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ritorix posted:So basically my players are giant pussies. They are still in the pre-4e mindset that certain death is around every corner, despite being 13 sessions in without a single player death. Their thought process went like this: well, dragons sound too tough for our level, we wont go to the swamp. A vampire is also way above our level. Lets do the slaver town, we can probably handle that. I would like to gently suggest that there can be too much of a good thing where game balance is concerned. If your players have a bit of ongoing nervousness about "oh poo poo if we do the wrong thing we are hosed", that's a GOOD thing. That builds tension and keeps the players on the edge of their seats and makes the overall game more exciting. It rewards strategic (and not just tactical) planning. If they are thinking in terms of "our long term plan should be X, then Y, to muster our forces to conquer Z", that's AWESOME, you should not be talking them out of that kind of thinking! I don't know if you know the Elder Scrolls computer RPGs, but Morrowind is still considered one of the greatest open-world RPGs ever. It was followed by Oblivion a few years later, which was a prettier and more polished game, but one which was widely criticized on account of all of the enemies in the game scaled according to the player's level. It didn't matter what order you explored the world because whereever you went you would always be guaranteed a fair fight. It sucked much of the sense of danger out of the game, and much of the intrigue and thrill of exploration along with it. I'm not knocking the encounter scaling system in 4E, nor am I saying you should be a sadistic GM out to kill the PCs. But make them sweat, encourage them to play intelligently (and strategically). If they start to worry about "oh we're so screwed if we go that way", don't try to reassure them, just smile knowingly and make them squirm a little bit. Think in terms of being a director of a suspenseful action movie, not a tour guide at an amusement park.
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Jul 7, 2009 07:26
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tendrilsfor20 posted:Take away everyone's cell phones, PDAs and Game Boys. Follow that with mood music (throw on the Diablo II soundtrack or any Lord of the Rings movie score), and don't let anyone near a PC or TV. No, don't "take away" anything, this isn't junior high. But don't be afraid to be politely a hard-rear end about no electronics at the table if that becomes a problem (and definitely don't have any TVs or whatever going in the room). A lot of it is just that one of the hats you have to wear as a GM (which they never quite spell out in the rule books) is that you have to learn to be a meeting facilitator and to Keep Things On Task, and that definitely is a learned skill. When your group gets together for a session, expect about 15 minutes of settling in time for everybody to get relaxed and chat. But once the game starts, remember that everybody is going to be waiting for you (the GM) to take the lead. Be confident but don't be bossy. Talk the group through the current situation, prompting for responses as necessary and leaving plenty of space for players to make suggestions and offer input. Make sure you are really comfortable with the rules and it'll be easier to keep things running smoothly. Tendrils' suggestion about being dramatic and a little hammy is excellent. Don't be afraid to get up and move around the room and use plenty of body language to help get your point across -- hunch your shoulders and wrinkle your brow if you're giving a speech as an evil NPC, that sort of thing. A little cheese is good, players will eat it up and enthusiasm is contagious. Overall, have patience with yourself and your group, like I say GMing is definitely a learned skill and it can take some practice to get comfortable with the role and in tune with what your players are looking for and to generally run a kick-rear end game. My other suggestion, if it's an option, would be for you to sit in for a couple sessions with a more experienced group, maybe at a local gaming store or gaming club or whatever, to get a better sense of the flow of things.
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Jul 7, 2009 07:45
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Two options in my group: 1) Designate another player to control your character for the session, collect XP as normal. No complaining if something bad happens to the character. Discouraged and rarely done, but sometimes a necessary evil for party balance or to keep the story moving. 2) "Your character is off looking after a sick friend / celebrating a gnomish holiday". Character is not present for that session, collects no XP. No risk, no reward. (Also, new characters start at 1st level / 0 XP, period. I wouldn't have it any other way as a player OR a GM. I really don't get the appeal of the "players should remain on equal footing just because" mindset). RagnarokAngel posted:It seems unfair to reward people for not showing up, but sometimes life gets in the way and thats not fair to them. On top of that you're asking to end up with a group of varying levels and that rapidly becomes a clusterfuck to maintain. I've never found that to be the case. In our Hackmaster group, we had a couple of level 1 characters in a group that was mostly level 7-8, and it was awesome (I was one of the level 1 chars). You get your butt kicked a lot, but you find a useful niche, and being in a higher-level group means you get loot and XP a lot faster and catch up pretty quickly. Plus it can be cool from a roleplaying / story hook perspective -- look at Star Wars, where Luke was a relatively unskilled nublet running around in a group full of seasoned badasses. h_double fucked around with this message at 16:30 on Jul 26, 2009 |
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Jul 26, 2009 16:22
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Poopy Palpy posted:"New players start at 0xp regardless of the rest of the party's level" seems like needless grognardism to me. You're basically saying that the only way anyone in the universe who might join the party could possibly have advanced in skill level is by adventuring with the party, which is patently ridiculous. You might be able to get a wide disparity in player levels to work in some games, but there are a bunch of games where the players who are behind aren't going to have any fun because they can't contribute; the players who are ahead aren't going to have any fun dragging a bunch of scrubs around; and the GM isn't going to have any fun because it's impossible to plan encounters. I'm not disputing that it can, on occasion, be interesting and fun, but as a hard and fast rule it can also be problematic. I can see how it could be problematic in D&D, where 1st level characters are pretty low-powered and where so much of the game is built around the assumption of balanced encounters. But of the games I and my group typically play: Hackmaster is such that 1st level characters can actually have a bit of firepower and durability (Hackmaster also has a cool protege mechanic, where you can allot some of your XP to train a student/henchman, so your character's successor can start at greater than first level, while still having indirectly earned those levels) Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay is so explicitly about gritty zero-to-hero -- and the scope of the game is a lot broader than just combat -- that toughing it out with fledgling characters is a lot of the fun. Point-based games like GURPS, HERO, etc. are such that specific skill levels are a lot more important than raw point totals. That's not to say I'd stick a 100 point character in a group full of 500 point powerhouses, but even a 25-50 point power gap isn't necessarily that significant. Overall, I just think that -- for a XP/level based game -- levels and loot are a lot more rewarding when there's some risk and cool in-game backstory to go along with it. Sometimes mixed-level parties CAN be a bit of pain to maintain, but I also think that every complication is potentially a way to do something cool and interesting.
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Jul 26, 2009 17:21
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:If you ever said this at my table I would boot you so hard. It's grognard talk. Games are supposed to be fun and it's not fun to get crapped on if you miss a session. Real life happens and gently caress you if you punish someone for not appearing for A FUN GAME. Do you know what their punishment was? That they missed out on the fun of the session! Plus, they are off-balance at the next session ("what's going on? who is this person?") RPGs have a cooperative element but they are still a GAME, which ought to have challenges and rewards. You can have a cooperative party and still have an element of friendly competition. RPGs grew out of miniatures gaming, and it's perfectly possible to keep some of that aspect of risk and challenge and competition without it turning into a PvP hatefest. Sometimes one player gets the best loot or singlehandedly saves the day, sometimes friendly rivalries come up; if you've got a good group it's all in good fun and can add something to the game. And again, I'm not trying to say "I'm right / you're wrong", I'm trying to participate in a discussion by saying "this is how my group and I play, and we think it's really cool and really adds something to the game." And good job personally insulting a stranger because they play toy soldiers differently than you do.
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Jul 26, 2009 21:23
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ripped0ff posted:Not rewarding someone is not the same as punishing them. You're not exactly hitting them with XP loss, you're just not giving them new XP. Exactly. The players who ARE present, they presumably have done something to earn those XP, including putting their characters at risk of death or lasting injury, paying to repair/replace damaged armor and equipment, paying for healing, maybe burning through some potions or scrolls. There is a cost for those XP (in the form of risk and expended resources), and if a player gets those same rewards without their character being present, it's not really fair to the other players. And of course players have lives and can't always make every session, but in my experience that's true of everybody; say on average a player misses one session in five. It evens out over time. If there's unusual circumstances, if one player is going to be out of town for a month, I'd be happy to find some workaround like letting another player control their character, or running a short side-adventure on a different night to help them play catch-up.
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Jul 27, 2009 00:25
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Mikan posted:H_double, on the other hand, the whole thing about players risking their characters and "earning" XP kinda boggles the mind. RPGs aren't serious business. I mean RPGs own and they're something I'm involved with both as a hobby and professionally but that kind of "the players must earn the right to deserve XP" thing is weird I'm a pretty easygoing guy, and my group has a casual beer & pretzels dynamics, and making sure that everybody has a good time is a top priority. This stuff is fun to argue about sometimes but it's hardly serious business. That said, they're experience points. Not attendance points or participation points. Characters will not earn them at exactly the same rate, will not level up at identical moments. But if everybody is involved in the game, characters progress at a similar enough rate that there's never really a game-breaking power gap in my experience. From the 4E Dungeon Master's Guide: quote:Only characters who take part in an encounter should gain the commensurate rewards. Characters who died before the encounter took place, or did not participate for some other reason, earn nothing, even if they are raised or healed later on. That's pretty clear-cut, and that's how D&D has been from the beginning; you get XP for fighting monsters and finding treasure and disarming traps (and good roleplay and advancing the story), not just for being along for the ride. Another question: how do the rest of you feel about giving XP rewards to individual characters, say for an exceptionally clever plan or great tactics or bravery?
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Jul 27, 2009 02:16
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The guy who introduced 4E to me described it as "more complicated at first glance, but more streamlined once you get used to it" (and I think that's a pretty good assessment). It's a little bit like with computer interfaces, where "easy to learn" and "user friendly" are actually pretty different concepts.
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Jul 28, 2009 22:02
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Ulta posted:Just to tie this to GMing, what do you guys think is the "best" setting? For sci-fi, I really like Traveller. You can run it as either more like space opera or hard SF (I tend to prefer the latter, largely because there's just not that many RPGs that do hard SF well). One of the basic conceits is that interstellar travel is still fairly slow (weeks or months) and expensive, and there's no FTL communication other than carrying messages by ship, so the whole thing has a kind of "age of sail" vibe to it -- there's HUGE amounts to explore, and since it takes a while to travel and for news to get around, the focus doesn't have to be on planet-hopping every couple of sessions (plus there's a lot else cool about the setting, the way it mixes mercantile, military, and political elements). For fantasy settings, I'm a big fan of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay -- it's gritty, deadly and relatively low magic, but there's plenty of room for epic heroism in holding back the forces of Chaos. It also has the advantage of a bunch of nicely detailed sourcebooks detailing the world.
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Jul 31, 2009 06:12
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:Maybe I am just saying it because it's new. But "The Day After Ragnarok" is pretty incredible. I think they are also working on a HERO version of it. But yeah, it sounds pretty amazing.
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Jul 31, 2009 06:14
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Fenarisk posted:One of the players is interested in Shadowrun, and I really am too, but the other 3 are iffy on the system and learning new rules, and are already kind of brushing it off before we even start to play it. In addition, I explained the first night would really just be character creation, learning the basic rules, and maybe doing a quick intro run just so everyone learns the mechanics and style, but to them that's terrible and "wastes a whole night we could be playing". They've decided they don't like the game and are just waiting to go back to 4e after one night of Shadowrun, but I really think the group could like the system if they actually learn it and go into it with an open mind. How about just planning on a single session one-off with pregenerated characters? That way all they have to do is show up, you give them a 10 minute mini-tutorial on mechanics and you're off and playing. Make a few more characters than there are players, so there's a good chance everybody will be able to play something they like. Make them pretty bold/cool archetypes -- street samurai or troll with a gun type stuff -- that show off the setting without getting too bogged down in complexity (e.g. go light on magic and hacking).
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Sep 23, 2009 23:41
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ItalicSquirrels posted:Do what my friends and I did for the entirety of 3rd Ed. None of us wanted to bother learning/playing with the Decker (SR's hacking) rules, so we invented "Decker In A Can"! Pop the top, hook up the wires, and it follow its preprogrammed directives. Find this file, defeat that IC, unlock this door, etc. Worked great, cut two hours of unnecessary gameplay out of every session. Actually in 4E Shadowrun, Deckers are now Hackers, and they've done away with the whole "jack into the net for a 90 minute solo quest while the rest of the group does nothing" aspect. The net is now wireless and omnipresent, and virtual objects appear overlaid on the real world if you've got the proper implants (in other words, it's like what you can do right now in real life with a smartphone and augmented reality software, only more so). The net result is that hackers now play almost like spellcasters, using their abilities to unlock doors or reprogram security systems in realtime, as part of the main flow of the adventure. Even so, the hacking rules are an added level of complexity that I'm not sure would work well in an intro game (especially if the GM is new to running the system too). Maybe you could have hacker or mage NPCs and hand-wave the fiddly bits, but let the players jump in and focus on doing cool exciting stuff without having to learn a lot of details first.
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Sep 24, 2009 02:44
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