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bbcisdabomb posted:I've played Exalted, can confirm. I still think of the two-year Exalted game I was in back in college, before smartphones, where one player ended up writing a graphing calculator program to do his combat turns because his standard combat array was five 15d10 attacks without adding more Charms in
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Oct 3, 2023 21:46
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Impermanent posted:the spellbound kingdoms expansion will come out one day! I feel it in my bones. it's not gonna do me like will hindmarch Same, but Spellbound Fantasy Craft. I know it's coming. One day it'll be here. One day. 
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Oct 4, 2023 00:02
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NachtSieger posted:Same, but Spellbound Fantasy Craft. I know it's coming. One day it'll be here. Hey, Far West came out. So, there is always a chance. Does suck arguably the best successor to 3.5 is a footnote in history.
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Oct 4, 2023 01:50
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We have some spooky themed threads in TG, like arkham horror and world of darkness: there's a halloween spooky forum this month, and Pragmatica says we can temporarily move threads there if we want! So I'll check in a handful of threads that seem obvious, but if anyone would like their thread to go on a scary trip to the halloween land, let mods know and we can do it no problem. 
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Oct 4, 2023 06:00
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So I have a first in my relatively inexperienced ttrpg career. I'm playing pathfinder 1e in a custom campaign where all the PCs got mythic buffs at level 6. They're focused around the 7 deadly sins, I have gluttony. Out of all the players I chose to not completely absorb the macguffins that empowers us, but instead have an item of power in the form of a shard that will empower anyone who takes it from my possession. The curse of gluttony for housing it in my body was too burdensome, and as a curious alchemist I also wanted to research this thing. Well, now comes time for me to create a stronghold for myself and all the glutton followers this thing is drawing to my side. The plus side of having it is I can empower myself and my organization if I house it somewhere in our base of operations. I have several BBEG npcs in the city our party inhabits and one particular PC who despite being the second most moral character after myself (formerly evil, but alignment shifted to good thanks to the DECK). I align with this PC on many things and they make sure not to cross the line on some moral issues, but they and the DM do like to goad my OOC paranoia over this shard. I know the DM can make up any scenario for my stuff getting nabbed, but I'd like to also guard against this skilled powergamer/not the DM but experienced DM sorcerer diplomancer. Anyone have some tricks to hide against mid level casters? Hopefully it's all just a tease, but I'll try to be ready regardless. Here's my current draft for my stronghold I'll send to the DM: Lair goals: House and train those who appreciate consumption of all manner of things. Be able to provide charity to those who hunger and need respite. May need a semi-militaristic order to accomplish charity. WORK HARD AND PLAY HARD. Lair: Noble Villa 8920 - Courtyard (-180) + Alchemy Lab (+390) = 9130 Alchemy lab is situated next to the kitchen for easy venting into lead pipe vents, the fume hood in the alchemy lab is wide enough for a tiny creature to climb up if the cover is removed. There is a diversion of the alchemy lab pipe that leads to the secret chamber (lined with lead) I explain to builders that arrests vapors as per the latest alchemy advances. I intend to house the shard and hide the security belt here as well. I hope to get a wand of shrink item too to quickly stock my belt when the need arises. The villa will have a dumbwaiter to each bedroom and the common lodging, the master bedroom’s dumbwaiter will have a door in its shaft between a floor that leads to lead lined chamber probably housing a trap or useful items. Still thinking on that one.The lodging dumbwaiter will have a secret escape into the undercity accessible to those with a key that will grant access to a short, locked shaft that drops into the undercity. Granary 1200 + Brewery 1450 Guildhall 2660 Hospital 2080 Stockyard 1700 Tavern 910 Black Market 2200 Feast Hall??? Common Room x 2, Kitchen x 2 20420 Rooms of Interest: Greenhouse, Guard Post, ??? If character research on the shard means I can separate parts from it and retain its magical aura in its fragments I'll pulverize the split pieces and have the powder baked into many of the bricks that form the villa. I'll gather more powder as the shard regenerates over time. As for the vent stuff, my PC has a valet tumor familiar than can climb into it, and my PC also is skilled in climbing and regularly shrinks to tiny. Lamebot fucked around with this message at 10:13 on Oct 4, 2023 |
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Oct 4, 2023 10:03
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Covok posted:Hey, Far West came out. So, there is always a chance.
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Oct 4, 2023 14:49
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The dnd reddit really doesn't like it when you say that the gm may want to compromise their campaign vision in the slightest for their players I don't get being that precious with it. Ominous Jazz fucked around with this message at 16:55 on Oct 4, 2023 |
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Oct 4, 2023 16:46
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Ominous Jazz posted:The dnd reddit really doesn't like it when you say that the gm may want to compromise their campaign vision in the slightest for their players I find a pretty big culture mismatch between myself and any of the various TTRPG reddits I've browsed. There seem to be a lot of "things everyone knows are true about RPGs" that I think are actually pretty bullshit.
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Oct 4, 2023 19:44
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Ominous Jazz posted:The dnd reddit really doesn't like it when you say that the gm may want to compromise their campaign vision in the slightest for their players The subreddit also goes on and on about "railroading" as in the DM having an actual plot he wants the characters to traverse. Different threads on different days of the week have different tones. A salad bowl of CR podcast watchers and grognards.
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Oct 4, 2023 19:47
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ninjoatse.cx posted:The subreddit also goes on and on about "railroading" as in the DM having an actual plot he wants the characters to traverse. Different threads on different days of the week have different tones. A salad bowl of CR podcast watchers and grognards. Good for the DMs that have an actual narrative in mind. Every sandbox RPG campaign I've participated in has been pretty boring in comparison to the ones where the GM has an idea of where things should go.
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Oct 4, 2023 19:58
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Jimbozig posted:There seem to be a lot of "things everyone knows are true about RPGs" that I think are actually pretty bullshit. One of the first things I learned in high school science class was that things that "everyone" knows are called common knowledge and are almost always wrong. Turns out to be the same for RPGs.
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Oct 4, 2023 20:04
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Whirling posted:Good for the DMs that have an actual narrative in mind. Every sandbox RPG campaign I've participated in has been pretty boring in comparison to the ones where the GM has an idea of where things should go. So what I've been having a lot of fun with lately is systems that split the difference between authored and improvised. I have my differences with technoir's system but it's plot map is brilliant, and I've been adapting it to my own games. With a system like this, you as the GM do not have to pre-plan any plot or mystery but neither do you need to fully improvise one. You get to have the feeling of finding out along with your players, but because you are generating the clues on the plot map before your players are investigating them, you are always one or two steps ahead so things never feel aimless. Done well, the results in hindsight will sound no different than the description of any pre-planned mystery scenario. There will be a few hanging threads that never got tied into the mystery. That's okay because in any investigative RPG, sometimes the players will manage to make a leap that gets them to the answer without having to follow up on every single clue. In my current campaign, in session one I was completely unsure as to whether the clues would ever come together, since they seemed so scattershot as I generated them. Through session two, I was able to find some interesting connections by generating yet more clues and interpreting them in the contacts of the existing ones. I was able to use the connections I had made to plan out session 3, which ran into session 4 because of misadventure, but still was unsure of how everything fit together until the very end of that session. In session 5, the players rolled bad a few times and ended up bouncing around not quite getting what they wanted, but the clues I generated were enough to make the final pieces of the puzzle fall into place. So session 6 was just a matter of responding to the players exactly as I would if I had planned the whole thing the start, and they figured out the mystery. From the players' perspective, they don't have to suffer through the primary weakness of purely improvised mysteries, which is that the correct answer always ends up being wherever they look (which can feel unsatisfying). In this system - just as in a pre-planned mystery - wherever they look they will find clues but the clues that are there to be found were already part of the mystery. A character can't become a suspect just by virtue of speaking to the players: their number must come up on the dice for the clues to point to them. Robin laws lately has been talking about the double structure of mystery games where you have the events that the players are experiencing as one timeline and the events that the players are investigating as a different earlier timeline. In a sense, these methods I'm using allow me to fully improvise the timeline that the players are experiencing while always being ahead enough on the timeline of the mystery itself that I can give them meaningful clues and useful leads. Robin talks about other campaign structures like dungeons or chain-of-fights. I know there are plenty of dungeon-generation procedures out there. I'm not sure what you would need to generate a chain-of-fights beyond maybe some basic prompts - that structure seems super friendly to improvisation. Jimbozig fucked around with this message at 23:06 on Oct 4, 2023 |
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Oct 4, 2023 21:43
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I like to have at least a thought of where things will end up and what events are going to happen in the future, but I keep things loose so I don't get too caught off guard when a player decides to throw me a curveball.
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Oct 4, 2023 22:27
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I think even a sandbox needs a starting pitch to get going. "Let's go explore the wilderness! Specifically that keep over there that people hear weird sounds coming out of at night."
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Oct 5, 2023 00:49
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On this topic, I've found that it's good for me to have an outline of what the world is doing, which gives the players the choice of what they want to interact with. I really like using a table from the old Companion DM's book from BECMI D&D, where it gives different percentile chances for various events, like fires, earthquakes, food shortages, etc. Where I differ is that the chart says to generate those events over the course of a year, where I do it quarterly, and see what comes up. This gives me a bare bones framework to start with, gives a ton of plot hooks, and leaves enough open to figure out what I can dangle in front of the players, and what would end up happening if they left everything alone.
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Oct 5, 2023 01:53
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Whirling posted:Good for the DMs that have an actual narrative in mind. Every sandbox RPG campaign I've participated in has been pretty boring in comparison to the ones where the GM has an idea of where things should go. Capfalcon posted:I think even a sandbox needs a starting pitch to get going. "Let's go explore the wilderness! Specifically that keep over there that people hear weird sounds coming out of at night." Most of the sandboxy type campaigns I've been in start with or turn into base building. here's a town/kingdom with colorful NPCs, stuff arises from that. After the first few, I have no compulsion to ever play them again.
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Oct 5, 2023 03:03
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ninjoatse.cx posted:The subreddit also goes on and on about "railroading" as in the DM having an actual plot he wants the characters to traverse. Different threads on different days of the week have different tones. A salad bowl of CR podcast watchers and grognards. Reddit is a shockingly good place to go if you want to learn about like, glassblowing, or antique HVAC systems, and is completely worthless for games.
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Oct 5, 2023 04:26
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Aniodia posted:On this topic, I've found that it's good for me to have an outline of what the world is doing, which gives the players the choice of what they want to interact with. I really like using a table from the old Companion DM's book from BECMI D&D, where it gives different percentile chances for various events, like fires, earthquakes, food shortages, etc. Where I differ is that the chart says to generate those events over the course of a year, where I do it quarterly, and see what comes up. This gives me a bare bones framework to start with, gives a ton of plot hooks, and leaves enough open to figure out what I can dangle in front of the players, and what would end up happening if they left everything alone. Would this contain the table from the old Companion DM book you are talking about? https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/17167/DD-Master-Set-BECMI-ed-Basic On my table, I have been reading up on the naval wargame Fighting Sail - Fleet Actions 1775 - 1815 published by Osprey and written by Ryan Miller. I was looking for an Age of Sail Napoleonic era wargame because the initial ship-to-ship combat actions I tested out with my group were considered too simple and not fun enough. I chose Fighting Sail after reading this review from wargame designer Blood and Spectacles. https://bloodandspectacles.blogspot.com/2016/12/review-fighting-sail-osprey-wargame.html What really confirmed my purchase was finding the youtube channel the Joy of Wargames and their about 30 minute review. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUnRK-90pEk Fighting Sail is more of a fleet combat game, with 6 or more ships to a side. However there is a "Frigate Duel Minigame" which I am probably going to rely heavily on and maybe mod. For some reason Fighting Sail is cheaper at WargameVault than Osprey's website so save a few bucks by going there if you are interested. https://www.wargamevault.com/product/151677/Fighting-Sail--Fleet-Actions-1775--1815
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Oct 5, 2023 05:13
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Tulip posted:Reddit is a shockingly good place to go if you want to learn about like, glassblowing, or antique HVAC systems, and is completely worthless for games. AskHistorians is SUCH a good subreddit thanks to its absolutely ruthless moderation and its huge pool of professionals. It's amazing how the gaming subreddits are truly the worst.
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Oct 5, 2023 05:15
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I remember the one campaign I ran with people here it started as a sort of sandbox in a wild west world using modules (pulled from Fantasy flight's Spellslinger, D20 modern wild west and deadlands and ended with the parry fighting a crimson robed cult (from d20 modern) who wanted to create a robot army powered by convicts souls and magic rocks called "ghost rock" (taken from a deadlands adventure) and culminated in aa fight with a giant mecha piloted by the cult leader. I suspect a lot of campagins (perticularly with less experienced GMs like me) do that, start more aimless with one shots until they find their bearings and come up with a plot, using elements of the one shots. I was fortunitely to have players who were able to find new directions to go and roll with the punches and do "yes and" when I didn't have plans, and come up with plans of actions that would prompt new stuff, and also when not doing stuff that helped the plot along were very funny doing it.
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Oct 5, 2023 05:28
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Azran posted:AskHistorians is SUCH a good subreddit thanks to its absolutely ruthless moderation and its huge pool of professionals. It's amazing how the gaming subreddits are truly the worst. I've never quite figured out a unifying theory of this. Like the two topics that reddit is the least trustworthy on are "dating" and "gaming," and I think its cuz reddit works for niche hobbies and if its something not niche then the selection process gets dominated by people who confirm the most asinine, poorly-thought out "common sense" arguments. AH is in a league of its own though. Absolutely incredible, a golden place on the internet.
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Oct 5, 2023 05:55
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The flipside is you can ask for video game advice literally anywhere on the internet and probably get better advice from people you at least vaguely know than randoms on the biggest shitpits on the internet.
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Oct 5, 2023 06:29
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Azran posted:AskHistorians is SUCH a good subreddit thanks to its absolutely ruthless moderation and its huge pool of professionals. It's amazing how the gaming subreddits are truly the worst. I wonder if there's any academic research on the utility of moderation. I think we all know strong moderation is good moderation (particularly those of us who are on SA) but it's mostly anecdotal. Internet communities generally have existed long enough that we must have some studies on it by now.
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Oct 5, 2023 10:58
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Well, there was that time Lowtax was invited to speak at the University of Illinois...
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Oct 5, 2023 15:42
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Having just last night played a dreadful sandbox one shot, I can safely say that these are fatal errors in sandbox design: * too big. You can’t make a world a sandbox because any action taken has no meaningful effect on the sandbox as a whole. Unless an “action” is a complete adventure but then it’s not a sandbox game but an adventure series with sandbox framing. * made of ants, not sand. It feels alive! It feels so alive that anything you do immediately undoes itself or changes and everything is unpredictable so you can’t or build anything! * only one target. Build anything you like but all that matters is the one tower in the middle. Guess what your game is now actually about.
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Oct 5, 2023 15:46
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I hate it when the setting feels like it's alive.
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Oct 5, 2023 15:47
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Helical Nightmares posted:Would this contain the table from the old Companion DM book you are talking about? https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/17167/DD-Master-Set-BECMI-ed-Basic Close, but you're looking at the Master set (or the M in BECMI), where you want the Companion Set (the C), the set before it. https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/17165/d-d-companion-set-becmi-ed-basic Specifically, you're looking at page 10, where there's actually two charts of "dominion events", separated into natural and unnatural events. Now, it's definitely geared towards the stereotypical D&D-style high fantasy dungeon crawl, and so there's mentions of outbreaks of lycanthropy, or other magical happenings, but the majority of the events are fairly generic. With a little effort, you could probably come up with other events that would fit for lower fantasy, or even other genres, but it's definitely a decent starting point.
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Oct 5, 2023 15:50
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Halloween Jack posted:I hate it when the setting feels like it's alive. It’s striking the balance between enough change and surprise to feel alive, and having so much that there’s no way to plan the results of actions.
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Oct 5, 2023 17:07
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Magnetic North posted:I wonder if there's any academic research on the utility of moderation. I think we all know strong moderation is good moderation (particularly those of us who are on SA) but it's mostly anecdotal. Internet communities generally have existed long enough that we must have some studies on it by now. Presumably there is. My education is a little old and I was never in that particular field (it would probably be digital anthropology?). There is a lot of research on community policing in general, but the bulk of what I've encountered has been on like, actual terrifying cults, so the comparison between a policed community and an unpoliced community is like...almost all of us live in an unpoliced community and e.g. Scientology is a policed community. We're talking about a literature where The People's Temple practically counts as 'mild,' so the difference in moderation between SA and 4chan is basically too small to measure. I do know what the (much older) research on strictness of church rules was like, e.g. church one expects a lot from its members and church two just is happy when people show up, and the answer was that in terms of total attendance, the effect was a wash. There's a weird effect where imposing obligations on people causes them to become more invested (like when I've been in volunteer orgs, it was pretty necessary to not just tell people they 'can' do things but to go 'oh man we really need some canvassers this sunday and you'd be a huge help'). How this would apply to online moderation is that there's no 'ideal' strictness of moderation, just kind of random chaos. The particular total measure here being 'human-hours of attendance' - more demanding places have fewer total people but those people have much better attendance and spend much more time. And...that might actually be more or less accurate. The biggest online communities are for-profit corporations, and moderation is an expense for them and thus should be minimized, hence why they generally all only moderate as much as they have to under pressure from those holding the purse strings (especially payment processors) or actual literal legal requirements. All else is equal other than the cost of moderation, so moderation is generally minimized to cut costs. Of course that's really just looking at attendance/size/useage, rather than more qualitative effects. A thing that I've gotten really used to anecdotally is that low-moderation environments become very gendered environments, because the bare minimum of slapping guys down for being creepy towards women already puts you into at least a medium level of moderation. There's almost certainly plenty of other qualitative effects that I'd be interested in seeing (one that I'd be very interested in is the role of moderation in concentration of power - I know people have studied wikipedia moderation quite a bit and I'd be interested to see what the actual results are). e: lol I got so up my own rear end I forgot I was in TG chat. Anyway, I think that all of this is interesting and valuable for anybody thinking about how to GM for situations other than "to a group of already established friends" and as an inveterate Baker fanboy I think would genuinely be useful to include in GMing advice and even in the GMing chapter of different games.
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Oct 5, 2023 18:25
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Tulip posted:A thing that I've gotten really used to anecdotally is that low-moderation environments become very gendered environments, because the bare minimum of slapping guys down for being creepy towards women already puts you into at least a medium level of moderation. And the original version of the “tyranny of structurelessness” article was about all-female groups who assumed they would not require moderation without the risk of men being creepy, and ran into the other difficulties with that.
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Oct 5, 2023 19:20
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Magnetic North posted:I wonder if there's any academic research on the utility of moderation. I think we all know strong moderation is good moderation (particularly those of us who are on SA) but it's mostly anecdotal. Internet communities generally have existed long enough that we must have some studies on it by now. Lots. Right now a lot of it is framed around disinformation for obvious reasons. Kate Starbird is doing really interesting work here, as is Renee DiResta and the other capable people at the Stanford Internet Observatory. “academic research moderation social media” was a pretty useful set of search terms for me just now, too.
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Oct 5, 2023 19:49
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Joke probes aside I barely had to use my IK powers on ADTRW and the place has been chugging nicely and has as much, if not more active users as here... maybe just try having the right vibes or something.
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Oct 7, 2023 01:00
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The Tao Te Ching posted:When the Master governs, the people
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Oct 7, 2023 01:17
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As good a place as any to drop a Traveller-themed Kickstarter. Dice-based exploration game, rules and art complete: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1995433411/to-honor-grandfather
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Oct 7, 2023 05:19
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mllaneza posted:As good a place as any to drop a Traveller-themed Kickstarter. Dice-based exploration game, rules and art complete: Oh cool, a Droyne game? Backing this.
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Oct 7, 2023 11:24
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Ominous Jazz posted:The dnd reddit really doesn't like it when you say that the gm may want to compromise their campaign vision in the slightest for their players realistically it is a balancing act. The GM is a player and should be able to have fun to. They also need to manage player expectations and power levels. But at the same time, players always have a right to not play the game and have completely valid complaints about GMs who have unreasonable restrictions. If a GM wants to run a low fantasy game with no wizards or Elves. That is fine. But if they do bait and switches or poorly thought out house rules that consistently screw over one player, that is a place where the gm should try to compromise their vision.
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Oct 8, 2023 03:27
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Zoeb posted:realistically it is a balancing act. The GM is a player and should be able to have fun to. They also need to manage player expectations and power levels. The original context was really weird because it was a dispute in session zero, where the player said that they came from a magical fearing people in the north west but the dm told them no the people in the north west LOVED magic and that they were wrong
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Oct 8, 2023 19:16
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Ominous Jazz posted:The original context was really weird because it was a dispute in session zero, where the player said that they came from a magical fearing people in the north west but the dm told them no the people in the north west LOVED magic and that they were wrong If who lives in the north west has absolutely no bearing on the campaign then yeah sure there's a magic hating people in the north west w/e.
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Oct 8, 2023 23:14
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Probably living right next door to the magic-lovers and having what they consider some pretty good reasons for hating magic, at that. Bam, more setting detail and a conflict that seeds adventures if you ever go there.
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Oct 8, 2023 23:26
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Or, there's a magical loving people in the North but you come from the only village that fears and shuns it. That's just loving plot hook city.
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Oct 8, 2023 23:27
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