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Widestancer posted:I thought that Shadowrun did an allright job with handling Neo Confederate style stuff. It's always hard to work with that though. Part of that is that Shadowrun's CSA doesn't really have much of anything to do with the Civil War, it's just "hey it's the future and everything's hosed, guess the USA's splitting up."
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Dec 1, 2014 23:34
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Gygax was basically just making poo poo up on the spot though, he wasn't really sitting down and concerning himself with things like unified task resolution. Saving throws were basically "ugh fine, even though the medusa should totally just petrify you I'll let you roll a die and if you roll the right number then it won't," which then got codified as a standard thing probably because the other players present suddenly all wanted the same consideration.
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Dec 2, 2014 06:51
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Well I'm pretty sure that's some of the reason why, for example, spells traditionally call for the target to make a saving throw rather than the Wizard to make an attack check of some sort, because the idea is that Wizards just don't fail to cast a spell properly, they are masters of the arcane arts thank you, if something goes wrong then it was (literally) out of their hands.
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Dec 2, 2014 07:07
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Swashbucklers of the 7 Skies is pretty good for the sort of thing the title suggests if you like A). the PDQ system and B). airships.
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Dec 4, 2014 03:25
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I am legit curious to know if anyone out there played in a 7th Sea game where the big metaplot reveal came into play and it was greeted as a positive addition. Someone out there had that happen and thought it was the most amazing goddamn thing and I want to hear that person's story.
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Dec 5, 2014 08:37
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Night10194 posted:Feng Shui's original metaplot is how you do it. Some poo poo went down, the 'old' heroes are all dead with your PCs expected to probably step in and become the main drivers of stuff, everyone's at a stalemate, and then the sourcebooks are just describing where specific factions and guys are at that exact point in time (or generally) and providing plot hooks instead of 'moving' things. A lot of games have done this sort of "here's a history, every game starts right at this point here, go" thing and it's pretty much superior to actual metaplots in every respect but the publisher's ability to churn out sourcebooks advancing the metaplot while teasing more metaplot. Feng Shui, Eberron, even Exalted, much dogged as it is here, did this for the most part which was kind of surprising when you consider it first came out during the oWoD days when WW writers never met a metaplot they didn't like. Metaplots seem to be one of those "90's RPGs" things (give or take) and as RPGs have gone forward they've mostly fallen out of favor. The only big-for-elfgame-values-of-big games I can think of that really revel in a metaplot anymore are Forgotten Realms and Shadowrun.
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Dec 5, 2014 20:24
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Davin Valkri posted: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? Metaplot means that there's an ongoing story that's been planned out and advancing regardless of whatever any player-characters or GMs might do, often with a bunch of secrets and twists that are doled out piecemeal over the course of sourcebooks and supplements. In other words there's an official canon that the RPG is going to follow, which can have knock-on effects for later sourcebooks. If I'm playing a game where the corebook has players being a part of a secret organization that's all about protecting the world from mysterious magical threats, let's say, and then three sourcebooks down the line it turns out that secret organization was an EVIL CONSPIRACY ALL ALONG OH NO, then suddenly the emphasis on the game line shifts to being on the run from your secretly evil former bosses and being forced underground, that's metaplot. If big, climactic, pivotal points in an adventure are stuck behind invisible barriers so the players can look but not touch as NPCs duke it out so the writers can guarantee an outcome so as to tie into future supplements, that's metaplot. Metaplot doesn't have to be full of bait-and-switch dickery and lovely adventures necessarily, though if often is. Shadowrun has a metaplot that's generally inoffensive in that regard though it's still full of "hey didn't this detail used to be here, oh right that got changed in the Event of Whenever. Also a magic comet swung by and now there are catgirls and people with four arms okay byeeeee." By contrast, Eberron fleshed out an entire setting in detail, but beyond a single two year jump to incorporate stuff from 4E D&D into the setting there's no train of ongoing events, no canonical "and then this happened next," no campaign secrets that Keith Baker doles out with an eyedropper. Eberron is designed to start everyone at the same point in time and turn them loose on the setting, making it their own.
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Dec 5, 2014 20:40
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Yeah I was gonna say, unironically you want Traveller. Get the Mongoose version since T5 seems to be honestly kind of not very good but MongTrav has tons and tons of random rolling poo poo and you are explicitly a bunch of random (usually military) retirees that don't even own your ship, trading and smuggling and stuff like that.
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Dec 7, 2014 02:00
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Tendales posted:Has anyone looked at Outbreak: Deep Space yet? We just got it in the store, and at first glance it looks like they're trying to be the Dead Space RPG. Just in time for, uh, Christmas! It sounds like there could be some interesting ideas in there (no idea about the execution thereof) and I do like me some Dead Space, but man, RPG ad copy is always hilarious. quote:Fluid Chracter Advancements and Unique party Roles (be the 'morale center', or 'gun nut' of the group!). Unique party roles like "the guy who loves guns," truly a thing no RPG has been ambitious enough to tackle before.
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Dec 7, 2014 03:23
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That's the second time AFMBE's come up in the chat thread in recent memory. I could see it doing a Dead Space-esque game pretty easily, there was already a sci-fi book for it.
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Dec 7, 2014 04:47
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Covok posted:I don't own AFMBE. Is it any good? Is it that one where you stat yourself? AFMBE was put out by Eden Studios, they of Buffy RPG and Conspiracy X "fame," and it was essentially their own pocket "GURPS: Zombies" using the regular, non-cinematic Unisystem. They published a whole slew of zombie themed, genre-slanted sourcebooks, including sci-fi, kung fu, pirates/age of sail, and I kid you not pro wrestling, plus a "zombies of the world" sourcebook with undead monsters from various cultures and myths, and the thing is they were actually all pretty decent to good. This was all before nerd pop culture hit peak zombie, so they weren't as worn out at the time either.
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Dec 7, 2014 05:21
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Sounds like the latest FATAL & Friends sensation.
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Dec 7, 2014 05:28
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RocknRollaAyatollah posted:Please, no more. Honestly I'm legit curious to see if John Wick's GMing advice remains the same or if his supposed play style has changed any over the years. Not curious enough to pay for the privilege, mind you.
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Dec 7, 2014 06:39
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There weren't really many books for the line that were bad except I guess the fiction anthology and some mini-supplements full of pregenerated archetypes which were thoroughly average. Eden's kind of an unsung bygone these days which is a shame, though I'm glad to see them Kickstarting more ConX2.0 stuff. Beyond Human never really materialized and that City of Heroes RPG was probably a bad idea from the outset (which also never materialized).
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Dec 7, 2014 08:51
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I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess that the vast majority of people who play tabletop RPGs do not, in general, possess the sorts of skills and abilities that many genre fiction protagonists, even "everyman" types, possess, at which point I'm left wondering what the value of statting up the members of your game table are if the vast majority of what you commit to paper isn't really game applicable. "Okay so we've got three guys who do IT, Bob's still in college for his Master's, and Steve does medical billing. Nobody knows anything about guns or survival, Bob had a year of Tae Kwon Do when he was 15, Jake had to be first aid certified but hasn't ever had to actually use any of it, and Steve is 300 pounds and has asthma." I'm not saying that no gaming group ever has members who've done things like learn to use firearms, serve in the military, go on wilderness excursions, be an EMT, etc. Simply that by far the majority of people getting together to play RPGs are probably not going to be "stat-worthy" by traditional RPG metrics unless FFG has come up with a way to make someone's CS degree a vital and integral part of their zombie apocalypse game. Covok posted:But wasn't AFMBE the game where your supposed to stat yourself? Nope.
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Dec 7, 2014 21:41
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Night10194 posted:At the same time Norms are a ton of fun to write because they have just enough points to have a chance and can grow well if they survive, but they're still easy to write as relatively plausible people. Sheriff's deputy, med student, research tech, petty thug, etc. Oh sure, the issue isn't that playing "normal" people can't be fun, it's just that most people around the game table probably aren't going to fit into the mold of what most tabletop RPGs generally consider worth statting these days. My last irl face-to-face group was a guy who did freelance editing and layout, his wife who was working on her veterinarians' degree, a philosophy major, two unemployed people, and a retail manager. In no RPG that we ever played would anybody around that table qualify for a full writeup without some generous stretching.
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Dec 7, 2014 21:50
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Covok posted:I mean it's not like that's such a bad thing. The standard adventurers in trpgs are kind of unrealistic and, even though we idolize them to a degree, they are kind of awful people. Sure, they qualities we should have such as bravery and, honestly, we probably could all stand to lose a few pounds and be in better health, but they also tend to be incapable of solving problems without violence, tend to be too greedy and obsessed, are unsympathetic to the plight of others unless they can get something out of it, are not emotionally old enough to settle down, lack emotional maturity in general thus are quick to wild and dangerous action, often know little about the ways of the world, never find love or have kids, can't even perform simple mathematics, ectera. Well I at least don't mean it in some sort of "critique of the modern man" sense, it's not "hurr nerds are dumb and bad," it's just that most RPGs are built to place an emphasis on adventure-y skills and not, say, your ability to file TPS reports or that time you coached little league. And these games FFG is making don't look like they're changing that paradigm what with being about zombie apocalypses and aliens and stuff like that.
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Dec 7, 2014 22:42
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Quarex posted:Pretty much this. My group has played crossovers in these systems that I can recall: Champions, Villains & Vigilantes, Homebrew System Based On Heroclix(!), 3rd Edition, Call of Cthulhu, Savage Worlds, and uhh I think they played a brief Rotted Capes crossover since I moved (edit: I was reminded to add Jumpers and Fuzzy Hero). I am not going to say that there is a system in there that would necessarily change any of the doubters' minds about the concept, but surely either a superhero system or Call of Cthulhu, depending, would appeal--where you can instantly stop being yourself and be Mythical Yourself or where you are going to die no matter what kind of character you are, so why not be you? Okay, but at this point I'm not really "playing myself," I'm playing an idealized version of myself. And not even an actual idealized version of myself either, because my ideal self doesn't have superpowers or a zombie-killing katana, my ideal self is me but independently wealthy and maybe with a better work ethic. So right away the entire concept falls apart for me because I'm playing a fictionalized version of myself that isn't even all that germane to the sorts of things I daydream about being. I don't have a zombie survival plan, I don't imagine what it would be like to have superpowers...maybe I'm the most boring nerd ever or maybe I simply possess an overabundance of self-consciousness, but the whole thing is a bit too "self-insert fanfiction" for me to completely get over.
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Dec 9, 2014 06:28
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Zurui posted:I don't understand what part of "playing as an idealized version of yourself" is not "playing as yourself." I mean, B⊆A. Seriously. Because I don't have superpowers and even by the most generous stretching of the imagination I don't possess a fraction of the sorts of skills and affinities that your typical RPG protagonist is assumed to have on hand. Adding those things to an expy of myself is perfectly possible, but at that point what is it I'm gaining by pretending that the superpowered, adventure-capable character that bears increasingly little resemblance to the person sitting at the table is actually me? Let alone the fact that my first reaction to "you're sitting around the gaming table when suddenly you hear an explosion nearby! What do you do?" would, in all likelihood, be "look outside the window to see what's going on, maybe call 911," not "band together with my gaming group and form a mystery solving team," and I'm pretty sure that holds true for the people I've gamed with over the years as well. Which means even sans superpowers the premise of these scenarios seems to hinge on you playing "yourself," but a "yourself" that responds to things in Default RPG Protagonist mode instead of, y'know, how you'd actually react to horrifying disasters and apocalypse scenarios. I'm not trying to knock anyone who has fun playing games that way, more power to'em seriously, but to me it highlights how unsuited most actual people are for insertion into your typical RPG framework when the apparently ideal way to make it work is "give everybody superpowers and do the opposite of what you'd normally do."
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Dec 9, 2014 08:37
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Zurui posted:You guys keep throwing the term "typical RPG protagonist" around and I'm confused. 99.99% of all roleplaying games out there broadly assume a certain type of character, generally rootless adventurers with skillsets that the average tabletop gamer, in all likelihood, doesn't possess, often including (but not limited to) extreme violence, skullduggery, criminal activity of all sorts, military training, professional medical training, vehicle handling, highly unrealistic computer hacking, extreme athletics, demolitions, social engineering, investigation, and/or spycraft, and that's not getting into really weird poo poo like magic. How many wildly successful RPGs are there about out of shape IT guys, unemployed college students, and office drones? I mean you can easily do that poo poo in a number of games but how often do people actually do that, as a rule, as opposed to essentially your typical D&D party? How many games robustly support those sorts of characters as opposed to murderhobos? I could see myself as the protagonist in a story, just not the story that the majority of RPGs are set up to tell. "The story of a guy in his 30s considering maybe going back to college" is absolutely a story that could be told and maybe even be interesting but it's not one most RPGs are interested in facilitating the telling of and it's not, if I'm honest, one I'm especially interested in playing because I'm already living it. All this "play yourself in a game" stuff just seems to be a way to layer the typical RPG "adventures and violence" play over a character that superficially resembles you after that layering is done. If genre conventions rule all and the idea is that these self-characters should just fall into line and go through the motions hitting all the tropes along the way then, again, what's the fundamental point of "playing yourself?" Because that's, to me at least, very clearly not "yourself" at that point, it's "you as some kind of self-aware RPG protagonist" and the whole exercise seems kind of weird having to constantly be thinking "okay what would I do, only not me exactly but, like, a fictional character version of me that behaves like an RPG character?"
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Dec 9, 2014 09:56
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AmiYumi posted:The longer this argument goes on, the more I'm seeing an underlying attempt to justify hiding away your life in a bubble. Like, I look back on the people I've gamed with, and I could absolutely see them as at least a group of Hunter: The Reckoning characters: we've had a doctor, a lawyer, gun nuts, survivalists, techies, Ren Fair groupies, ex-military, jack-of-all-trades, librarians, teachers, belted martial artists...just a big ol' mess of skillsets and personalities, like you encounter when interacting with other people in the world. I've been in sessions where 3/4 of the group was knitting while gaming, myself included. That's certainly one interpretation I guess. It's kind of condescending (especially that whole "well it's just self-loathing" bit) and wrong, but sure, why not. I'm technically a "belted martial artist," I actually practiced for ten years give or take. I would absolutely not, by any stretch of the imagination, ever stat myself up as any sort of RPG-equivalent martial artist because A). it's been many years since I've practiced, B). my body is in significant worse shape at this point, and C). the number of actual fights I've ever gotten into could be counted on zero fingers. Likewise I once held and fired an actual gun, I'm pretty sure that doesn't mean I know how to shoot someone, and I'm not really interested in pretending it does, nor do I really want to listen to Bob try to tell me that he would totally have Guns 6 because he's logged a hundred hours of Call of Duty and that totally counts. The people I've gamed with, and myself, are not a Hunter the Reckoning party waiting to happen unless we're talking "hear voices from God, go insane and maybe commit suicide," I could see that happening. I'm not upset about that because RPG characters are frequently like adepts from Unknown Armies...they may have the ability to do things like "walk into a knife fight unarmed and walk back out standing" or "break into secured facilities without being detected" but they frequently don't have things like "a loving family" or "a decent home and a stable job." Also they get shot at a lot more often. So frankly RPG protagonists are fun to play in the same way that a fictional character is fun to watch or read about, but actually being one is not something I particularly fantasize about being, no. I have no earthly interest in going out and learning something because it might make me a better RPG protagonist or whatever the gently caress. Yes, I'm interested in bettering myself, but the things I'm interested in learning and doing still won't make me a better zombie apocalypse survivor and I don't care, because zombie apocalypse nerd survivalist fantasies frankly get pretty insufferable after a while.
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Dec 9, 2014 19:48
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AmiYumi posted:My past few posts have been needlessly hostile. Yes. There's a significant gulf between "I hate my life" and "I acknowledge that I am not a genre fiction protagonist" is the thing, and some people seem to conflate the latter with the former. You don't have to be consumed by self loathing to not see an RPG grade player-character when you look in the mirror. I'm sorry about your friend but that sounds like a whole different issue.
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Dec 9, 2014 22:16
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Mr. Maltose posted:The 'correct' way to play I Am Myself in an RPG is to do what every action movie does with an average joe character: exaggerated competence. Of course your highschool science teacher could forensically examine a crime scene just like a firefighter has the physique necessary to fight off terrorists at a hockey game. It's a bit of robbing Peter to pay Paul because it's really not you but you-through-Van Damme or similar, of course. Yeah, this was my point from earlier. If you're playing an idealized, exaggerated version of yourself in a world that runs on action movie logic it's not like you're really playing "you" so much anymore.
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Dec 9, 2014 22:39
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Zurui posted:How is it any less "you"? To borrow from Eclipse Phase, if I sleeve you into Indiana Jones' body, it's still you. If you go on an adventure in that body to save the Staff of Destiny from Nazis in colonial India, you're still on that adventure, doing those things. I guess if you ignored the physical differences, personality differences, and obvious superpowers required for the concept to fly then sure, it would be exactly like me.
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Dec 9, 2014 23:04
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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. If I woke up and had superpowers I'd still be me, which means I wouldn't rush off to fight Nazis and aliens, I'd probably try to leverage my sweet superpowers to make a zillion dollars and retire young. But because doing that would basically be the "I sit at home and do nothing" option and damnit Bob we game once a week if that, can you at least try to play along, the whole concept hinges on me pretending that my response to gaining superpowers.wouldn't be how it would actually play out but instead "I decide to act like an RPG protagonist I guess."
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Dec 9, 2014 23:34
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Worst that can happen is nobody posts there and it dies off.
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Dec 10, 2014 09:05
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Games with coarsely-grained attribute and skill ratings are always terrible about stuff like that. The writers set down what each rating is supposed to correspond to, fine, and then almost invariably completely ignore it. Like in Shadowrun how having a 6 in an attribute is supposed to represent peak unaugmented human capability, best of the best in the days before orks and trolls showed up, but you need a Strength of 8 to hip-fire an M60 machinegun, a thing that real unaugmented people have been known to do all the time. Plus a 6 Strength really just works out to 2 average successes on a roll anyway so it's not even that impressive to begin with.
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Dec 13, 2014 08:30
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It's not even a failure of simulation in and of itself, like a game that tacks on crunchy and fiddly rule after rule to account for every possible situation until you end up with GURPS by way of Hybrid and things become an unusable mess, it's a failure of the writers to actually stick to what they want their own guidelines to be, i.e. "A rating of 2 is average" and then giving Joe Beat Cop 4 dots in everything (as was the case in the nWoD's core rulebook, for example).
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Dec 13, 2014 09:30
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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. Even without explicitly calling things out on some sort of graded scale you're going to wind up establishing what certain levels of STAT or SKILL mean simply by them existing the way they do. Like in Shadowrun, you could get rid of the descriptors for what each level of Strength are supposed to signify but by virtue of humans having their stats capped at a max of 6 that tells you right there that 6 is the normal human max without getting into things like cyberware or magic, ergo 6 is peak unaugmented human. So if the writers then go on to assign certain tasks with minimum Strength thresholds above that and those tasks are things that normal people can do right now in the real world, then someone hosed up. The issue with Shadowrun in particular is that thanks to the aforementioned cyberware and magic, along with metahumans with default attribute levels higher than humans, the general scale that play tends to happen at isn't really a "1 to 6 with outliers for stats" scale, it's more like "4 to 12" and I think that tends to skew both the players' and writers' perception of where "average values" should lie.
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Dec 13, 2014 21:59
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Honestly, in my experience D&D is pretty terrible at running games that ever do more than occasionally flirt with seriousness. I mean, the number of games I've been in that were even semi-serious could probably be counted on one hand, but I feel like something about D&D just inherently leads to, well, what you've got going right now.
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Dec 13, 2014 22:07
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Why yes, it turns out that boring poo poo is less boring if you put in the time and effort to make it interesting. If only we could go back in time and deliver this message to the D&D writers of yore, and maybe warn them about 9/11 while we're there.
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Dec 15, 2014 00:07
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Rand Brittain posted:There is such a thing as being too gameable, though. If a world looks too constructed for player characters it's going to feel fake. (The obvious example I'd use is the character splats from those White Wolf games where the character splats were most vestigial—there for the sake of character creation and nothing else.) It turns out that someone's masturbatory attempt at creating a "real, verisimilitudinous" setting feels fake too, because no game writer that fancies himself Tolkien is actually Tolkien and so all these settings full of extraneous details like the Quasi-Elemental Plane of Salt just wind up like those character backstories from that one guy, you know the one, who wrote like 15 pages detailing his character's life story down to the history of each individual scar and pimple, literally none of which ever came up in the six sessions you played before Bob got bored and decided he'd rather run something else. Stacking a bunch of dumb, pointless poo poo into your setting doesn't make it feel any more "real" no matter how much die-hard simulationists rail against making things "too gameable," it just feels like someone crammed a bunch of stuff together because that's how you make settings, right? Just layer on the fake places and fake names and meandering backstory with a trowel until you hit critical mass. This all reminds me of the ongoing LP of Killzone, a bad and boring game that through the power of hype managed to inexplicably spawn an entire franchise. I played Killzone years and years ago and I never even realized until the LPer brought it up that the people who made Killzone penned this elaborate backstory for the game, an entire historical timeline chronicling everything from the near-present day future to the point at which the game itself begins, all of which was hosted on a now-defunct website for people to peruse. And literally none of it matters at all. Not a single loving part of this sprawling historical saga they penned to set the stage for their epic tale of the generic white guy army versus anime space Nazis ever comes up in the game. It's all completely and utterly pointless. It doesn't get referenced, it doesn't impact the story, it never informs gameplay, nothing. I'm willing to bet I'm not the only person who played Killzone and never even knew about this stuff either, and even if Killzone's myriad technical flaws were somehow obviated and it turned into a smooth and tightly polished game it would still be nothing but a generic, soulless shootman if ever there was one with a completely pointless, tacked-on backstory trailing behind it like toilet paper stuck to its shoe.
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Dec 15, 2014 02:16
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Mormon Star Wars posted:Kai Tave this is a picture of two tradgames critics who were turned into a pillar of salt much like LOT (a noted anti-gygaxian), for disparaging God's Own quasi-elemental planes. They look like LARPers so good riddance.
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Dec 15, 2014 02:29
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RocknRollaAyatollah posted:This is why Killzone 2 is the strongest out of all the games because it uses Killzone as the setup mythos and it boils down to get Space Hitler. I agree with everything you're saying by the way because I played 1-3 and did my time with that series. What's funny is that Halo did the same thing...there was this whole complex backstory and history that never made it into the game itself, much of which never even made it into any game, so unless you read the website and the novels and the promotional comics and whatever the hell else you'd never know, for example, the Master Chief was originally a kidnapped child turned child soldier put through unethical super-soldier experiments designed to give the oppressive Earth government a tool to use against rebellious colonists, but then suddenly aliens show up and gosh, wouldn't you know we have all these super-soldiers lying around, guess that sure was a stroke of good luck! Does any of this have any bearing on the game whatsoever? Sure doesn't! At least when Homeworld gave you the equivalent of an RPG sourcebook for a manual it was to make losing Kharak feel like more of a punch in the gut after you'd read about this robust civilization that had now been reduced to half a million cryo-capsules aboard a ramshackle spaceship.
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Dec 15, 2014 02:52
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Lightning Lord posted:"There is a magical dimension where salt monsters come from that will generally kill people if they go there" is not a sprawling pseudo-Tolkienesque detail at all, though. I guess it all boils down to whether or not you feel every detail of a published setting has to be immediately 100% gameable out of the box without any touching from the GM or players. I mean it's the loving Plane of Salt, it's not that big of a deal, and I get that it represents Gygaxian naturalism to you because it springs from the interactions between energy and all that, but it really feels like railing against old design for the sake of railing against old design. Who has ever been hosed over by the elemental planes? I don't mean looked at the section of Manual of the Planes or Planescape that detailed it and yawned, I mean who has had their gaming totally upended by it in the same manner as Forgotten Realms canon? I'm not even against not using it, or versions of D&D cosmology that don't have it. I'm just finding it odd that people are acting like it's this inexcusable design flaw, and that people are so salty about it. If it's boring and pointless, if the best thing that can be said about it is "well it's inoffensive," then why are you, the writer, wasting wordcount on it instead of something, anything more interesting? Of course anything can be made interesting through your own judicious effort but at that point you've just approached the Oberoni Fallacy from the fiction side of things instead of the mechanics side. If it could be made more interesting then why didn't the writers themselves actually do that in the first place? And if it's ultimately not that important than why do so many people hold it and things like it up as examples of how worldbuilding should be instead of something that's "too gameable?"
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Dec 15, 2014 03:06
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When the party reaches Section Q, roll d100 on table 10-3 to determine the sort of resolution that the adventure will have. Table 10-3 01-07: Deus Ex Machina 08-13: Dramatic Irony 14-20: Comic Irony 21-30: Anticlimax 31-38: Morality Play 39-46: Musical Number 47-54: Dadist Surrealism 55-65: Pie Fight 66-72: Greek Tragedy 73-81: Sudden Plot Twist 82-90: Cliffhanger 91-00: CAUGHT IN TIME LOOP: Return to Section A and replay adventure from the beginning.
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Dec 15, 2014 05:03
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Plague of Hats posted:A preview of 100 Awful Tables to Make Your Games Seriously the Worst. Coming soon to Lee's Lists.
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Dec 15, 2014 05:08
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Well never mind then.
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Dec 15, 2014 05:27
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Error 404 posted:What's funny, is that I legit liked the Halo backstory novels more than the games themselves. Well one of the big feathers of the Halo franchise was Bungie's ability to successfully spin it into things like novels that a ton of people bought and read, including people with no interest in playing the games. Surprisingly it turns out that having a whole bunch of bullshit backstory that's only useful for reading on the toilet actually comes in handy when you decide to package it up for that exact purpose. I mean, none of it ever really mattered to the games until they decided to make Halo: Reach and even then only tangentially, but at least they recognized that all that stuff was better served as literal books if they weren't going to bother doing anything else with it.
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Dec 15, 2014 06:51
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 00:21 |
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I don't necessarily think that there's anything wrong with the idea of a GM tossing a handful of threats and challenges into the air and letting the ones that the players can't/don't focus on develop into further complications down the line. I mean, there's a difference between hardcore simulationist sperg "my campaign setting NEVER SLEEPS, now please hold while I roll a million dice to determine how these various events play out" and "there are three pressing dangers, you have enough time to handle two." I would say that this is a case where it comes down to execution rather than it being a sign of bad GMing period.
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Dec 15, 2014 23:12
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