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I'm kind of curious, actually--for those games that have established settings, at what points does the setting go from "establishing setting details" to "establishing a dumb metaplot"? Like, for the Legend of Five Rings thing, I'd imagine you'd need at least some setting details about clans and emperors and such, and for weirder settings like Shadowrun you'd probably need even more pre-existing detail, but is there some point where the detail just collapses into an obvious metaplot, or does it very from (good) writer to (bad) writer?
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Dec 5, 2014 20:26
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Is there any sort of setting where "play as yourself!" could work well? I mean, zombies and aliens are probably bad at it, but would something like Golden Sky Stories or Do: Monks of the Flying Temple adapt well to that sort of play? Games where you could ask something like "here's a fantastic problem, how would you use what you yourself know to solve it," I mean.
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Dec 7, 2014 22:51
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Not to confirm AmiYumi's sentiments, but the only possible way I see myself playing myself and not turning out soul-crushingly badly is by playing games based on either FFTA (as Professor Cirno suggests) or Log Horizon/Sword Art Online/.hack, and they all have some rather "...erm..." issues. Guess it's sticking to prettyboys who are nothing like me, then! 
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Dec 9, 2014 21:20
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Zurui posted:ProfessorCirno made the reply I would have. It's a grown-up version of play pretend, just like every other RPG experience. "What would life be like if I was in an awesome fictional situation?" is an interesting diversion. Obsessing over stats in that scenario is so weird. I think it's more that it's easy to do that sort of thing when the character you make is completely separate from you. A character concept that's explicitly "like me but with all these fancy abilities" is probably going to fall into the adolescent power fantasy trap and become something that would be roundly mocked on other parts of Something Awful or this subforum.
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Dec 9, 2014 22:15
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Esser-Z posted:You might in fact be a hideous insect. Or a butterfly dreaming that it's a human. Or a brain in a jar. Or the mouthy athletic manifestation of some weird gestalt Zanar--  ProfessorCirno posted:I think that's the big disconnect. If I woke up tomorrow with superpowers, I'd still be me. I'd just be a me that can also fly. Let me put it this way. It's no secret--a lot of my characters are prettyboys. I try my best to take them in different directions, but odds are they're at least a little attractive. Everybody makes light of it and I laugh along with it too. No great harm. Now imagine you have a campaign that goes "a gooey kablooie gives you-yourself superpowers, what do you wake up with?" and I said "inhuman ethereal beauty and glamour." That's a recipe for a Worst TTRPG Experience at best and would probably reveal actual depressive/control mental issues at worst. Either way it would get me roundly laughed at as one of those delusional sorts who thinks he's in an anime and make an absolute firestorm of accusations as to what particular mental disorder I've got.
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Dec 10, 2014 00:12
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Jimbozig posted:Man, gently caress this team rocket bullshit. That actually sounds like "Ash's sidekicks from the anime all get together to get their own series". Which sounds pretty neato.
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Dec 11, 2014 05:24
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Quarex posted:You would think this means it would be the easiest thing to do it right ... using BAYESIAN INFERENCE you start with the numbers/dots/donuts that you want characters to use to represent their innate characteristics/abilities/knowledges/brainpool/arm-movement/whatever, then you start playing the game, and when you discover your numbers make it impossible for an average person to do things that average people do all the time, you either raise the "average" number or change how the system works. Then you repeat until something makes sense. Isn't that sort of playtesting what you do even if your game system is as "not-simulationist" as it can possibly be?
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Dec 13, 2014 21:32
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AmiYumi posted:One of the Pathfinder adventure paths has this; whatever the bad guy's plan was, it centered around casting a spell from a scroll with a Use Magic Device check (or something, I don't remember the details). If you were thinking "how loving groggy a GM would you have to be to actually make that roll straight", well, it's written right there into the "villain tactics" section what to do when your bad guy stands up, makes his "JUST AS PLANNED" speech, then nothing happens and he awkwardly shuffles out of the room, never to be seen again. Making the villain much less competent than they imagine themselves to be sounds like a nice way to put a bit of levity into the game. Although they should probably still get beaten down at the end, and that should probably be something decided instead of rolled by random chance.
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Dec 15, 2014 04:28
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Evil Mastermind posted:There's one company that's put out a whole line of Fate shovelware. They basically take the OGL, staple 10 to 15 pages of half-assed setting onto it, then charges $15 for the drat thing. If Fate has an OGL, and Fate Accelerated is free, then how are they still in business? That all sounds very...generic.
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Dec 22, 2014 21:19
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That seems a bit...out of genre. Is that good or bad that it exists?
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Dec 29, 2014 02:08
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clockworkjoe posted:So I've been reading Salem's Lot and playing Payday 2. Thinking of running a Night's Black Agents game where the PCs are a crew of professional thieves hired to steal a super rare antique from this dealer in a small town in the middle of nowhere. Once they steal the antique, they find out the dealer (and most of the town) are vampires. The person that hired them knew this and wanted to pit the crew vs the vampires because she thinks they'll succeed where a group of candy rear end priests, writers, and cops wouldn't stand a chance against the undead. All of those questions are going to vary depending on your vampires. I might do something like: The antique is a royal seal from a house long lost to history. It's important to the vampires for a much more utilitarian reason--the material its made of is somehow a necessary catalyst for infecting people and turning them into vampires. And the reason the crew can't get out can be the same reason Sergeant Howie can't leave in The Wicker Man--the place is an island and their boat/seaplane has been busted. Or maybe the vampires are working a storm at some arcane site in town. The vampires themselves you'll have to make yourself. Considering the isolation themes, it's up to you whether you want to go physical horror and have the vampires in direct control of the town with all manner of vicious beasties, or go more Mirror Mode and say that the town has been subverted at its core, so that its nominally human inhabitants report to their vampire sires on the crew.
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Dec 29, 2014 06:57
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