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Drone posted:Traditional Games: dare you enter our magical realm?
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Dec 27, 2020 22:28
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Drone posted:Traditional Games: dare you enter our magical realm?
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Dec 27, 2020 23:12
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Drone posted:Traditional Games: dare you enter our magical realm? It's an injoke but it works on the surface level too, I like it.
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Dec 27, 2020 23:51
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hyphz posted:The counterpoint is that if the protagonists of a movie are acting in certain ways "so that there can be a movie", then the movie's badly written. no that's literally all movies.
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Dec 28, 2020 00:37
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TradGames: Fear my arcane might! Or Drone posted:Traditional Games: dare you enter our magical realm?
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Dec 28, 2020 00:44
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Mistaken Identity posted:„Wake up, meeple!“ I've had enough of magical realms, personally, but like this one
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Dec 28, 2020 00:48
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LeSquide posted:I've had enough of magical realms, personally, but like this one Yeah, they can't all be piss wizards and no sense of right and wrong guy. The tree of RPG jokes must be watered with fresh material.
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Dec 28, 2020 00:57
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Drone posted:Traditional Games: dare you enter our magical realm? I am going to support this if we're informally voting.
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Dec 28, 2020 00:59
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It might be nice to not have an RPG in-joke, for once.
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Dec 28, 2020 01:00
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Traditional Games: Cyberpunk 2020 since 1988
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Dec 28, 2020 01:16
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TG: basically held to be the antithesis of weal.
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Dec 28, 2020 01:28
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Trad Games not trad wifes
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Dec 28, 2020 01:37
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Reject Video, Return to Traditional
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Dec 28, 2020 01:40
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Elfgames posted:no that's literally all movies. Yeah, one very common writing scenario is writing yourself into a corner where your protagonist needs to (for example) be uncharacteristically antagonistic to a cop and get arrested midway through act 2, so you go back to act 1 and have a scene demonstrating them having a stubborn rebellious streak so getting arrested later is now a natural result of their established personality. All characters have traits that exist so the story can be told.
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Dec 28, 2020 04:04
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Traditional Games: You may ask, why do we post up there when it's so dangerous?
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Dec 28, 2020 05:13
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Doing a bit of prep-work for an upcoming arc of a campaign, and wondering: anyone know how I might generate what is essentially a random node diagram? A bunch of circles of varying sizes, connected by random lines? Something like these:   It's important that the nodes and lines be randomly generated, both because I want it to feel organic, and also because I'm going to need something like 70+ nodes and their connections, and the idea of doing that by hand is, uh, not palatable. For context, this is a D&D game where the main conceit of the setting is that the land is full of ley lines, and where they intersect they form nodes, which get tapped for power by druids, geomancers, etc. I've got an arc starting this week where it would help the players to be able to actually see what the line and node layout of a region looks like because their adversary is basically an evil ley ghost that can jump around between bodies as long as they're near to a node he's corrupted. The party's best bet at stopping him is to somehow corral him into a node without an exit (possibly by having the party's geomancer cut off the lines that lead into that node) then kill his current incarnation while he's trapped. We could run all that in theater of the mind, but it'd be cool to overlay a ley node map over the regional map and say, "here's what you're up against, plan your war."
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Dec 28, 2020 05:36
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Please tell me I'm not the only one who can easily pull a character onto the table as a GM but struggles to scrape one together as a player. Company would be comforting. I say, several weeks late on getting a Cyberpunk RED character together more than just mechanically & rolled lifepath, with less than a week to go-time.
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Dec 28, 2020 06:08
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I'd just keep things basic, nail down a couple cliches of your choice and let them expand over gameplay.
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Dec 28, 2020 08:42
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Kestral posted:Doing a bit of prep-work for an upcoming arc of a campaign, and wondering: anyone know how I might generate what is essentially a random node diagram? A bunch of circles of varying sizes, connected by random lines? Something like these: I'm a broken man because I could do this abstractly in seconds but have no idea how to make it graphically. I'm very interested for when someone smart comes in and explains.
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Dec 28, 2020 08:59
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Kestral posted:Doing a bit of prep-work for an upcoming arc of a campaign, and wondering: anyone know how I might generate what is essentially a random node diagram? A bunch of circles of varying sizes, connected by random lines? Something like these: It is not optimal, but maybe this could be a starting point: http://bl.ocks.org/erkal/9746513 https://graphstream-project.org/doc/Generators/Random-graph-generator/
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Dec 28, 2020 10:25
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Kestral posted:
Generating a random node diagram is easy enough but generating them so they both look organic and like that exemplar is relatively difficult. If you're a programmer then the general term you want to google is "random graph". Specifically you'd be looking at generating a geometric graph, where the points are distributed in space and then randomly connected according to their position. The problem is both generating a nice set of points to begin with, and selecting the random edges according to some model that ensures they both look nice and all hang together in the end. It's a couple of hours of work, I expect. There are graph libraries that do this in various programming languages, but you still need to program to get anywhere with those. The only "complete" online solution I found was http://bl.ocks.org/erkal/9746513. It uses a version of the Erdős-Rényi model to connect the nodes, which doesn't guarantee that the network is connected but is very simple, and some relaxation to make it look neater at the end. You'd still need to edit the code somehow to make it generate more than the default 20 nodes.
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Dec 28, 2020 10:32
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SkyeAuroline posted:Please tell me I'm not the only one who can easily pull a character onto the table as a GM but struggles to scrape one together as a player. Company would be comforting. Well, I'm coming up on what may be the third attempt at a session 0 of Spire and so far exactly 1 person has a character, so even in games with very light systems folks sometimes have trouble putting together the basics. 4 of the 6 players all have quite a bit of GM experience.
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Dec 28, 2020 10:48
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Honestly I think that's one of the reasons games like D&D or Shadowrun stay popular, due to their heavy character build focus it means it's easy to latch onto a quick and dirty character concept like alcoholic Dwarf Fighter or egotistical Elf Wizard to give you a starting point for something more complex
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Dec 28, 2020 10:59
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SkyeAuroline posted:Please tell me I'm not the only one who can easily pull a character onto the table as a GM but struggles to scrape one together as a player. Company would be comforting. No, but I'd be super interested to hear what's going on that's causing you problems, because it might help me help out a friend who does the same thing.
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Dec 28, 2020 13:13
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Coolness Averted posted:Well, I'm coming up on what may be the third attempt at a session 0 of Spire and so far exactly 1 person has a character, so even in games with very light systems folks sometimes have trouble putting together the basics. 4 of the 6 players all have quite a bit of GM experience. It tracks - I have a harder time with light systems (I have even less set up for a planned Over the Edge game, that one's just on less of a timer... Elector_Nerdlingen posted:No, but I'd be super interested to hear what's going on that's causing you problems, because it might help me help out a friend who does the same thing. Combination of decision paralysis and a complete lack of any creative impulse. We've got our pitch (old SovOil submersible FSO from the 4th Corp War shows up abandoned and drifting, crews gearing up to reclaim it for their own ends). We've got a group (fixer, rockerboy, solo, my Media, and techie). I've got my angle to fit in here, since people really preferred the "old war reporter going back into the field" character I'd rolled through the tables over the Nomad or Exec I was considering as alternatives. I just have absolutely nothing to translate this into a functional character, even as cliches, beyond the mechanics of the sheet. Nothing comes to mind whatsoever, regardless of what I do. I used to be good at roleplay. I can't get into characters' heads any more and it's been years since the last time there was any bleed. I don't know what happened that makes this so difficult now.
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Dec 28, 2020 14:40
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SkyeAuroline posted:
Maybe you're overthinking it? I know that's one of my player's problems. They'll come up with a dozen concepts then get the same decision paralysis. I've increasingly -especially with narrative focused games- gone less from "yeah but what's my motivation?" or "what would my character do?" to "what would move the story along and be interesting?" Then the fun improv game is justifying that and trying to make for a coherent character. Like folks said earlier about letting the fiction dictate the character.
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Dec 28, 2020 15:21
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In all honestly I try to use session 0 as both a way to explain mechanics, answer system/setting questions and make characters all in one while doing some roleplaying to get folks to get a feel for their characters and the tone. It makes inspiration more accessible by letting everyone see what they're all making at once and having the GM be there to answer questions helps because everyone's there on the same page and it's an environment specifically to ask questions. Everyone making characters at once also helps avoid tone clashes down the line that can be found in individual construction.
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Dec 28, 2020 15:23
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Kestral posted:Doing a bit of prep-work for an upcoming arc of a campaign, and wondering: anyone know how I might generate what is essentially a random node diagram? A bunch of circles of varying sizes, connected by random lines? Something like these: I thought of something else which might do what you want with a bit of touching up: https://github.com/mxgmn/WaveFunctionCollapse Got it out of the procedurally generated thread. It procedurally generates images based on a small source sample.
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Dec 28, 2020 15:40
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Hostile V posted:In all honestly I try to use session 0 as both a way to explain mechanics, answer system/setting questions and make characters all in one while doing some roleplaying to get folks to get a feel for their characters and the tone. It makes inspiration more accessible by letting everyone see what they're all making at once and having the GM be there to answer questions helps because everyone's there on the same page and it's an environment specifically to ask questions. Everyone making characters at once also helps avoid tone clashes down the line that can be found in individual construction. Yeah, that sounds like... a much more helpful session 0. Simultaneous character creation would be nice too, vs multiple weeks apart. Coolness Averted posted:Maybe you're overthinking it? I know that's one of my player's problems. They'll come up with a dozen concepts then get the same decision paralysis. Entirely possible, but it's still not a helpful reframe; have to have something to walk in with before the game starts to get any "what would move the story along", and aiming for that directly is the straight road to "play optimally, roleplay be damned" without much in the way of branches and none that don't loop back into the main path.
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Dec 28, 2020 15:48
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SkyeAuroline posted:Entirely possible, but it's still not a helpful reframe; have to have something to walk in with before the game starts to get any "what would move the story along", and aiming for that directly is the straight road to "play optimally, roleplay be damned" without much in the way of branches and none that don't loop back into the main path. They also don't have to be anywhere nearly as dramatic as killing/saving a guy. For various reasons I have a tendency to join campaigns on session 2, and a bunch of my most well rounded out characters started the (well, my) first session as nothing but a pile of stats but had their entire personalities and motivations fully fleshed out by the end of the in media res introductory RP scene. e: SkyeAuroline posted:Please tell me I'm not the only one who can easily pull a character onto the table as a GM but struggles to scrape one together as a player. Company would be comforting. Splicer fucked around with this message at 17:53 on Dec 28, 2020 |
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Dec 28, 2020 16:22
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Elfgames posted:no that's literally all movies. Ratoslov posted:Yeah, one very common writing scenario is writing yourself into a corner where your protagonist needs to (for example) be uncharacteristically antagonistic to a cop and get arrested midway through act 2, so you go back to act 1 and have a scene demonstrating them having a stubborn rebellious streak so getting arrested later is now a natural result of their established personality. All characters have traits that exist so the story can be told. hyphz posted:The counterpoint is that if the protagonists of a movie are acting in certain otherwise unjustified ways "so that there can be a movie", then the movie's badly written. If you're playing a TMNT style game where the bad guys never really try to kill anyone then leaving the bad guys alive is both a part of and explained by the genre; there's no in-universe risk so there's no in-universe reason to escalate to murder. If you're playing a game where Deathman O'Genocide has and regularly continues to visibly and provably maim and murder vast quantities of people then you're going to have to come up with a better reason not to just kill him other than "we're the good guys". Splicer fucked around with this message at 17:15 on Dec 28, 2020 |
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Dec 28, 2020 17:03
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Kind of one of the most basic forms of western plot is based around "this character has a Tragic Flaw in their personality that leads to their downfall" and I'd generally say it's pretty compelling to watch, say, Hamlet's indecision gently caress him up. It's not that stories never have characters that are poorly written or poorly execute this format, but it is weird to see it criticized in the abstract. And on track for making RPG characters, I think it's a good thing to think about for making PCs even (especially) if its in a system where there's no explicit vice or what have you. Flaws that lead to mistakes like being impatient or vain are some of the best things to add to any RPG, since they drive the action and make the character a more active participant in the drama.
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Dec 28, 2020 17:34
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Appreciate the advice. I think Splicer's commentary is the mindset I needed going in here. Now I just need to figure out where Pondsmith put my light pistols...
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Dec 28, 2020 17:41
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How do you incentivize movement in combat, both in a game system, or in individual scenarios? I feel like a lot of systems do not do this which leads to people standing in place and plunking away rather than engaging with terrain at all.
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Dec 28, 2020 18:04
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Have interesting terrain, combat objectives beyond reducing the other guy's HP to zero and PC/NPC abilities that manipulate/require positioning/terrain.
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Dec 28, 2020 18:08
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Pretty much that. LANCER is excellent to look at for a game that makes moving essential for many of its archetypes and in differing ways.
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Dec 28, 2020 18:12
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Make sure the game's action economy doesn't punish movement. If moving takes away your ability to attack, the optimal decision is to sit in place and keep attacking, rather than sacrifice potential damage to improve your position.
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Dec 28, 2020 18:13
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DalaranJ posted:How do you incentivize movement in combat, both in a game system, or in individual scenarios?
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Dec 28, 2020 18:33
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Making standing in one place and swinging / firing hazardous also works, preferably in combination with a carrot as well as a stick. If the default assumptions of the system are that your defenses are X as long as you're in motion, but [a much lower number than X] if you're stationary, people are going to find ways to hustle.
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Dec 28, 2020 18:34
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Absurd Alhazred posted:It might be nice to not have an RPG in-joke, for once. Modest proposal after looking at other subforum taglines: Traditional Games: The place to discuss analog gaming -- pen, paper, cardboard, dice. Dare you enter our magical realm?
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Dec 28, 2020 18:56
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