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So as someone who just got into Spire thanks to the amazing bundle of holding deal, I have some questions for folks who are more experienced with the system: Does the base "add all stress when checking for fallout" make characters as incredibly fragile as it seems? Also how have you handled stress tracking? I'm not a fan of the suggested "The GM knows, and doesn't tell players their scores but instead uses flavor descriptions" I think I'd lean towards having my players track their stress and when I hand out more asking where it puts them, then rolling for fallout. I also lean towards having the different stresses count as different tracks -per the alternate rules for more heroic play. Ideally I'm looking for a feel where the characters are a tad less resilient than say a blades in the dark PC, but the trade off is costs to people around them. I don't want to be the guy who immediately houserules or modifies a system before playing it, but I also don't want to merc and stomp a group that's used to beefier characters and not being punished for risks. Reading the thread I get that part of the theme is only roll if it's meaningful, but I don't want to get into a "Ok players try to engineer ways you avoid touching the dice, because that's how you lose" like some old school dungeon crawl. Coolness Averted fucked around with this message at 22:24 on Dec 3, 2020 |
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Dec 3, 2020 22:22
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Gorefiend posted:The characters are fragile with the base stress system, but that is intentional as they aren't supposed to be automatically on top, the cell is the underdog. Playing with individual tracks instead is totally fine though, I've done both and they'll still get hurt plenty. Yeah, and I totally want there to be risks and for them to feel like the pressure is on, which I think just having a dice system where there's between 25-75% chance of taking stress from any action that requires a roll builds towards. I just see the pooled stress, especially with hidden values leading to some of my players becoming risk adverse, since after 2 rolls they'll potentially be looking at nasty blowback. The seperate pools and player facing numbers I feel would lead more to my table saying "Ok we need to do a heist to get cash" or "Ok we need to go do something that refreshes my character and can help rebuild my cover"
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Dec 4, 2020 02:41
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Another quick question: what have you folks used for character sheets, especially on stuff like roll20? I'm not a fan of the spire sheet uploaded to the site, it looks a bit more confusing than the default sheet to someone who doesn't know the rules, and since there's no compendium or SRD integration, I think I might just give my players the fillable pdf to use.
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Dec 10, 2020 02:29
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I've wound up using the roll20 sheets since they do work a little better than they seem to at first blush, but still don't calculate and do math you'd expect them to. About 2 full sessions in, things are going pretty well. Does everyone else import mechanics like clocks for factions and npc movement behind the scenes? I feel like having that little bit more structure for successes and failures (especially partials or multirolls) helps a bit more than just strict GM handwaving, especially so there's some trade off with 'ok I wanna spend this session reducing bond stress' or 'we're taking the full refresh action' So far my players are big fans, the roughest convert has been a player who has only really done d&d and crunchier stuff feeling some things are arbitrary, and also being more used to 'good' choices and tactics being rewarded and 'bad' ones punished.
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Jan 9, 2021 00:40
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DalaranJ posted:Is there a preference for the regular fallout rules or the 'less lethal' fallout rules? I've found the 'less lethal' is good for figuring out dice rolls and learning the game, also lets you do stuff that requires multiple successes (whether by using clocks or making the PCs fill an NPCs stress boxes they same way they would in a fight). The downside is if you have someone trying to 'win' you'll see a lot more strategic plays and bargaining to spread stress around between categories. Like in my game, 4 sessions in my players taking risks are banking between 3 -15 total stress counting their resistance slot freebies. They're still only getting a 0-30% chance of fallout on a roll. If playing the standard rules, any given failure or partial success would be literally risking character death at this point. I'd say the biggest drawback to characters surviving this much is we're starting to hit advancement bloat, and I'm having to get far more miserly about low advances, since it can be tricky to keep track of 7-10 powers and abilities for some.
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Jan 16, 2021 05:11
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My d&d player is still dragging us down by trying too hard to negotiate their way out of consequences and costs or mother-may-I and rules lawyer their way out of dice rolls and stress. I'll probably post a rant about them in the chat thread, since it's not spire specific. Just the usual player with bad habits and traumas from particular genres, and potentially the warnings in the first pages of the book.
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Jan 16, 2021 05:15
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SkyeAuroline posted:The "less lethal" rules are the only ones that make sense imo. Default fallout rules introduce some weird behavior re: narrative conditions when clearing it comes into play. Can't comment on the difficulty or lack thereof except in the Heart playtest (in which standard fallout was ridiculously, horribly lethal). In Heart I think it's a bit more fitting though, since it's pitched as a horror game. Both do say 'this will kill your character,' but with Spire, it feels more like just setting up that the game is one of underdogs with high stakes. I don't see everyone coming to the table in a horror game sure they'll all be the the final girl. Also Heart's resistance system where it's more of a soak vs free slots seems to click better to me if going off one pool. Part of the problem I think with Spire's resistance stats is how they're presented on the character sheets. Copying the old white wolf system of bubbles marking your permanent slots and check boxes for filling in used ones probably would have conveyed it better.
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Jan 16, 2021 07:16
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Yeah, at my table it feels like pooled stress would frequently lead to sort of situation where you'd take the book's suggestion of downgrading to mutiples of the lower tiered fallouts, since it would make more sense narratively; The low stakes gambling shouldn't lead to financial ruin or the character bleeding out from wounds from a day or two ago. So I'm now defacto seperating the different stresses into different pools, just with room to make it seem unfair and arbitrary when stuff like "Last session Jane lost a PC at 9 stress, following something small. This session John walked away from 16 stress with only 2 minor and a moderate fallout." Hell, I'm already getting the risk adverse player quibbling about why they think certain abilities should make them a perfect master of disguise immune from risks or consequences. If they felt I wasn't applying rules evenly it would get worse.
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Jan 16, 2021 08:47
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Elector_Nerdlingen posted:I have a dude with this exact attitude in my Blades game and it's making an otherwise fun game really loving drag at times. He's a D&D-alikes-only guy too. I've been trying to bribe them with stuff like "Ok folks, I'd say the humiliation you caused a small gang could get you a minor advance if we say they're still claiming this turf but won't be putting on any displays of ownership or harassing the locals. We can make it a medium advance if they've fully abandoned it. That will mean the bigger scarier sharks are going to move in and claim it." The d&d player immediately pounced on that. We'll see if that means they're starting to get the flow of the game, or if they insist the flavor text of an ability means bad things never happen. My favorite rules lawyer moment (and the only one where I actually deviated from RAW) so far was when they corrected me that a d4 stress was invalid, and the rules require a d3, d6, or d8. When I asked "Ok, so d3 was too small, but I didn't want to bump you all the way up to a d6, should we go with a d6?" they dropped it.
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Jan 16, 2021 19:23
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Doubleposting to help bump the thread, but I can't recommend the Shadow Operations Book enough. It's a really great collection of one shot adventure hooks for Spire. I've peppered a few of the adventures from it into my regular game as distractions from the main plot for our season, and as a way of kinda nudge the group into doing things. It's also my favorite sort of adventure supplement "Here's a bunch of props, and some scene ideas. Set the players loose and see what happens." I also like that all of the adventures are pretty easily tweaked to fit into something ongoing, so you can insert factions and NPCs the group has already encountered and also gives suggested rewards for integrating into an ongoing game. My group ran the "How to Steal a Body" story last night and almost immediately decided they were going to weekend at bernie's the corpse with no prompting. The only thing I'm sad about was when given the option of stuffing the body in a kebab cart or palanquin they opted for the palanquin, but it fit the weekend at bernie's motife so was all good. So far bribing with better advances or material benefits for risk is working a bit better with the D&D player, but I still need to have a private talk with them about spotlight time and maybe giving the other players a little more of a chance to do their ideas. A player commented privately to me that it felt like if I ever stopped speaking the D&D player was immediately launching into what his character did -at one point even talking over me to explain what he wanted to do when I specifically asked another player. I appreciate the enthusiasm but they come from an improv background too so I think aren't quite used to a moment of silence and expect everyone to be shouting over each other when in freeform RP mode, with combat providing the structure that prevents that.
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Feb 5, 2021 21:58
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FrozenGoldfishGod posted:I've had to just straight-up say "Shut up, <name>, it's <other name>'s turn right now. You'll get one too." to a few players who weren't getting the spotlight concept right away. Mostly after gentler hints failed. Yeah, I was just downright surprised they actively talked over the GM to proclaim an action that would try and make another character's moot. The session I was posting about probably had them at their worst. They also failed a roll at one point and argued I chose the wrong consequence. I was wrong to say their attempt to shoot an animal to scare a pack of beasts away resulted in the beasts attacking the group. They should have still fled from the sound of gunfire, but the character who failed the attack should have been embarrassed and taken a rep hit for it. So that's what the player felt was an acceptable failure condition: "you get exactly what you want, but look silly." Other characters getting a chance to instead shine in combat was too much. They actually got better about spotlight hogging in a few later sessions, even if they were still really bad about trying to bargain out of penny ante impacts or stretch low tier advances beyond any reasonable expectation of how they should work. Scheduling conflicts made them drop out of the game though, and it's been smooth sailing ever since.
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Apr 1, 2021 11:18
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zerofiend posted:Nothing official, but a buddy of mine released an unofficial supplement called Ichor-Drowned. Contains multiple new classes, a new calling (Retribution), a different take on the Heart as a psedo-oceanic setting, vehicle rules, a Tarot-inspired deck for delve creation, and an adventure about breaking into the Incarnadine afterlife. It's gotten a lot of good feedback on the RRD discord. I'm biased, obviously but I think it's worth picking up. That does seem pretty cool as a pitch. I love me some customized callings, and love some alternate minigames for generating stuff. Delves especially are something that can use some help finding ways to keep them interesting.
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Nov 6, 2021 05:55
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Haystack posted:I've been thinking about a pipe-dream PbtR hack, and in the process realized that if you tweaked the fallout resolution so that you check if the die rolls under the highest stress total in any track then it's a design intermediate between the highly lethal "roll under your total stress" base mechanic and the less-lethal "roll under the stress in the resistance you just used" alternate mechanic. Just thought I'd share. Have you seen the Heart version of fallout checks? It works much better in practice than Spire's. GM rolls a d12, it's against total stress. Still needs to roll under. If the fallout check is under the total stress they trigger fallout and the die result determines if it's minor or major. Minor fallout clears the stress track in whatever category of fallout they're taking, major clears all stress. The GM and player can opt to upgrade 2 minors into a major or 2 majors into a critical. So there's never a "gently caress, narratively it doesn't make sense for you to die in this situation but the dice say you gotta" Also taking fallout leading to fully clearing 1 category or all stress, so it's much quicker to resolve than having to subtract different stress amounts based on the fallout. Coolness Averted fucked around with this message at 20:53 on Nov 14, 2021 |
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Nov 14, 2021 05:13
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DoubleDonut posted:I've been reading through the book for this and a lot of it seems really cool, but I'm really not especially keen on some of the core conceits basically being "you will do horrible things and then you will die, having achieved, at best, nothing at all, and every player character is aware of this." It just sounds like it would make for a pretty miserable, pointless time overall. I ran a Spire game for folks where I did a lot of bending and kept stuff mostly at tier 1 threats and risks until they were rolling with 4 dice consistently and I still had 1 pc death. The group really wanted to do more of a dungeon crawl type play so we ran a second campaign of Heart, where the PCs are a little less fragile and that ran out of gas when a player actually crunched the math and saw it was even more skewed towards failing so lost all motivation to play and asked we play something else. Plenty of folks in this thread have made Spire more their own by making the Ministry more just, but ultimately the stuff under the hood is geared around pyrrhic victories and characters paying heavy costs, and you'll be wrestling with the game if you don't want that. It's also not a good fit for groups that want longer stories following the same PCs forever. Like you absolutely can do a game with meaningful victories and the Ministry liberating Spire, but you need to end on that note or switch to a different system if you want to model a fight on equal footing or rebuilding the city. Coolness Averted fucked around with this message at 09:07 on Jun 9, 2022 |
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Jun 9, 2022 08:57
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rear end-penny posted:A friend ordered me the Spire core book and that got here Sunday... I had no idea what I was looking at but the blurb on the back sounded cool. Once I started reading the book I had a hard time putting it down, it is crazy dense with lore. I don't know when I'll be able to get a group together for it, but I'm really looking forward to taking a crack at this game. Nah, other than like big enough to be an industrialized nation state where there's not enough open real estate.
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Jun 16, 2022 08:26
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DarkAvenger211 posted:I saw the Shut up and Sit down review on this game so it brought me here. It seems extremely my jam, but his notes at the end mention that the book itself is so jammed with background and lore that it might require players to really dig into it themselves so they have an idea on how the world works. It makes sense in games where players have narrative agency themselves and I think player abilities here allow them to make some fun changes. Eh, how creative are your players at making stuff up, or for that matter are you down with spinning what they make up into setting details? I only had 1 giant lore nerd, and 1 player that at least mined the books a little to find stuff related to his character, and everyone else either didn't read the book or read just enough to get basic rules. I did have a problem player who really didn't want what spire was selling, and he had to duck out midway through the story though. I think it's worth reading to get a good feel, and it's a drat cool setting tailored to having a billion plothooks and jumping off points, but the GM can do the heavy lifting in terms of reading and connecting world stuff to what happens at the table or making Spire fit the story your group is telling-as long as there is buy in for the kind of games Spire does well. On that note: Hammer home the system stacks the deck against the player characters, it is not a game where the flavor is they are underdogs but the mechanics are weighted around their inevitable victory.
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Jun 17, 2022 20:19
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