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When I DM’d years ago I took to heart all the advice to not make NPCs that join the party and are basically your own little player characters because you will steal the spotlight from the players and ruin their time or something. Nowadays, my attitude is that they are loving players so who gives a poo poo. What are they gonna do, start GMing themselves? Lol, they aren’t even going to finish the player’s guide. I’m going to get in on that CharOp too and no one can stop me. I am a Chaos DM
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Jan 4, 2021 20:04
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mellonbread posted:"Inflict a DMPC on the players so one of them picks up DMing" is definitely a tactic. Heh. In my experience I could probably defecate on the table while wearing a funny hat and making a weird voice before people would commit to running traditional TTRPGs themselves. Seriously though, we’re approaching traditional TTRPGs again with some serious skepticism towards the folk wisdom surrounding best practices, especially stuff that is biased towards the player’s experience, because our collective experience is they are fun until the GM burns out and the game collapses. We have nothing to lose. If it turns out to not be fun again we can just stick with GM-less stuff like For the Queen and Archipelago, narrative / storytelling games, board games whatever.
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Jan 4, 2021 21:56
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I mostly agree with this take on adding a DMPC: https://blogofholding.com/?p=2572 I would also add to the list of reasons to consider it is that running a DMPC from time to time has let me and a couple of the more adventurous people in my group try different systems without having too few characters to fill assumed roles or run published content without a ton of surgery.
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Jan 4, 2021 22:26
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Kyrosiris posted:The group I played with back in high school had a rotating DM chair and thus whoever was DMing had their character essentially as a DMPC. It worked out well enough. Ars Magica sort of formalizes this with troupe play; players don’t have a 1-1 relationship with characters, and this facilitates switching the storyteller (GM) role around as an option (but it’s not required). I have never played it so I could be mistaken about details. I feel like one of my groups is getting close to the point where we could probably try troupe style play with something narrative like PbtA or cortex. We’ve been leaning in to player author stance stuff in narrative games and the rules are light enough that I think players might feel comfortable adjudicating those games. We’ve also been playing a lot of fiasco and other GM-less stuff and I think that’s good cross circuit training, heh. 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.
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Jan 5, 2021 00:57
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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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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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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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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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Lemon-Lime posted:The answer to these two questions are "yes" and "yes if you want the thing the previous question was asking about," respectively. If you don't want the thing, you won't have fun, but that's completely irrelevant because the game is explicitly not intended or designed for you. Well, to put the original questions into context, they were intended as steering for prospective designers coming to Sorensen, Luke Crane, Wick, asking for advice with presumably the goal of having a popular design. So I think I could have worded that different as more of a “is this likely to be considered fun for some significant number of people who might try this game?” Or something. Like, if your goal is to have people play your design, and your design does an incredible job of capturing the experience of having open heart surgery or something, you might need to think about the f-word unless your goal is to make a piece of art or statement or something different than what people typically play games for. I should know better though than to get in a discussion about the f word in trad games  edit: Like if you follow the MDA framework research, you could maybe ask if you can imagine the design appealing to any of the aesthetics listed there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDA_framework F-word nihilism is totally a position I can respect, too, though fozzy fosbourne fucked around with this message at 02:02 on Jan 6, 2021 |
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Jan 6, 2021 01:55
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Yeah, I agree that whether a game is broadly or narrowly appealing to play doesn’t mean it’s good or bad. Unless I don’t like it, in which case it’s poo poo
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Jan 6, 2021 02:07
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Evil Mastermind posted:Yes. Next question. If a game has never been played, is it still a game?
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Jan 6, 2021 02:36
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Evil Mastermind posted:Also yes. Is a pop tart a sandwich?
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Jan 6, 2021 02:50
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Is Agricola OSR?
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Jan 6, 2021 19:32
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Two things that I find bothersome and frequent elsewhere: “That’s just stuff a good GM does anyways” And “We just house-rule over [flaw] so it doesn’t matter”
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Jan 7, 2021 06:43
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This would be a pretty sweet set of terms if it were finished: https://www.indiegamereadingclub.com/glossary-of-terms/
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Jan 7, 2021 07:18
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SkyeAuroline posted:So I'm actually curious. How many of us are in ongoing (or imminent) games & what are they? Sort of between games while we figure out a new system to try. Been playing low-commitment Dungeon World and gm-less stuff in meantime (fiasco, for the Queen, king is dead, kingdom, archipelago, dialect, and I just got Alice is Missing). As an aside, I’ve actually been curious about running Eclipse Phase with the official Fate adaptation.
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Jan 10, 2021 01:00
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If you wanted to give a new gm the greatest chance possible of successfully running 4-10 sessions, what system and possibly supplements would you give them? Can include published adventures. For this hypothetical, assume that YouTube and other internet fan resources aren’t available so that popularity doesn’t have as strong a weight.
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Jan 10, 2021 01:03
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