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Tuxedo Catfish posted:and it makes sense because for Lovecraft, civilization -- doomed though it may be -- is the antithesis of everything the horrors represent And by doomed Lovecraft meant "the Italians moving in."
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Nov 29, 2023 16:59
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Fuego Fish posted:This is from literally months ago, but in my defence I've had a lot of poo poo going on and checking SA forum threads I'm already a hundred pages behind on is way, way down the list of priorities for me. Anyway, those drawings were by KC Green but they weren't for the D&D Next playtest, they were for my much earlier homebrew project called "Rats in the Basement" (wherein you play rats in a basement) and he drew 'em as a small favour to me. He's a real cool guy. I found them at the time on an old dying laptop and saved them to my new dying laptop so all psychological damage was resolved at time of incident. I was actually able to deduce the old imgur links from the filenames and all. Splicer fucked around with this message at 18:03 on Nov 29, 2023 |
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Nov 29, 2023 17:58
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Traveller posted:If the universe truly is uncaring and cold, then Great Cthulhu isn't really that much more important in the grand scale of things. People die all the time from stupid accidents and infections from bacteria and viruses that literally cannot be seen by the human eye because they're so small, why wouldn't a being that is at the end of the day a priest for the really big cheeses get turbofucked by a sailor and a steamship? Aww gently caress my foot, who let the mice make metal ships while Iw as sleeping? Goddamn I'm late for work. gently caress it, back to bed.
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Nov 29, 2023 19:21
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Look, if I wake up to find that there's a mouse infestation in my apartment and those mice have developed metallurgy, the first thing I'm doing is calling off work
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Nov 29, 2023 23:15
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Splicer posted:Thanks! I could have sworn it came out if the 36d20 rats debacle but that explains why I couldn't find them through search. They probably just got reposted a bunch when it came up. Oh nice! I have always liked seeing your avatar around, gives me a sense of nostalgia.
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Nov 30, 2023 04:47
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So tonight as a between-campaigns palate cleanser, we tried out Monty Python's Co-curricular Mediaeval Reenactment Programme. As far as comedy games go, it was pretty solid. We got through character generation and a short adventure. Pluses - * The GM/HoLE having a persona was very fun. * Alternative Programming is one of my favorite moment-generators in RPGdom. (Basically - you pause the adventure and everyone starts a short improv routine of a completely different show, before returning to the game. We had a fun one with a mafia call-in.) * The mechanics are thankfully light enough to be present but not intrusive. * The random generator tables create suitably Python-esque situations. We had a livestock store where the proprietor kept all the animals in burlap sacks and you needed to pick blindly. * Basically it's good at creating the "sane, serious people trying to make sense of a senseless situation" tone of the show and movies. It's good to set this up for your players too - they don't have to be wacky; the game itself will make it wacky enough for everyone. * It's definitely not a campaign game. Minuses - * So much page flipping. I wished I had my physical copy already. I ended up having four copies of the pdf open at once. I had the adventure, whichever adversary they were facing, my persona, and a random table at one point. * Maybe a few too many skills but I get it. It's for a purpose. * While I found some kind of balance, having a GM character can get weird. Gotta clarify when you are speaking in your HoLE persona vs just doing normal GM stuff. It was a good thing but not for novices. * It's definitely not a campaign game. Overall - we're doing it again next week.
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Nov 30, 2023 06:31
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Antivehicular posted:Look, if I wake up to find that there's a mouse infestation in my apartment and those mice have developed metallurgy, the first thing I'm doing is calling off work quote:I've never seen a Juggalo or heard of this band until I started reading Something Awful. Discovered them was like finding a hidden, secret, timeless treasure.
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Nov 30, 2023 08:46
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Antivehicular posted:Look, if I wake up to find that there's a mouse infestation in my apartment and those mice have developed metallurgy, the first thing I'm doing is calling off work
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Nov 30, 2023 09:56
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Random question: What would stop a Session 0 game like Microscope or Quiet Year from keeping their schtick going throughout an RPG session or campaign? Besides like...One Ring or Double Cross, are their games out there that hand a part of your character to the GM? What about the rest of the players?
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Dec 1, 2023 01:28
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Ghostbusters is a completely plausible Call of Cthulhu campaign. Hell, Cthulhu actually showed up in the Real Ghostbusters cartoon once, though because of some idiot "correcting a typo" in the script it was spelled "Cathulhu". Though I suppose the only thing more horrific than Cthulhu would be Cthulhu with cat traits.
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Dec 1, 2023 02:34
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MadDogMike posted:Hell, Cthulhu actually showed up in the Real Ghostbusters cartoon once, though because of some idiot "correcting a typo" in the script it was spelled "Cathulhu". Though I suppose the only thing more horrific than Cthulhu would be Cthulhu with cat traits. That ep was also written by the Chaosium crew so it was ultra weird it ended up that spelling. Totally didn’t follow sanity rules: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vJilPgMqNM Also, if you haven’t gone through the ghostbusters rpg. It is perhaps the best rpg ever written. Someone put up some barebones of it: https://ghostbusterscities.com/media/ghostbusters-the-roleplaying-game/
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Dec 1, 2023 02:54
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PuttyKnife posted:That ep was also written by the Chaosium crew so it was ultra weird it ended up that spelling. Did Michael Reaves also work on the Call of Cthulhu RPG? I thought he was mostly a cartoon writer.
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Dec 1, 2023 03:48
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I've been thinking about something lately and I wanted to ramble on it some. Something I'm tentatively calling the big fish in the small pond. For reference, I have a long term group that's absolutely fantastic and I'm very happy with. But I'm someone who enjoys variety so I occasionally give joining random internet games a shot. Sometimes it gives me diamonds in the rough that I can poach for other endeavors, sometimes it gives me hilarious experiences with wildly dysfunctional people, and sometimes it even gives me an actual legitimately high quality game out of nowhere. My wife and I had a couple recently experiences doing this that got me thinking about something as they had a bit of a pattern in common. I'll say I think both of us are excellent players and GMs, and I guess if you don't take my word for that then a lot of this probably falls apart. In both cases the games (GMs, mostly) seemed to have a lot of promise. There were a few fun first sessions. And then some issues started showing up. In the first case, a complete inability to manage pacing. In the second case, inability to improvise anything, and seemingly no ability to do more than surface level characterization. In both cases, issues that don't really start to show up until the game has properly gotten going and it starts to become apparent that stuff that read as a promising start is never going to be any deeper than that. In both cases, the GMs presented themselves as people who wanted feedback on their GMing. So, we gave them feedback. And I think in both cases it rapidly became clear that neither of them actually wanted feedback. Or maybe more accurately, when they say they want feedback what they probably actually mean is they want feedback on minor things like including certain types of content. Both of them were very uncomfortable dealing with feedback that was critiquing deeper structural stuff that actually cut at their GMing itself. In the first case is manifested as the GM ignoring us for a week and then cancelling the game, in the second case it was the GM saying stuff to the effect of "No, it's totally fine, just trust me!" and then being blindsided when we ended up quitting after he kept on doing the same thing he was doing before but worse. Which brings me to this weird dynamic that I think might be present in a lot of RPG groups in general, the big fish in the small pond. The GM that attracts a group of people who are all slightly worse than him, who are happy and grateful to show up and eat the slop, who go along with whatever he wants and praise him for it. I think was definitely the case in both of these games, the GM came with a few preexisting players, who were basically non-entities who showed up, did some token roleplay (worse than the GM), and showered the GM with praise for what I say were clearly pretty flawed games. And I was wondering if I'm just spinning this narrative of the weird symbiotic relationship between above average GMs and wholly mediocre play groups, or if people think there's something to it. Because I sure hear a lot of stories in the hobby of groups that, from an outside perspective, seem to work exactly like that. And really it seems to go back to the bizarre GM-as-God D&D group mythos, of the wise, all-knowing GM that deftly manages and awes the adoring player group and shows them great times.
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Dec 1, 2023 03:50
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Leperflesh posted:Was it the "freelance spy" OCC? I can't find anything like a "Freelancer" OCC with a bit of searching Vulpes Vulpes posted:It's from Dimension Book 1: Wormwood- Thank you both. I'd just about figured I'd made those up somehow. It's nice to have an answer on that.
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Dec 1, 2023 06:44
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PuttyKnife posted:That ep was also written by the Chaosium crew so it was ultra weird it ended up that spelling. The original boxed game was great, it came with the forms to fill out to start a Ghostbusters franchise.
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Dec 1, 2023 07:21
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Colonel Cool posted:I've been thinking about something lately and I wanted to ramble on it some. And then some issues started showing up. In the first case, a complete inability to manage pacing. In the second case, inability to improvise anything, and seemingly no ability to do more than surface level characterization. Both the things you describe are difficulty spikes of GMing skill. Giving feedback on lack of those is kind of moot as I imagine most GMs would like to be able to do them but it’s not a free choice.
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Dec 1, 2023 20:18
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PuttyKnife posted:Random question: I'm not totally sure what you mean by this. As in, just take breaks in a campaign to revisit Microscope or Quiet Year for another turn or two? Nothing, really. A recent game had the GM start us with Quiet Year to get the setting going and then we took a break partway through to run a game of Microscope (or something like it, I don't quite remember) as a sort of interactive info-dump of some ancient history of the setting. The GM used his turns in that to set up the core stuff he'd planned the rest of the campaign around, and we added extra stuff and our own spins on his material to give him more to work with.
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Dec 1, 2023 20:56
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hyphz posted:Both the things you describe are difficulty spikes of GMing skill. Giving feedback on lack of those is kind of moot as I imagine most GMs would like to be able to do them but it’s not a free choice. Sure, of course. I don't expect people to be instantly perfect or anything. But the feedback also isn't "You suck at pacing, get better at pacing". It's much more reasonable incremental stuff along the lines of "Can we maybe let roleplay have a little more time to breathe instead of quickly moving on to a social roll and then ending the scene?" I think what I'm more getting at is the attitude I think I perceive of not wanting to try to improve and instead just surrounding yourself with people a little worse than you to tell you you're amazing. That's what I find really strange.
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Dec 1, 2023 23:49
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I mean, a lot of people game primarily as a social activity for screwing around with their friends, not as a serious creative endeavor where they want constructive criticism, and a lot of gaming friend groups will end up at about the same (not necessarily very high) skill level and not feel any need to improve because they're all having fun. There's nothing wrong with giving concrit if you're not enjoying a game, but if everyone else is, you may have to accept that the group just isn't a good fit for you.
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Dec 2, 2023 00:20
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Antivehicular posted:I mean, a lot of people game primarily as a social activity for screwing around with their friends, not as a serious creative endeavor where they want constructive criticism, and a lot of gaming friend groups will end up at about the same (not necessarily very high) skill level and not feel any need to improve because they're all having fun. There's nothing wrong with giving concrit if you're not enjoying a game, but if everyone else is, you may have to accept that the group just isn't a good fit for you. Sure, that's not a problem either. But again, these people did present themselves as people who want feedback so they can improve.
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Dec 2, 2023 00:27
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disposablewords posted:I'm not totally sure what you mean by this. As in, just take breaks in a campaign to revisit Microscope or Quiet Year for another turn or two? Nothing, really. A recent game had the GM start us with Quiet Year to get the setting going and then we took a break partway through to run a game of Microscope (or something like it, I don't quite remember) as a sort of interactive info-dump of some ancient history of the setting. The GM used his turns in that to set up the core stuff he'd planned the rest of the campaign around, and we added extra stuff and our own spins on his material to give him more to work with. Something like this. I’m more interested in a sort of organic back and forth among players with or without a GM where they begin with a session 0 game of sorts and it just sort of…melds with the game. I haven’t quite understood why session 0 games and like…Fate Tokens couldn’t be more robust in how they are used. Like at some point I get a reward and it’s room card or secret backstory to an NPC or even a card from something like Once Upon a Time that I can use to shift the story a bit. I suppose this breaks the sacred rpg foundation of systems mattering but I feel like it’s something interesting.
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Dec 2, 2023 00:41
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Colonel Cool posted:Sure, that's not a problem either. But again, these people did present themselves as people who want feedback so they can improve. A lot of people in all walks of life and every kind of endeavor think that they want constructive criticism, in theory, but when it is offered, are likely to react negatively. Especially when offered from someone who isn't a close friend or confidante. "I want feedback" can be a stand-in for "I want praise," too. At the same time, critique can be presented in an exceptionally blunt and off-putting way, and we kind of just have to presume that you're totally couching your criticisms by bracketing them with praise and including reassurances that you're happy with the game and want to keep playing regardless etc.. It's hard on a forum like this to judge if one party or another is being unreasonable or weird or whatever. e. also, not to boot this conversation because it's totally fine here, but we do also have a GM advice thread: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3150535
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Dec 2, 2023 00:42
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Leperflesh posted:A lot of people in all walks of life and every kind of endeavor think that they want constructive criticism, in theory, but when it is offered, are likely to react negatively. Especially when offered from someone who isn't a close friend or confidante. "I want feedback" can be a stand-in for "I want praise," too. Yeah, absolutely. I think we were both extremely gentle with the criticism and hit on all those points repeatedly. I think if anything the opposite might have been true, being too gentle with criticism to the point of not making it clear that these were actually serious problems up until the hammer dropped, leaving him feeling like this was out of left field. But sure, I appreciate that I'm just some person on the internet saying this and I'm only giving one side of the story here. It really does feel like it's the code word for wanting praise thing to me though. I guess the broader point I was musing on initially is it seems to me like this whole setting up groups to feed you praise thing seems really common in this hobby in particular and I'm wondering if there's something about the structure of RPGs that draws in a certain personality type. Or maybe it really is just common everywhere and I'm not looking hard enough at society as a whole.
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Dec 2, 2023 01:41
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Colonel Cool posted:Sure, of course. I don't expect people to be instantly perfect or anything. But the feedback also isn't "You suck at pacing, get better at pacing". It's much more reasonable incremental stuff along the lines of "Can we maybe let roleplay have a little more time to breathe instead of quickly moving on to a social roll and then ending the scene?" It is possible that you’re actually encountering different creative agendas. Some groups want to run roleplay-light games, after all. I think in general it’s a mistake to assume that “skill at tabletop gaming” is a single axis question. I recognize that I’m reacting to one example here and I don’t have the full picture, of course.
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Dec 2, 2023 03:12
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I just watched Napoleon and I'm kinda interested in small scale (6mm) miniatures wargaming from the napoleonic era. it seems to be one of the most famous eras to wargame, especially among much older crowds, and has a long history. this makes it sort of intimidating to dive into the subject. whats the msot popular ruleset/mm scale these days? I have intermediate wargaming experience for clarification
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Dec 2, 2023 04:17
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LurchinTard posted:I just watched Napoleon and I'm kinda interested in small scale (6mm) miniatures wargaming from the napoleonic era. it seems to be one of the most famous eras to wargame, especially among much older crowds, and has a long history. this makes it sort of intimidating to dive into the subject. whats the msot popular ruleset/mm scale these days? I have intermediate wargaming experience for clarification Not to shut down discussion here because I don’t know how active it is, but there’s a thread on the topic of historical wargames (don’t know if it includes hex & chit as well as lead). https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3248082&perpage=40&pagenumber=1&noseen=1
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Dec 2, 2023 09:18
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Admiralty Flag posted:Not to shut down discussion here because I don’t know how active it is, but there’s a thread on the topic of historical wargames (don’t know if it includes hex & chit as well as lead). it's fairly active when topics come up or questions are posed. ive seen some cross over into "board game" style games but the focus is on games w miniatures
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Dec 2, 2023 14:59
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Colonel Cool posted:I guess the broader point I was musing on initially is it seems to me like this whole setting up groups to feed you praise thing seems really common in this hobby in particular and I'm wondering if there's something about the structure of RPGs that draws in a certain personality type. Or maybe it really is just common everywhere and I'm not looking hard enough at society as a whole. There’s feedback and feedback, though. Like “can’t Sproggy the Goblin come back? We never found what happened to him.” It’s not quite praise, but at the same time it’s positive from a GMing point of view because it reflects engagement with the fiction. And certainly “I want feedback but at the same time I want acknowledgment that having done this is better than having not done it” is very common in creative things or social organisation, and GMing is both. Plus, wanting to bring other people into your imagination is a motivation for GMing and being told “yea, but actually it sucks” is going to hurt.
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Dec 2, 2023 16:29
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Feedback is often better delivered as “this is what I would like to have happen” than “this is what I think about what you did”. It’s not really quite as helpful, ultimately, but it’s much easier for a lot of people to accept.
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Dec 2, 2023 17:15
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PuttyKnife posted:Something like this. I’m more interested in a sort of organic back and forth among players with or without a GM where they begin with a session 0 game of sorts and it just sort of…melds with the game. I think this is an incredibly interesting idea that more people should be experimenting with. The major hurdle I suspect you could run into is that an expectation of tabletop roleplaying games as mist people perceive it is a primacy of character actions, whereas in a game that has an external superstructure frame game you would be aiming for a primacy of player actions, but the agency of the characters would be greatly lessened in contrast since the frame game has so much more narrative structuring power. For instance, if you were to perform this sort of play using Microscope I would expect that the players wouldn't even be ever playing the same characters since the time scale could be so vast, they would instead jump into a subgame whenever you performed scene play, where you create characters distinct to that scene (in more explicit mechanical terms than the rules of Microscope intends). You could try limiting the range of scope of the game to a very small period of time, but Microscope doesn't scope spacial limitations, so I suspect it would be very hard to create a scenario where the same characters actions 'mattered' to the narrative consistently.
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Dec 2, 2023 18:43
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I guess what I'm trying to say is a major part of the 'fruitful void' in Microscope is showing that the myth of the great man is patently absurd. But most ttrpgs are about making a cool guy and telling stories about your cool guy.
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Dec 2, 2023 18:48
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Microscope Explorer is an expansion book for Microscope. As well as a whole chapter on using it for world building it has three new modes of play, one of which is explicitly about playing a smaller scale, more focused game:quote:CHRONICLE focuses and streamlines Microscope, narrowing the history to the story of a single thing, such as a city, a political movement or a ring of power. It also brings individuals to the forefront with anchor characters whose lives are intertwined with each chapter of the history. It’s a simpler, more personal Microscope.
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Dec 2, 2023 18:59
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hot cocoa on the couch posted:it's fairly active when topics come up or questions are posed. ive seen some cross over into "board game" style games but the focus is on games w miniatures Board wrgaming thread: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3564278
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Dec 2, 2023 19:05
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DalaranJ posted:I guess what I'm trying to say is a major part of the 'fruitful void' in Microscope is showing that the myth of the great man is patently absurd. But most ttrpgs are about making a cool guy and telling stories about your cool guy. I think Icarus does an ok job with the Great Man but that’s neither here nor there. What I guess pushes me into this is that I’m more interested in a world everyone actually inhabits rather than a character immigrating to a new world with nothing and seeking everything.
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Dec 2, 2023 21:50
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Tarnop posted:Microscope Explorer is an expansion book for Microscope. As well as a whole chapter on using it for world building it has three new modes of play, one of which is explicitly about playing a smaller scale, more focused game: Yes... Ha ha ha, yes! PuttyKnife posted:I think Icarus does an ok job with the Great Man but that’s neither here nor there. What I guess pushes me into this is that I’m more interested in a world everyone actually inhabits rather than a character immigrating to a new world with nothing and seeking everything. I think the simplest way to accomplish this might be to start in a setting that is intimately familiar to all the players. That would be not ambitious enough for my taste. I'm interested in ways we can bend and break the normal boundaries we place around the GM's control of the setting. Please, when you try this, report back.
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Dec 3, 2023 22:12
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Goddamn, is there some way to play mouse guard that doesn't loving suck? Maybe this is the wrong place to ask. Everything runs like a skill challenge where it doesn't matter what you wanted to do because oops now you're playing a shittier Apocalypse World and the only moves are Attack, Defend, Maneuver, and Feint. loving poo poo loving sucks.
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Dec 4, 2023 20:25
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moths posted:Goddamn, is there some way to play mouse guard that doesn't loving suck? Just use the rules for regular tests. Don't use the conflict rules if they don't click for your group (they didn't for mine.)
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Dec 4, 2023 22:05
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moths posted:Goddamn, is there some way to play mouse guard that doesn't loving suck? https://mausritter.com/
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Dec 4, 2023 22:36
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moths posted:Goddamn, is there some way to play mouse guard that doesn't loving suck? You’re overusing the full-blown conflict rules. If it doesn’t directly involve someone’s Belief or Goal, it almost certainly shouldn’t use the full conflict mechanics, and you should make normal rolls to resolve it instead.
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Dec 4, 2023 23:19
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Thanks, I'll definitely bring that up to our GM. I feel like he's running a scripted adventure; Every session has been just a goddamn loop of picking one of the four cards and rolling dice around the table until a score goes to zero. Absolutely dreadful.
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Dec 4, 2023 23:31
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