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GMs still have alot of the say. If you let your players take part in the world building, there needs to be standard for stretching it.
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Oct 17, 2022 06:10
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ninjoatse.cx posted:GMs still have alot of the say. If you let your players take part in the world building, there needs to be standard for stretching it. Could you expand this? I'm not parsing it at all.
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Oct 17, 2022 09:58
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I parse that as "set some limits so one player alone doesn't end up writing half the setting and edging the others out of having a say." Normally I'd say "that sounds like something you fix by having people talk to each other," because I'm a very wise human being, but there are some players who genuinely have a hard time speaking up about things they don't enjoy or in some other way ruin their fun, especially if it invites even the mildest of social conflicts with another player or the GM.
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Oct 17, 2022 10:30
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I read it as "It's on the GM to make sure you don't use Squire to the Goblin Queen for literally everything" but it's also on the system to make that job as easy as possible. If I was making such a system I'd bake the concept of broad and narrow skills into the core game assumptions. Like you get three boxes for your narrow skill and every time you use it you tick a box, and full boxes don't have any mechanical impact but if you're filling the box every game you're strongly encouraged to spend XP to upgrade it to a broad skill.
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Oct 17, 2022 13:47
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That’s very much an attitude difference. Some groups may hate the idea of being able to use Squire To The Goblin Queen to do anything and dominate the table. Some groups may be fine with using it to do anything provided it changes the fiction by being done in a sufficiently squire-to-the-goblin-queenish kind of way, and resolve table domination socially.
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Oct 17, 2022 14:30
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I posted this question in the Minis painting thread as that seemed the most "minis game agnostic" thread I could find but I'll post it here too: Does anyone know of a Miniatures game that doesn't begin with both players deploying their whole army? Or a game where you don't know what your enemy's roster is?
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Oct 17, 2022 16:25
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Sab669 posted:I posted this question in the Minis painting thread as that seemed the most "minis game agnostic" thread I could find but I'll post it here too: Isn’t that how Infinity does it? I’m sure someone will correct me soon.
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Oct 17, 2022 16:31
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Splicer posted:I read it as "It's on the GM to make sure you don't use Squire to the Goblin Queen for literally everything" but it's also on the system to make that job as easy as possible. I have no idea how this would work psychologically but what I often end up doing in my own game spaces is add OOC or side-channelled suggestions to people on how to utilize their own skills and roles as far as I'm aware of them. So if I was the Squire to the Goblin Queen I might murmur to Enigmatic Robot, "you know, I bet your invincible orokin body could just walk into that burning farmhouse and find that kid."
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Oct 17, 2022 16:44
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Sab669 posted:I posted this question in the Minis painting thread as that seemed the most "minis game agnostic" thread I could find but I'll post it here too: Conquest: Last Argument of Kings doesn't begin with deploying your whole army. Regiments arrive to the table based on a dice roll and their weight class, and walk in off your edge or on the sides behind your forward units, and also alternates unit activations between players. Round 1: Lights arrive on a 4 or under. Round 2: Lights 4 or under, Medium on 1-2 Round 3: Lights Automatic, Medium 4 or under, Heavy 1-2. And so on until round 5 guarantees every remaining unit.
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Oct 17, 2022 17:00
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CitizenKeen posted:I really like backgrounds as skills in systems where there's a cost to failure - systems with "success at a cost" mechanics and so forth. In 13th Age's defense, as one of the earlier games in the modern fail-forward trend, I do like the minor touch of being able to choose to have a skill like A Friend In Every Port low so things inevitably get really complicated when I try to use it. If they leaned into it intentionally and just made a chart for how complicated things are probably going to get if you rely on a background with whatever value, I'd honestly be into it. (But it's still a 2013 d20 game at heart, so I get the point. There's a lot of room for improvement, and I wish I could trust the new edition to take advantage of that.)
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Oct 17, 2022 17:05
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ngl all the issues people are having with invoking your backstory seem like issues that exist only on forums where people talk about theoretical weird tables. im the failed knight im gonna impose myself between the ruffians and those travelers. im the princess without a kingdom lemme navigate this complex social situation or know how to hide a knife on a fancy gown to this dicey political get together. easy
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Oct 17, 2022 17:15
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if people do it in a weird metagamey way or a way that stretches the fiction you just say "ehhh nah not buyin' it" and the problem is solved
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Oct 17, 2022 17:16
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Farg posted:ngl all the issues people are having with invoking your backstory seem like issues that exist only on forums where people talk about theoretical weird tables. im the failed knight im gonna impose myself between the ruffians and those travelers. im the princess without a kingdom lemme navigate this complex social situation or know how to hide a knife on a fancy gown to this dicey political get together. easy I mean, I'm running Eyes of the Stone Thief for four clever players who are mature and communicative, and 13th Age's backgrounds strain under the weight. Like, casually, here's a shoot from the hip list about "princess without a kingdom" and the 5E skill list, and I've been considering this for all of five minutes.
It's trivial to do this with the word "princess" without even doing "without a kingdom", unless failure creates a certain kind of complication. If your failures are flavored by your chosen background, then it's great. Otherwise, as a GM, it can be tough. 13th Age gives you 8 points to spread, and a 5/3 where 5 covers almost everything and the 3 covers the two or three things it doesn't is an easy task (e.g., Princess Without a Kingdom and Druid Acolyte cover the entire 5th Edition skill system). Lurks With Wolves posted:In 13th Age's defense, as one of the earlier games in the modern fail-forward trend, I do like the minor touch of being able to choose to have a skill like A Friend In Every Port low so things inevitably get really complicated when I try to use it. If they leaned into it intentionally and just made a chart for how complicated things are probably going to get if you rely on a background with whatever value, I'd honestly be into it. Yeah, it's there, but I agree - I wish 13th Age did more to mechanically support fail forward. I also echo my lack of confidence in the revision.
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Oct 17, 2022 17:31
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Xiahou Dun posted:Isn’t that how Infinity does it? I’m sure someone will correct me soon. Sort of. CLOAK was already mentioned which is closer but I figure I may as well talk a little about how this applies to Infinity. In Infinity, you do start deploying (functionally) your entire army on the board. The trick about this is that due to the way that the action economy of infinity works and the relative lethality of weapons, deployment is a very involved process. Just dropping your entire army down in a fairly standard formation is a good way to "lose the game during deployment." So deploying units in Infinity is often describe as half the battle, and takes up a lot of time to the point where it is functionally just gameplay in and of itself. However, there are a lot of ways to gently caress with your opponent's ability to understand what you actually deployed. There's a number of rules that enable this (the main one is Camouflage, but I'll just note that aerial deployment, holomask, decoy, holoprojector, impersonator (lmao sure) and hidden deployment all provide additional methods). A unit that has camouflage is deployed not as a model but as a camo marker. When you finish deployment, all the models on the board are public information (with the exception of whether or not the unit is a lieutenant and some of the fuckery with aforementioned skills); camo markers are not models. So if you put down your standard 15 models you're supposed to hand your opponent a 'courtesy list' that has all 15 models, including their stats and equipment. If one of those units is deployed camouflaged, it just simply will not be on the courtesy list, so you just hand over a list of 14 units. I think all armies have some access or another to camo tokens, but some armies have a lot of access and can hand over a courtesy list that is just blank, or more amusing 15 of a unit that is supposed to be unique. Basically Infinity does do the 'deploy your army then start play,' but there's a lot of texture to how you deploy units. As a further note the kind of thing CLAOK does is more common in historical games, and I may as well just refer to the only real source I have on the topic, this goonhammer article: https://www.goonhammer.com/goonhammer-historicals-deployment-roundtable/
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Oct 17, 2022 17:38
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CitizenKeen posted:I mean, I'm running Eyes of the Stone Thief for four clever players who are mature and communicative, and 13th Age's backgrounds strain under the weight. All those things are interesting bits of backstory that can be built upon by the player (with a little nudge to get more specific) and the rest of the table. As you said, this stuff works much better in a non-binary resolution system but if binary is what we have to work with then I'll take passing too often + character and world development over the usual D20 thing of too many failures to keep interesting
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Oct 17, 2022 17:43
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Sab669 posted:Does anyone know of a Miniatures game that doesn't begin with both players deploying their whole army? Or a game where you don't know what your enemy's roster is? Quite a few Historicals games require that you keep a good chunk - sometimes half or more - of your army "in reserve"/off the table at the start and move them in over time. Too Fat Lardies' game Chain of Command is quite good at this. It's a WWII skirmish game. None of your army is on the board at the start. You start by playing a sort of mini-game called the "patrol phase" where you move markers onto the map in areas where they're in cover. Pretty soon they come into "contact" with each other. Then the real game starts, and you use those markers as starting points where you can deploy your stuff onto the map one at a time. It's a really good system. Edit: Since my description was terrible, this might help: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiT70m6CJO8 Cessna fucked around with this message at 18:09 on Oct 17, 2022 |
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Oct 17, 2022 18:07
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CitizenKeen posted:I mean, I'm running Eyes of the Stone Thief for four clever players who are mature and communicative, and 13th Age's backgrounds strain under the weight. Well mechanically it's probably not an actual problem to have +5 to whatever you want, the problems I see are: 1. It's certainly not very much like the versions of D&D that 13th age was supposed to be like. 2. It feels unfair if some players have easier to leverage backgrounds than others. 3. It can make characters feel one note if they're going to the same background every time. Any other issues I'm not seeing? e: I guess if you want niche protection, this is not going to do that. DalaranJ fucked around with this message at 18:23 on Oct 17, 2022 |
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Oct 17, 2022 18:19
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CitizenKeen posted:It's trivial to do this with the word "princess" without even doing "without a kingdom", unless failure creates a certain kind of complication. If your failures are flavored by your chosen background, then it's great. That's kind of an interesting idea. You can apply your bonus from "princess without a kingdom", but only if you're doing something where failure would threaten your status as a princess without a kingdom.
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Oct 17, 2022 20:14
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hyphz posted:That's kind of an interesting idea. You can apply your bonus from "princess without a kingdom", but only if you're doing something where failure would threaten your status as a princess without a kingdom. I actually prefer it the other way, where you status as a princess without a kingdom threatens your action. The simplest example is the Cortex games, most of which give each character a Distinction of d8. Which Distinction you roll as a d8 is mechanically irrelevant - they're all a d8. But which one you pick tells the GM "I'm doing this as a [thing]." The player chooses the thing they want to bring to bear on the problem. But since Cortex rolls are rife with complications, if you choose to be a Princess Without a Kingdom, then the complication may be angry peasants from your failed kingdom, or old enemies who now rule your land, or whatever. Whereas if you had chosen to use your Druid Acolyte background, maybe the GM would reveal malevolent arcane magic or angry elemental spirits or whatever. The player gets to say "I don't want to deal with my homeland right now, it's not interesting to me, I'm solving this as an acolyte." It gets even more interesting when those backgrounds are ranked. I could solve this with my +5 Princess, but I know the GM is going to have Baron Badface show up if I botch, so I'll go with my +3 Druid.
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Oct 17, 2022 21:18
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CitizenKeen posted:It's trivial to do this with the word "princess" without even doing "without a kingdom" The way I handled this in an early covid 13th age game is that everything mentioned in the background has to be relevant to the roll to apply the bonus, higher ratings require more adjectives, and reaffirm you only pick one relevant background. So a background like princess I'd only let you put one point in because it's "generic." Princess without a kingdom could take three points. Want the five pointer? secret werewolf princess without a kingdom +5, but you've got to sell me on all of "secret werewolf," "princess," "lost your kingdom" are relevant to the same check. You could take all of princess: 1, lost your kingdom: 1, and werewolf: 1 but then you're capped at +1 on a roll.
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Oct 17, 2022 21:26
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hyphz posted:That's kind of an interesting idea. You can apply your bonus from "princess without a kingdom", but only if you're doing something where failure would threaten your status as a princess without a kingdom. Rolling a one and someone immediately giving you a kingdom would be pretty funny, ngl
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Oct 17, 2022 22:02
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Typical railroading GMs, always trying to give me the land of my birthright
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Oct 17, 2022 22:18
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Nessus posted:Alternatively you could have it be that you have your big and your little skills, which give a big and a little bonus. You can always use the little skills for a little bonus. Using your big skill puts a check by it. You have to fulfill some conditions to erase that check, which will always include "everyone at the table has a check" or "there is a meaningful narrative interval (camp for the night, journey to Rivendell, montage on motorcycles to the next town)" hyphz posted:That’s very much an attitude difference. The problem with the ranked freeform approach is if you have +1s, +3s, and +5s, you're incentivised to always push for the +5s. So now the person who put Squire To The Goblin Queen at +5 and hobbyist fisher at +1 is at a significant mechanical advantage to the person who put basketweaving at +5 and Is Literally Superman at +1. So what I was thinking is that you build this into the system. Your +1's can be something widely applicable that you're going to use pretty much all the time, while a +5 needs to be something very narrow that comes up infrequently. The box ticking is less a hard limit and more a formalised system for keeping track of what is actually proving frequently useful and/or useless; if you've managed to shoehorn "ropesmith" into every scene so far then that tells us it should maybe be switched to a foundational skill, while seeing that you've pretty much never used your existing core concept "Greatest Sheep Farmer In Christendom" means we should switch that to the +5 "niche skill" category so it's super cool when you actually do get to use it.
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Oct 17, 2022 22:19
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Countblanc posted:Typical railroading GMs, always trying to give me the land of my birthright
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Oct 17, 2022 22:20
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That's just girl carrot, from discworld.
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Oct 17, 2022 22:30
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Splicer posted:They never said it was your original kingdom. Well done you're now Princess of the Ants. time to become an antagonist then, I guess
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Oct 17, 2022 22:36
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Point me elsewhere if this is the wrong place, I didn't think this was really code-ish enough for the Game Dev Megathread in TCoC but: is there a particular software you would use to start the process of brainstorming an idea for something like a card game? Something that would let me like, define the contents of a deck, deal some cards out on a table to at least start thinking about what the actual rules and procedures would be whether or not I could fully implement it in that software. I'm probably competent enough at coding to put together a rough draft once I work out some gameplay but I'm not going to get anywhere starting at a blank page in PyCharm. Haven't used any of the software people use to play tabletop stuff online so I wasn't sure if one of those would be flexible enough for this purpose and would let me work out ideas by myself.
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Oct 17, 2022 23:07
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KICK BAMA KICK posted:Point me elsewhere if this is the wrong place, I didn't think this was really code-ish enough for the Game Dev Megathread in TCoC but: is there a particular software you would use to start the process of brainstorming an idea for something like a card game? Something that would let me like, define the contents of a deck, deal some cards out on a table to at least start thinking about what the actual rules and procedures would be whether or not I could fully implement it in that software. ...I'll be honest I'm very dumb so I'd use TTS, which is honestly just a harder version of using a stack of index cards. Farg posted:ngl all the issues people are having with invoking your backstory seem like issues that exist only on forums where people talk about theoretical weird tables. im the failed knight im gonna impose myself between the ruffians and those travelers. im the princess without a kingdom lemme navigate this complex social situation or know how to hide a knife on a fancy gown to this dicey political get together. easy There's a reason I'm trying to draw back and use examples from games I've actually played and know the rules to. The discussion seems to have started from a place of what are basically FATE aspects and I've kind of stretched into talking about how these concepts for using a character whose concept is to some extent "loser" have been not just viable but particularly good PCs for me in games I've played. We have very explicit, concrete examples of games supporting this as a type of PC so the question of it is a problem at a higher level of abstraction to me seems several steps behind observed reality, like asking if heavier than air flight is even possible in a world with common commercial flight.
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Oct 17, 2022 23:23
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The thing with 13th age backgrounds is that having them be used for everything is kinda the point. It’s not really a game with much emphasis on non combat being a source if frequent failure, and it means there’s a huge amount of character work going. Every rolls a good chance to flex your character’s identity and past. Plus I think the impact of its overstated, you’re still bound by stats and you’re also getting the level bonus.
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Oct 18, 2022 03:15
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KICK BAMA KICK posted:Point me elsewhere if this is the wrong place, I didn't think this was really code-ish enough for the Game Dev Megathread in TCoC but: is there a particular software you would use to start the process of brainstorming an idea for something like a card game? Something that would let me like, define the contents of a deck, deal some cards out on a table to at least start thinking about what the actual rules and procedures would be whether or not I could fully implement it in that software. If you're using pure playing cards, https://playingcards.io/ is an option, but for anything more complex, tabletop simulator (more established, larger modding community, kinda clunky to get started with) and/or tabletop playground (newer, editing objects is a lot easier once they've been made, less taxing on the ol' cpu) are probably good options for actually playing. For designing cards, it's super fast to whack things together with http://www.nandeck.com/, though the interface is a little... windows 95? I feel like it might be worth making an effortpost about virtual playtesting/designing to help folks getting started, because with modern virtual tools, you can iterate pretty quickly and get together playtesters, compared to having to make pile after pile of index cards to test with like I had to back in the dark ages.
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Oct 18, 2022 04:39
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Wrestlepig posted:The thing with 13th age backgrounds is that having them be used for everything is kinda the point. It’s not really a game with much emphasis on non combat being a source if frequent failure, and it means there’s a huge amount of character work going. Every rolls a good chance to flex your character’s identity and past. Plus I think the impact of its overstated, you’re still bound by stats and you’re also getting the level bonus. 13th Age backgrounds are fixed (others have said variations of this already in the thread) by making them identical to Facts from WWN or Godbound: you pick three of them, and they all give you a +4. That turns "use your best background for everything" into "use your most applicable background at the time", and the only time a background doesn't apply is if you give your justification and the table goes "boo" or seems very skeptical.
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Oct 18, 2022 05:54
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Yeah, I definitely prefer "come up with some Things About You and they all get the same bonus" systems vs allocating points, which falls into the chargen trap of "you can make a specialist or a generalist, but difficulties are set for specialists, so generalists can't succeed at much / you always need to shoehorn your best skill into the narrative somehow."
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Oct 18, 2022 06:04
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Every good idea in 13th Age comes with some crappy rider that it's hard not to attribute to Jonathan Tweet given the circumstances. The key to good 13th Age games is to find those vestigial Tweets and cut them away.
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Oct 18, 2022 20:49
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Tarnop posted:Every good idea in 13th Age comes with some crappy rider that it's hard not to attribute to Jonathan Tweet given the circumstances. The key to good 13th Age games is to find those vestigial Tweets and cut them away. Considering Heinsoo threw a fit and refused to work on a 13th Age 2e unless Pelgrane brought Tweet back for it, I don't think they can be solely attributed to Tweet.
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Oct 18, 2022 21:17
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Lemon-Lime posted:Considering Heinsoo threw a fit and refused to work on a 13th Age 2e unless Pelgrane brought Tweet back for it, I don't think they can be solely attributed to Tweet. Seems to me like Pelgrane should toss him out too and just do it without either of them
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Oct 18, 2022 22:11
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Lemon-Lime posted:Considering Heinsoo threw a fit and refused to work on a 13th Age 2e unless Pelgrane brought Tweet back for it, I don't think they can be solely attributed to Tweet. Yeah, fair enough, it's remnants of groggy design no matter which of them came up with it
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Oct 18, 2022 23:22
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Lemon-Lime posted:Considering Heinsoo threw a fit and refused to work on a 13th Age 2e unless Pelgrane brought Tweet back for it, I don't think they can be solely attributed to Tweet. Is this known, or do we still have only the vague er, tweets from back in August?
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Oct 19, 2022 21:06
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Maxwell Lord posted:Is this known, or do we still have only the vague er, tweets from back in August? “Threw a fit” is editorializing, but: http://robheinsoo.blogspot.com/2022/08/13th-age-2e-same-core-team.html Pelgrane can’t publish a new edition without Rob, since Fire Opal Games owns the game. I am not buying the new edition, not because I think it will suck but because I get annoyed whenever JoT decides that his wisdom is so special he needs to play Socratic games and give platforms to assholes and so on. I have never believed the common wisdom that all the quality is from Rob and all the crap is from JoT. I love Rob’s design sense but he is a really gonzo designer and will tend to ratchet it up to 11 at every opportunity. Great for Feng Shui, less great for a d20 game that wants to appeal widely. JoT is pretty stolid as a designer. They probably do complement each other well. On the other hand Rob could find another prosaic person to work with. And Pelgrane has the right to decide that they’d rather focus on Swords of the Serpentine, although I dunno what the sales numbers are. Or in short: I understand the motivations behind the decisions even if I think they’re bad choices.
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Oct 19, 2022 22:53
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Thanlis posted:I have never believed the common wisdom that all the quality is from Rob and all the crap is from JoT. I think that just comes from all the conversational asides in the book about how they each run their respective games of 13A, and Tweet's sound like miserable grog poo poo
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Oct 19, 2022 23:04
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Yeah, isn't Tweet the one who's continually making the "make the players SUFFER" margin comments? They feel really weird and off-putting in a game that is otherwise "PCs-as-heroic-protagonists"-flavored (the OUT, the Icon connections), versus "PCs as disposable adventuregoons" tone I associate with that sort of attitude.
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Oct 19, 2022 23:10
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