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Absurd Alhazred posted:Maybe read that a bit more charitably, then?
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Apr 22, 2022 15:49
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I like random tables fine. They can be useful. But they didn’t say that. They said a finite thing is bigger than an infinite thing and that’s dumb.
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Apr 22, 2022 15:50
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Xiahou Dun posted:I like random tables fine. They can be useful. An individual person's invention in the moment is not as infinite as you were lead to believe. Some people freeze, other people just go with the most obvious cliche, very rarely people come up with one or two ideas. A table could have 100.
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Apr 22, 2022 15:51
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Random tables are an amazing way to generate ideas, they're just not a good way to generate hard-and-fast results.
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Apr 22, 2022 15:53
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In theory just making poo poo up on the spot is unlimited, but in practice having made a bunch of stuff up beforehand will probably lead to more actual variety.
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Apr 22, 2022 15:53
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Sure are a lot of people jumping in to defend a totally different statement than what was said. Huh.
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Apr 22, 2022 15:55
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According to the principle of anamnesis, every encounter table is already within us just waiting to be rediscovered
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Apr 22, 2022 16:00
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Xiahou Dun posted:Sure are a lot of people jumping in to defend a totally different statement than what was said. "Because your own imagination is limited." Do you object to this? Why? Do you think one's own imagination has no limits? I think you're wrong if that's the case. "When you make poo poo up based on a random table it's more unique" Do you object to this? Why? Do you not agree that constraints and input from other people, either combined or separately, lead to a more unique experience?
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Apr 22, 2022 16:03
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I mean, I still think the wildest take is simply "I don't think this product is a good idea because it probably won't take into account the DMs that need to use random procedural generation in advance to populate the entire land/world/universe in case the players go anywhere." Because yeah, a lot of games don't. A lot of D&D settings already don't. It's not usually a stated design goal. Arivia was kind enough to point out that there's a 5e module that sort of does it, but like... 5e Eberron didn't seem to generate a constant string of problems for hex-builders when it had trains in it.
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Apr 22, 2022 16:16
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theironjef posted:I mean, I still think the wildest take is simply "I don't think this product is a good idea because it probably won't take into account the DMs that need to use random procedural generation in advance to populate the entire land/world/universe in case the players go anywhere." I mean, if we want to relitigate what people actually said, originally it was: Rutibex posted:Spelljammer has its own issues as a D&D setting. I've honestly never got it to work as well as a grounded campaign. Giving the PCs a spaceship and access to the whole world really limits what you can do with logistics and random encounters and dungeons. If you're charitable this could be read as one issue for Rutibex rather than the issue that makes it unplayable, period. A spaceship, yes, like an airship or a train network makes styles of play where logistics and random encounters and dungeons kind of rough. Actually an airship or spaceship are worse because of how pretty universally you can use them - with trains you can at least say "well, that's great, but there's still that whole area over there that doesn't have a train system yet."
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Apr 22, 2022 16:23
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Absurd Alhazred posted:"Because your own imagination is limited." Do you object to this? Why? Do you think one's own imagination has no limits? I think you're wrong if that's the case. Of course imaginations have limitations, but they don’t have as many inherent ones as a random table which is very specifically limited by being a set list. Yes all of possible space is more unique than the proper subset of that space made from a random table. This is a completely ridiculous statement which is why no one is defending it and instead arguing that random tables are good, a totally different, not obviously wrong idea. Any limitation you put on imagining something is going to apply to interpreting a random table as well. You can talk about how the table gives you an immediate prompt or how constraints help creativity, and those are true, but they’re also not what we’re talking about.
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Apr 22, 2022 16:24
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Expecting a 5e product to facilitate hexcrawls and dungeoncrawls does seem foolish.Xiahou Dun posted:Of course imaginations have limitations, but they don’t have as many inherent ones as a random table which is very specifically limited by being a set list.
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Apr 22, 2022 16:26
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I don't think it's that unusual to think that players having a spaceship can make a sandbox game a little harder to run. I think players having a sailing ship in a setting can make a sandbox game a little harder to run too. If you're invested in making the world feel more fleshed out than it does when you just make everything up on the spot, then players having access to a ship means there's a lot more potential places they can go at a moment's notice, which means you're going to need to prepare a lot more in advance. Personally I think a good solution is trying to set things up so they're picking a destination at the ends of sessions so you have time to prepare before the next session.
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Apr 22, 2022 16:26
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theironjef posted:I mean, I still think the wildest take is simply "I don't think this product is a good idea because it probably won't take into account the DMs that need to use random procedural generation in advance to populate the entire land/world/universe in case the players go anywhere." I think this new book is great for people running narrative games who never read the original spelljammer books. I was just hoping the books would have something for me, the DM who has been running spelljammer type games for the last 10 years. When I say there are problems when giving players a spaceship that's not just me speculating, thats my personal experience with giving my PCs a space ship on multiple occasions. I like my rpg books to have game master content and crunchy rules. I know most people will buy the book because of the fancy art and player options, but I can still dream that WotC cares about me 
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Apr 22, 2022 16:32
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Colonel Cool posted:I don't think it's that unusual to think that players having a spaceship can make a sandbox game a little harder to run. I think players having a sailing ship in a setting can make a sandbox game a little harder to run too. If you're invested in making the world feel more fleshed out than it does when you just make everything up on the spot, then players having access to a ship means there's a lot more potential places they can go at a moment's notice, which means you're going to need to prepare a lot more in advance. I mean, to me it just seems like you need to think bigger. I mentioned starting with Traveller, someone either here or in the 5E thread said something about Spelljammers of Drinax, you could just scale up your sandbox. Instead of navigating a waste and getting into dungeons, you're navigating the solar system and getting into planetoids.
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Apr 22, 2022 16:32
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Absurd Alhazred posted:I mean, if we want to relitigate what people actually said, originally it was: Which mostly just hauls the topic right back around to my initial response. If you're in a situation where you're having to tell your players "No, there's an in-universe reason you can't just go wherever you want" then you've got a player problem you should be addressing with conversation. Like yes, I could probably have just responded to this with something like: "Oh well you can't go to Krynn because there isn't a phlogiston gate to that crystal sphere network that your helm is attuned to yet" or whatever, but that's failing on my part. I don't want to play calvinball. I'd just say "Guys the game isn't in Krynn, did you want to play the game or no" and be done with it. That said, we already did all this. I'm down with hex-crawl DMs, they're fine. Not my style but at least I understand the point of it.
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Apr 22, 2022 16:40
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Absurd Alhazred posted:I mean, to me it just seems like you need to think bigger. I mentioned starting with Traveller, someone either here or in the 5E thread said something about Spelljammers of Drinax, you could just scale up your sandbox. Running the exploration at this level works, but it also does not play to the strengths of D&D. When you get a random encounter in space that's usually a ship combat. You can do boarding parties with spelljammer (everything is open), but most of the time it will be ship combats instead of squad combat that D&D is designed for.
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Apr 22, 2022 16:42
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Rutibex posted:Running the exploration at this level works, but it also does not play to the strengths of D&D. When you get a random encounter in space that's usually a ship combat. You can do boarding parties with spelljammer (everything is open), but most of the time it will be ship combats instead of squad combat that D&D is designed for. Yeah. Another thing Drinax has is boarding combat, IIRC. But that doesn't help you. Also I should finally read through those books. 
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Apr 22, 2022 16:43
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Rutibex posted:I think this new book is great for people running narrative games who never read the original spelljammer books. I was just hoping the books would have something for me, the DM who has been running spelljammer type games for the last 10 years. When I say there are problems when giving players a spaceship that's not just me speculating, thats my personal experience with giving my PCs a space ship on multiple occasions. I have also been running Spelljammer for decades, lol. Solidarity! I just do it way different. I just sort of stole the vibe of "High age of sail + fantasy dungeoncrawling" and set it in other games. In 4e the campaign I ran had a spelljamming port accessible through a permanent portal in Sigil, and they could head there to take on work on ethereal and astral voyages. Had a game where they were hired to take a cargo-load of corpses out to a dead god the deceased worshipped, as their religion suggested that if enough worshippers were in orbit around the god, she'd reignite. In fact I'll admit I'm also not a good target for a new Spelljammer book. I don't play D&D these days and if I want to include Spelljammer content in whatever I do play I already know enough about it to do what I want with it.
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Apr 22, 2022 16:52
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Libertad! posted:
On the one hand I expect this to suck on general principles, but on the other they have a good point there about the design - they are zeroing in on the idea that Dragonlance as a setting is defined by large-scale wars, and that's not really something that is front-and-center in most other settings. I think they have at least a starting point to think about how to distinguish Dragonlance from other settings and supplements that's other than just Kender and janky magic orders.
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Apr 22, 2022 17:28
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theironjef posted:I have also been running Spelljammer for decades, lol. Solidarity! I just do it way different. I just sort of stole the vibe of "High age of sail + fantasy dungeoncrawling" and set it in other games. In 4e the campaign I ran had a spelljamming port accessible through a permanent portal in Sigil, and they could head there to take on work on ethereal and astral voyages. Had a game where they were hired to take a cargo-load of corpses out to a dead god the deceased worshipped, as their religion suggested that if enough worshippers were in orbit around the god, she'd reignite.  My favourate crack at a Spelljammer campaign was also a combo with Planescape. My players had jumped through a random portal to Sigil. Being low level they had no idea where they where and got lured by a succubus into another portal to her home layer of the abyss  They stole the succubus Amulet of the Planes and rolled a random plane.....Carceri  This was litteraly the worst option because they can't use their amulet again to try another plane. So the next week I decided to pull out Expedition to the Barrier Peaks. After an extensive scifi dungeoncrawl they now had a D&D spaceship! I said they could only travel one plane left or right on the great wheel and needed to pick up some muguffun fuel each time they do. It worked out quite well, and it gave me the oppratunity to plan what was happening next week. For example they chose to escape Carceri through the Abyss (rather than Hades) and I let them choose from a number of different layers. They choose the Demon Web Pits which was just fantastic for them ahahaha. Rutibex fucked around with this message at 17:39 on Apr 22, 2022 |
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Apr 22, 2022 17:34
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Actually it's impossible to tell whether any given number is bigger than any other number. Mathematics just doesn't work that way.
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Apr 22, 2022 17:44
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Does Rutibex roll on a d100 encounter table every time he's threadbanned to find a new thread to stink up?
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Apr 22, 2022 18:57
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Nuns with Guns posted:Does Rutibex roll on a d100 encounter table every time he's threadbanned to find a new thread to stink up? Yes, but this time he got a critical that sent him to every rpg thread so he can make them all awful at once.
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Apr 22, 2022 19:45
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Nuns with Guns posted:Does Rutibex roll on a d100 encounter table every time he's threadbanned to find a new thread to stink up? Bottom Liner posted:Yes, but this time he got a critical that sent him to every rpg thread so he can make them all awful at once. Rutibex fans should make a seperate thread to keep the rest of TG on topic imho
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Apr 22, 2022 20:16
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Comstar posted:And it both starts AND ends at a cliffhanger every time. This is why regardless of the setting, the PCs spaceship should always have the infinite improbability drive.
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Apr 22, 2022 20:48
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Colonel Cool posted:I think players having a sailing ship in a setting can make a sandbox game a little harder to run too.
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Apr 22, 2022 21:55
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Halloween Jack posted:Random tables are an amazing way to generate ideas, they're just not a good way to generate hard-and-fast results. Star Control II's use of them was the best: guy randomly generated realistic planets which meant 90% of the galaxy was dead and barren (wee) and then they went through and just manually made planets actually habitable through magic. Also some planets are like, giant jewels floating in space and such.
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Apr 23, 2022 00:53
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Talk about a franchise I want a TTRPG for.
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Apr 23, 2022 03:13
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Halloween Jack posted:Talk about a franchise I want a TTRPG for. Think of the complaints about "lol random" players. Now think about the Orz.
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Apr 23, 2022 04:14
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My beak is stuffed with grubs nonetheless.
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Apr 23, 2022 05:04
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Kalman posted:Think of the complaints about "lol random" players. Playing as the Zoq-Fot-Pik would be a great way to adapt the Gibberling rules.
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Apr 23, 2022 05:20
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Beware: your players may attempt to do the Yehat accent. Beware2: That Player may play Syreen.
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Apr 23, 2022 05:25
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Just use the UQM wiki as a starting point to build some Traveller cultures.
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Apr 23, 2022 05:27
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The Culture probably makes a good setting for tabletop RPGs as well. Resources are just sort of handwaved away, you have the somewhat inscrutable Minds running things, most of the conflict happens at the edge of things. Ohhh, that's Lancer.
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Apr 23, 2022 05:40
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El Fideo posted:The Culture probably makes a good setting for tabletop RPGs as well. Resources are just sort of handwaved away, you have the somewhat inscrutable Minds running things, most of the conflict happens at the edge of things. I assume everything I run is in The Culture. After all, they call me the player of games. I'm sorry.
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Apr 23, 2022 05:48
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Traveler is a weird beast, I've found, and I honestly have no idea how I'd run a Spelljammer campaign other than as a sort of sequence of mostly-unconnected episodes. (Which is definitely a fun way of doing things, don't get me wrong) I ran one of the published Traveler hexcrawls and found that just about the only thing giving big continuity was the whole trade subsystem, which will presumably be pretty deemphasized in a 5e D&D game. Really, the big difference between a hexcrawl and a spacecrawl is just that the things within the hexes can't leave their hex unless they own a spaceship, right? I don't think that's a big deal with a more Trad-style GM-led game, but I've never wrapped my head around how to do more of a crawl-style game in that format. In a dungeon crawl, the space you move through is super dense with treasure and challenges. In a hex-crawl, the act of moving between interesting points leads to a lot of unexpected discoveries and obstacles. A space-crawl just feels like a hex-crawl where the spaces between your destinations have less (not nothing, but less) going on in them. Colonel Cool posted:In theory just making poo poo up on the spot is unlimited, but in practice having made a bunch of stuff up beforehand will probably lead to more actual variety. I've found a technique I like that sort of threads the needle, although I'm often using it as much to populate prepped content as mid-session. What I do is make a table of however many different 'themes' I want the campaign or dungeon or whatever to reflect, then whenever I need a shot of in the moment creativity I roll on the chart twice and try to think of something interesting at the intersection of the two concepts. So I'm not populating the table with "1d20 orcs" so much as "Regional Warlords" and "Nature Reclaiming Civilization", and whenever I roll on a table I'm always getting a hybrid concept that makes it really hard to fall into conceptual ruts while also usually being specific enough that I don't fall into blank-paper creative paralysis, and also open ended enough that I can always factor in the pre-existing situation. If I roll the two above concepts on a wilderness encounter, maybe you run into the local orc warlord's Bear Subjugation Squad, but if I roll it in a village it tells me that the local government has fallen apart after the castle was destroyed by a nature spirit, and so on.
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Apr 23, 2022 17:54
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To answer actually burning questions or discussions here, it seems pretty unlikely the new Spelljammer rules would say they could blip to any point in a matter of minutes or seconds. Kestral is probably on the money that they'd just copy over water-ship combat and navigation rules. And like yeah the party can sail away from any town they've pissed off, but they can ride off on horseback or dimension door away without a ship, too. Kettling in a TTRPG is very hard the minute you give a party a world beyond a dungeon of 10x10 hallways. That doesn't mean they can peel away from another ship, space dragon, whatever that's chasing them in their mode of transport though. It doesn't mean the heat immediately dies down, either. People with grudges don't instantly forget and now you've got enemies in what's probably an important port of call and any GM with sense is going to bring that back around. And if you're doing random encounters or setpieces in an overland or hexcrawl scenario, you can always mock up a list of possible encounters to throw down as they happen. You could also just have hard "On day X, this event will always happen" if you want a really good setpiece to occur. Maybe that's "bullshit" but it seems pretty sensible to expect something as they hit certain landmarks. You'll get events as you hit rivers in Oregon trail, you'll get interesting events when you come across a large scrap of land floating in magi-space in your Spelljammer. Dare you approach? Of course you do, there's probably some cool treasure there. Anyway um.... Industry Things... how about this, with rising corporate interest in D&D and tabletop RPGs now, what's one licensed property you'd love to see conveted into a TTRPG? Answer 1: A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones using something like Pendragon rules And what would be the worst one to specifically adapt using 5e D&D rules? Answer 2: Breaking Bad
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Apr 23, 2022 19:26
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OtspIII posted:What I do is make a table of however many different 'themes' I want the campaign or dungeon or whatever to reflect, then whenever I need a shot of in the moment creativity I roll on the chart twice and try to think of something interesting at the intersection of the two concepts. So I'm not populating the table with "1d20 orcs" so much as "Regional Warlords" and "Nature Reclaiming Civilization", and whenever I roll on a table I'm always getting a hybrid concept that makes it really hard to fall into conceptual ruts while also usually being specific enough that I don't fall into blank-paper creative paralysis, and also open ended enough that I can always factor in the pre-existing situation. If I roll the two above concepts on a wilderness encounter, maybe you run into the local orc warlord's Bear Subjugation Squad, but if I roll it in a village it tells me that the local government has fallen apart after the castle was destroyed by a nature spirit, and so on. I like this approach a lot. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with it, but I like it.
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Apr 23, 2022 19:26
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Nuns with Guns posted:To answer actually burning questions or discussions Atelier as an app-assisted TRPG. The app manages item storage and alchemy but combat and other things are played on the tabletop. quote:And what would be the worst one to specifically adapt using 5e D&D rules? Mario Brothers
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Apr 23, 2022 20:03
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