Splicer posted:Controversial. In this multi-paragraph post I will the student asked the teacher "are role-playing games fun?" to which the teacher answered "what is fun?" and the student was enlightened
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Jan 2, 2020 18:15
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| # ¿ May 20, 2024 09:38 |
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My latest game, Shepherds Through the Ash and Flame, is now live! In the game, you take on the role of a wombat trying to save animals from the horrifying bushfires currently devastating Australia. It is a one player game that can be played within a half hour, and includes means of how to help and support those currently suffering from and fighting these fires. In lieu of payment, please consider donating to the following sources: WIRES Fire Relief Fund for First Nations Communities NSW Rural Fire Service
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Jan 15, 2020 22:45
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Zaphod42 posted:Everybody I know hates it so I'm real surprised this thread is super big on it apparently? So the core answer to this question is that 4e is the game that a lot of people here play. I’ve not found that the classes play very similarly in practice, despite using a common lexicon of keywords and technical language. It goes a lot farther to empower the players to make useful and interesting choices, especially as their characters level up, regardless of class. In the general “D&D-like,” DCC and SotDL are solid choices and fairly popular, though I’d extend Lancer as an option, though it’s a mech game so some of its thematics are quite different. Moving further afield, popular games tend to PbtA or PbtA-derived, though Dungeon World implements too many D&Disms to really be recommended. If you’re looking for a fantasy adventure PbtA game, then Fellowship is a good choice. If your people are looking for something a bit more crimey, then Blades in the Dark could be a solid choice, but I’d personally lean in support of Spire. Belonging Outside Belonging games, meanwhile, tend to be a bit more heavy on the feels and light on the fighting, so it might not be a good fit for a group looking for something more traditional. The same could be said for the my personal favorite engine of choice, the Firebrands engine, but it’s real good. Luke Crane’s games (Torchbearer, Burning Wheel, Mouse Guard, etc.) might be worth looking into for a more crunch experience, as might Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying. Finally, I’d recommend taking a look at Genesys games. There’s definitely some flaws at work there (people in particularly find fault with the bespoke dice and difficulty adjudicating mixed results), but it still generates interesting play.
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Jan 18, 2020 00:38
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Speaking of TTRPGs and video games, what’s that Legacy game that’s clearly just Castlevania but also incredibly good? I highly recommend that one too.
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Jan 18, 2020 00:44
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Zaphod42 posted:Someone asked. Me thinks you doth protest too much Weird how you choose to only engage with this argument rather than say... the big list of potential games that I provided you.
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Jan 18, 2020 00:58
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Lemon-Lime posted:Amazing how disingenuous you can be. Rhapsody of Blood is so hecking good! I need to dig into Voidheart Symphony some more soon, the modern day version with some tarot symbolism added in.
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Jan 18, 2020 01:26
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I will reiterate that LANCER is a very good D&D
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Jan 18, 2020 02:17
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Agent Rush posted:I've read through both books and they look fantastic, but I haven't had a chance to play either yet. Did Voidheart offer late backing? I remember seeing it was really close to the new playbook stretch goal. I don’t know. There’s a free beta edition available on itch.io though!
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Jan 18, 2020 05:22
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I’m going to sing the praises of LANCER once again, for making its different roles all active participants in the combat. There may be some dedicated healing abilities, but it seems like recovery is mostly handled internally and that support is handled mostly by handing out stranger debuffs to the enemy and by giving the allies significant buffs. Also, it’s fairly easy to completely change out what role you’re playing between missions and most mechs fulfill some form of hybrid role. It does have ability scores, but they’re the good kind, in that everyone wants all of them, they perform interesting effects, and they’re used in place of a skill system inside of mechs, instead of in supplement to it.
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Jan 18, 2020 20:20
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I miss the good old days of REAL D&D when Wizards were mortars with beards and fighters were boats.
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Jan 20, 2020 11:25
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The reason that most of Lovecraft's protagonists become "crazy" after encountering the unknown is because Lovecraft himself had many mental illnesses, including a deep-set, pathological xenophobia. In reality, while trauma can induce PTSD, the sort of trauma that occurs from being exposed to the actual horrible truths of the universe (cops are evil, capitalism is rendering us all to serfs, climate change is going to cause extinction if not stopped) tends to lead to emotional states that are not a form of mental illness, but that are merely the effect of rationally trying to cope with such a huge and terrible revelation. This is the sort of thing that can be directed into healthy directions with the right sort of education, i.e. more knowledge about the terrible thing, which tends to be the opposite of how it works for Lovecraft. The idea that things like mood or personality disorders or schizophrenia can emerge as a result of acute environmental factors, meanwhile, is pure garbage theory that, in many cases, works to dehumanize those with mental illness. And don't even get me started on how nerd media in general treats neurodivergence and other forms of disability. There's probably an academic paper about how media demonizes facial disfigurement alone. I'm a firm believer that games really shouldn't have mental illness as a major theme, unless it is the major theme of the game, see for example Senua's Sacrifice. Most of the TTRPGs focusing on topics of mental illness are more likely to be indier, more narrative games, as more traditional games prefer to be more escapist in general and you can't really have escapism when dealing with incredibly real poo poo.
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Jan 22, 2020 21:25
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moths posted:Honestly that seems much more gross and exploitative to me than "I saw a Cthulhu and now I'm a 1920's madman." Genre emulation isn't presenting itself as a genuine approximation of anything - except how these stories work. But what if, and this might be a wild one here, the genre being emulated is itself harmful and indeed feeds into narratives that lead to the mentally ill being taken from their communities and institutionalized and overmedicated and all other things that lead to the disintegration of their lifestyle, well-being, and autonomy. Meanwhile, if I, a personal with extreme mental illness, made a game about my mental illness in a way that was accessible and understandable to the players in a way that respected my identity, I don't see how that would be problematic. Obviously, bad games are still bad games, but dealing with the reality of vectors of marginalization in a healthy, constructive way is not bad. Like, c'mon, not every playing RPGs is an abled, white, straight dude, and people have the emotional maturity to play games therapeutically not as a replacement for therapy. I've seen arguments along the line of that second sentence A LOT on these forums, and they seem to imply that the only sort of table that exists for RPG is a bunch of emotionally stunted ultra-privileged nerds who refuse to have an honest emotional engagement with their work. Maybe that is what your table is like, but the people I play with have a wider plurality of experiences and a greater degree of willingness to engage openly with the text on the level that the text is presented at, and its disingenuous to say that my experiences are not reflective of a lot of people's play experience.
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Jan 22, 2020 22:03
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There is nothing unique to games that makes them unable to handle serious topics, including mental illness. All games can be therapeutic, which is different than them being a stand-in for therapy. People with mental illness are going to play games and how they seem themselves reflected in the games is going to have an impact on their well being. A game that handles mental illness respectfully is going to have a better impact than one that handles them as if though they were some pulp horror show.
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Jan 22, 2020 23:04
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Antivehicular posted:I think the question here is what you mean by "therapeutic." If you mean that games should be respectful on topics of disability/mental illness/neurodivergence/etc., and should provide toolkits to help players treat each other with respect and kindness re: these topics, I certainly agree, although I'd argue that's less therapeutic and more just basic decency. If you're talking about games being used as active tools to help people work through issues and reinforce mental health... well, it's a nice idea and I support attempts to design in that space, but I can't see myself necessarily being comfortable playing games like this. Roleplaying can be a social and emotional challenge even at baseline, and in my experience, entangling personal mental-health issues with it has never ended well, even in mature groups of friends who mean well. I mean that the act of socializing and being creative in a safe, friendly environment is inherently good for mental health.
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Jan 22, 2020 23:52
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Listen, I think we all know who the real bad guy here is, the one who is manipulating things to assure that Lovecraft's works are repeated ad nauseum and without sufficient reflection. The name of that villain is capitalism.
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Jan 23, 2020 18:56
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There’s a greater impulse to be emotional when the stakes involve matters of social equity. Too many nerds forms purely capitalistic attachments to the media that they consume, wherein their fandom is turned into a consumerist hunger by the deliberate strokes of the companies creating these media. This particular sort of emotional reaction sucks and is bad and is why fandoms are so insufferable. However, the sort of emotional reaction garnered by media endorsing “problematic” ethics is a much more genuine and important one. The idea that the media we consume does not impact our way of thinking is, I believe, flawed. Indeed, the way we view media comes to impact the way that we view the world, and being fed a diet of media that is sexist, racist, cisheteronormative, classist, etc. can lead a person to develop unhealthy views of the world and indeed feeds into and reinforce real world policies and systems of oppression. So yeah, people can feel aggressive sometimes when this kind of content comes up.
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Jan 23, 2020 21:47
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Whybird posted:Corporations totally different to Great Old Ones. Great Old Ones are lumbering entities, sustained by but independent of human belief, wearing a persona that is at best an unconvincing facsimile of humanity, with entirely alien motivations and a complete disregard for the sanctity of human life, who would happily step upon us without even noticing our deaths if it brought them an inch further to their inscrutable, inhuman goals. And corporations are totally different to that. now you're thinking with material dialecticalism!
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Jan 24, 2020 01:40
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There's a part of me that does like random generation in character creation, but I am a firm believer that it needs to be for non-essential stuff. Or alternatively, if you're going more OD&D where most of the game is combat, most ability scores have no effect on combat, and there's an intentional churning of PCs in killer dungeons, which allows the strong to rise to the top. In a more character-driven game (either mechanically or narratively), it just doesn't make any sense.
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Jan 24, 2020 20:58
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drrockso20 posted:Hard disagree, Race should have a mechanical effect otherwise there's not much point in including them races don't have a mechanical effect IRL but they're still included here
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Jan 24, 2020 23:57
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Lemon-Lime posted:FF14 is a bad example to pick here, because "humanity" in Eorzea is explicitly a political construct with no basis in reality that exists purely to give the alliance moral and legal justification to steal from, exploit and murder the peoples they have arbitrarily decided are "not human" (the ones they label "beast tribes" so you're extra sure to know that they're animals, not people). Hm, and where else is race a political construct with no basis in reality? And one where it exists purely to support the colonization and subjugation and dehumanization of the outgroup? Flail Snail posted:In a world with actual physical differences between the different peoples, should the bird people not be able to fly, the fish people not be able to breathe underwater, and the human people not be able to declare these differences racist? Because it almost always starts then and the becomes “and so the ones that are stand-ins for racial minorities get an intelligence penalty.” To be more generous, different species with legitimate physiological differences are cool and neat. It’s just important that these species are present as different species and don’t become coded as represented different races. Avoiding monocultures is a hugely important step here. And it’s also important to not frame things in term of weaknesses and strengths, and instead to think of it as purely biological permissions. It is then useful if there are tool- or magic-based options that also open up these permissions for those that wish to invest in them. If you’re playing a game with underwater fish people, you need to have some way for surface folks to breathe underwater through artificial means.
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Jan 25, 2020 06:07
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Xarbala posted:From what I've seen, though, hyur, elezen, au ra, and roegadyn are capable of interbreeding, however rare such instances are. And I could've sworn G'raha Tia was a miqote descendant of an infamous hyuran emperor. Nah, not actually a descendent just a bunch of magitechnobabble.
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Jan 25, 2020 07:31
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The four true ability scores are as follows: Gravity Electromagnetism Weak Nuclear Strong Nuclear
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Jan 25, 2020 23:54
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I think it's fairly fraught territory to be honest. Having disabilities occur as "punishment" for failing in a challenge or series thereof suggest that being disabled is a negative thing. In addition, most media tends to forefront the experience of those who become disabled later in life rather than those who are born disabled. And when it comes to mechanically modelling things like being born blind is already fairly murky, and it gets worse if the game provides methods for mechanizing developmental disabilities or related things. But also not having disabled characters allowed is also an issue! The storygame route can be useful here, having a disability simply changes the character's fictional positioning. If, for some bizarre reason, you need a check to remember the color of something, a blind character simply is not able to make that roll, just like trying to stab a dragon with a tiny dagger in DungeonWorld. Another option is like in Chronicles of Darkness or Fate where a disability can be a Flaw or an Aspect, but the ways that it is invoked is up to the player and there is a meta-currency reward for doing so, but no standing penalty for the disability or for not bringing it into play. In a similar vein, you can just say that there is no mechanical impact at all for being disabled, but that particular solution sticks in my craw as a mechanics-first designer. I don't have any particular firm ideas for how to handle the mechanics in crunchier games, though, but it seems like WHFRP may be on the right track with things. To speak more broadly, it's important to present disabilities as being real and present but also not inherently negative (or inherently positive!). Disabled people don't get any magical powers to make up for their disability but also they're capable of living full, dynamic lives and any lack of agency they may experience comes from encounters with an ableist society. A disabled person may not be able to do certain activities, but that doesn't mean that they should be excluded from the narrative or punished for their inability to do that thing. The Fate Accessibility Toolkit is an useful tool for those just starting to explore these things, but ultimately the only way to really address them is via conversation with disabled people. Also paying them if you're making a commercial product, don't skip that step.
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Jan 28, 2020 02:03
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The thing is, “D&D” isn’t one thing. It’s four different things with very different system requirements, with different players coming in with very different expectations of which game D&D should be. I wrote a twitter thread about the concept here: https://twitter.com/meinberg13/status/1219366219209416706?s=21 The overall point, though, is that the reason that so many D&Ds (and Pathfinders fit into this) is that they don’t know which of the four they want to be, so they try to be all of them and wind up just creating a mess of different systems that don’t fit together well at all. 4e and BECMI are pretty much the only ones that are successful, because they have an idea of what D&D they want to be, and so have a design vision beyond “like how it used to be.”
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Jan 29, 2020 04:28
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Maybe it's just because I started with 2e, but I have trouble seeing D&D as anything but a sometimes messy collection of modular rules designed to be added or removed or tweaked as necessary to reach the desired tone of play. (This may be why I mostly design bespoke systems today, rather than using other people's engines.) Still, the notion that D&D cannot be altered and made into something new without stopping being D&D is a ridiculous notion. OSR games may have different names, but they're still often D&D. Pathfinder is absolutely D&D! In part, this is due to there not being a single definition of D&D that everyone can agree to (beyond the overly simplistic "it is these specific texts"). But in part, it's because of the cultural penetration of D&D as a brand and genre unto itself. While I am very much not making D&D games, I still have to be aware of what D&D is and what D&D has been, in order to chart out the position of my design. Now, Arivia is probably going to call this sophistry on my part, but I really don't think it is. I think that there is more to D&D than just the texts, I think that the concepts have spread and bled and cannot be neatly excised from TTRPG, and so it is something that all designers must come to terms with at some point. Hell, I think that's a large part of what the Forge was, in all of its messiness, a means for that generation of designers to understand and reject D&D. These conversations are constantly ongoing, though, and while there is likely no end to them, I will state here clearly the following: of course D&D can be analyzed and synthesized outside of its original texts. It is durable enough to survive being pulled apart then put back together into strange pieces.
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Jan 29, 2020 23:02
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Also, the implementation of ability scores as a number used to derive an additional number that has wide utility sucks butt. in the bad way
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Jan 29, 2020 23:03
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DalaranJ posted:How would one write a mechanical framework for "Clever Solution to Dangerous Situations"? I’ve been wracking my head on this for a bit, and I think it’s Mouse Guard.
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Jan 30, 2020 08:30
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My latest game game, inspired by but legally distinct from, the movie CATS, The Angelical Life is now live on itch! Come and explore ominous sites, have meetings with bizarre entities, dance your way to uncertain safety, and try to survive a year in the purgatorial nightmare realm of the City. 
Meinberg fucked around with this message at 03:20 on Feb 5, 2020 |
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Feb 5, 2020 03:02
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Joe Slowboat posted:Sweet! I'd love to know what you think. As someone who has recently been deep diving into Fate content, it seems to me that canon is a flexible and thing within itself, and that everyone cheats anyway.
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Feb 11, 2020 08:29
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Hello everyone, I wrote another blog post that is likely to get me a redtext. In this case I introduce the concept of designing TTRPGs for gamefeel. I have the next article in the series written already and the next two in outlines, so this series is going to be an actual series!
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Feb 12, 2020 20:59
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DalaranJ posted:Yes. I am excited for this topic. Nice! Next three posts are going up weekly, then after that I'm moving to a monthly schedule as I tackle specific genres and types of scenes. Those will be taking longer because I intend to also a publish game that demonstrates the mechanics I devise in each of those blogs posts.
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Feb 13, 2020 23:10
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Zorak of Michigan posted:I think I know what you meant, but because I am an rear end in a top hat, this bit: Definitely not the intent of my statement, but I can see how it could be read that way. Tuxedo Catfish posted:Probably the first time I've read an article of yours and not only agreed with everything, but beyond that, nothing you say here should be even remotely controversial. I'm saving some of my hotter takes for later in the series! The next one should be extra spicy, I think. hyphz posted:There is one thing I wasn’t sure about, but it’s more an extra concern than a disagreement. As for this, well, there's a difference between something feeling like a frantic and chaotic fight and the mechanics being frantic and chaotic. And it's not the only way to represent a fight, that is also true. A fight can also be represented by something quieter, more like a duel or a gunfight, where there's a lot of stillness followed by sudden action. But generally, that's not what being portrayed in D&D. D&D is a melee, a wild clash of forces, and it needs something faster paced to represent that.
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Feb 14, 2020 16:56
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hyphz posted:The main thing I was basing that on is that when you present a group that's used to d20 with a simpler flat number based system like the one described in the article (and this isn't just my group, I've seen this repeated over and over on forums), the reaction generally isn't "cool, this will be more like a battle because it will be faster". Their reaction is much more commonly "so I can never get a better weapon? so it doesn't matter if we ambush them? so it doesn't matter where I stand?" etc. Very few people actually enjoys tallying up all of their nickel and dime bonuses in the middle of an encounter. People like accumulating them and like being able to express greater power, but the way that it is expressed with a wide array of small bonuses is inherently tedious. And again, I'm not talking about realism. I'm not even talking about verisimilitude, I'm talking about gamefeel, which is a very different thing. But also, player choices should have an impact on things, which is why that mechanic I presented is just one mechanic, rather than a full rules system. A full rules system would have to include meaningful choices. Any game that does not have meaningful choices in the beat-to-beat moments is a bad game. This is why 4e is the best edition of D&D and perhaps even the only good one.
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Feb 14, 2020 22:22
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Humbug Scoolbus posted:My gaming group is absolutely one where we enjoy the fiddly adding of bonuses. I don't agree with a lot of your points, but I credit that with different preferences in what we each are looking for in a game. I am looking for entertainment/fun for example. Ah yes the tidal wave of fun that is taking five minutes to resolve a single action.
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Feb 16, 2020 01:31
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My biggest concern right now is that PF2e Core Book + Bestiary total up to 1000 pages, which seems like a lot to me. Still, I'm going to go ahead and give it a read through, see what stands out to me, maybe even do a F&F.
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Feb 18, 2020 23:49
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Arivia posted:It does, but the Bestiary is largely like any given monster book in that you don't need to read it cover to cover. The Core Rulebook you definitely have to though. For sure, but it’ll be useful to see how iconic monsters are handled in the system and to see if there’s anything neat and new in there.
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Feb 19, 2020 00:50
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My next article in the Designing for Gamefeel series is out! This one talks about modality! It's mostly an introduction to the subject, but I also briefly explain why it's important for good gamefeel.
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Feb 19, 2020 19:25
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Sometimes, I ask myself if I am, in fact, too extra. Other times, I do as I have done and released a playbook for a non-existent PbtA game that is also a frank discussion of depression and self-loathing in the online age. Anyway, check it out if you want to feel very sad!!!
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Feb 25, 2020 05:01
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The next blog post in the designing for gamefeel series is out! I think this one is legit useful for folks who are interested in design. It's the first part of the series where I move away form pure theory into more of an applied theory perspective. I highly recommend checking it out and humbly request that folks share it widely.
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Feb 26, 2020 20:14
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| # ¿ May 20, 2024 09:38 |
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The promised follow up post, discussing campaign frameworks and inter-scene structures. This is probably a topic I will need to return to later, but I feel like this is a good primer on the subject.
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Feb 28, 2020 18:27
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