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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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Tulip posted:It's fairly trivial whether or not games are art, but that means we have to figure out a good critical vocabulary for discussing them that isn't pure extension of existing literary/movie/music criticism. It's particularly acute with tabletop games since the game is in a lot of ways a toolbox for creating further art, but I'd say its art on its own regardless of its other merits. extremely true the sooner people start thinking of mechanics as objects of aesthetic appeal, the better
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Jan 6, 2021 04:19
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Jimbozig posted:It's not the only game with that problem. Chess sucks in the same way - playing with newbies feels like a waste of everyone's time. I don't think this is really a flaw, I think it's just an inevitable characteristic of any sufficiently deep competitive game.
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Jan 12, 2021 19:26
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Xiahou Dun posted:I think they might have made it up for comedic effect. But who can tell with them drat tea-sodden football hooligans. i searched a few variations of the name + hyenas and yeah, it looks like it was a joke i still had to check, though. and there are real life lords with far more ridiculous names, i just couldn't find any related to the study of hyenas
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Jan 25, 2021 04:32
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Braid tugging is Robert Jordan.
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Jan 29, 2021 09:02
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FFT posted:And I'd rather the players feel like they have agency instead of arbitrarily picking stuff so yeah: I'm going to let them roll against the full list in both cases and let it play out. randomness is the opposite of agency
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Feb 4, 2021 13:37
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CitizenKeen posted:What game had dueling grids where you could "move" to spaces orthogonal to your current action type? It was different sword-fighting styles or something like. Was it Spellbound Kingdoms? yeah, that's Spellbound Kingdoms
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Feb 9, 2021 16:45
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aldantefax posted:Cards + tabletop RPGs combining has always been a pretty underutilized space, I feel like. Cards not being utilized very much is exactly the right amount, at least in terms of resolution mechanics. They're prone to damage, prone to dirt, shuffling well enough to get a decently random sample is much harder than people assume, they're basically just worse than dice for everything except presenting information. I hate them, they stink! Cards as memory aids is a great idea but that's a very different subject.
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Feb 11, 2021 19:12
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Tulip posted:There's a common bias that a TTRPG should be basically infinitely durable that's not a "bias", that's just being completely correct on a aesthetic, practical, and moral level 
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Feb 12, 2021 04:17
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honestly, as someone on the autism spectrum, i think some of the problem is way deeper and simply goes to the fact that people treat literal-mindedness and attention to detail like insufferable character flaws like half the time when "sperg" or that emote are evoked it's not even really a mischaracterization of autism, it's just people treating something neutral (or even occasionally positive) like it's a crime just because it isn't socially typical e: which is to say, i wouldn't be sad to see it go, but "decoupling" doesn't really cover it
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Feb 13, 2021 02:31
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i've played RPGs in person... with everyone at their laptop looking at their character screen and the map that's the best way to do it imo, i would never want to go back to pure analog
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Feb 18, 2021 21:03
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When I quit playing Magic I just checked the prices of all my good cards on Ebay and put them up for sale in Coupons and Deals. I actually managed to break even over my entire MTG-playing run, amusingly enough, although more thanks to trading up and tournament winnings than from everything I spent money on holding its value.
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Feb 22, 2021 09:46
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There was a 3-part adventure chain for AD&D 2E that was entirely about fighting Sahuagin. And yeah, it basically boiled down to giving the players not only permanent water-breathing, but for a good portion of the campaign you're using magic potions (or something like that, it's been a while) that transform you into Sahuagin lookalikes.
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Feb 25, 2021 21:03
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Plutonis posted:It doesn't help with the impression outsiders have of this forum as being full of spiteful indie designers who hate the biggest market share owner. D&D is bad but the constant complaints that D&D isn't a narrative-first rules-light RP framework is like people being upset that a crock pot isn't a colander. But that doesn't erase the problem that a) D&D is a lovely crock pot, and b) Crock Pot Inc. hires serial abusers.
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Mar 1, 2021 17:00
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basically spite is good but i want something i can make chili in
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Mar 1, 2021 17:02
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i can't really complain as loudly as i used to, the truth is there are a solid 3 or 4 D&D 4E successor projects now and the funny part is most of them were made by goons. this forum may actually be the best loving laboratory of high-crunch tactical RPGs there is
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Mar 1, 2021 17:20
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and right here we have a good example of why my complaints are still relevant lol
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Mar 1, 2021 17:29
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the actual reason so few people advance the tactical combat-centric wargame/RPG hybrid design space that D&D examplifies is because it's loving hard work, requiring far more published content (in terms of player options, opponents, etc.) to work effectively, which in turn is measured on far more objective terms (game balance), than your average indie RPG
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Mar 1, 2021 17:33
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PeterWeller posted:Another possible point in OSE's favor is that it's compatible with most of that content published by TSR. while OSR stuff doesn't interest me much the inter-compatibility is a pretty clever solution to the content problem, yeah ultimately there are some things that unfortunately do work better with the funding and manpower of a giant company behind you
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Mar 1, 2021 19:54
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Len posted:i've been on a one piece kick lately, are there any good pbta pirate games i can use as a jump off point? It's not explicitly pirate-themed, but Fellowship supports One Piece really well to begin with, and even better with the "Horizon" alternate GM role.
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Apr 2, 2021 03:41
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I mean, Hunter x Hunter is already basically a point-buy superpower game, complete with classes/archetypes, just as-is in the fiction.
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Apr 7, 2021 19:01
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Whybird posted:One of the ideas that a certain class of grog clings to is "things used to be more racist, because racism is the natural state of things", and depending on the grog, this is followed up with either "so we should be grateful for the few crumbs of equality we've managed to achieve" or "and things would be better if we went back to that". Ditto with sexism, ditto with homophobia. it's still a uselessly broad generalization but if you want to model medieval attitudes a little better, you should have a setting where nobody cares that their neighbor is an orc but if you come from the other village across the river you then gently caress you, buddy
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May 2, 2021 18:01
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Pollyanna posted:I'm learning Strike right now, and I feel kinda bad for the first people I GM this for. They're gonna have to dealing with me referring back to the book a lot whenever something happens I GM new systems all the time and while my ideal standard is that I sit down and run encounters solo until I can retain the rules from memory, there isn't always time or energy for that. I also don't really like the idea that the GM is solely responsible for teaching the game (or even for rules adjudication) even if cultural momentum from D&D and running games for other adults sometimes makes it inevitable. Basically don't worry about it too much, you'll all get better with practice. e: although it's usually better to make fast and potentially incorrect rulings and fix it later than bog down the game Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 20:03 on May 2, 2021 |
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May 2, 2021 19:58
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Does anyone else often have first sessions of a system end up like that, where it's slow going and a lot of reviewing on the part of the GM? Or am I doing it wrong, somehow?
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That specific passage is why I consider AtMoM one of Lovecraft's better stories. It's not intentional but it ends up indicting his protagonist. Although the all-time best is still Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, where it's revealed that the mechanism by which the protagonist has been seduced into the world of the weird, the thing that drives him to risk madness and death to obtain it, is simply nostalgia.
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May 17, 2021 20:25
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whydirt posted:Maybe a useful exercise would be to recommend authors who similar to Howard and Lovecraft but are less racist or are even minorities themselves? C. L. Moore is honestly still kinda racist but she's far more ambivalent about indigenous cultures than Howard or Lovecraft, and is an interesting point of reference as one of the few women Weird Fiction writers of the era.
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May 21, 2021 20:50
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Shambleau is one of my all-time favorites. Like, yeah, it's about a predatory succubus and ultimately concludes that the protagonist was an idiot for feeling sorry for her and wrong to save her from a lynch mob but it's not terribly hard to read that conclusion as the characters justifying themselves rather than an objective truth.
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May 21, 2021 23:08
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Berserk is good but it's also basically an exhaustive list of content warnings in manga form, so keep that in mind going in.
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May 22, 2021 03:47
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GitS is full of characters who are defined by their ability to do violence even (or especially) when they aren't actually doing it, which is kind of awkward to translate to a game. You're stuck between making it important enough that you aren't simply asserting something narratively that isn't backed up by mechanics, while also making sure those mechanics aren't the entire game. It's not an insoluble problem by any means but it's one which cuts against both of the prevailing design schools in TTRPGs, which means a lazy copy-and-paste attempt at it is almost guaranteed to get it wrong. Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 21:00 on May 28, 2021 |
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May 28, 2021 20:57
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Chakan posted:There’s that one page rpg, NICE MARINES, about space marines trying to help normal people but their bodies are built for war. But yeah without a comedy feeling it would be exceptionally hard to convey that. i mean it's also the pitch for Lasers and Feelings, but Lasers and Feelings is a mediocre joke and a bad game
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May 28, 2021 21:14
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The all-purpose answer to this question is that the best thing for games to model with high-crunch systems is games. No, seriously. D&D is a series of wargame scenarios wrapped in a narrative that is designed to promote emotional investment in the outcome of the encounter (especially for people who aren't as big on serious competition / the intrinsic goal of winning) and to tie one encounter to the next. Literally just do that but with whatever game you like instead. Approaching it from the angle of "but what should we model and how should we model it" is falling into the exact same trap as people who try to calculate dexterity by swinging a computer mouse around by its cord, just slightly less obviously. Dread is a good object lesson here. There should be some resonance between the game mechanics and the narrative situation it stands in for but the important thing is that translating it back into narrative is a matter of interpretation, not simulation. You want social "combat"? Play a hand of poker and then the winner gets to explain what happened in the story.
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Jun 2, 2021 11:58
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the trouble with this approach, of course, is that either you steal an existing game and your results fall somewhere on a scale of "that Jenga RPG" to "d20 shovelware" depending on how appealing people find the concept -- or worse, you have to actually do game design and not just write a series of RNG-modulated creative writing prompts
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Jun 2, 2021 12:08
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potatocubed posted:Creative writing prompts are game design. They're just design for games that TC there doesn't like. I'm being facetious, and more than a little at my own expense given how much debt I went into to get formal training in creative writing. It's not actually a relevant criticism of PBTA games or BITD or whatever to say that nobody would care about the mechanics shorn of the narrative, even though it's true, because nobody actually encounters the game like that. What is relevant is that D&D baits the hook for people who aren't interested (or at least aren't solely interested) in the mechanical experience and most of these games don't do the reverse -- something I generally approve of, in that I've probably got two or three pages of posts in here about how games are better when they're focused on a particular audience and experience instead of pretending to be something they're not. There's just a certain irony in how the only people who really seem to understand the thing about focus are the people who (rightly, to the betterment of their games!) exclude me from their audience.
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Jun 3, 2021 00:43
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Gort posted:Anyone got thoughts on how to run Fragged Empire? My players like a tactical map combat so I'm kinda interested - probably mostly in the Bloodborne-esque Fragged Aeternum spinoff. the game itself advises long-running exploration campaigns, where basically your players go from planet to planet getting into episodic trouble, or neighborhood to neighborhood in the case of Aeternum. a lot of the perks and drawbacks assume you're traveling and meeting lots of different people (who each react to you differently) and that your contacts, resources, etc. will be more or less available depending on how far from home you are combat is attrition-based but annoyingly the rulebook actively refuses to give specific guidance on how many encounters between downtime (and deflects with some hogwash about combat never being perfectly balanced) if you're running Aeternum it matters less though, because narratively your characters are practically expected to wipe and respawn from time to time, especially when they're new and still finding their legs
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Jun 6, 2021 14:33
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the intended answer is absolutely "bank Momentum and spend it on Critical Damage" in the core game you don't even have the luxury of storing it from turn to turn, you just roll and hope for strong hits e: remember that you auto-crit enemies with 0 Endurance
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Jun 9, 2021 22:00
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Countblanc posted:"An experienced player has a better chance f winning than an inexperienced one" sounds like a good thing for a game, not a bad one not really TTRPG-related but i remember reading the medieval combat sim thread in Games and doing a double-take at people going "ugh, Mordhau lets a really good player basically 1v5 people, it's so great that in Chivalry it's not even possible to be that good" unfortunately Mordhau is also apparently infested with nazis, which is a vastly better pro-Chivalry argument
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Jun 22, 2021 15:28
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Imagined posted:Unfortunately with videogames that allow that level of skill ceiling very quickly you end up with ONLY the players who are that good still playing, leading to a death spiral where all the less sweaty original players have fled to more casual-friendly games, and anyone new who tries to come in is immediately ripped to shreds by teams full of triple-plat xxxgokuweedlords. See: trying to play Titanfall 2 anytime but a free weekend after three months post-launch. Like it or not but your average player isn't going to just keep coming back if they feel like they're just like NPCs in a Dynasty Warriors game. people who are extremely demotivated by losing to the point where they'd rather quit than improve and get revenge should just go ahead and play something else. this isn't even really a mark against them, more against an industry and marketing standard that constantly pumps out quasi-competitive games that try to downplay competition and sucker people into participating in a play format that they hate and resent especially because the way they keep them hooked usually involves both a) watering down the experience for people who are actually there for that and b) incredibly gross psychological manipulation with sunk cost fallacy, FOMO, gambling-like dynamics, etc. Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 15:48 on Jun 22, 2021 |
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Jun 22, 2021 15:43
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i agree about Dark Souls but it's also a really weird (if fascinating) example, because the purpose of invasions in Dark Souls isn't really competition at all so much as enlisting other human players to act as obstacles or "heels" in the same manner as NPC enemies in a singleplayer game. it's incredibly clever and also, i think, often incredibly misunderstood by both parties, and definitely not the target of my criticism here in any case
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Jun 22, 2021 16:11
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Sounds kind of like a version of Hollow Knight's setting except without the tragic-yet-inevitable apocalypse.
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Jun 27, 2021 05:44
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psychological effects of presentation in this context are very real but also should be discouraged as much as possible from being used as the basis of design decisions the actual mechanical / mathematical effects of a standard deviation are great, though BattleMaster posted:I like 2d6 or 3d6, or similar, because if the base target number is closer to the average then positive and negative modifiers are more impactful. And if a roll is very favorable there is a much smaller chance of it failing than if the distribution is flat, smaller than the ever-present 5% failure/5% critical chance in d20 systems. basically seconding all of this
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Jul 16, 2021 22:03
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Search and rescue seems pretty ripe for being adapted to tactical gameplay, either alongside combat as an alternate win condition or as its own system.
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Jul 18, 2021 16:15
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