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Hey friends! Post your incredibly navelgazey ideas about the philosophy of tabletop/RPG game design and play here. If you want to talk about what kind of play a particular ruleset encourages and how it is framed to players, how player choice influences gameplay, etc then this is the place to do it.
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Apr 22, 2020 06:15
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Is this just about trying to rehabilitate hyphz or is this a wider thing?
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Apr 22, 2020 06:32
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I expect hyphzposting to get funneled here but I would be glad to see this be a wider thing. I think some of the conversations are genuinely interesting but everyone is sick of it eating the entire chat thread.
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Apr 22, 2020 06:52
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Do this.Joe Slowboat posted:Hyphz, maybe try this:
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Apr 22, 2020 06:55
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Thank you, I was considering whether it was ok to crosspost that or if I should try to summarize it again.
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Apr 22, 2020 07:06
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Also, like, read the books you're talking about. All of the the books. With your eyes. And think about the words on the pages.
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Apr 22, 2020 07:15
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Joe Slowboat posted:Talk to your players. Talk with them about this concern that the story you build out or the challenges you design might come off as unreasonable, and then tell them that you're just going to be constructing the game to the best of your ability to be fun and interesting. Sometimes, this means it'll feel a little off or too hard or not hard enough, and that's something you'll build on. Sometimes you'll disagree with them that a given plan should work and not realize it, so they'll find themselves in hot water they didn't expect. Sometimes they'll hit on a solution you didn't see coming, and either they'll win too easily or you'll have to recalibrate to give them something to do. In the case of encounter imbalance, that's fine, that's already accepted. But the "sometimes [I'll] disagree" thing is a pretty bad case, since it's basically saying that the way to get things to succeed is to do what I agree with. And I can predict how that will go - at least two players will barrage questions in advance of doing anything in the game in order to find out what I'm looking for. quote:I'm really more and more convinced that the 'secret technique people can't tell you about' is players having trust and a suspension of disbelief, an interest in the fiction you're creating. And you need to trust in your own artistic impulses, modified by your experience as a GM with what will be compelling. I don't sit down to write a session thinking 'now I must carefully balance the party's path to the Jewel of All Desiring' I think 'what would be cool and fit my vision for this story and appeal to my players, and how can I make that happen mechanically.' In WTF terms, I'm still chasing that Jewel of All Desiring with them, but in order to do so I'm focusing just on the world and story around us. The meta-level falls away because I can focus on the creation of a game for fun, because they trust me and I trust them. I guess I should probably do that second half now, hmm? But yea, the problem is that what's going to be compelling is still influenced by how it comes out in terms of mechanical balance. Again, if I have a player who has terrible Climb and I put in a mountain then that player can feel hard-done-by because the practical reality of having their character damaged or made to be incompetent outweighs the coolness value of having me talk about a mountain instead of a lake.
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Apr 22, 2020 12:40
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Paraphrasing from the other thread: You're expending a heroic amount of effort on figuring out every last weird loving reason you couldn't possibly put a mountain in a hypothetical roleplaying game that you're not actually running. Why not expend far, far less effort on writing a fun scenario for your favorite roleplaying game where the players have to get to the top of a mountain, then run that scenario for some actual real live human beings who enjoy games, and report back on what happens? I promise you that if you've read and understood the rules of the game, and you're playing with real live human beings who enjoy playing games, that none of this dumb poo poo you're making up to stress about will be a problem. And Hyphz, if you say you've done that but instead you've just thought about what might happen if you played the game with a fictional group who all have the exact same weird need to find the least possible fun thing to do instead of playing the game that's in front of them that you do, and write about that instead, we'll be able to tell. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 13:25 on Apr 22, 2020 |
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Apr 22, 2020 13:21
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hyphz posted:In the case of encounter imbalance, that's fine, that's already accepted. But the "sometimes [I'll] disagree" thing is a pretty bad case, since it's basically saying that the way to get things to succeed is to do what I agree with. And I can predict how that will go - at least two players will barrage questions in advance of doing anything in the game in order to find out what I'm looking for. b) If the questions they are asking are too nitpicky, it's legit to ask them to reframe them more broadly. "Without getting too deep into the details, are you asking if this is a valid plan?" is a good question to shoot back at them, as is "Do you need me to run down the foreseeable risks from this plan?"
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Apr 22, 2020 13:46
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hyphz posted:In the case of encounter imbalance, that's fine, that's already accepted. But the "sometimes [I'll] disagree" thing is a pretty bad case, since it's basically saying that the way to get things to succeed is to do what I agree with. And I can predict how that will go - at least two players will barrage questions in advance of doing anything in the game in order to find out what I'm looking for. Why not ask them to knock that off and play the game that's in front of them to find out what happens, instead of finding an un-fun way to not actually play the game that's in front of them?
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Apr 22, 2020 13:59
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hyphz posted:But yea, the problem is that what's going to be compelling is still influenced by how it comes out in terms of mechanical balance. Again, if I have a player who has terrible Climb and I put in a mountain then that player can feel hard-done-by because the practical reality of having their character damaged or made to be incompetent outweighs the coolness value of having me talk about a mountain instead of a lake. So your players are choosing to be weaker in certain areas of the game, and they cover all their weaknesses by complaining you're out to get them if one ever happens to come up, ever?
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Apr 22, 2020 14:04
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hyphz posted:But yea, the problem is that what's going to be compelling is still influenced by how it comes out in terms of mechanical balance. Again, if I have a player who has terrible Climb and I put in a mountain then that player can feel hard-done-by because the practical reality of having their character damaged or made to be incompetent outweighs the coolness value of having me talk about a mountain instead of a lake. This may be a tangent, but this is one of those places where system matters. To stick with the mountain example, say you're playing something like D&D 3.5. You put a mountain to climb, because that sounds cool. And then your fighter can't climb for poo poo because they get two skill points per level and their armor check penalties are huge and they just don't have a meaningful way of interacting with this encounter and you feel like an rear end in a top hat. However, you shouldn't, because the only thing you did wrong was not have the system mastery to recognize that this system makes your cool-sounding encounter an absolute pain in the rear end. The designers are the real assholes, because they made a system where's it's incredibly easy to make a scenario characters can just do nothing of value in mechanically and left you with all the work of figuring out how to make this scene interesting for everyone. There isn't even much GM advice on how to work around this sort of issue. Alternatively, say you're playing Dungeon World. At worst, people are rolling 2d6-1 when their best is probably 2d6+2, and the game actually talks about how to handle failure in a way that doesn't stall things entirely. The amount of system mastery needed to do what you're trying to do is much lower, and you can focus on things like your players' tastes over just forcing the system to function. (To be clear, I'm not saying attribute+skill systems are always bad and PBTA is always good. You can make a really good attribute+skill system that explains itself, and a really bad PBTA system that doesn't do poo poo to teach you how to make it work for what you want. I just really dislike 3.5's skill system and Dungeon World provides an easy counterexample.) EDIT: Of course, all the group dynamics stuff everyone else is talking about matters too. The impact system has is just interesting. (And is an incredibly basic part of RPG theory that I wrote about for basically just my own amusement, let's be honest here.) Lurks With Wolves fucked around with this message at 14:42 on Apr 22, 2020 |
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Apr 22, 2020 14:34
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hyphz posted:You would definitely think something was unfair if you couldn’t see the deck, couldn’t see me shuffle, and I was dealing from under the table. If I was playing a game with my friend, and they did that, I would trust them. Because that's what you do with friends. You trust them. That's how friendship works.
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Apr 22, 2020 15:07
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Glazius posted:So your players are choosing to be weaker in certain areas of the game, and they cover all their weaknesses by complaining you're out to get them if one ever happens to come up, ever? Well, it's not really that they're choosing to be weaker. It's that they're choosing to be stronger at something else (say, Sneaking), and then running out of points. It's not like they made a conscious decision to have "being bad at climbing mountains" be a part of their character that they want to explore; they just want to have fun being sneaky. If you want real examples the best one was probably a superhero game I briefly ran where our munchkin made a ridiculously powerful gun with the disadvantage "doesn't work on plants". Plenty of folks on the forum for the game told me that I should just stick him against Poison Ivy or equivalent. But what's the point of that? Every character has some weakness, if there's no restriction on what the GM can make up then I can just always have them encounter that weakness and then they can't do anything, what a surprise, why would that be fun for them or me?
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Apr 22, 2020 15:40
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hyphz, come with me on a hypothetical. Don’t try to invalidate the question or dismiss it, just try to answer it honestly: If you had players who would go along with literally anything and have a great time, and never complain, and put in real effort, what games or stories would you run? What would you actually like to play with players you could trust implicitly?
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Apr 22, 2020 15:50
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hyphz posted:Well, it's not really that they're choosing to be weaker. It's that they're choosing to be stronger at something else (say, Sneaking), and then running out of points. It's not like they made a conscious decision to have "being bad at climbing mountains" be a part of their character that they want to explore; they just want to have fun being sneaky. If I made a character and specifically took a weakness "my gun doesn't work on plants," I'd not only expect plant-based obstacles to show up in the game, I'd desire it. If the majority of the obstacles were plant-based, that wouldn't be fun, but having a few instances of having to think on my feet and use different tactics and abilities because I can't use my ridiculously powerful gun would be fantastic. Same goes if I deliberately don't put points in some skill. True there's a difference between just not having enough points to cover a skill and deliberately not putting points in something, but that's why I'd also talk to my GM about it and explicitly tell them about the flaw I want to explore. And yes, determining how often to ping a flaw is part of the skill of GMing: it needs to be enough to bu fun but not so much as to be annoying, and that is something that depends on the player, the style of game, and the severity of the flaw. You can even outright discuss with your players roughly how often they want a weakness to come up in play. If they answer "zero times" then they shouldn't have the flaw at all. Or possibly they're just playing for pure power fantasy. Which is fine I suppose, although I personally wouldn't find that enjoyable and it should be hashed out before you start a game whether that's the assumption going in. It's also part of the skill of GMing to determine how a weakness or flaw actually affects play. It's never a good idea to just say "sorry because of your flaw you get to sit this scene out." Flaws should make the game more exciting, mix things up, force players to try different tactics and get into new interesting trouble. Not force them to not play for a while. It's the same as the general idea of "failing forward." It's even better if players ping their own flaws. I do this all the time. Right now, in a game I'm playing tonight, I have a character with PTSD, anger issues, and occasional drug abuse problems. They get into all sorts of non-optimal trouble because they freeze up, lash out, or get high at inopportune times. Some of my most memorable scenes in that long-running game come from situations like that. And leaning into your own flaws can even work for something like "my gun doesn't work on plants." You can just say to your GM, "Hey, my gun flaw hasn't come up for a while, what if these enemies were plant-based?" That is something I'd do. So yes, even if there's no restriction on a GM as to how they make their encounters, I expect flaws and weaknesses to come up sometimes, and I do find it fun. So again but more generally: If I make a character with a flaw, I want it to come up occasionally. Exploring character flaws is just as much fun as exploring character strengths!
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Apr 22, 2020 16:20
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hyphz posted:Well, it's not really that they're choosing to be weaker. It's that they're choosing to be stronger at something else (say, Sneaking), and then running out of points. It's not like they made a conscious decision to have "being bad at climbing mountains" be a part of their character that they want to explore; they just want to have fun being sneaky. If you give a player the disadvantage of "has trouble fighting plants" and you never confront them with plants, you have effectively created a player with no disadvantages and subverted the initial rule intended to give disadvantages to begin with.
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Apr 22, 2020 16:24
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hyphz posted:Well, it's not really that they're choosing to be weaker. It's that they're choosing to be stronger at something else (say, Sneaking), and then running out of points. It's not like they made a conscious decision to have "being bad at climbing mountains" be a part of their character that they want to explore; they just want to have fun being sneaky. Someone who explicitly puts down a weakness and then weeps the weepy weep-way when that weakness comes up in a game is being a weenie and, if they are not actively engaging in bad faith, at the very least seriously needs to go back and reconsider their thought process.
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Apr 22, 2020 16:53
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Joe Slowboat posted:hyphz, come with me on a hypothetical. Don’t try to invalidate the question or dismiss it, just try to answer it honestly: If you had players who would go along with literally anything and have a great time, and never complain, and put in real effort, what games or stories would you run? What would you actually like to play with players you could trust implicitly? That's very difficult to answer because the only real answer I can give is that I'd experiment. I don't really know that much about running any but one or two story types improvisationally. Of course, the realistic answer is that I probably wouldn't GM for them because I would be concerned I wouldn't be able to repay their investment. Warthur posted:Your example is of precisely the opposite thing your first paragraph was talking about : the character being helpless against Poison Ivy or the Killer Tomatoes or Audrey II is something your munchkin player specifically decided would be a thing and noted down on their sheet as a thing, not something they simply didn't consider in character generation as something they wanted to explore. He didn't write it down because he thought it would be fun to explore being helpless against plants. He wrote it down because he wanted to have fun being super powerful when shooting things other than plants. Just because the game is forcing him to make a tradeoff doesn't mean he's interested in making that tradeoff in fun terms. LimitedReagant posted:If I made a character and specifically took a weakness "my gun doesn't work on plants," I'd not only expect plant-based obstacles to show up in the game, I'd desire it. You might, but he and many players I've met wouldn't. The classic issue with this is "if you actually want to explore a flaw, why give you points for it? Why not just take it because you desire it?" PinheadSlim posted:If you give a player the disadvantage of "has trouble fighting plants" and you never confront them with plants, you have effectively created a player with no disadvantages and subverted the initial rule intended to give disadvantages to begin with. Indeed true, but that's a problem with that type of disadvantage rule. The player will not have fun when fighting plants. Too few plant encounters and the game system is not satisfied; too many and the player is not satisfied. Which is correct? I tend to end up veering to too few, because the game system isn't going to get up and leave, but that leaves things open to exploitation as you mention. hyphz fucked around with this message at 17:20 on Apr 22, 2020 |
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Apr 22, 2020 17:18
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Ultimately this goes back to the designers being bad, because these weaknesses almost never compensate for the increased power. Either plant guy hits above his power level all the time because the GM forgot plants, he goes on the adventure with Poison Ivy and sucks worse, or (the more likely scenario) he talks the rest of the gang out of doing the plant adventure and they go fight devils instead. I have never seen a system where taking flaws or whatever isn't just a massive free power increase and you pick the most narrow flaws possible. People need to stop making these things.
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Apr 22, 2020 17:24
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Hyphz... why do you GM? What do you get out of it? You say ‘experiment’ but then you also say that you don’t think you could handle the freedom of actually having player trust, rather than ‘knowing they would enjoy the game I choose to make, I would run a game.’ What do you want out of the stories you run, the games you run? Surely it’s not just to be able to say you did it. You seem to be saying that you can only really imagine running a game without the trust or support of your players, and that’s both sad and your problem right there. That’s the trick. That’s the technique. Have a social rapport on which you can build play, or every minor issue you identify will be as fatal as you fear - but with trust and support, they become minor inconveniences at worst.
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Apr 22, 2020 17:31
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hyphz posted:If you want real examples the best one was probably a superhero game I briefly ran where our munchkin made a ridiculously powerful gun with the disadvantage "doesn't work on plants". Plenty of folks on the forum for the game told me that I should just stick him against Poison Ivy or equivalent. But what's the point of that? Every character has some weakness, if there's no restriction on what the GM can make up then I can just always have them encounter that weakness and then they can't do anything, what a surprise, why would that be fun for them or me? Just think of it as another tool in your GM toolbox that you have on hand to shake things up or make things interesting. Even if it only comes up once in a campaign! How does Jimmy Gunman solve THIS problem when his omnigun won't hurt Plants McShrub, corrupt governor of the Greenhaus? If you really do want to play these kinds of narrative-focused games, you will *never* have a good experience if your players are the kinds of people who will throw a tantrum or get upset if their characters' disadvantage(s) come into play. I'm sorry if that's not fun to hear, but it's true. These games require some buy-in from all participants in order for them to function as designed and if coming up against a challenge that doesn't fit their strongest skills ruins their fun, they aren't going to be a good fit.
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Apr 22, 2020 17:34
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A flaw as specific as "gun bad against plants" is ripe for abuse. 99% of the time flaws are a way to grab more power. d&d 3.5 had one that was -2 to ranged that all the melee players took and then never applied cause "oh i hardly ever make ranged attacks not taking the penalty this one time is fine"
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Apr 22, 2020 17:40
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:Ultimately this goes back to the designers being bad, because these weaknesses almost never compensate for the increased power. Either plant guy hits above his power level all the time because the GM forgot plants, he goes on the adventure with Poison Ivy and sucks worse, or (the more likely scenario) he talks the rest of the gang out of doing the plant adventure and they go fight devils instead. Merits and Flaws systems are one of my white whales because as you say, they almost always just end up a mess.
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Apr 22, 2020 17:47
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There are better Flaw systems that have it so that Flaws don't grant additional chargen bonuses, instead they give extra exp or abstract resources whenever they become an active hindrance with a concrete effect on play. Setting aside roleplaying hooks, this incentivises players to take flaws that they want to see their characters confront because they receive quantifiable rewards for doing so and receive no mechanical benefits if they don't.
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Apr 22, 2020 17:50
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Yeah, I like flaw systems that incentivize players to make the game more interesting, where having a flaw come up becomes a good experience for the player.
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Apr 22, 2020 18:03
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hyphz posted:Indeed true, but that's a problem with that type of disadvantage rule. The player will not have fun when fighting plants. Too few plant encounters and the game system is not satisfied; too many and the player is not satisfied. Which is correct? I tend to end up veering to too few, because the game system isn't going to get up and leave, but that leaves things open to exploitation as you mention. The game system isn't going to get up and leave, but you can, and so can the player. Your example clearly describes a case where he's making unwelcome compromises because the rules won't let him make the character he wants. Why is he playing a game that won't let him play the character he wants? I agree with all the other posters about how the idea of offsetting advantages and flaws just doesn't work. It's been tried and found wanting. In some cases it was a useful sidestep in RPG evolution, because it introduced the idea of giving the players more control over the game world. Newer games have found better ways to do that and moved on. You can too! That said, if you take a flaw, and get pissed when the flaw turns out to actually be relevant, then you're playing in bad faith and need an attitude adjustment. If all you're willing to do is win, win, win, win win, then go play a computer game and savescum it like the rest of us. As an aside, this is why I despise Erick Wuckik's article on diceless role-playing. It starts with this long account of how he was playing a first-level thief and used role-playing to avoid ever having to roll his terrible thieving skills. Hey dumbass, your character sheet says you're a terrible thief who will die at any moment. Your GM keeps throwing you lethal traps. Do the honorable thing and get killed a lot. Refusing to engage with the system isn't a sign of genius, it's a sign that the system is terrible and you're unwilling to call your GM out on it. Perpetuating this ruse just furthers everyone's delusion that they're having fun playing D&D, when apparently, you're just doing collaborative storytelling but using D&D rules to keep score.
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Apr 22, 2020 18:07
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Xarbala posted:There are better Flaw systems that have it so that Flaws don't grant additional chargen bonuses, instead they give extra exp or abstract resources whenever they become an active hindrance with a concrete effect on play. Yeah, in addition to Fate-style aspects you also have Burning Wheel and co.'s Traits that similarly in concept but differently in implementation can provide positives sometimes or give incentives to be invoked negatively. It's almost like good systems think these things through and provide overt mechanical support to making characters that are well-rounded and naturally lead to interesting interactions instead of being soul-less robots. I've always been the stereotypical min-maxing munchkin kind of player. Which in games like most versions of D&D is basically just "Hi I remember grade school math and can remember to put big numbers in the stuff I do all the time k thnks I win" : it's really boring. Contrast that with something like, say, Monsterhearts and the way to play "optimally" is to, you know, come up with a compelling character that interacts with the other PC's and makes drama and does exactly what they're supposed to do in a game about being catty little teenage monsters. It's taken me a while to realize this, but anyone who uses things like "optimizer" as a pejorative is inherently coming from a framework of playing bad games. If the game wants you to do a thing, it should be good if you can do it well ; if the game doesn't want you to be able to do a thing, then why the hell can a character do it? Sometimes designers gently caress up and you have to duct-tape over it, but assuming that all players have to constantly have to politely agree to not do basic addition to keep the game functioning is offensively stupid.
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Apr 22, 2020 18:12
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hyphz posted:He didn't write it down because he thought it would be fun to explore being helpless against plants. He wrote it down because he wanted to have fun being super powerful when shooting things other than plants. Just because the game is forcing him to make a tradeoff doesn't mean he's interested in making that tradeoff in fun terms. Here's a thing: most PCs, especially well-rounded PCs, and especially PCs in systems where the character creation system channels you into making a well-rounded character rather than a hyper-limited tool who is useless out of certain parameters, do not exist in a binary state of "can act usefully/are completely useless". Sometimes a situation happens in the fiction where it logically makes sense that a particular PC will find themselves at a disadvantage - which isn't the same thing as being helpless, just like being dealt a crap hand in poker doesn't mean you are automatically hosed - and that's fine! It is sometimes exciting and interesting to explore a situation where the party can't rely on Pastramiman's meat packaging gun to save the day yet again and that doesn't mean that the player in question can't contribute in the scene in ways which are perhaps less optimal than the meat packaging gun but still useful and make a contribution to the overall success of the party. It's equally fine to occasionally throw in a situation where Pastramiman is facing a gang of delinquent cold meats and has a major advantage thanks to his meat packing gun! Variety keeps things interesting. I can imagine someone being justified in picking up their poo poo and going home if they end up spending an extended period of time unable to contribute to the game in any meaningful way, especially if that ran for an hour or so. (Hell, I can see myself lasting longer if my peril is at least fun and interesting - say, I've been captured and put in a deathtrap by the big villain so the referee's been cutting between the party fighting to free me and me exploiting the opportunity to actually converse with the villain to see if I can get them to blab some useful intel in a moment of overconfidence.) If someone picks up their poo poo and leaves because their character is momentarily disadvantaged they're being feeble and I question why they are playing a multi-player game in the first place, because in a game with multiple participants you can't expect it to go your way all the time, especially if there's any random factor involved at all in the resolution mechanic. Question: How many times has a player actually picked up their poo poo and left the table on you? You seem very worried about this happening and I don't know whether this is because your "friends" act out like this constantly, or because you are full of constantly restimulated negative engrams from a bad GMing experience you had a while back but is unlikely to happen again, or because you are imagining your friends doing something they would never actually do.
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Apr 22, 2020 18:49
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Joe Slowboat posted:Hyphz... why do you GM? What do you get out of it? You say ‘experiment’ but then you also say that you don’t think you could handle the freedom of actually having player trust, rather than ‘knowing they would enjoy the game I choose to make, I would run a game.’ There is actually a lot of satisfaction in that, as well as being able to facilitate people enjoying themselves. And I can enjoy making things up and seeing where they go if it's not too stressful. Warthur posted:Question: How many times has a player actually picked up their poo poo and left the table on you? You seem very worried about this happening and I don't know whether this is because your "friends" act out like this constantly, or because you are full of constantly restimulated negative engrams from a bad GMing experience you had a while back but is unlikely to happen again, or because you are imagining your friends doing something they would never actually do. It has happened, I've probably mentioned it a few times. 1) Disasterous Shadowrun game, mainly due to being Shadowrun. Munchkin player spends hours making a character who can shoot anything instantly. Complains that the game is boring because he just shoots everything. Game abandoned. 2) Game in which the "guns that doesn't work on plants" appeared, Mutants and Masterminds. Player with the gun completes sample adventure in 5 minutes. Other player, who is normally tactical type, creates Homer Simpson as his character and spends the entire adventure searching for a donut cart. He never explains why. 3) Early in a game I wasn't GMing, player attacks a random person in the woods because "people who ask us to do this stuff are always evil". Other PCs try to stop him and attack him, nearly downing his character. Player complains that inter-PC attacks are normally treated as jokes and don't result in actual damage rolls. Leaves table and refuses to participate until everyone apologises OOC. 4) My attempt to run Strike. Nobody makes a character and plays on their phones instead until we bust out 7 Wonders. One player already says the game is "poo poo" because there are no stats for him to max. Abandoned attempt. 5) Feng Shui game I wasn't GMing, player makes a Killer which is already a broken Archetype. Super strong against mooks but has trouble against bosses. GM triples the number of mooks in each encounter to give him people to mow down in hails of gunfire at the start of each encounter. He gets bored and frustrated because he just does that then spends time unable to hit the boss, also because he can't take cover behind another PC. Leaves the group temporarily. hyphz fucked around with this message at 19:30 on Apr 22, 2020 |
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Apr 22, 2020 19:24
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hyphz posted:1) Disasterous Shadowrun game, mainly due to being Shadowrun. Munchkin player spends hours making a character who can shoot anything instantly. Complains that the game is boring because he just shoots everything. Game abandoned. #1 sounds like an issue where a) Shadowrun is a poo poo awful system and you shouldn't have been using it anyway and b) one of your participants is the sort of person who breaks a system in a way which makes play boring for them, and then complains that play is boring. The way to deal with that is to level with them that if they tries to "solve" the game by making unstoppable characters, but their fun is in being challenged, then they shouldn't sabotage their own fun by making a character who won't be significantly challenged. #2 sounds like the wrong person got apologised to. Does this player understand the concept of IC and OOC knowledge and the difference between them? What was the character's motivation for assaulting some random stranger in the woods? It can't be based on past precedent because the campaign was new. By either the metric of trying to make the game tell a story that makes some semblance of sense or trying to make decisions from a perspective of "What would this character, knowing what they know, do in this situation?" (often the same thing, characters doing poo poo which can only be explained as them using knowledge they don't have is a serious plot hole and therefore a major violation of the fiction and character actions which are well-rooted in their motivations and background usually make for good story), it's a lovely thing to do and overall suggests that this player is so actively disinterested in roleplaying that he may as well not play RPGs with them. #4 sounds like you ran into a system issue (which I agree Feng Shui has, it's too possible to make a character whose only job is mook clearance) and, rather than address the actual problem (which is that the PC is useless once the mooks run out), your referee just tried to lazily patch it. (That said... how much did he try to use Feng Shui's stunting system?) #3 I am going to need more detail on exactly how it unfolded. What, did the players just sit there and play on your phones while you ineffectually begged them to attempt character generation? And you people actually treat each other this way? These people are not friends, or at least not friends you can usefully game with. You should go find new gaming friends who don't treat each other like that and also you should probably seek new friends in general and also therapy, because that level of passive-aggressive shittiness right in someone's face is not normal. Warthur fucked around with this message at 19:54 on Apr 22, 2020 |
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Apr 22, 2020 19:38
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Yeah #3 is not something friends would do to a friend, it's something assholes would do to an acquaintance they tolerate because of group gaming inertia when they don't want to play a game but don't respect that acquaintance's time or feelings enough to say so outright. It's a totally normal thing to just say, "I'm sorry but this game doesn't interest me." It's also the mature, common-sense thing to do. What happened to you sounds like neither. Also I agree that with #2, the person who actually needed to apologize was definitely the person who forced everyone to apologize to him.
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Apr 22, 2020 19:43
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Why on earth do you willingly spend time with these people. Like, no, I'm being serious. Do you think this is normal interpersonal behavior at all? I'm just going off of your narrative but this is somewhere between "absolute rear end in a top hat" to "abusive". Do not talk to these people, they are not nice.
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Apr 22, 2020 19:56
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Xarbala posted:Yeah #3 is not something friends would do to a friend, it's something assholes would do to an acquaintance they tolerate because of group gaming inertia when they don't want to play a game but don't respect that acquaintance's time or feelings enough to say so outright. It's a totally normal thing to just say, "I'm sorry but this game doesn't interest me." It's also the mature, common-sense thing to do. What happened to you sounds like neither.
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Apr 22, 2020 19:57
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my philosophy of roleplaying games is that liches are cool as gently caress
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Apr 22, 2020 20:59
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hyphz posted:Again, if I have a player who has terrible Climb and I put in a mountain then that player can feel hard-done-by because the practical reality of having their character damaged or made to be incompetent outweighs the coolness value of having me talk about a mountain instead of a lake. Providing a challenge to the characters is expressly about playing to their weaknesses. Not all the time, but frequently enough that the players know that a clean success is never guaranteed. It's why you sometimes make the thief have to engage in a stand-up fight or make the warrior in jingly head-to-toe chainmail have to sneak past the dragon or make the bard engage in a contest of strength or make wizard have to sweet-talk his way into the princess' chambers. And why you keep the story moving forward even if (when) they fail. Again, and I cannot stress this enough - success or failure is not a coin-flip binary situation. Most games have some notion of "partial success" or "success at cost" or similar, and this is what allows you to challenge a character without necessarily killing them. ASIDE: I don't know which edition of SR you were playing, but wired reflexes aren't game-breaking even at extreme levels. There are so many modifiers in that game that usually all wired reflexes mean is that you miss faster. But if the only modifier you remember is the -2 for your smartgun link, then yes, you're going to have problems. As the GM, it's your job to remember the modifiers and actually apply them when calculating target numbers. Letting wired characters run roughshod is a GM problem, not a system problem.
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Apr 22, 2020 21:09
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Ilor posted:No, you put the mountain in because the character has a terrible Climb skill. And you do it because you want to challenge the party, so see what clever tactic they will come up with to overcome any particular weakness. Because if you don't do this, if they are always able to use their best skills/abilities, they will consistently succeed at little or no cost, which is boring as hell. This is exactly the problem you had in Shadowrun. That's perhaps true, but what I argued was still the case - that it's not going to be fun. The player's interest in maxing their shooting and minning their climbing is that the game is about their maxed shooting, not their minned climbing. I used to joke it would be clearer to do character generation if instead of buying what you were good at, you bought what you were bad at, if that was what the game was actually going to be about. Warthur posted:The bit which gets me is... nobody tried to make a PC? Everyone just sat there determinedly loving with their phones? Maybe this is paranoid of me but that sounds like an agreed course of action there - like the players all agreed to take that course to get hyphz to give up on running Strike. If that wasn't the case I'd have expected at least some variation, like someone sort of does character gen but half-asses it or someone isn't fiddling with their phone but is gazing out of the window or loudly talking about a TV show they saw last night or whatever. The way hyphz describes it sounds utterly bizarre, which is why I want more detail about how it went down. One actually made a PC before the session using the character generator, the other two different. They weren't just messing with phones, mind you, they were talking about the phone game they were playing which I think had just come out at the time? I can't remember which one it was, I think it was one of the Marvel ones. Xarbala posted:Yeah #3 is not something friends would do to a friend, it's something assholes would do to an acquaintance they tolerate because of group gaming inertia when they don't want to play a game but don't respect that acquaintance's time or feelings enough to say so outright. Nah, it's probably just British politeness crossed with the Abilene Paradox. Nobody wants to say anything in case everyone else thinks the opposite. Warthur posted:It can't be based on past precedent because the campaign was new. By either the metric of trying to make the game tell a story that makes some semblance of sense or trying to make decisions from a perspective of "What would this character, knowing what they know, do in this situation?" The thing is, I did have some sympathy to be honest, because "the quest giver turns out to be the villain" is so hackneyed by now that it can't be a good story just because it's done to death. I've sworn to never use it in an RPG, together with the "hey if you had done nothing everything would have been great" plot. So if the goal was to tell a good story he was arguably succeeding by flipping the script, but it didn't work so well (and I think the character wasn't a villain) hyphz fucked around with this message at 21:18 on Apr 22, 2020 |
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Apr 22, 2020 21:12
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Nemesis Of Moles posted:my philosophy of roleplaying games is that liches are cool as gently caress  I once played in an AD&D campaign where our entire mission was to turn ourselves into liches.
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Apr 22, 2020 21:13
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Xiahou Dun posted:It's taken me a while to realize this, but anyone who uses things like "optimizer" as a pejorative is inherently coming from a framework of playing bad games. If the game wants you to do a thing, it should be good if you can do it well ; if the game doesn't want you to be able to do a thing, then why the hell can a character do it? Sometimes designers gently caress up and you have to duct-tape over it, but assuming that all players have to constantly have to politely agree to not do basic addition to keep the game functioning is offensively stupid. I think one of the things that stopped me from becoming a bad GM was the GMing advice on players who take lots of points in something in Ironclaw 1e, which I first played in high school. "They're not min-maxing, they're saying they want to do that thing. If a PC is the best swordsman from their home city, give them a kickass swordfight to show it off. Put major enemies in who challenge them to duels so that sometimes they can show off exactly how good they are." Instead of it being treated as something you punish PCs for.
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Apr 22, 2020 21:22
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hyphz posted:That's perhaps true, but what I argued was still the case - that it's not going to be fun. The player's interest in maxing their shooting and minning their climbing is that the game is about their maxed shooting, not their minned climbing. I used to joke it would be clearer to do character generation if instead of buying what you were good at, you bought what you were bad at, if that was what the game was actually going to be about. I do not know if this is the same toxic group who was trying to do that boot in a fortress trick or however that went down, but it sounds like you have a bad track record of gaming with very inconsiderate players. Their problems are entirely outside the meta-context of existing rules systems. The Gaming Den used to try something similar, the belief that the rules of a game could counteract toxic out of character behavior if properly worded. It didn't work then, and judging by /r/rpghorrorstories it doesn't work now. Libertad! fucked around with this message at 21:31 on Apr 22, 2020 |
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Apr 22, 2020 21:27
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