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Talk about how you design, develop, ad-lib, or half-arse a setting for your tabletop roleplaying game. (EDIT: also card game, board game, war game, skirmish game, miniatures game, etc. I guess if you're doing a ultra rules-lite collaborative writing thing while framing it as a game that counts. If you're doing something bizarre like pretending to be a character in a scifi western while you play regular poker, that counts too. Fictional settings that you make up for games that you would talk about in the Traditional Games subforum.) Talk about weird and wonderful settings you've had a hand in creating. I remember one goon years ago doing some weird far future hyper-arthurian kingdoms set in a ruined dyson sphere with nanotech Sword Stones or something, and I'd love to hear about that poo poo again. Laugh about the dumb stuff that you and your friends made up when you were 12. Maybe your game started in the outpost at Far Kew? Talk about how you get players to collaborate on building a world rather than passively experiencing it, or talk about how you get players to interact with your 200 page setting document. Talk about doing it all completely randomly and the world that was implied. There's also been a bunch of people recently talking about how a fantasy world that's not built on colonialist ideas might look, how to construct fantasy races without importing IRL racism, how deeply weird things can be when D&D alignments are applied to everything without thinking about it and so on. Hopefully this thread also provides a place for those discussions where nobody who has an immediate violent "who cares?" reaction needs to look at it. --- I usually come down in the "ad-lib" through "half-rear end" camp when I'm making a setting. I like all players to have input (whether active or passively), and I don't like to plan ahead or make assumptions. To encourage that, I usually try to make sure there's only one of each character type, and encourage that player to be the authority on their character's species, job, background, etc. So in D&D terms, I want someone who's saying "I'm a wizard" to be the one saying what wizards are like here, do they have schools or do they do master/apprentice stuff, are they regarded as weird beards or are they normal parts of existence, etc. I want the player who says "I used to be a pirate" to tell me what pirates are like here, what do they get up to, exactly? Are they more like government sanctioned private warships, or more like water bandits? Yaaaar walk the plank splice the mainbrace skull and bones? Or a 400-person anarchist sea-adventuring commune? And gradually something comes together that might not be great, but has elements of what everyone wanted. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 03:03 on May 16, 2019 |
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May 13, 2019 07:37
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Wrestlepig posted:I developed a pretty quick method for developing a setting for Apocalypse World, which would work with most one-shots that can handle excess. That's so so important for short games. You gotta go all in. Big and bold, because when the whole game is measured in hours, you've really only got minutes to get the setting across, so subtle doesn't work. For my pbta stuff I write a short list of impressions and questions to ask. Here's one I haven't quite finished yet, "The Iron Halls" for Dungeon World. I won't use all of that stuff. The second question is pretty bad (I'm explicitly going for a several-hundred-years-post-apoc fantasy dungeon, as discussed with players). The Iron Halls lie half buried beneath the shifting sands of the Dune Sea. How did you find them? Do you think these long metal buildings were under the water that they say used to cover the Dune Sea? What do you hope to scavenge from the Iron Halls? How did you reach the top of this rusty wall of iron to find your way in? This sand gets in everything. Large spaces, metal constructions of unknown purpose looming from the darkness. A maze of tight passageways, all alike. The same rusty metal on everything. Floors, walls, ceilings. Brown and smelling like blood. A rust rotten floor, jagged edges, a seemingly endless drop. The only non-rusty metal is the chains on their wrists and ankles. Small blind creatures, who have never seen the light. Oh god it's full of snakes. A teetering, groaning walkway across the abyss. Shanties made of rusty sheets torn from the walls Huge pale beetles smelling of dead skin A shaft of light from a high hole illuminates the skull of something huge and ancient A bent metal door hangs halfway off its huge metal hinges. (When you are exposed to the Death of Iron...) Hedningen posted:Things I need to work on - avoiding cliches and dangerous cultural parallels, especially with the dwarf analogues: I know they get coded as Semitic frequently enough, so I really need to clearly differentiate them. First off, premise of looting alternate timelines is loving cool and I love it. Yeah, general game settings should definitely count but I've never thought much about the requirements for (eg) a fantasy war game as opposed to an RPG So I don't know how any of what I have to say will relate to the specifics of something like a minis game where it's always seemed to me that race/species/etc is a big bold signal about "this is the horde army", "this is the sneak army" etc that's inherent to the style of game. In general, you can avoid a lot of uncomfortable cultural parallels by not having all members of the race/species be the stereotype. If you (for example) make the ones you're focusing on a weird cult (like, weird even by the weird standards of the culture they're from), you at least avoid the "all <race> are <stereotype>" problems, and if on top of that you take a little bit of care not to do the more obvious RL stereotypes you'll be on the right track. The rule of thumb I try to use is that I try to imagine a hypothetical unabashedly racist player (like an actual nazi or KKK type person), and if I can imagine them looking at my fiction and going "oh yeah, I get what you're saying, but don't worry I won't tell anyone", then I try to re-think it. Ditto potentially sexist stuff - go "what would one of those incel dipshits think of this" and then don't do it if they'd cheer about how it's a return to the good old days or whatever. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 03:05 on May 16, 2019 |
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May 16, 2019 01:09
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Yeah you're never gonna run out of music to rip stuff off from. Most PCs are basically 70s rock stars in personality anyway. I'm currently trying to write a fantasy/punk pbta game (working title "Who's gonna throw the toilet?") where the core theme is gently caress Off We'll Do It Ourselves, the main mechanical gimmick is passion vs obsession, and the implied setting's an ongoing slow apocalypse caused by the neglect of the comfortable people who need to have neither.
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May 22, 2019 23:40
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Count Chocula posted:Red Right Hand is cliche but good for a big bad I did a 5 or 6 game d&d series in the 90s that was blatantly this and nobody noticed. I haven't listened to nick cave for ages but now I wanna do curse of millhaven in coc or motw or something. What was her motive though, from memory it's just "they all gotta die" because she's crazy (or maybe possessed?) I only listened to the song but isn't it just she admits its her doing it and then the ambiguous like my eyes aint green and my hair aint yellow, its more like the other way around Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 09:48 on May 23, 2019 |
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May 23, 2019 09:39
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Count Chocula posted:How’d you do Red Right Hand? Literally a ‘man, a god, a ghost, a ghoul’ who manipulates people? Like I know those are all things you can be in D&D with stats. He reminds me of King’s Randall Flagg or Mr Needful/Leland Gaunt. 20 years ago and it was pretty cliche, but... I just did the Walkin' Dude with a dusty black coat as the villain in a cusp-of-industrial kinda world. The devil himself (red skin hooves and pitchfork guy), walking up and down upon the earth, recruiting. Only part he can't hide with magic is his right hand. There's always a huge dramatic storm when he arrives in an area. His schtick was to secretly gently caress stuff around until heroes showed up, then demonstrate that you couldn't trust knights in shining armor pretending to help for the glory, but you could trust him to fix the problem (PCs as cogs in his plan). I did the "disappearing land" thing literally. Once he'd got people on-side, the area... went away. e: And using the best ever death metal band out of denton as antagonists is... holy poo poo, I love it. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 02:42 on May 24, 2019 |
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May 24, 2019 00:21
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