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unseenlibrarian posted:Anima Prime is...no idea, though I understand the rules got released under creative commons, so that's kind of neat but hasn't urged me to go look it up, but no relation to any of those. You can tell by the lack of colon. I'm not sure how well Anima Prime plays, but it's the only game I've seen that attempts to emulate the feel of Final Fantasy abilities without bringing along a ridiculous amount of complexity. Its basic mechanics are similar to Mythenders' dice pools (I think the authors playtested for each other, so probably not a coincidence). Also, its non-conflict resolution mechanic is "the player decides whether their character succeeds or fails", which is at the very least refreshingly simple. It's interesting enough that I've been wanting to try it out, but haven't really had the opportunity.
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Jan 7, 2017 02:05
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Brainiac Five posted:Then, uh, a significant part of play in any RPG doesn't consist of gameplay, such as any time you play out a conversation. If you go an entire scene without using mechanics, I'd say it could certainly be argued that you've stopped playing the game for a while. Personally, I would say that playing an RPG consists of roleplay (the decisions you make for your character) and mechanics (the defined capabilities of your character within the minigames that the RPG provides), each feeding into the other. If that feedback loop stops for a prolonged period, then you've basically slipped into either pure roleplay or pure gameplay. E: Actually, that's a bit narrow, since a game like Diplomacy specifies periods of discussion that take you away from any mechanics for extended periods. Those discussions feed directly into the decisions made in the main gameplay, though; I suppose the real question is how often D&D will generate the same strong link between roleplay and mechanics when taken outside its usual focus. Zandar fucked around with this message at 13:28 on Jan 9, 2017 |
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Jan 9, 2017 13:16
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Brainiac Five posted:Well, I think any model of RPGs which concludes that substantial parts of the activity of role-playing are extraneous blubber is one that encourages a dysfunctional approach to design where everything must be gamified, and is one that assumes RPGs are basically board games rather than a category of game on their own. You can do freeform roleplay while playing a board game as well; lots of players make up a personality for the "general" they're playing as in war games. The difference between RPGs and board games is that RPGs have you make decisions about your character that affect their capabilities in the mechanical part of the game. If you keep an IC journal for your general, that doesn't mean you're playing the game while you're writing it after the battle. That's fine! Activities surrounding actual play are fun too. Similarly, having a conversation which doesn't change anything about your character's capabilities or their situation in subsequent play is some (presumably fun) freeform roleplaying surrounding the actual play involving mechanics. And these activities aren't extraneous, of course; games should be taking them into account, because part of the appeal of both wargames and RPGs are the stories they generate. That's the other part of the feedback, where the results of the mechanics inform the roleplay. Honestly, though, this is pretty tangential to whether D&D is a good fit for romance. The real issue is that when you try to make them fit, you're essentially paring D&D down to a pretty rules-light skill system for the majority of play (except maybe someone has Charm Person, which is... probably not ideal), and there's probably going to be another system that's been designed specifically as a rules-light skill system which will run more smoothly.
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Jan 9, 2017 15:10
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Brainiac Five posted:This just leads us to demanding people roll for every task, since someone just automatically getting on a horse to ride it is not playing the game, but it becomes part of the game if you have to roll for it, even if you would automatically succeed by the rules. This is what I meant by gamifying everything- in order to make discussions about tactics or plans part of the game, you have to be rolling or have elaborate speaking rules, else it's just a distraction from the game which ought to be eliminated as a waste of time. You'll note that I didn't, in fact, demand that people roll for every task; I said that games should take the surrounding activities that come with them into account. In fact, part of a game's design should probably be to determine how much time players are expected to be engaging directly with the rules and to design those rules accordingly. In any case, getting onto a horse would generally change how you interact with mechanics in following scenes. Bargaining with a merchant affects the resource-management minigame. Choosing whether to take a slow, safe route to the enemy's fortress or a quick, dangerous one will probably affect encounters on the way and when you arrive. Lots of decisions while roleplaying interact with the game, it's just that deciding to ignore your crush because you saw them with another girl might well not.
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Jan 9, 2017 15:32
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Brainiac Five posted:So on the one hand, we still have it passed down from the hand of God that these activities cannot actually be part of play, and the true nature of gameplay is in contextless activity without any purpose or reasoning behind it, but on the other hand we also have the statement that the context is suddenly part of gameplay now because the game state no longer consists solely of the raw gears and their interactions. How do you resolve this contradiction? They are part of play, and I never said otherwise. I only said that "having a conversation which doesn't change anything about your character's capabilities or their situation in subsequent play is some (presumably fun) freeform roleplaying surrounding the actual play involving mechanics", and I haven't changed that stance. I did use "gameplay" to refer to directly interacting with the rules at one point, so that's probably confused the issue; sorry about that. The unique thing about RPGs is that they're essentially an interface between two separate activities: freeform roleplaying and... some game, whether a card game, an FPS, a very simple dice game or Jenga, which acts as a resolution mechanic. In the course of play, there is a feedback loop. Say that as part of your roleplaying, you get on a horse. That affects how you interact with the rules of the game. Let's say that as a result of these mechanics, your horse is spooked by a fireball and bucks you off. You decide that your character now has a deep distrust of horses; the result of the mechanics has influenced your concept of your character. Due to this, you never put any points into riding; your roleplaying has again influenced your character's capabilities within the rules. If you have a conversation that only affects how you see your character, and doesn't change how you're going to interact with mechanics, then it's roleplaying influencing roleplaying - it's not part of that feedback loop, it's just straight roleplaying. Which, again, is fine and expected; different RPGs have different amounts of this feedback loop (computer action RPGs, for example, often limit it to class choices and putting points into skill trees). But if the amount you interact with the rules differs from the amount that the designers expected you to, it's likely that parts of the rules will need changing to stay fun, in which case it probably wasn't the best fit in the first place.
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Jan 9, 2017 16:53
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Brainiac Five posted:This argument leads to the conclusion that all games should have extremely narrow foci such that designer intent can be readily comprehensible so that we can be sure we are dedicating the proper amount of time to acting and not improper amounts. Well, most games do have pretty narrow foci, and in a perfect world where there were an infinite number of free RPGs available (and a really good filing system), I suppose all games should be infinitely narrow so that one of them perfectly suits your group and campaign. Since that's not the case, though, games have a focus depending on the audience they're trying to reach, and generic systems have an appeal as a cheap way (in terms of both money and time to learn systems) to run campaigns in a variety of genres. Designer intent being readily comprehensible is absolutely a plus, though. One of the major strengths of Apocalypse World was that it told you why the system worked the way it did, and the ways in which changing certain assumptions would break things without reworking other parts of the game. Also, games which use sessions as breakpoints often start to strain if people aren't using resources at the expected rate, so how much time gets dedicated to acting can actually affect how well a game runs.
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Jan 9, 2017 17:28
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gradenko_2000 posted:Isn't Paragon/Renegade a sort of gamified emulation of the sort of curated, player-driven plot you'd get with a human DM in the first place, such that you might not need an explicit representation of it anymore if you already have a human DM driving the game to begin with? It also serves as a mechanic to basically tie your charm/intimidation skills to your reputation, so you might want to include that in some way.
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Jan 12, 2017 12:06
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hyphz posted:Again, there's threads of massive confusion about that on the RPGnet forums. The GM makes a move when the players "look to them to see what happens" but don't they do that immediately after they've declared their action, every time? And one of those moves is "use up their resources", so what stops the GM just pulling stuff out of their rear end to drain a party to nothing? "Make a move when they look to you" is meant to be trumped by "if a player describes doing something that fits a move, tell them to roll a move". I can't remember exactly how clear that's made in the rulebook, but without that players would technically never get to roll anything, so the intent is pretty cut-and-dry. In general, you can only make a "hard move" (one which actually has a negative effect on the character) if a player has rolled a 6- or has ignored a "soft move" (a warning of oncoming danger). You can't just take someone's sword away without giving them any chance to engage with the mechanics. There's still room for arguments as to whether a player has ignored a soft move, of course, but that's a question of communicating the situation properly to players, which can cause problems in pretty much every game.
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Jun 21, 2017 15:44
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| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 03:16 |
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There are no penalties for firing while prone in PF - actually, it just stops you using missile weapons (except for crossbows/firearms) altogether. Supposedly Prone Shooter originally gave a small attack bonus while firing from prone, but the editor nerfed it to negate penalties without bothering to read the relevant rule. The errataed version is still terrible, but since there's no attack penalty it does provide some benefit if you're in a ranged duel - at least until the opposing wizard fireballs you.
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Dec 28, 2017 06:43
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