 26, 2022 21:13
|
|
|
sebmojo posted:i feel like AW basically systematised Being a Good DM in a brisk, commanding sort of way and didn't lean on 'all of these rules are simply suggestions!' which has been a mainstay of the hobby since day one.
|
|
#
?
Mar 26, 2022 21:14
|
|
|
Tulip posted:some of it's just stuff that would fall under "keeping it simple and streamlined" but that is part and parcel of "I want this game to get people from 0 to 60 in under 20 minutes" Sure, it's less of a pain in the rear end to learn than a lot of other game, but this is the first I've heard of AW being designed for convention gaming specifically.
|
|
#
?
Mar 26, 2022 21:37
|
|
|
AW and PbtA can also have the narrative take place a fair bit faster than more traditional RPGs.
|
|
#
?
Mar 26, 2022 21:59
|
|
|
Nuns with Guns posted:There were a few qualities to Dogs that lead to it not catching on the way AW did besides the Mormon flavor. "Mormon Western" itself was definitely a factor though. The dice pools are definitely a barrier, for instance. The 2d6 basis for Apocalypse World is such a simple system for most people to wrap their heads around, both for understanding odds in play and in designing new moves, playbooks. etc. around those odds. There's a visceral delight in grabbing a fistful of dice, rattling them around, and throwing them on the table, but in play you're tallying them up and isolating out the "most important" ones for any instance and it's a lot of ticky-tacky time consumption. It's also harder to parse the underlying odds and design new content around. It's a lot of labor for a "light" system. I appreciate your thoughts. The dice pool system is most of what I was hoping to salvage from it, of course, so knowing how others feel about it is... useful. I didn't find it to be as much of a burden in my limited play experience in terms of time, but maybe that was just the group involved in it. Setting-wise, for much the same reason I'm not invoking "Westerns as a genre" here ever again, I'm not going to dig too hard into DitV's setting. I did grow up close to a Mormon & with other "weird offshoots of Christianity" in my family (and am ex-religious), so that's probably given me enough personal experience to be interested in the deconstruction of faith that the game does. Have another player in my group whose personal experiences would lead to fantastic GMing as well, if they're ever up for it It's not gonna be for everyone, though, yeah. Zorak of Michigan posted:As a springboard for future development, I think Dogs suffers from the way it links mechanics to the fiction. You have the stakes of the conflict, and then the need to keep the fiction aligned with the way you're using the dice with each exchange, and then you have the fallout. You end up having to have a certain amount of side conversation just to keep things running. AW's more straightforward concept of moves and "to do it, do it" just flow better. That doesn't mean AW is better than DITV, but I think choosing Dogs only makes sense if you really want to spend a lot of time thinking about escalation and fallout. I have to agree, as well as where it doesn't link mechanics to the fiction - anything outside of "interpersonal conflict, whether verbal or physical" is pretty much up in the air. Arbitrate it however, the mechanics only really work if you have sentient opposition that you have some interest in not immediately escalating with though, and there's no support for anything else. Main disappointment out of the system for adapting it to something broader. Baker's Star Wars version is supposed to fix that, but I'm still waiting on him to actually give me the access to his Patreon drafts that I already paid for before I can even see how it's managed.
|
|
#
?
Mar 27, 2022 01:04
|
|
|
Siivola posted:The reason I ask is, a lot of AW design speaks to the opposite: It's got lots of tools to support extended games with developing characters and settings. It's got moves for beginning and ending game sessions. Even the language is weird and requires learning. To be fair, some of that does also make things easier to run in a one-shot. Start of session moves are the main example, just because they automatically give a bunch of good hooks to add into the rest of the one-shot as improv. Some of the other things you mentioned are extensions of what you described as systematizing good GMing advice, and mostly exist in the full book and not the core of the game you could print out on ten sheets of paper. As for the language... I'm just blaming that on how easy it is to forget that Vincent Baker is a indie game design weirdo than you'd think, given how big PBTA ended up being. It's easy to remember Apocalypse World as being as approachable as the mechanics ended up being, but then you reread the book and it's all hx and sex moves and weird new jargon. Ultimately he's just a guy making very niche games, and sometimes those niche games were made to be easy to pick up if you're already the kind of RPG nerd who'd know who Vincent Baker is in the first place. (Of course, I don't actually know if Tulip's right and AW was originally made to be good for cons. I just don't think your points are as anti-that as you're implying.)
|
|
#
?
Mar 27, 2022 03:33
|
|
|
As written it has a bunch of rules for a campaign and none for con play, but it makes sense that it would work well as a one off.
|
|
#
?
Mar 27, 2022 05:17
|
|
|
I'm pretty sure I read Baker talking about adjustments he makes when running this at cons, so no, I don't think it was originally designed around that format. Edit: Found it, it's in this Q&A session he did a while back, starts at "Back when I used to run a lot of Apocalypse World con games". Absurd Alhazred fucked around with this message at 05:45 on Mar 27, 2022 |
|
#
?
Mar 27, 2022 05:42
|
|
|
Absurd Alhazred posted:I'm pretty sure I read Baker talking about adjustments he makes when running this at cons, so no, I don't think it was originally designed around that format. That's a great link, thanks!
|
|
#
?
Mar 27, 2022 06:48
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 25, 2024 23:01 |
|
|
The entire series is amazing and imo applicable to any kind of game design, not just PbtA specifically. But look out! It killed my game project stone dead when it forced me to admit I can't actually playtest nearly as often as I should.
|
|
#
?
Mar 27, 2022 08:10
|
|