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I think people tend to flake on things that they aren't enjoying enough to care about making a priority. And I'm also of the opinion that PbB in general just... isn't very good. It's not what RPGs were designed to do, which makes it an inherently unsatisfying medium. All the tips and tricks for making a successful PbP game are basically just a list of things you can do to help mitigate the inherent problems with the format, many of which aren't present in in person games. Which isn't to mock anyone doing PbP games, there's plenty of valid reasons to prefer doing PbP. But if you are then I think you kind of have to accept the limitations of the format and accept that they're going to have a higher failure rate in general because of it.
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Aug 1, 2022 23:59
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| # ? May 27, 2024 21:50 |
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It's not really tg, though we have had adventure writing competitions in there, but I'm gonna post anyway to alert all you fine nerds to the literal decade of Thunderdome that's just been reached! Ten years, 10.6 million words, just gosh. If you've ever thought wow I should write something, the currently running celebratory birthday week is an excellent opportunity to start. If you don't want to read the fairly involved prompt, just post and say 'in' and you will be assigned a prompt! OR you can read all the rules twice and optimise the goddam fresh hell out of your entry I mean this is tg who am I kidding. Fabulous prizes! Eternal glory!  See you in there!
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Aug 2, 2022 02:51
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MyMiniFactory is a website that sells STL files for 3D printing miniatures and terrain. Now they are getting into the PDF hosting game. Here is their announcement. quote:Hi all, So it looks like MyMiniFactory is diversifying to start competing with DriveThru? I bought a painting guide from Bite the Bullet for $2. Got to say I'm a lot happier with it than say a White Dwarf. Then again it's less instructive than a video I suppose. If you like the painting guide you can download the STL of the miniature it is for. Neat to have everything in one place. When they start banging out wargames for those minis and maps for said wargames then I think the circle will be complete. 
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Aug 2, 2022 03:20
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Epi Lepi posted:I can't remember the name of the site now but there used to be a forum dedicated to letting people host their PBP games on it. That was the whole of the site from what I remember. My interaction with it would have been around 2007-2008 as that's when my high school gaming group all went to college and we were going to attempt to keep a game going despite being at different schools. Didn't work out because our old GM was a flake. There were a few of these, I think. I used Myth Weavers for a bit circa 2010 and I seem to remember there being several alternatives in the designed-for-PbP space.
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Aug 2, 2022 04:05
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Panzeh posted:Honestly, i've found that people flake really often in online things, particularly if they don't know you, and it's a fact of life. If you recruit six people, you'll probably get 3 at most, and you have to keep churning and churning. People said I was mad to accept ten people for a Dungeon World PBP game. I wanted six people and that seemed like a good ratio to get six actives. I was in fact mad as a hatter. PbtA games can be really good for PBP play. PbtA relies heavily on The Conversation, and if you can get into a conversational groove with enough people, you've got a successful PBP.
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Aug 2, 2022 06:06
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atelier morgan posted:hello thread, this is the poster once known as UberJew Here's the discord where all the hot goons hang out these days.
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Aug 2, 2022 07:20
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Colonel Cool posted:I think people tend to flake on things that they aren't enjoying enough to care about making a priority. And I'm also of the opinion that PbB in general just... isn't very good. It's not what RPGs were designed to do, which makes it an inherently unsatisfying medium. All the tips and tricks for making a successful PbP game are basically just a list of things you can do to help mitigate the inherent problems with the format, many of which aren't present in in person games. I don't think PbP is inherently bad, I just think that it's inherently inappropriate for... basically most existing systems. Because most existing systems are relatively granular, with the expectation(or at least opportunity) of a check and feedback from the GM for actions as simple as swinging a sword, firing a gun, sneaking down a hallway, trying to convince someone not to buy an NFT, jumping through a window, etc. You need either the right GM who's willing to be a bit liberal about what they describe and what they call checks for, to the point that the system really isn't working as intended OR a system tailor-made for PbP play. Like, probably the "ideal" PbP game would have the player characters themselves far removed from the action, giving general instructions to a team or faction for execution over the span of a day, week or even month of game-world time which the GM then "simulates" and summarizes the consequences/results of afterwards. You could even do that with a conventional system by giving each player a "stable" of characters, and then missions/adventures pop up that each player sends X of their goons on, with orders to avoid/cooperate/kill the other teams as appropriate, how to approach the mission, perhaps some specifics, etc. with perhaps a midpoint where the team phones in for updates: "Hey, Jones got killed, Xygox is missing his head, and we turned half of Team Swampfoot into ants. Do we keep hunting the Chalice of Unfathomable Eggs or do we bug out and try to minimize losses?" Lot of GM work, not what everyone would want to play, but I feel like it would probably be the best way t oavoid most of the things that slow PbP to a crawl.
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Aug 2, 2022 12:47
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Yeah, if you're looking to design games to be played over a forum then a good model for a rule set would be something like Diplomacy or a Watch The Skies-style megagame, where most of the action comes from player-on-player conversations and task resolution only kicks in at predefined intervals.
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Aug 2, 2022 13:19
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PurpleXVI posted:I don't think PbP is inherently bad, I just think that it's inherently inappropriate for... basically most existing systems. Because most existing systems are relatively granular, with the expectation(or at least opportunity) of a check and feedback from the GM for actions as simple as swinging a sword, firing a gun, sneaking down a hallway, trying to convince someone not to buy an NFT, jumping through a window, etc. There was a PBP on RPG.net (Kai Tave knows what I'm talking about, because they were in it) that I love to point to as a masterclass of how to do everything right. Everybody was super engaged, the GM (Old Kentucky Shark, also a goon) knew how to keep things going and had an amazing roster of NPCs and it even weathered one player being a little odd and also another just up and ghosting the game mid-way through. While it just stopped instead of ending, I daresay it went on long enough for most regular campaigns. Honestly it's just the engagement that's the key and a GM willing to do the work, which is a heady brew and not one often found.
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Aug 2, 2022 14:25
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PurpleXVI posted:I don't think PbP is inherently bad, I just think that it's inherently inappropriate for... basically most existing systems. Because most existing systems are relatively granular, with the expectation(or at least opportunity) of a check and feedback from the GM for actions as simple as swinging a sword, firing a gun, sneaking down a hallway, trying to convince someone not to buy an NFT, jumping through a window, etc. I used to play on a forum like that, set in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms era. Most RP was free form, with a GM only asked to intervene in the event of a duel (where both sides submitted multiple rounds of tactics that could be run at once) or if some kind of scheme happened. The real heavy lifting happened at the end of each game “month” when the players who were rulers had to submit all simulation stuff for their kingdoms, and of course tactics for battles they were in. Due to the number of kingdoms + NPCs it required multiple GMs to run though, and like most PbP things each game would rapidly peter out in the mid game as people got burnt out on the mechanical side of things or their personal RPs fizzled.
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Aug 2, 2022 15:51
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My ex did years of PbP gaming and thought it was the norm*, but honestly I just think its a different thing in enough ways that, other than some very basic psychological itches getting scratched, I wouldn't try to put PbP and improv next to each other. Like one is collaborative epistolary fiction, the other is improv theater. Those are just so, so different, and you come at them from totally different mindsets. I think unfortunately a fair number of people want one or the other and get exposed to the other first, which leads to a fair number of poor experiences. *I think there's some element of both gender and where your online 'base' is - she met RPers through livejournal and tumblr, and it was overwhelming women (also overwhelmingly weebs). It was VERY much a fanfic-culture practice. The improv theater style gaming has I think been a male-dominated tradition, not helped by so many of the classic games being pointlessly misogynistic.
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Aug 2, 2022 16:09
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Sounds like most of you weren't here on SA during the PbP Golden Years around 2002-2005. So. Many. Games. Long-running ones, too, with the same group all the way through for years. We were patient bastards, I guess.
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Aug 2, 2022 22:09
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Dragons of Deceit just came out on Amazon. No reviews yet, so must be real hot off the shelves.
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Aug 2, 2022 23:55
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Libertad! posted:Dragons of Deceit just came out on Amazon. No reviews yet, so must be real hot off the shelves.
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Aug 3, 2022 00:05
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Just as long as this doesn't make for a new Dragonlance module I have to review.
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Aug 3, 2022 00:21
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Splicer posted:What happened with the whole lawsuit thing I stopped paying attention. wizco and the dragonlance writers settled
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Aug 3, 2022 00:22
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Leraika posted:wizco and the dragonlance writers settled
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Aug 3, 2022 00:23
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Splicer posted:That tells me less than you'd think given I've forgotten who was suing who and what the demands were that's all I remember. That and that the original thing was that wizco either blocked the publishing of or refused to publish the new dragonlance books and the writers sued for breach of contract, I believe?
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Aug 3, 2022 00:32
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Mirage posted:Sounds like most of you weren't here on SA during the PbP Golden Years around 2002-2005. So. Many. Games. Long-running ones, too, with the same group all the way through for years. We were patient bastards, I guess. I was, and it was a mess of flakes and no-shows and games collapsing left and right even back then. The long-running games were very much the exception rather than the rule, although they were more common because the number of games being run was higher.
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Aug 3, 2022 01:09
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Leperflesh posted:Players usually do not complain, ironically out of politeness, even as they start to disengage and posting gets slower and slower. A key skill for a PbP GM then is to be willing to aggressively ignore the games rules and dump any scene that shows signs of stagnating. And a key thing for players to do is to realize that being polite and not saying that the current situation in the game isn't really grabbing you really sucks if your response to that is to forget to post for a week. I think these are key points for running a successful PBP. I also wonder if there being some sort of timed writing exercise (you have 30 minutes to write a post or a bomb goes off) wouldn't help keep the momentum for players to post. Granted I don't think most players would sign up for a writing under stress exercise (maybe they would?). I think a fun and even way to keep player engagement would be a web app where you have a certain time to write a post and if you finish slightly before time, on time or slightly after time you get some amount of character experience, maxing out if you finish exactly on time. Then in that scenario the onus would be on the Game Master to be disciplined enough to keep up describing things and writing prompt posts. I am not such a Game Master. 
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Aug 3, 2022 01:22
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Mirage posted:Sounds like most of you weren't here on SA during the PbP Golden Years around 2002-2005. So. Many. Games. Long-running ones, too, with the same group all the way through for years. We were patient bastards, I guess. That was slightly before my time, but even when I first started playing games here around 2007, there were still a ton of games. Multiple games starting every week, sometimes more than one a day. A really high death rate for those games still left plenty that ran for months or even years. I think we had a younger population of posters with more free time; a much larger population; perhaps a more naïve idea of what games should be and how they should feel... just a lot of factors I think played into how things were then vs. now. We also had some forum superstar GMs that people scrambled to get into games with and maybe folks were less likely to drop out or abandon a game they'd felt very lucky to get into. I remember applying with a character to recruitment threads that got 20+ applications.
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Aug 3, 2022 01:24
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Helical Nightmares posted:I think these are key points for running a successful PBP. I also wonder if there being some sort of timed writing exercise (you have 30 minutes to write a post or a bomb goes off) wouldn't help keep the momentum for players to post. Granted I don't think most players would sign up for a writing under stress exercise (maybe they would?). I think a fun and even way to keep player engagement would be a web app where you have a certain time to write a post and if you finish slightly before time, on time or slightly after time you get some amount of character experience, maxing out if you finish exactly on time. How fast you write is the resolution mechanic. It’s like a dexterity game now.
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Aug 3, 2022 02:59
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I’m at work. Can anybody hook me up with some receipts of the Pathfinder 2 developers acknowledging that 4E had some strengths? Edit: Arivia posted:This was literally what Paizo rules designers said when challenged about how much like 4e Pathfinder 2e is. "4e was ahead of its time and we just didn't recognize how right it was with some of what it did." or something like that. CitizenKeen fucked around with this message at 15:39 on Aug 3, 2022 |
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Aug 3, 2022 14:22
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The PF2e lead designer Logan Bonner actually worked on D&D 4e?
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Aug 4, 2022 00:22
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CitizenKeen posted:I’m at work. Can anybody hook me up with some receipts of the Pathfinder 2 developers acknowledging that 4E had some strengths? I think it’s from James Jacobs on the old playtest forums.
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Aug 4, 2022 01:18
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Here's a topic I was thinking about today. Our group has been playing with one of those art prompt bots for an RPG sourcebook we're writing. An alchemical coffee drink  A magic duel in a McDonald's  A statue in the Florida Everglades  A gelato shop in a mausoleum  Colonel Kurtz running a Pizzeria None of these illustrations are exactly what we wanted, in the same way as something created by a human artist to our precise specifications could be. But we never planned to commission artists for this book. The original idea was to grab a few public domain photos, toss on a couple filters and call it good. And if you learn how to craft the prompt you can get something pretty close to the image in your head. So this is a straightforward improvement in production values. The pictures generated by the bot are CC share and share alike, so they don't cause rights issues unless you need exclusive ownership of every image in your book. If the proliferation of poorly functioning bots across storefronts and customer service is any indication, people are generally willing to accept "poorly functioning but cheap" over paying a human being to do the job properly. This could end up being true in indie RPGs, especially when the default for small press or self published books is often minimal or no art at all. There may be a substitution effect, if authors who might have otherwise commissioned real artists instead choose to just have the bot poo poo out 20 or 30 attempts at a prompt and choose the best one.
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Aug 4, 2022 08:34
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Which bot's that?
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Aug 4, 2022 09:31
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That looks like the sort of thing that Midjourney churns out.
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Aug 4, 2022 13:29
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I've found Midjourney to struggle more with faces than from what I've seen with DALL-E, but yeah, either of those.
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Aug 4, 2022 13:48
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Gort posted:Which bot's that?
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Aug 4, 2022 13:51
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That looks exactly like Midjourney. (It's gotten a lot better at faces recently, especially if you base it on a celebrity and it's the only thing in the image.) But their copyright situation is a little different than just CC share and share alike. The terms Midjourney uses do not give free users ownership of the art assets. Free users instead get a CC BY-NC license to it (by attribution and noncommercial). You can use it, but not commercially. Paid users who create images completely own the images they create, but give Midjourney the license to allow other users to use the images to generate more assets through the service. Although there's nothing besides the licensing to actually stop anyone from just taking another's creation and using it themselves because, by default, they're all published to the Discord/website. You can pay for an additional "private mode" that doesn't make your creations public and, I believe, doesn't grant Midjourney the previously mentioned license. This is, of course, assuming AI-generated art is even capable of being copyrighted, which, at least in the US, is a completely unsettled issue.
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Aug 4, 2022 14:15
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I suspect using an AI generated image, private, and then running it through some filter such that it becomes a derivative work will ensure you have the copyright to the image you put in your indie RPG, and nobody else has source to the actual image. Don't take my legal advice.
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Aug 4, 2022 16:15
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Is it not DALL-E 2?
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Aug 4, 2022 18:06
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I've started reading Glitch, and I love how this is apparently a game about playing bumbling morons with cosmic powers who go on weird road trips in the desert. Half of the first example of play is taken up with the characters crashing their car into a cactus and then arguing about whether to bother removing it from the car or just throwing a tarp over it and making it part of the party. Oh, and you get bonus points for being a disappointment. It's like slapstick Sandman; I love it.
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Aug 5, 2022 11:58
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CitizenKeen posted:I’m at work. Can anybody hook me up with some receipts of the Pathfinder 2 developers acknowledging that 4E had some strengths? https://youtu.be/jaCaQjBCHgY I haven't watched this since February but I think they mention 4e's influence during the panel. Logan definitely worked on 4e.
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Aug 5, 2022 20:49
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SimonChris posted:I've started reading Glitch, and I love how this is apparently a game about playing bumbling morons with cosmic powers who go on weird road trips in the desert. Half of the first example of play is taken up with the characters crashing their car into a cactus and then arguing about whether to bother removing it from the car or just throwing a tarp over it and making it part of the party. Oh, and you get bonus points for being a disappointment. It's like slapstick Sandman; I love it. Jenna Moran’s weird mixture of supernatural crisis and whimsy is great. It’s more jarring in Glitch though, as you’re playing people who the world literally wants dead.
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Aug 5, 2022 21:20
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i mean even Nobilis is very clear on the point that e.g. your magical fantasy fairy realm full of talking toys was created by stealing the life of a human being a day for a hundred days, or that the Valde Bellum might require you to stake your life to protect the platonic ideal of Torture or Genocide or whatever if that's what the Excrucians decide to target. there's always been an edge buried under the superficially whimsical surface. Glitch just comes at it from the perspective of people who are significantly less, uh, let's go with "enfranchised" by mythic reality Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 23:49 on Aug 5, 2022 |
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Aug 5, 2022 23:47
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Noblesse 2e is pretty much the The Sandman played straight. I could never wrap my head around 3e, or get my current group to try Glitch. They like rolling dice 
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Aug 6, 2022 03:22
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Playing Xenoblade 3 and honestly if a JRPG can handle a party of 7 players so can your GM.
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Aug 6, 2022 20:00
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| # ? May 27, 2024 21:50 |
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Is Holden still around here? Because I just found "Exalted vs The World of Darkness", and it's hilariously awesome.
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Aug 7, 2022 09:33
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