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Admiralty Flag posted:The die jar is a neat mechanical solution to the "town problem," but if your plot allows it, you could as a result of a 6/in addition to the roll allow news of a known/potential threat advancing their nefarious plans to reach the players, and intimate that in general that no one else might care enough/be powerful enough/have the focus to deal with the threat. ("Disaster! The bandit lord Fertingoxar's men have raided Fairhaven, a mere two days' travel along the Forest Road. Reports are sketchy, but they apparently made off with some of the villagers' livestock and killed several bodied defenders. No doubt that blackguard will be emboldened by his success, especially as the Duke doesn't have a standing militia in this part of the Vale.") Yeah fronts are another good way to do this. This is the classic town problem. How do you get players, who are going to be cautious and calculating, to align with their characters, who are brave adventurers? How do you get them to leave the comfort/safety of town? It’s the carrot and the stick. Entice them with adventures, and make it clear what the characters risk *not* leaving town. Their enemies continue to plot, their allies are threatened, and opportunities are missed. The tricky part is making it so that it’s not GM fiat saying “gently caress you, downtime’s over, time to go adventure”. It’s aligning incentives so that the players and their characters want to get back to adventuring. Edit: this still sounds too railroady. I’m not even saying the players *have* to do anything. Just that every choice they make in how they spend time—either here in town or out on the trail—should be consequential. For every thing they do, the opportunity cost is all the stuff they didn’t do. It’s easy to understand this in real life—there are millions of things we could do if we had the time for it, and every day we decide what we’re going to do and pass up on the millions of things we don’t do. But in RPGs the focus is on the characters and their actions, and it takes active effort to simulate the background world of all the stuff they’re not doing. Fronts and Complications are ways to easily simulate the stuff that they’re not doing without having to waste unnecessary effort. I’m reminded of Pathfinder Kingmaker (the video game, not the TTRGP adventure path) that got heavily criticized for having hard time limits on each chapter quest, limiting the time you could spend exploring or in downtime kingdom building. But in retrospect I think having some sort of mechanic to limit how long you could explore, grind, turtle and build your kingdom unmolested was necessary. Otherwise there’s no stakes or cost to building your kingdom—you have the time and resources to do everything and don’t have to make interesting decisions. I think where Kingmaker failed with this was making it a hard and artificial time limit via quest expiration rather than having the limit arise naturally from the situation. Sure, you can keep building your kingdom, but the Fey are rampaging on its western border. Sure, you can keep exploring, but Pitax is still preparing to invade. Etc. Or gently caress it and play Ars Magicka and spend years to decades at a time building your base. That’s fun too. Cantorsdust fucked around with this message at 18:46 on Dec 28, 2023 |
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Dec 28, 2023 18:40
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Cantorsdust posted:Yeah fronts are another good way to do this. Right. There's part of me that still wants to do a Kingmaker campaign at some point...but as I've thought about it more, the tension of hexploration and exploring the edges of the Stolen Lands against the Town/Kingdom building seems not great. I'd love to do a campaign that's all about exploring. I'd love to do one that's about kingdom building. I sort of think the meta-mechanics for each are probably going to be at odds. Also- as someone who's started a lot of failed campaigns, I've really come around on how much you need to think through exactly what you're saying and how you're going to execute something that seems like a basic principle that people should get. "This campaign is about traveling and not staying in towns." Ok does that mean there won't be towns? Will the players be punished if they're in a town? Am I expecting the players to just know to leave? I now know that I have to reallllllly think through what I'm saying with stuff like that, or it'll leave all the players imagining their own thing.
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Dec 29, 2023 00:35
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Ok question for people who do a lot of worldbuilding and lore stuff: are there any recommended formats for doing summaries of Kingdoms and Cultures? I'm sort of thinking about doing one of those year long create-a-X challenges in 2024 for a campaign I've been kicking around in my head for the last few months.
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Dec 29, 2023 00:40
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My main tip for worldbuilding is to think about what the user-facing side is. What are people gonna see up close and interact with? What are the npc's they'll be talking to and what's big in their life? Focus on that. What your summary looks like flows from that.
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Dec 29, 2023 00:48
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I want to give more spotlight to the bad boy academic/mad scientist in my 1930s pulp game. We’re going to have him, the lounge singer, and the reporter as a trio… What dramatic things, not necessarily dangerous, could happen at an academic conference? What are some weird places south of equator for those conferences? We’ve seen a lot of Australia.
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Dec 29, 2023 03:55
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Golden Bee posted:I want to give more spotlight to the bad boy academic/mad scientist in my 1930s pulp game. We’re going to have him, the lounge singer, and the reporter as a trio… What dramatic things, not necessarily dangerous, could happen at an academic conference? Continuing in the great tradition of medical self experimentation, perhaps the conference features some weird medical self-experiments? The absolutely 100% reliable method for re-attaching one's own decapitated head? The Inside-Out Man? Fully functional double grafted arms? That last one could turn into a combat encounter if desired as the arms take over, Liquid Ocelot style. And put it on Cape Horn, in the observation room atop a sprawling naval complex, where the preeminent naval powers are competing to launch expeditions to the Antarctic.
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Dec 29, 2023 04:41
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Golden Bee posted:I want to give more spotlight to the bad boy academic/mad scientist in my 1930s pulp game. We’re going to have him, the lounge singer, and the reporter as a trio… What dramatic things, not necessarily dangerous, could happen at an academic conference? Cape Town, Tangier, Rio de Janeiro, or heck an Antarctic research base would make good candidates. As far as dramatic events? Health scares, weird science, spies
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Dec 29, 2023 04:52
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Mundane, petty and _viscious_ professional drama. Accusations of plagiarism and nepotism. The stakes are grant money and professional reputation. This works equally well for regular science and superscience.
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Dec 29, 2023 05:13
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What factions should I add, for non-scientists? I love the idea of putting it in the city of Ushuaia, Chile. I’m looking for the adventure to be maybe 1/3 of a four hour session, with the other parts being a crash landing on a zombie island in the south Pacific. So the more social problems the scientists have, the better!
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Dec 29, 2023 05:27
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There was an adventure for Top Secret called Whiteout that was published in Dragon Magazine #86. I remember running it when I was thirteen years old and having a blast (It gives rules for surviving an Antarctic blizzard in a space suit  ). Perhaps it could be ported to your use?(Im putting up a PDF of a scan of a 39 year old magazine article. Surely that doesn't count as :files: anymore?) It's a secret agent infiltration of a scientific base in Antarctica. The base is run by a secret terrorist group who were performing banned nuclear research and had a spill, alerting the PC Agents to the scene. Agrikk fucked around with this message at 06:55 on Dec 29, 2023 |
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Dec 29, 2023 06:52
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I dig top secret; I really need to run one of their train modules.
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Dec 29, 2023 09:19
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Golden Bee posted:What factions should I add, for non-scientists? I love the idea of putting it in the city of Ushuaia, Chile. A celebrity is dating one of the scientists and gossip reporters are swarming the place. And when they get bored they aren't above starring in their own column... Some of the scientists are part of a barbershop quartet. An unscrupulous record dealer is trying to sign them. Also the group is in danger of breaking up due to science related drama. The committee for "Sane Science" is trying to shut down unorthodox meetings. Obviously this includes mad science. But it also threatens geo-poetry, self anesthetizing, and whatever Marconi is getting up to on their floating research yacht: the Elettra. Rumors that the head of the commission is an Italian fascist descended from a catholic inquisitor are unconfirmed.
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Dec 29, 2023 10:46
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Any good articles or blog posts people have read regarding architecture in fantasy settings? Particularly: -Some "architecture for idiots" info to help people think about what could be important or interesting in defining a culture's style -best practices in describing architecture during games to help highlight and differentiate places
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Dec 30, 2023 05:23
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I would look up old 99% Invisible episodes, find a trend you like, and describe how a fantasy culture would do that.
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Dec 30, 2023 07:31
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Fidel Cuckstro posted:Ok question for people who do a lot of worldbuilding and lore stuff: are there any recommended formats for doing summaries of Kingdoms and Cultures? I would avoid the trap of writing yourself into a point where you have nested trigger points in your conflict tension points. The challenge, to me at least, of that kind of extensive world building is putting in enough specific detail while also staying abstract enough that you leave space for your players to imprint into the world building. If you feel like what you're writing is getting too prescribed and railroady then just convert that particular narrative into a lore tome for one of the factions.
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Jan 1, 2024 00:20
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What do you do when a player wants to do something that, reasonably, their character could do, but they lack the RAW mechanical ability to do it? For example, a rogue wants to shoot an enemy's legs to stop them from moving. They lack a mechanical ability to do this, but it makes a decent amount of sense. Also, where do you draw the line?
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Jan 3, 2024 20:37
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That depends really heavily on the game. In a well-balanced game with distinct silos for tactical and narrative play, it's important to understand that tactical combat is not a simulation of actual fighting; it's an abstract minigame that you interpret back into narrative when you're done. The game, or at least that part of it, is fundamentally not about coming up with clever narrative solutions, it's about using player-level skill at the minigame as an oracle for character-level success. That's not to say I would necessarily disallow it -- just that I would process it on those terms. It's usually fine to come up with some ability roughly comparable to what a character of that class or role could do with an action, with the understanding that it's a one-time reward for quick thinking, and if they want to make it permanently re-usable it should come at some opportunity cost in terms of build resources and might need the balance or exact workings tweaked. In a poorly balanced game that still has tactical combat as a pillar, or one where the silos are muddled to begin with, the considerations are about the same but I'd be even more willing to allow it, because really, what are you worried about breaking?  In most narrative games, I'd just let them do it, although the problem likely wouldn't even come up for an example as simple as this unless it's a game where characters aren't expected to engage in violence at all or something. Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 21:01 on Jan 3, 2024 |
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Jan 3, 2024 20:53
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Verisimilidude posted:What do you do when a player wants to do something that, reasonably, their character could do, but they lack the RAW mechanical ability to do it? For example, a rogue wants to shoot an enemy's legs to stop them from moving. They lack a mechanical ability to do this, but it makes a decent amount of sense. Also, where do you draw the line? This is correct, Tuxedo Catfish posted:That depends really heavily on the game. But simplifying it to “the rule of cool”: Does it improve the entertainment of the whole table, drive the encounter or circumstance forward, and do so without breaking things or elevating one character above the rest on a permanent basis? Then by all means allow it. I’m running a short Cyberpunk 2020 campaign and the characters are about to pull off a well-choreographed ambush of an armored courier. (Think opening scene of Heat). The plan involves placing a shaped charge pointing upward in a hole dug in the street and maneuvering the target into driving over the spot and then detonating it. The players spent hours creating this plan and all of the details involved and I was having as much fun watching them put all the pieces in place as they were in planning it. Only problem was when I asked them to roll a demolitions roll to set the explosive in the street in the middle of the night. It was revealed that no one actually had demolitions: everyone thought that everyone else had the skill. Well gently caress that. We had the techie roll a tech roll with a slightly higher DC and kept the game moving forward. I told the players that this was a one-off get-out-of-jail free card because their plan was so rad, but don’t expect this kind of boon in the future. Everyone was happy, the ambush was a wicked success and no one was harmed by bending continuity a bit.
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Jan 3, 2024 23:02
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Golden Bee posted:I want to give more spotlight to the bad boy academic/mad scientist in my 1930s pulp game. We’re going to have him, the lounge singer, and the reporter as a trio… What dramatic things, not necessarily dangerous, could happen at an academic conference? Sadly most of the really weird scientists didn't move to South America until the mid 1940s.
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Jan 3, 2024 23:40
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habituallyred posted:Ideas The reporter didn’t show up but we had the fake academic fraud selected as a pre-gen. We did get a sex scene when someone decided the best way to deal with a rumor they were gay was to seduce the reporter covering it. This got interrupted by the academic decided he needed to understand the mad science invention (ice that spreads like fire)… by opening its container.
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Jan 4, 2024 01:25
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I don't know if it's come up here but by gosh Bing image creator (runs on dall-e) is fantastic for character portraits.  We don't know why it has teeth but they're canon now. Anyhow, highly recommend.
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Jan 4, 2024 21:28
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We’ve just finished our big campaign, after five and a half years. Feels good man. Thanks to everyone who ever answered one of my questions or posted an idea I stole!
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Jan 9, 2024 23:03
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Sanford posted:We’ve just finished our big campaign, after five and a half years. Feels good man. Thanks to everyone who ever answered one of my questions or posted an idea I stole! I've enjoyed your check ins, sounds like it was a great campaign! what are you doing next, playing for a bit?
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Jan 9, 2024 23:40
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I’m already in another game, unfortunately the DM loves AI art, and enemies, and random tables, and now dungeons. It’s fine but bland. At the end of our big game all three players said they’d like to play more which is lovely, very gratifying. As part of the finale they all had a “what am I going to do next?” moment and all three opened up potential quests for a low-level party in the same world, which I think we’ll all enjoy. One of my players is having a baby on Sunday (that’s why we had to rush the end a bit) so she’ll be out for a bit, but she’s said within a week or two she’ll be ready for some socialising that doesn’t involve going anywhere. We’ll probably get right back into it - I’ve promised a ten-session campaign but that’s what we said about the one that’s just finished, so we’ll see.
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Jan 10, 2024 08:53
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If you want to try something new then traveller is neat, mongoose traveller 2e has the extremely fantastic pirates of drinax campaign.
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Jan 10, 2024 09:02
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Enjoy the new parent player being very tired all the time.
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Jan 11, 2024 02:35
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Many years ago, we ended a campaign the night one of the guys’ wife went into labor. We knew the date was coming up, so we scheduled the game to get ahead of it, and all our wives had decided to hang out there too that night, so when it all started, it was perfect. We wrapped up the game, had the big climactic set piece boss fight complete with lights and dry ice fog in the scenery, the ladies all got to hang out and help the mom-to-be through the initial stages, and then we finished and an hour later dude and wife went to the hospital and by morning there was a new baby. Anyhow, that’s my new-parent-dnd story. We haven’t managed to seriously start a campaign since though.
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Jan 11, 2024 03:25
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So my players just took advantage of the sandbox map nature of the campaign and made a wild left turn because they came across a new star system they found interesting. I was getting ready to introduce a complicated murder plot with cosmic horror elements. Now they're arming some fur-wearing barbarians with laser guns in exchange for oral history and petroglyphs of a wandering star that should be a space hulk they're interested in. The thing is, I don't have a clue what's on the space hulk or where it is. I've got enough plates spinning with mythos plots so I don't want to just tell them to come back later. Anyone have advice on the plain old players want to know what's inside the mysterious tomb and the GM doesn't know either type situation?
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Jan 15, 2024 00:54
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A hook to redirect them on to material you've prepared, some set dressing, and 2d6 rewards.
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Jan 15, 2024 01:03
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The Space Hulk has been completely looted, but what's this? There's a recently destroyed cargo ship and dozens of spaced terran corpses floating in the void. Looking at their comms, it looks like someone powerful betrayed them and took their xeno prize. And wouldn't you know it, they're wearing Clan Railroad Tracks uniforms that trace right back to the A plot.
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Jan 15, 2024 01:11
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The cosmic horrors that are being unleashed in your main plot? They're so bad that a bunch of unrelated eldritch beings from beyond the stars foresaw it and sent their greatest heroes on a century-long journey to this planet to put a stop to it. The space hulk was what they travelled in, but for some reason (sabotage? incompetence? hostile action?) crashlanded. Most of the crew are dead (maybe killed in cryosleep? maybe correctly awoken but killed by wildlife?) However, one is still in cryosleep and can be awoken, if the PCs can get past the hulk's autodefences and escaped lab specimens and alien wildlife. The hulk also, if the PCs investigate it well, has a load of information that obliquely foreshadows the cosmic horror elements in your planned murder plot. (Like, maybe it's got a briefing room which is still showing a diagram of the same sigils the cultists in your murder plot will be drawing.) The survivor has no common language (even Comprehend Languages doesn't work) and doesn't want to share information about its mission in case its enemies have spies, so it is not immediately helpful, but the PCs could conceivably leave it with their barbian allies for a month or so and let them learn to communicate with it, at which point it'll have a bunch of intel about the bits of your main plot the PCs are just starting to uncover.
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Jan 15, 2024 01:30
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Ooh you know this star system has a problem with the Dark Eldar faction that's at war with the faction the RT's aunt is unwittingly patronizing and are mad that the dynasty is helping their rivals horn in on their territory. In fact it's the same Eldar Cabal that planted a listening device on the RT several months ago but don't have a way to receive its recordings,... until the players decided to make a left turn and wandered into receiver range. Wouldn't it be a shock if they went to confront some strange xenos and it turns out they know them by name and exactly what they're doing here, and want to know what kind of deal they have with their rivals?
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Jan 15, 2024 02:00
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I have to say I complain about the Rogue Trader system but the random encounter generator in the books really helped me fill out the space hulk.
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Jan 20, 2024 16:01
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I need help coming up with a good actionable villainous scheme. This is a D&D campaign set in Eberron, currently low level. My BBEG is a tyrannical local artistocrat, and I have a strong grasp on his beliefs and medium and long-term goals, but lack something "adventure-y". Basically, the guy is your typical "lawful evil pragmatist" ruler: treats ruling as if he's playing a strategy game in which people are just inanimate pieces. He's planning for conquest, so he treats his land and people as a resource to be rapidly squeezed dry for a war chest that will fund getting the land he actually wants. For means we're talking the usual tyrant stuff - oppressively high rents/taxes, "land consolidation" to squeeze farmers and turn them into cheap laborers, bloated military spending, brutal punishments to stave off crime and dissent, and so on. This is all well and good and hateable, and it gives the PCs lots of room for low-level heroics as they fight back, but it's also all rather mundane and gradual. I need some kind of big focal point that can drive the central story and give the PCs a concrete big win or defeat (with the stakes being putting the bad guy on the back foot rather than immediately toppling him). So my villain should, to facilitate his more political-scale evil, be trying to pull off some kind of scheme involving a MacGuffin, a big magic spell, or something similar that can have big decisive moments. Unfortunately I'm drawing a complete blank on what it could be. Any ideas?
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Jan 23, 2024 15:14
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Given his goals and the setting, perhaps he's trying to reactivate a weapon from the Last War? Could be a means of controlling warforged,a powerful spell, or perhaps he's trying to restart a "supersoldier"program?
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Jan 23, 2024 15:37
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Guildencrantz posted:I need help coming up with a good actionable villainous scheme. There are a ton of ways that someone might want to use magic to give themself an edge as a mundane ruler, the hard part is going to be coming up with something where the ritual is a means to his political ambitions rather than his political ambitions being a means to achieving a ritual. Like, if stage 2 of his plan is to gain ultimate mastery over time and space why does he care about claiming land in stage 3? So it feels like the ritual should be the kind of thing that gives him large-scale military capabilities rather than small-scale personal ones. I'm thinking something like activating an ancient superweapon or bringing a supernatural ally over to his side. Maybe he's looking for a means to animate a dead army or finding the means to bind a dragon to his will or prove himself the chosen one of the Lizard People or something like that?
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Jan 23, 2024 15:42
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Personal cloning mcguff
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Jan 23, 2024 15:56
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He’s quietly sending prisoners, vagrants, and orphans from the city he rules to his private cult to (insert whatever evil god or demon that applies here, don’t know the setting). There they are sacrificed to power a super weapon / mutated to form a secret army / sold into slavery to generate funds for his plans. The players get wind of the plan when an important contact of theirs goes missing after getting too close to the truth. They need to investigate, follow the clues, and track the contact down to one of the lairs where the captives are processed. They free their contact after a daring raid, but during the raid they uncover evidence about the plan. The main villain is never definitively named, but there are enough clues to lead to further follow up investigations. Perhaps they get clues to the next site—a temple where the sacrifices are done / lab where the mutations happen / secret market where the slaves are auctioned. From there they get hard evidence that the villain is involved. Do they take it to the public? Move against them quietly? Blackmail them for their silence? Etc.
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Jan 23, 2024 15:59
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If they're low level you can always give them a middle manager/Sheriff of Nottingham to have a minor victory over that can represent the flipover into "wait there's more stuff going on here" too when they're ransacking the office. I'd probably seed "something is happening here" with people going missing and questionable things are happening and listen to what the players think is happening before actually deciding what I wanted to happen. Having a mid-boss gives you a nice stopgap from making a decision until you've let them marinate on the hints.
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Jan 23, 2024 16:16
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Anyone have recommendations for narrative descriptions of battles being fought between large armies (100,000+ per side) in which spell-users are involved? We might be heading towards a reckoning in my campaign in which the spell using army of the good guys will be fighting the spell-using bad guys and I'd like to be able to convey the tactics employed by spell using armies to my PCs who most likely won't be directly involved. I'd like for my description of the battle to be more than lighting bolts and fireballs tossed around, but more interesting use of illusionary terrain, walls of stone/ice/fire, stone to mud, how magic could enhance or hinder battlefield logistics and communications, etc. I'd also like to see the tactics and counter tactics of spell users and what a mundane army might do to protect its casters. Any suggestions or articles/books to read?
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Jan 24, 2024 01:13
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