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fozzy fosbourne posted:I sometimes wonder what the TTRPG industry would be like if D&D started as something like troupe-style play. It seems like the old school open table style play, with players coming and going and no expectation of like a 2 year long epic Dragonlance style drama, was sort of close. But the game moved far away from that somewhere at the end of 1st/start of 2E. Hilariously this was D&D 3.0/3.5e in a homebrew setting. I'm honestly amazed we kept it going as long as we did (like two and a half years meeting twice a month).
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Jan 5, 2021 01:52
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Kyrosiris posted:Hilariously this was D&D 3.0/3.5e in a homebrew setting. I'm honestly amazed we kept it going as long as we did (like two and a half years meeting twice a month). This is incredibly similar to how I learned DnD, save that it was FR. I still think it was a good strategy to have just like, a rotating GM slot. Made having any sort of tonal or plot consistency a joke, but at least burnout was low and the whole thing was really an excuse for middle schoolers to be fake jackasses while eating pizza in a basement.
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Jan 5, 2021 02:04
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One of my biggest TTRPG design peeves (other than hating post-decision randomness  ) is that GMing as a role is overloaded and that it should be broken down into components and divded among the group. There's no real reason that rules adjudication and world design should be done for the same person, for example. Rotating GMs being the standard would also be fantastic.
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Jan 5, 2021 02:07
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Back in college we came up with the idea that "the party" was a subset of a mercenary company, so each "arc" (for wont of a better word, since it could be a one-shot or a mini-campaign or whatever), we'd swap GM's. This also had the added bonus that you could try a different character for a bit if you wanted to while your "main" character was off doing something that we can specify later if we care to. This came at the same time when we realized XP was dumb bullshit so we'd also jump around in the time-line and do flash back/flash forward games ; so it was totally normal for someone to have a cool idea for a level 8 game when everyone had been at level 3 and the next game we go back to level 5 and fill in the gaps. It was a very simple narrative framework that massively increased the flexibility.
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Jan 5, 2021 02:45
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:One of my biggest TTRPG design peeves (other than hating post-decision randomness It sometimes feels like the role itself needs to be meaningfully examined and played with a bit beyond the current steps forward of distributing GM duties to others at the table. Even that feels to me like admitting there's one person at the table who is doing "work", even if that work is often fun and enriching and good. I can name a handful of games that give the GM a new and interesting set of mechanics and ideas to play with, but basically every system tends to be about giving one side of the table a bunch of interesting and new tools to create new and interesting experiences, then telling one player to just do the same thing they always do but maybe with a different form they have to fill out before play
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Jan 5, 2021 04:46
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Nemesis Of Moles posted:It sometimes feels like the role itself needs to be meaningfully examined and played with a bit beyond the current steps forward of distributing GM duties to others at the table. Even that feels to me like admitting there's one person at the table who is doing "work", even if that work is often fun and enriching and good. I can name a handful of games that give the GM a new and interesting set of mechanics and ideas to play with, but basically every system tends to be about giving one side of the table a bunch of interesting and new tools to create new and interesting experiences, then telling one player to just do the same thing they always do but maybe with a different form they have to fill out before play I don't think this is true. PbtA and related design has done a lot to liberalize GMing by making it much more hands on and direct while also being less work - the moves go both ways and enrich both players and the GM. The same players who are intimidated by playing in splatbook-heavy D&D-alikes are also very much better at GMing PbtA, because they don't have to do so much work and it also makes their existing tools and knowledge useable behind the screen. I ran Monster of the Week for awhile and I did okay at it, but I'm not good at GMing PbtA - I like doing way more scenario prep and worldbuilding and actually running the game feels like slowly drowning in quick sand to me. But a completely new player took to the game like a duck to water - first as a player, but then he stepped up as GM for a session and he was much better at getting it immediately than I was. When the game petered out, I gave him the rulebook I'd bought - he was obviously going to get more out of it than I ever was, and its tools enabled him to tell his own stories in different ways and means than I do with a copy of the DMG.
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Jan 5, 2021 04:59
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:One of my biggest TTRPG design peeves (other than hating post-decision randomness Some games do this. Band of Blades in particular comes to mind, having relatively recently played it, for segmenting out all of the "player-faction" stuff into individual roles for individual players to take up (instead of the GM tracking Absolutely Everything about the Legion the players are a part of, one handles time, world map movement, missions, and part of intelligence; one handles the actual makeup of squads & keeps all the playbooks between missions since characters are shared, and tracks morale; one tracks supplies, personnel, and materiel & their use; one optionally tracks casualties, mission details & results, and handles Legion backstory-building; one optionally tracks the Legion's intelligence network which isn't really a GM role but is the main "players receive world information" method). It works poorly in practice, as does most of Band of Blades. I'm sure other games do the shared-GM-load division better without going fully GMless, but I sure keep on not finding ones that do it well.
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Jan 5, 2021 05:17
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I understand the distinction being made, but for me they don't ever seem nearly as broad or meaningful as the change a player gets in a switch between any two given games. PbTA Moves are a Thing, sure, and even minor things can help lower the bar to entry for other GMs, but even Moves mostly serve to formalize and mechanicalize an already existing set of GM Duties and expected Stuff GMs Do, they're basically designed to do that while prodding GMs toward certain vibes and genre tropes, but they don't meaningfully change the GM experience to even close to the same degree that a player's experience would change going from D&D to PbTA, to pluck an example. A GM swapping between the two is def gonna find a more streamlined, less Worky experience, but there's very few games that make me feel like I'm working with a different kind of machine altogether. Shifts in how the role works tends to be a simplification, or a democratization of a pre-existing set of assumed duties that need doing rather than, like, significant mechanical changes. Most of the changes many games make boil down to advice on How to do the role, rather than any earnest attempt to change what the role does. All that said, I do like the tools PBTA gives you, and I'm glad they changed things for the better in the industry. It's just been 10 years since then and I'd like to see further development past that. Take the experience of playing Blades in the Dark (again just picking a random game I'm familiar with from both sides of the table) - as a player you get a whole suite of unique mechanics, a base building thing, a crew management minigame, a whole thing about maintaining vices, a neat combat risk/reward thing, to say nothing about the dozens and dozens of options and choices you get to make about how your character works and interacts in the world. Compare that to what the GM gets and it's p clear where the design focus largely sits. Edit: I like how Fellowship does the Overlord role in theory, I've never gotten to try it in practice but it feels like that might lead to another kind of GMing experience vs other games, at least a little. Nemesis Of Moles fucked around with this message at 05:27 on Jan 5, 2021 |
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Jan 5, 2021 05:19
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SkyeAuroline posted:Some games do this. Band of Blades in particular comes to mind, having relatively recently played it, for segmenting out all of the "player-faction" stuff into individual roles for individual players to take up (instead of the GM tracking Absolutely Everything about the Legion the players are a part of, one handles time, world map movement, missions, and part of intelligence; one handles the actual makeup of squads & keeps all the playbooks between missions since characters are shared, and tracks morale; one tracks supplies, personnel, and materiel & their use; one optionally tracks casualties, mission details & results, and handles Legion backstory-building; one optionally tracks the Legion's intelligence network which isn't really a GM role but is the main "players receive world information" method). Could you tell me more about what BoB does poorly in practice, or point to a write-up about it? It was doing a lot of stuff I've also being thinking about, and clearly has a lot of similar influences to some of my games, so I'm very curious to know.
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Jan 5, 2021 05:21
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Jimbozig posted:Could you tell me more about what BoB does poorly in practice, or point to a write-up about it? It was doing a lot of stuff I've also being thinking about, and clearly has a lot of similar influences to some of my games, so I'm very curious to know.
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Jan 5, 2021 05:32
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Jimbozig posted:Could you tell me more about what BoB does poorly in practice, or point to a write-up about it? It was doing a lot of stuff I've also being thinking about, and clearly has a lot of similar influences to some of my games, so I'm very curious to know. It's been a hot minute since I've played, and my memory isn't the best, but I thankfully have my book in front of me. IGRC's writeup is probably going to be a much better summary than mine. Late at night so I' may not be very coherent. For me:
I promise I actually like RPGs, by the way. Just not this one. SkyeAuroline fucked around with this message at 06:39 on Jan 5, 2021 |
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Jan 5, 2021 06:36
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SkyeAuroline posted:IGRC's writeup is probably going to be a much better summary than mine. "XCOM, but it's The Black Company" is definitely a major selling point of the system for everyone I've heard talk about it. But nobody I know has ever made the jump to actually running it - the logistical effort always proved too much to rope any players in.
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Jan 5, 2021 07:56
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Thanks, that's great! So one game I'm working on (backburnered right now because I'm playtesting a different thing) is literally XCOM but an RPG. So... I'm just going to try summarize the thoughts I got out of your post and the linked blog post, and let me know if I'm on the right track. One thing going on is that BitD puts a LOT into each roll, and in particular a lot on the GM. And so yeah, doing 20 Devil's bargains per session is exhausting, and so on. Putting that much focus on the tactical aspects was not really what the design was intended for. But if you take some of that structure and put it around a game actually designed around having lots of tactical fights and chases and stuff (like, say, Strike!), it might work better. So if I were to do that, what lessons do I see here? 1) Don't be stingy with downtime. Downtime helps players with embodiment and actually getting to RP their character if they didn't get much opportunity for that in the missions. Since downtime is also recovery, being stingy here also feels really bad when you spend your only chance to do fun RP stuff just getting your character working again. (I had already noticed this issue in Mouse Guard - when you have players who aren't as into earning checks as Luke Crane's players, or a GM that calls for fewer rolls and thus fewer chances to earn checks, then the fun players' turn becomes rote recovery.) 2) Even before reading BoB, I had tentatively written a rule in my notes doc saying you can't play the same soldier in consecutive missions, because soldiers die and you are not to get attached. This rule would be no big deal for me personally, but if I'm thinking about player types (and I should be), that is too alienating. I should aim for a tad less lethality and give players more of a chance to get attached since that's like one of the big draws to RPGs for some players. 3) The metagame roles like commander are too abstracted? Too much paperwork? The funny thing is that I actually have metagame roles in Strike! They're in the section where I write up how to adapt the Black Company novels to the game. So either the designers read Strike! and were inspired a bit, or they happened to hit on the same idea for adapting the same source. (It's a fairly obvious idea, given the source.) But my version was not at all paperworky - it was about each player contributing something useful to the group's social dynamic. One player would take notes and give recaps to start the session, another would be in charge of drawing maps and diagrams for the group to use, one would cut things short when they got bogged down in discussing what to do, another would smooth over any bickering, etc. (p. 184 if you've got Strike! handy). I have some ideas for how I might make them even more fun, but having them be more paperwork and less connected to the characters is not one of those ideas, so I feel like I am on a good track here anyway. So my big question is, assuming you wanted a game with low-to-moderate amounts of RP between proper tactical missions, what parts of the between-missions structure worked really well and what didn't?
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Jan 5, 2021 08:13
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Arivia posted:I ran Monster of the Week for awhile and I did okay at it, but I'm not good at GMing PbtA - I like doing way more scenario prep and worldbuilding and actually running the game feels like slowly drowning in quick sand to me. I find that despite the reputation, PbtA games are more fun for me with not insignificant prep. Especially after the honeymoon when just tropin’ around has lost some of it’s initial appeal. Many of the genres tend to go well with relationship maps and conspyramids and that sort of thing. I think I would describe the prep as madlibs, where we’re still playing to find out things but it’s kind of focused. These days if I have nothing prepped and still want do something improvised I’ll suggest a GM-less game instead. But part of this might just be like a phase or something, I don’t know. Speaking of IGRC, I relate to the second half of this post when it comes to pbta prep: https://www.indiegamereadingclub.com/indie-game-reading-club/recalibrating/ Anyways, I’m not posting this just to be contrarian — just suggesting that I think that time spent prepping PbtA is rewarding in play not too differently than other games, in my experience. Edit: this post goes into greater detail https://www.indiegamereadingclub.com/indie-game-reading-club/prep-2-0/ fozzy fosbourne fucked around with this message at 10:00 on Jan 5, 2021 |
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Jan 5, 2021 08:39
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Jimbozig posted:So one game I'm working on (backburnered right now because I'm playtesting a different thing) is literally XCOM but an RPG. This would rule. I daydream about this all the time. I’ve wondered about binding like a lightweight version of something like Pandemic or Eldritch Horror’s whack-a-mole style strategic map to an RPG to build a sort of reactive structure to a campaign. I think the idea came up because I was thinking how GMing traditional super hero systems is kind of challenging for me, because the genre is mostly about heroes reacting to maintain status quo so it’s a little inauthentic feeling if I end up just running them through a point crawl or something that I’m used to. An X-Com/Pandemic/EH style campaign would fit the genre, I think, but I don’t have any examples of that type of structure in an RPG to try and rip off.
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Jan 5, 2021 08:48
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SkyeAuroline posted:It works poorly in practice, as does most of Band of Blades. This is extremely not the case. BoB is very good at doing the exactly one thing it wants to do, which is replicating the early Black Company/Malaz 7th Army feeling from Black Company/MBotF. It's not a generic "Blades in the Dark but you're mercenaries" hack, it's a hack for playing one specific military campaign with a very specific fictional positioning and an understanding of the game's theme that everyone at the table needs to share for the game to work. 90% of the stuff you bring up (Corruption, high lethality, recruits being a shared pool of initially-nameless characters, campaign roles being given out to players, the existence of Scale and Threat as two different axes) exist specifically to drive that fiction. It's not designed to, and will not, work for anything else, but it also makes it very clear that it's not interested in even trying to work for anything else. Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 12:32 on Jan 5, 2021 |
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Jan 5, 2021 11:59
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Has anyone tried the Dungeon Keeper looking FitD that just came out recently? Wicked Ones, I think? Does it do anything mechanically particularly novel?
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Jan 5, 2021 12:42
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Yeah I just own Band so I don’t know how it plays and it could suck for all I know or care, but all those points seem like intentional emulation of the books. Might still suck butts idk, never got it to the table, but the points you bring up sound as an outsider more like not liking what the game wants to be rather than it failing in its goals.
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Jan 5, 2021 13:05
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fozzy fosbourne posted:Has anyone tried the Dungeon Keeper looking FitD that just came out recently? Wicked Ones, I think? Does it do anything mechanically particularly novel? I've started it up with a group. Essentially it just takes what's in BitD and twists it to fit the Dungeon Keeper theme. You draw out your dungeon together with defined rooms, and the GM can throw adventurers into it as the forces of good respond to the actions the players take. I haven't done a side by side comparison of the two and I would need to get further in to say more. I will say that drawing the dungeon together is pretty fun, especially if one of the players has access to some mapping tools to turn your scribbles into something that looks nice.
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Jan 5, 2021 14:18
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fozzy fosbourne posted:I mostly agree with this take on adding a DMPC: https://blogofholding.com/?p=2572 Honestly I find the most critical element to players enjoying recruiting an NPC is letting the players decide who they take with them. If it was their idea to hire/rescue/recruit an extra person to follow them around as a support character, it generally works out. In addition to the well-made point here that these kinds of characters should be supporting cast and function to reveal more about the PCs and let the PCs get more of a spotlight by having a foil.
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Jan 5, 2021 14:26
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SkyeAuroline posted:Troupe play with shared characters is somewhere up there at the top of "things I never want to see in an RPG" and it leaves a very bad taste in my mouth. I can't speak to BoB, because "bleak story about mercenaries running away from a dark god" is not a campaign RPG that I want to play. However, "troupe play with shared characters" can be awesome if done right. The one-two punch of Spectaculars and Legacy: Life Among the Ruins did it so well I've been folding it into pretty much everything I've run since.
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Jan 5, 2021 14:45
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CitizenKeen posted:I can't speak to BoB, because "bleak story about mercenaries running away from a dark god" is not a campaign RPG that I want to play. However, "troupe play with shared characters" can be awesome if done right. The one-two punch of Spectaculars and Legacy: Life Among the Ruins did it so well I've been folding it into pretty much everything I've run since. I don't think Legacy is an example of that at all, though. If I'm playing my Riders with the "last old world officer left standing" Elder as my character for the age, nobody else is going to come in and play that Elder. There's room for incidental characters to be used and/or reused, but they're explicitly disposable and lightly statted, and it's just as easy to roll a new and separate character if desired. BoB forces a fixed pool of characters to draw from, and RAW puts that pool of characters fully communal with no individual ownership of the Specialist you create. Lemon-Lime posted:This is extremely not the case. BoB is very good at doing the exactly one thing it wants to do, which is replicating the early Black Company/Malaz 7th Army feeling from Black Company/MBotF. It's not a generic "Blades in the Dark but you're mercenaries" hack, it's a hack for playing one specific military campaign with a very specific fictional positioning and an understanding of the game's theme that everyone at the table needs to share for the game to work. 90% of the stuff you bring up (Corruption, high lethality, recruits being a shared pool of initially-nameless characters, campaign roles being given out to players, the existence of Scale and Threat as two different axes) exist specifically to drive that fiction. It's not designed to, and will not, work for anything else, but it also makes it very clear that it's not interested in even trying to work for anything else. These are valid points, but I'd also contend that just embodying the one specific aim is not the end goal of RPGs. A game can be a perfect recreation of the exact subgenre and source material that it's drawing from... but if that game is actively unpleasant to play, regardless of what its themes are, then how much does that "accuracy" actually matter?
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Jan 5, 2021 15:09
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SkyeAuroline posted:I don't think Legacy is an example of that at all, though. If I'm playing my Riders with the "last old world officer left standing" Elder as my character for the age, nobody else is going to come in and play that Elder. There's room for incidental characters to be used and/or reused, but they're explicitly disposable and lightly statted, and it's just as easy to roll a new and separate character if desired. True. Some characters are reserved for individual players. But I've had Quick Characters get used for back-to-back sessions by two different players. Legacy was just the next game I queued up after Spectaculars, and Spectaculars only has shared characters, and watching my players in my Legacy game put their takes on characters somebody else played the previous session really reinforced the lessons learned. It was also an underlying assumption in the design of Marvel Heroic adventures Since then, in my session zeroes, I've been talking about how I'm less interested in running games where one player controls one character, and that I find the game more fun if the table approaches the game as a writers room, where each player has a favorite character for a season, but season to season "who" might change.
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Jan 5, 2021 15:39
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SkyeAuroline posted:
I mean, the obvious answer is, quite a bit to people who want to play in that specific subgenre? Again, I have not actually gotten Bands to the table so I won't defend it per se, but your objections so far seem to be based more on what it's doing rather than how it's being done. Which is fine and good ; everyone has preferences and their entitled to them. But like it's one thing to not like horror movies and a totally different thing to not like a specific horror movie cause it's scary ; if The Descent was too ookily spookily for you that's totally cool, but not really a criticism of the film since that was the whole point. Am I wildly misreading you? I'm totally down with everyone having their preferences but this seems like someone ordering a vindaloo and complaining it's spicy. Well, yeah, it's vindaloo. And?
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Jan 5, 2021 16:27
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Xiahou Dun posted:Am I wildly misreading you? I'm totally down with everyone having their preferences but this seems like someone ordering a vindaloo and complaining it's spicy. Well, yeah, it's vindaloo. And? "Fantasy XCOM RPG" is something I'm interested in, though less "troupe play" and more "roll a new character if yours dies, otherwise keep a running cast" because the latter allows for running stories much better. "Force a fantasy tactical combat game into an intentionally loose narrative framework & break fundamental mechanics to get where you want to go" is not, and that's all that Band of Blades is. Some really good setting writing and ideas shoved into the absolute wrong framework for its goals. It could have been done well in a system that actually supported combat-heavy play. See also: literally any high-budget 5e hack, from the opposite direction.
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Jan 5, 2021 16:58
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The issue with GMing as a role is that it's supposed to be facilitator role, and yet demands much more commitment and involvement than is demanded of anyone else in the group. So the GM is trying to facilitate people who aren't as involved as they are, which is a rather contradictory role. It isn't helped by the fact that the GM may actually be the primary participant: in regular tactical RPGs, not only does the GM get to play with a wide range of ability sets compared to the relatively static ones that PCs have; they also get 3-4 times as many turns, and are much less restricted by resource management! It's refreshing to see some indie games try to rebalance the work but there's still the problem of the "looking for players" effect where the GM is expected to initiate the game and thus ends up bearing responsibility for whether it goes well or not. This seems to be very difficult to shift, even for games that explicitly downplay the GM role (I've even seen a Vincent Baker game where the GM is renamed "the volunteer", but never known it to actually be run on the basis of someone volunteering after the group is formed)
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Jan 5, 2021 17:37
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SkyeAuroline posted:"Force a fantasy tactical combat game into an intentionally loose narrative framework You keep calling it a tactical combat game when it isn't. Fights in BoB are just a type of narrative obstacle, one you'll see more often than you would in BitD because of the thematic nature of the game, but they work the same. They're not trying to be tactical combat.
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Jan 5, 2021 18:04
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Lemon-Lime posted:You keep calling it a tactical combat game when it isn't. What term would you prefer for "combat-centric game explicitly framing every mission through the lens of combat as obstacles, requiring successful use of positioning and tactics to improve position & effect of combat actions to win" as a descriptor? The intensification of harm by double dipping on P/E and Threat makes P/E (the parts you can mitigate as a risk) far more important to keep favorable to the players so the GM can't immediately wreck your character into "unable to contribute" territory, without even touching any other mechanics. This isn't Monster of the Week or something where all the moves may as well take place on a flat plane because none really affect them meaningfully, BoB relies on P/E for every roll as much as or more so than Blades itself.
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Jan 5, 2021 18:11
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This post seems pretty relevant to the previous conversation about designs that provide some novel GM-facing fun toys (beyond the basic act of *waves hands dramatically* creativity): https://www.indiegamereadingclub.com/indie-game-reading-club/certain-values-of-fun/ I’ve played many of these and I would agree. A few more that come to mind beyond those mentioned: - Night’s Black Agents conspyramid / vampyramid stuff - Ryuutama gmpc that has its own special progression - Technoir plot mapping stuff - Reign org management - Bluebeard’s Bride I can’t articulate why but it feels like it belongs I feel like something in common with a lot of the best gm-facing stuff that I like is that it provides some structure above th innermost loop of a game. To elaborate, if you were to describe a trad rpg like: - Inner loop (action resolution stuff, scene level) - Middle loop (moving from scene to scene in an “adventure”, five room dungeon, hex crawl, etc - Outer loop (campaign level stuff, moving from whatever unit defines an episode, whether it be session or adventure or whatever) I feel like the stuff that empowers me the most these days is stuff that gives me some tools to build upon for the middle and outer loops. Stuff that is purely action resolution system (which includes strictly player-facing charop stuff) is only mildly useful to me, especially as there are a few pretty decent options out there now. And things that just include a bunch of setting fluff and implied genre tropes but no mechanics to help me implement them in the game is kind of useless by now since there is so much setting out there to rip off these days Conventionally, these middle and outer loop tools are supplied in separate adventure modules rather than in the GM guides, which is OK I guess, but I prefer more of the Kevin Crawford approach where they are supplied as more generic scaffolding that I can build my own stuff around. As an aside, I feel like a lot of published adventure module stuff takes a lot of the potential “play to find out” stuff a GM could enjoy and uses it up themselves, heh. Read my epic tiamat fan fiction and also here’s a poorly keyed dungeon map
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Jan 5, 2021 22:04
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fozzy fosbourne posted:This post seems pretty relevant to the previous conversation about designs that provide some novel GM-facing fun toys (beyond the basic act of *waves hands dramatically* creativity): Cheers for posting this, I'm familiar with a few of these but a couple I need to take a read of
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Jan 5, 2021 23:04
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Band of Blades is enormously successful at doing the very specific thing it wants to do, and that's a thing its audience enjoys. SkyeAuroline is not that audience, and that's ok. It's a niche flavor, but for people who've been waiting for this exact thing - and I count myself as one of them - it's delicious. "Actively unpleasant to play" is very much a personal preference: I've played and enjoyed it, and you can watch an entire campaign of it run by the author to great success over on Actual Play. It is absolutely not Blades in the Dark, and if you go in to a BoB game expecting it to be like BitD you will be disappointed and probably frustrated. If you go into it expecting The Black Company: The Roleplaying Game with everything that entails, including hideously dangerous combat and a campaign layer that is actively trying to make you lose, you will get what you've ordered.
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Jan 6, 2021 00:16
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I own Band of Blades and I thought it was supposed to be like a grim military misery heroics thing and maybe you make it to the Last Stand like that Sabaton album but AT WHAT COST and it seems that is mostly accurate. If dice are flying, someone's dyin'. I have no reference to playing Blades in the Dark (which I also own, but have never really played, just read through) but I also try to treat each game as its own thing unless it has some expectation somewhere that I should have explicit knowledge of some other game before playing it I should get around to using the Pool to run a BLAME! game like I tried doing but quickly lost interest in via pbp several years ago. Superpowered robots that have gravitic beam emitters with a finite energy reserve vs. replicating silicoid life forms and other weird poo poo seems good. Related, but I was a bit underwhelmed by Nibiru, but its setting is okay to mine. Zone Raiders might be the game of choice I'd have but playing tactical wargame minis campaign can be tough (speaking as someone who runs LANCER and GURPS). Might be a cool thing though.
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Jan 6, 2021 00:35
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SkyeAuroline posted:"Fantasy XCOM RPG" is something I'm interested in, though less "troupe play" and more "roll a new character if yours dies, otherwise keep a running cast" because the latter allows for running stories much better. "Force a fantasy tactical combat game into an intentionally loose narrative framework & break fundamental mechanics to get where you want to go" is not, and that's all that Band of Blades is. Some really good setting writing and ideas shoved into the absolute wrong framework for its goals. It could have been done well in a system that actually supported combat-heavy play. I'm sorry but I still can't understand your argument. Again this really sounds like your disagreement is with what the game set out to do and not how it was done. Which is cool and good because everyone can like different things, but it's a totally separate kind of criticism getting into subjective tastes.
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Jan 6, 2021 00:37
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I guess I'm completely incapable of communicating my thoughts so I'll just shut up about the game already.
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Jan 6, 2021 00:41
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SkyeAuroline posted:I guess I'm completely incapable of communicating my thoughts so I'll just shut up about the game already. fwiw I got your deal but yeah. Anybody play Sword World 2 yet? If not, who wants to play it in some fashion?
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Jan 6, 2021 00:43
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Also, I need some appropriate music for both Sword World and just generic fantasy tunes in the classical music space in general. Suggestions?
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Jan 6, 2021 00:56
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SkyeAuroline posted:I guess I'm completely incapable of communicating my thoughts so I'll just shut up about the game already. Sorry if I seemed to be brow-beating you! I legit just don't understand. aldantefax posted:Also, I need some appropriate music for both Sword World and just generic fantasy tunes in the classical music space in general. Suggestions? I've been having a renewed love affair with sea shanties lately, so depending on genre that might be right up your alley. Youtube is god drat full of hour-long compilations of them.
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Jan 6, 2021 01:01
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aldantefax posted:Also, I need some appropriate music for both Sword World and just generic fantasy tunes in the classical music space in general. Suggestions? the soundtracks for baldur's gate/neverwinter nights/etc were on discount as part of the steam sale
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Jan 6, 2021 01:06
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If we're throwing out recommendations for 'Grim Military Heroics' then I'd toss in The Watch. It's explicitly about soldiers fighting a seemingly unbeatable foe and has mechanics for the emotional toll that inflicts, is PbtA, and doesn't have a lot of bookkeeping. It also has the entire military campaign laid out with phases, missions and special rules that will crop up as the war progresses. It's good poo poo.
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Jan 6, 2021 01:10
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Re: the BoB stuff“Jared Sorensen” posted:The big three questions are; Seems like maybe there are two different discussions being had but that might be mistaken for the same conversation:
They can have different answers. That’s my impression anyways but maybe I’m lost, too TL;DR: Are games art???
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Jan 6, 2021 01:19
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