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gradenko_2000 posted:I don't really disagree with you either, but Essentials didn't fix that, and even with 5e slow drip-drip-drip of Unearthed Arcana articles were still seeing waaaaay too character options being created. WOTC can always claim "the UA articles don't count as supplement bloat because they're unofficial", but ... it's out there, which means people will want to use it eventually, and if "my table says Corebook only" was enough of an rebuttal, then this shouldn't have been considered a problem in the first place. Exactly. With a fair number of the options inside the actual 5e core book also being badly-designed, the freeze on official content means that things get stale really quickly. I know you can still vary up how characters play, but it gets a bit silly when every character has to be designed around a reason for having the same set of abilities as that class did in the last campaign. And, wow, selling someone FAE instead of Pathfinder was bold, but I'd like to see how their game would go. D&D's ultimately popular because it's easy to run, while FATE and FAE tend to leave the GM floundering (just look at the arguments about how to represent "being on fire")..
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Jun 21, 2017 11:53
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drrockso20 posted:Agreed, I honestly can't comprehend how FATE and other similar ultra light "story" based games got so popular, but then when I say can't comprehend, I mean I literally cannot wrap my brain around how such systems work, my brain just zones out whenever I try, it's just too abstract(I think it might have something to do with how my brain is wired from my Autism) They work in a situation where there's a strong tacit agreement between the players and GM. They have problems otherwise. I mean, I did notice that D&D recently did a series of streamed games (Stream of Annihilation) which were presumably meant to show off how great 5e is, but actually to anyone who knows the system showed off how bad it is because of the number of times rules had to be ignored or fudged. Likewise with the comedy goon-involved podcast Dragon Friends which is meant to be about a group of newbies playing D&D, except the GM has to frequently dodge the D&D rules in order to keep things interesting, most obviously drastically cutting monster HP.
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Jun 21, 2017 12:54
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gradenko_2000 posted:It assumes "don't be a dick" and "don't take over the story" are things you can just say to people and they'll follow along, as opposed to more structured games where actual mechanics prevent you from being a dick (not really, not always) and actual mechanics prevent you from declaring yourself God Emperor and destroying the world on your say-so (also not really, also not always) It sounds much more reasonable put like that, but more importantly it assumes that the players will be OK with the GM fiating bad things onto their characters without the support of any rules or pre-provided text. There are plenty of groups that are not OK with that, even though a lot of roleplaying communities online seem to have a blind spot with regard to them. I believe that's why the "5e/PF with adventure modules" style has substantial coverage outside of those groups.
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Jun 21, 2017 13:24
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Harrow posted:That's definitely not how PbtA works, at least. When bad things happen to your character, it's explicitly as a consequence of something you did or a failed roll. If it ever feels like GM fiat, the GM is using the system wrong. Hell, PbtA games even have a list of moves for the GM to ensure that they don't just start pulling things out of their rear end or being unfair to players. 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? Andrast posted:The GM can GM fiat bad things onto your character in every RPG. Using a different system won't change anything if you GM is an rear end in a top hat. What's different is how easy or hard it is to avoid being an rear end in a top hat. If you don't have the adventure in advance, then hitting the players with any encounter you're not certain they can handle will feel like fiat-bad. In most story driven games, there's no clear rules for how bad stuff happens to the character, so however it's interpreted is down to the GM. If you look back at those questions about being "on fire" in FATE, a lot of them came from the fact that nothing in the Aspect system explicitly allowed the GM to rule that the PC was taking Stress from being on fire, because it's just another aspect. What mindset asks that question? The mindset that wants to avoid any sort of GM-inflicted badness to the characters that isn't backed up by rules. You don't have to like the fact that some players seem to want to play like that, but the fact it comes up so often suggests strongly that they do. If there's no rules, then what's the maximum badness the GM can inflict and not be an rear end in a top hat? Now what's the minimum the GM they're supposed to inflict to to reasonably represent the stress and challenge of the setting? What's the overlap? D&D and its ilk make it nice and clear. I'm not an rear end in a top hat for putting you against this dragon, the book says you're the right level for it. I'm not an rear end in a top hat for rolling the huge damage the dragon does, it's in the book. I'm not an rear end in a top hat that you all got killed, Mike Mearls is an rear end in a top hat for giving dragons stupidly low CRs. But I'm in the clear and don't have to worry about my rear end in a top hat threshold every moment I'm running.
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Jun 21, 2017 14:48
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Evil Mastermind posted:"I’m not out to get you. If I were, you could just pack it in right now, right? I’d just be like “there’s an earthquake. You all take 10-harm and die. The end.” No, I’m here to find out what’s going to happen with all your cool, hot, loving kick-rear end characters. Same as you!" - Vince Baker, Apocalypse World. Sure. So how much harm is it OK to inflict on them? How much is it OK to do? The problem with the "hard move"/"soft move" thing is that there's no actual list of which moves are hard or soft; you can use up PC resources as a soft move. But It's not even just that. Even if the GM balances everything perfectly, the feeling in play from the fact that the GM is making things up on the fly is not the same as knowing it already exists. I mean, how cheated did everyone feel at Lost when they were told the mystery had no answer? That'll be in your mystery RPG unless you work out the answer in advance, no matter how well you run it otherwise. The feeling that the evil dungeon was all in place and there are 5 goblins in the room because there are 5 goblins in the room, not because you decided to put some goblins in, and it's a fixed challenge that the players are pushing against (and even one they can compare their progress on with other players across the world!) is important for a lot of players. For all the neat innovations in RPGs, none of the new innovators seem to get that this stuff is important, so we're left with those players stuck with duff systems.
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Jun 21, 2017 16:08
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Covok posted:Dude, I've run Fantasy Craft, Eclipse Phase, Torchbearer, and Burning Wheel exactly in the manner you just described. Doesn't matter how rules heavy it is you can run any game by the seat of your pants. All it takes is good improv skills and a decent understanding the system as a matter of fact I hate to break it to you but most games are run that way. Very few people I know actually sit down and really plan out their s*** regardless of the system they're using. Sure you can. And good for you! But it's not particularly easy for many people. Saying you have to have "Good improv skills" is a pretty harsh filter against some people. quote:but most games are run that way. Very few people I know actually sit down and really plan out their s*** regardless of the system they're using. Are "most games" run that way? They might be in your perception and on gaming fora. But the figures don't seem to match up when you consider that firms like Paizo are kept in business by adventure paths and they're the only supplement Wizards charges money for on the entire line. Curse of Strahd hit 250 sales/month for a bit when it first came out, that's at least 500 or so groups that play with fixed adventure modules, assuming no GM ran it for two groups. But anyway - this isn't about persuading me. It's about my belief that the bulk of gamers are stuck with D&D and their horribly flawed systems because the people developing innovative systems are treating the difference in rulesfeel caused by excessive GM fiat as an elephant in the room. Heck, I'm a huge fan of Strike! but the lack of adventure support is making it niche. quote:Most GM's might do some planning but most of it goes out the window anyway because you know players. I'm just saying but if you think we one hundred percent planned a lot of that s*** out I hate to break it to you but we did not. Even if we have the dungeon mapped out we might be making s*** up. And that's ok, because the poo poo you make up is likely to be linking material. You hopefully aren't going to "just make up" the final boss fight if you've got the stats in the book, or at least you'll probably base things on them. And the players know that, which is important, because they know the boss they are facing was set up like that at the moment they stepped into the castle. If they don't know that, then for all they know, if they won it was because you let them and if they lost it was because you made them. I mean, sure, when I ran a Shadowrun game a while back the players totally went off the expected rails and ended up meeting several of the big-bad gang leaders in totally out-of-the-way situations. But they were still the gang leaders from the book and their abilities and strengths and weaknesses were always there from the beginning. quote:I've had dungeon Maps where I just use the map and made s*** up in every room and no one noticed. You really can't tell the difference especially when you pretended to look at your notes. I can't speak to your games, of course, but every time I have had a GM say you couldn't tell the difference and then I have watched them run, the difference was immediately obvious.
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Jun 21, 2017 16:59
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paradoxGentleman posted:Okay, to be perfectly fair I don't agree with this; what that other poster was saying isn't all that weird. As a player, realizing that the GM invented an important plot point at the last second can be take me out of the story. It's like recognizing that the shadow puppets are, in fact, not queens and knights but bits of paper cut to resemble. It's noticing the man behind the green courtain. 
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Jun 21, 2017 17:00
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S.J. posted:I haven't looked at the 5e DMG since launch but I don't remember there being anything particularly notable about it's DM instructions. It certainly isn't suggesting anything like dropping rocks but when you've built your game's sales pitch as being fueled by nostalgia, people are just gonna keep rolling with the same stupid poo poo they've always been doing. You really couldn't put much to the contrary of what's already been written by your 'good' games (not much) or people will bitch. The 5e DMG has some truly horrible advice in it though. My personal favorite is that if a door's flush with the wall and painted to look like the wall, that's a secret door, and you find it with a search check. But if a door's behind a curtain, that's a concealed door, and you don't find it with a search check, you find it by saying you are moving the curtain.
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Jun 21, 2017 18:35
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gnome7 posted:So to answer your way earlier post about "how does PbtA stop a GM from just being an rear end in a top hat and taking your stuff all the time?", the difference between soft and hard moves is some of it, because that's the rules and how the game works. A little bit of it is also "that's a boring way to play a game." And most of it is "that goes against their principles and agendas." I realize its easy to ignore those as a player coming from other games, but you cannot. Your Principles are your rules, they are important, they're how you make a PbtA game work. And your Agendas are strong guidelines, telling you how to play the game to get the mood it wants to set, and informing how you should use your moves. I like a lot of those. But it's not so much about how does it stop the GM from being an rear end in a top hat, as much as how does it enable the GM to know how much of an rear end in a top hat to be. After all, the GM can always be a complete doormat who never does anything bad to the players, but that isn't fun and just looks like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yb-sCNfE0bM. I mean, Principles and Agendas? 2e AW has the principle "Respond with fuckery and intermittent rewards." I mean, how are you supposed to balance those, or balance those against things like "be a fan of the players' characters". But even then, it's not necessarily just about that. I mean, also leaving through the AW 2e PDF it has things like an ability that lets you ask the GM questions about an enemy but with the note, "On a miss, ask a question anyway but be prepared for the worst." I think the idea of a player knowing that an enemy's properties were made worse because they rolled badly asking a question about them is immersion shattering for at least some players. DalaranJ posted:Hyphz, what would you advocate regarding furthering the development of nonrule modules? FATE probably can't be, because it's a system that allows players to specify arbitrary pieces of text and those are almost always harsh to run, especially with the "always on" rule in Fate Core. PbtA games could probably benefit from them (Monster of the Week actually does have adventures, although they could be better formalized) but AW itself probably not for the reason above.
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Jun 21, 2017 19:32
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Harrow posted:This is true of drat near any system, though. What you're saying is that "if the GM ignores the way the game is supposed to be played, the GM can be too much of an rear end in a top hat/too much of a doormat," but that is true of any game system. What stops a DM from making encounters too easy in 5e D&D? What stops them from throwing too much loot at the players, or withholding loot to the point of being a huge rear end in a top hat about it? Well, let's try to avoid talking about "stopping" them. Obviously words in a book aren't going to stop them. Second, let's establish that the GM doesn't want to be an rear end in a top hat. If they wanted to, yes, no problem, they can do that in any system. But that isn't the problem. The problem is how the GM can give the players a challenging experience without ending up being seen as an rear end in a top hat, even if they fail. What stops a DM from making encounters too easy in 5e D&D? Nothing. But if the DM wants to raise the challenge, there's guidelines for how to do that. If he wants to have them fight a dragon and they lose, he's not an rear end in a top hat, he may have just made an innocent mistake. Compare that to any game where the stats for that dragon aren't written down in advance. Oh, does the dragon hit the player? That wasn't because the book says dragons have +7 to hit and you rolled a 10, it was just because you made it up, rear end in a top hat. Oh, does it do enough to kill them? That wasn't because the book says dragons do 3d6 damage and you rolled 15, it was just because you made it up, rear end in a top hat. If the GM has to make that decision on the fly on a round-by-round basis in the fight, then it's no better than a "bolt from the blue". Even if the DM didn't mean to be an rear end in a top hat, how can they deny the allegation? They did, after all, make that decision knowing that a character would die. quote:This likely just comes down to a different perspective on what a tabletop RPG is supposed to do. If you're expecting that the GM has created a world and your characters are in it, playing out an adventure, then yes, it's going to be difficult to swallow that your roll might have made the situation worse for what seems like an unrelated reason. But if you look at it as the GM and players collaborating on creating a story together--with the rules forcing and resolving conflict and helping to inject tension into the narrative--then it makes perfect sense that the in-universe facts might be different depending on your roll. It is a philosophical difference, but I don't really see it as "having difficulty" more than just "not wanting" to play that kind of system. Which is fine, but that category of players aren't getting a whole lot of love from RPG designers at the moment, which is why they're stagnating on stuff like 5e and PF. I mean, I have a group playing PF at the moment, I'm playing along, I'm not a great fan of the system, I'd really like to try something else but one of the other players who hasn't run before wants to GM and I can't deny the fact that 5e plus a module is much easier to GM than everything else.
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Jun 21, 2017 20:38
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gnome7 posted:They play tabletop games a few times. They gently caress up. They acknowledge they hosed up. They ask their players how they did, if things went how they wanted, what they could do better. They learn. And they do better next time. But again, I'm not talking about making a mistake. At some point you have to do bad stuff to the PCs and you have to do it to some extent on purpose. Not being an rear end in a top hat while doing that is the tricky bit. If your player's favorite character gets in the way of dragon's breath, and they have 10 hit points left, and you roll an 8, then if you don't have something written down - ideally written down by someone else - that says that dragon's breath has a +4 damage modifier then you're going to be seen as an rear end in a top hat if you decide that it does. And if, because of that, you decide that it doesn't? Then your player need no longer fear dragon's breath. Harrow posted:When does the dragon hit the player? When the player rolls a move and the results say they take damage. For example, if the player attacks the dragon head-on in a melee fight and rolls Hack and Slash, they'll take damage on a 6 or lower, or possibly when they open themselves to a counterattack on a 7-9. How much damage does the dragon do when that happens? Well, the SRD says that to determine the dragon's damage you roll 2d12, take the higher, and add 5, and it ignores 4 armor. None of that is GM fiat. In the specific case of fighting a dragon, yes. But that was just an example. In the case of Dungeon World, the question is much more likely to be about the frequency and level of impact of Defy Danger checks. (And my understanding is that DW is considered a malformed PbtA game because of the ill definition of Defy Danger.) quote:I mean if you want a game with more mechanical crunch and developed settings that are better than PF or 5E, those do also exist. For games close to those, there's 13th Age and Torchbearer. If you're willing to spread out into other kinds of fantasy, there's Shadows of the Demon Lord or The One Ring. For games completely different but still in that style, there's Costume Fairy Adventures or Strike! I actually like 13th Age, but the F&F review of it suggests it's seriously flawed once played with experience, which has put me off it a bit. CFA of course I like (I wrote the F&F for that one) but is a bit specific and doesn't really have the same nature of challenge as most RPGs. And Strike! is ok for the combat system, but the skill checks are a bit vague. hyphz fucked around with this message at 22:37 on Jun 21, 2017 |
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Jun 21, 2017 22:35
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Wow, that made me remember my old copy of TFOS too. I remember thinking how blatantly it was based on Lum without actually mentioning it.. but then had that weird list of episodes as the sample adventures which didn't feel like Anime at all. How did it tie into Ranma? The boy/girl gun maybe?
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Jun 26, 2017 09:44
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Ok, so this is a tricky and probably unreasonable one. Is there any game that isn't D&D that has support for a novice GM in a D&D type group? Something along the lines of one of the 5e campaign books. One of our group members has asked to GM and the group are kind of by default saying he should do 5e because it's easy to get campaign prefabs for it and easy to run. While I agree with that, I think a lot of people in the group - myself included - are a bit bored of 5e and its limited options, and I don't know if he'll have trouble as a result. So are there ary other things I could suggest that wouldn't be intimidating and have a similar thing? I did think of 13A and EotSF but we've tried 13th Age before and people didn't like it.
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Jul 2, 2017 13:40
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gradenko_2000 posted:Pathfinder? Any of the older editions? There's a lot of other games out there with more than one premade adventure. Too many of them have already been broken by the group though. Pathfinder? He'll have a Summoner for sure.
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Jul 2, 2017 16:15
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Countblanc posted:There are two Strike premade adventures, one for free and one for $4, both can be found here. I'm a pretty huge fan of Strike! but the premade adventures are a bit too thin to last long, compared to the 5e path books. They also lack maps of the tactical areas.
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Jul 2, 2017 18:32
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Strom Cuzewon posted:Stuff like this makes me really sad about how small the community is for Strike! Part of why PbtA games are so great is the huge community and all the custom playbooks and stuff, and similar stuff for Strike! (monster sets, custom maps, re-skinned classes) would take it from Great to Seriously Fantastic. I think it's a bit in the nature of the game though, PbtA is fairly fudge/fiat heavy and based on group cooperation. Plenty of those custom playbooks are rubbish - just look at the reviews of the Monsterhearts add-on playbooks from the FATAL thread - and even some of the PbtA published games have weak playbooks, but they get away with it because the GM can fudge anything and/or be blamed for not doing so. In Strike!, however, the story-driven bit is so general it doesn't really need much in the way of expansion (you could add Origins and Backgrounds but they're fairly short and campaign specific) and the tactical section puts the class developer right in the spotlight; it's a much more careful task.
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Jul 3, 2017 12:16
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gradenko_2000 posted:It's when it's a Superhero game that you're expected to use points, but then at the same time, not only do Superheroes have more points to play with, but it also actually makes some kind of sense to distill really good equipment down to points so that Iron Man can compete with mutants - a laser rifle would be functionally equivalent to laser beams shot from your eyes. I think the idea is more that superheroes tend to have fixed equipment that is part of their character. Spider-Man isn't just going to hand off his web shooters to someone else, nor Green Lantern his ring. Edit: On a totally unrelated note, LotFP just released the dreaded Vaginas Are Magic on RPGNow as a PWYW. hyphz fucked around with this message at 18:21 on Jul 3, 2017 |
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Jul 3, 2017 18:05
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Splicer posted:How married are you to the medieval fantasy genre? The EotE starter sets are pretty decent, and there's three of them. I actually ran FaD for a bit but it was broken by autofire.
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Jul 3, 2017 22:07
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Splicer posted:Were you adding the extra difficulty die and applying soak to each attack? It's a while back, but I'm pretty sure, yes. It did result in groans and hilarity when it was discovered that you can just machine-gun a Jedi. Sure they can deflect blasters, but if you just go full-auto on them, they'll be too tired to deflect them all.
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Jul 3, 2017 23:30
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kingcom posted:Yeah thats specifically how lightsaber fighting works in the FFG SW systems, its all about burning through strain until they can't deflect shots any more. The one real change that is handy is to just prevent the Auto-fire quality from being modified to require less than 2 advantages and it tends to be a solid balance to things. Yea, but it kind of screwed up in FaD where the players are supposed to be "reclaiming the ways of the Jedi" but when they meet the low-end Sith at the end of one sample adventure, they just machine gun him because it's the safest option. Oh, they all had their own sabres which they had hand-crafted as guided by the Force, but there didn't seem to be anything in the traditions which said they had to use them. Groan.
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Jul 4, 2017 15:00
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Blood In The Chocolate. Best Adventure. Please tell me that's a troll raid and they aren't really that stupid.
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Jul 4, 2017 22:10
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SunAndSpring posted:That's the book where it's obviously made by some guy who got all his fetishes from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, right? Yep. And where the entire adventure is rigged to force the players into those fetishes. I F+Fed it a while back (I don't think it's in the archives, presumably because inklesspen doesn't need or want oompa-loompa inflation rape on his site)
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Jul 4, 2017 22:36
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https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3758962&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=340#post469054447
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Jul 4, 2017 23:36
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LORD OF BOOTY posted:like how many pieces of zombie media, exactly, have them melting into sentient pools of goo at will and/or combining into 5-man superzombies and/or rocketing their loving heads four goddamn yards away and swinging them around at people like a flail Randomly reminds me that when I was young there was a Dracula computer game where Dracula could kill you by picking you up by the leg, whirling you around his head and fastballing you into a wall. The hilarious thing was that it was a text adventure and the author actually tried to write that in gothic horror style.
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Jul 5, 2017 12:46
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Sorry for the incorrect pronoun! I'd add it on the slender chance that someone might see what crap they're putting in the Ennies.. On that topic. Has anyone actually played OLD?
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Jul 5, 2017 19:31
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Halloween Jack posted:I really need to know which Dracula game this was. (There is a surprising plenitude of Dracula adventure games.) Um.. "Dracula". By CRL in 1986 for C64 and other 8-bits. Edit. Here we go: Rod Pike, Dracula 1986 posted:His eyes are read, like burning coals! His features are twisted with fury.... he moves towards me.... his thin red lips retract to reveal the most viscious (sic) rat like teeth! I breath in shallow gasps... there doesn't seem to be any air! AND I CANNOT MOVE! This is by no means all there is. quote:THE MANIACAL FACE OF RENFIELD IS ABOVE ME! "Hello Doctor" His voice is quite but full of menace. "I want you to see where I have been hiding. But I know you would not come willingly, and I could not carry you far. I am going to take... just your eyes with me... HA HA HA!" He holds a knife at my throat!... Then.. then he produces... A SPOON!!!! When I was a child I was genuinely frightened of this game hyphz fucked around with this message at 22:36 on Jul 5, 2017 |
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Jul 5, 2017 21:13
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Mr.Misfit posted:We may rag on Raggi for all we want. LotFP sells. The glossy art, the polished print, those sell. To be fair this is fairly typical adverse selection behaviour.
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Jul 6, 2017 11:40
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The usual objections I see to fail forward are: - it makes a failure feel like a critical failure; - you have to just plain fail eventually and when that happens you may have dug yourself into a huge hole.
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Jul 6, 2017 19:31
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It's not just that though. They fail the check, bears appear, the bears TPK the party and now the player who failed the check feels like crap because he/she ruined the adventure for everyone. It makes things much riskier.
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Jul 6, 2017 19:54
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Harrow posted:How is that functionally different from the GM having planned that bears are nearby, and if the player fails the check, they don't notice the bears and get ambushed? The only difference is whether the GM planned it ahead of time, which is something the players probably shouldn't know at the time, right? What's different is that if the bears were "there anyway" then chances are the PCs would have encountered them anyway at some point. If they appeared because a roll was failed then the player knows that. Even if it's the example you picked.. what if the players were really engaged with the story, looking forward to delivering the McGuffin, and then because of Bob taking a single risky roll now that is all spoiled? Narratively it's the "oh god they got sent to prison AGAIN" in Order of the Stick..
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Jul 6, 2017 21:24
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Thing is, the while "preplanned or improvised" thing might be transparent IC, but it surely isn't OOC. One of my biggest problems with Shadowrun is the enormously complicated stat sets for NPCs compared to the default city setting where the PCs could meet anyone. No one can make up a full stat block for everyone, but if you are going to handwave the stats, it makes all that complexity irrelevant. One reason I like Strike! is that the system design acknowledges this. There _is_ value and relevance in knowing you're exploring an existing world that is defined. It's the difference between Knytt Underground and No Man's Sky. As for "I should get a roll to know these directions are BS", well, that's another issue where skill granularity can become critical. A failed Streetwise check under fail forward could reasonably get you fighting a gang, but a failed Ask Question check.
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Jul 7, 2017 11:36
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AlphaDog posted:How far ahead of time does it need to be made before it's "an existing world"? Before you start playing at all? Before you start a given session? Just in time for you to experience it? It has to be made independently of my PCs actions and contain predefined responses to them that are coherent. That does not mean that my PCs actions can't change it or that improv will never be necessary. Only that those they _are_ changing it from something that existed. You can't change the world if there is nothing to change it from. Most GMs, including myself, can't define a world independently of their PCs actions when they know what they are.
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Jul 7, 2017 12:38
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AlphaDog posted:How do the players know what the PCs are interacting with looked like before they experience it? That's ok. It's still independent and potentially coherent. The problem is not necessarily with improv but with too much of it. What's a problem is if you changed from goblins to (let's presume, tougher) kobolds because nobody asked the right question when asking the villagers what they saw. Likewise "if the players fail to pick the lock then the orcs rush down from their guardroom" is ok. "If the players fail to pick the lock then orcs appear and the next unexplored area the players enter has an orc guardroom" isn't.
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Jul 7, 2017 13:04
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Because of the message the players get. The last case is especially bad because it tells players "an easy way to progress is to be bored". Heck, I've seen some adventures that say the GM should keep an area running for as long as the players are interested. So being bored is the ONLY way to progress.
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Jul 7, 2017 13:22
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If all the players had the same opinion.. and it was easy to tell that.. and the extension could be bailed out any time since they could stop enjoying it at any moment or in response to an OOC event like a new session... and story progress and pacing weren't just as important as an enjoyable IC environment.. then I can see that logic. But it practice it will never be that cut and dried. I have never met a GM whose improv/notes split couldn't be detected easily. I don't deny that they might exist, but I'm certainly not one.
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Jul 7, 2017 13:43
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See, it's vice versa for me. I find players don't want to roll if there are interesting consequences for failure because it's too risky and they would bear the responsibility to the group. ("May you live with interesting consequences...") Risk free failure gives the scope to experiment and explore.
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Jul 7, 2017 14:14
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It's more to do with experimentation. If we fail to pick the lock, maybe we can break down the door. Maybe we can find the person with the key and bribe, trick or kill them. Maybe there's another route around. All of that ability to experiment collapses if you only get to try one thing. And there is then no reason to try anything other than the safest option.
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Jul 7, 2017 14:38
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Subjunctive posted:Are you worried that your players will choose to be bored in order to advance a plot they care about advancing? If the players are excited to try and defeat Mr Dragon, but they're exploring a planar fortress and enjoying it, occasionally finding a hint or a power up but never a lead to where he is, they would be mightily annoyed to tell them that they would never have been able to learn where to find Mr Dragon until they were bored of the fortress. Or "until the end of the session" which is the other horrid pacing fudge.
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Jul 7, 2017 19:18
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JackMann posted:Also, Hyphz, I want to say that I appreciate that you're keeping in on this and explaining why you feel the way you do. I don't agree, but I appreciate you arguing with us in good faith. Arguing on my end has helped me understand my own thoughts on the matter better. It's a tricky one, because I actually do like the idea and see the logic behind it, but I have trouble dealing with the tradeoff. I mean, as another example, when I was running FaD the players were often going to environments like broken down spaceships or distant villages and they tended to move pretty quickly between locations, naming what they were searching for and more or less being able to find it quickly. This was a bit odd for a group that's very used to classic room-by-room dungeon crawls, even if they're a bit burned out on the "no information navigation" thing and tend to just go "left hand rule". While the stories went a lot faster and were more engaging as a result of not going room-by-room, at the same time the feeling of size and detail in the environment was reduced pretty drastically, and I wasn't sure this was a good thing, but I wasn't sure what to do about it. I'm still not, to be honest.
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Jul 8, 2017 13:17
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| # ¿ Apr 28, 2024 23:46 |
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What do people use for creating dungeon maps nowadays? All the mappers I can find either focus on overland maps, are massively overblown (CC3) and/or ancient, or are extremely lazy and focus only on drag-and-drop tiles. It's rather sad to say that the DROD editor still makes better maps more easily than most map makers, which is a bit of a shame. Has there been any innovation there?
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Jul 14, 2017 18:40
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