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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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aldantefax posted:I don't know if the TG Wiki is still a thing but having a living curated document somewhere to help define these high level concepts would be good, and reiterating that they should only be high level. It is, and could use some new year love. https://forsoothgoons.com/tg/index.php?title=Help:Glossary
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Jan 7, 2021 19:49
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The problem with all the terms is that they're based on the experience delivered by the game, and so none of them can be applied until there's a way to unpick the game's responsibility from the GM's responsibility. A GM who is determined to send you to the piss forest can ruin almost any game system, but that doesn't make the systems less valuable. Edit: also, that glossary is cheating in a good few places. Kenosis, etc, are real things, but "ludus" isn't defined as a kind of fun, and "paida" is just a chopped off Greek stem meaning "child" which has no defined meaning as an emotion. hyphz fucked around with this message at 22:46 on Jan 7, 2021 |
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Jan 7, 2021 22:38
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I'm really interested in Legacy but haven't played it - the only complaint I have heard is that there's only four Family moves and they have limited options. Like, if you want to trade for a resource, there's no option to do that as written; Claim by Force is, well, by force; and Conduct Diplomacy doesn't have trade as an option. So it presumably has to be handwaved.
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Jan 8, 2021 18:54
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At this moment, just playing Pathfinder 2e.
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Jan 9, 2021 15:57
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Xiahou Dun posted:I've never heard of this game, but it sounds like if Dracula sucked all of the fun out of The Great Dalmuti. (Which I won't exactly stan but my family played that with various silly hats and special chairs for the roles so it's waist-deep in nostalgia). So no wonder you hate it. Great Dalmuti (and later Dilbert Corporate Shuffle) was Richard Garfield’s attempt to rebalance President. hyphz fucked around with this message at 16:40 on Jan 12, 2021 |
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Jan 12, 2021 16:37
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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. And dear lord, Go..
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Jan 12, 2021 17:42
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aldantefax posted:I dunno if chess is like this but I do know there is a culture of quality game teaching through instructive play in go and unless you are going out into the wild as a lil baby gamer and getting whomped on by people with galaxy brain ELO then it is likely you will run into someone hopefully that is like This is supposed to happen with Bridge as well, especially if you have an experienced teacher who uses duplicate hands. The problem with Go is that because of the ridiculous number of established patterns it can really easily happen in just a regular game. "Um, by the way, you had no chance of winning there and all your stones are dead" is practically unavoidable, even if it's hopefully not stated in that way.
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Jan 12, 2021 20:00
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Leperflesh posted:I get what Hyphz is saying: Go has a particular structure in which a novice can be in a hopeless position well before the game is over, without realizing it. I should clarify that I don't mean the entire game. Like, Go has a ton of cases where "if you have a stone in position X,Y and nothing is nearby, and you place a stone in position X+2, Y+1, then any attempt by your opponent to capture that stone in that situation is hopeless because all possible combinations of moves have been analyzed in the past and all have winning responses for you". So it's really easy to play into those as a beginner. But at the same time, the experienced player can't really say "you can't capture this stone" directly because if another one of the newbie's stones ends up in a particular place 4 or 5 spaces away then the situation changes. So the newbie spends a lot of time playing out doomed established sequences.
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Jan 12, 2021 22:41
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I find it very amusing that Reclaimer was written by someone with an infosec background. I’ve wondered about a cyberpunk setting where an algorithm has been found that can subvert any computer that accepts input, full stop. Security is dead. But the tech companies don’t offer the masses any replacement for online banking or anything similar; they don’t get the blame for being hacked even now, and any time that might change, a few bungs to politicians (plus human personal account managers for them, of course) is much cheaper than retooling the systems back to the manual days. It’s the old cyberpunk game “why would anyone use an X that could be hacked” embraced large, I guess.
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Jan 21, 2021 06:13
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Leperflesh posted:Do they have junk food? Of course they do, everyone does. But I defy you to point to a better tasting junk food than a piping hot battered fried fish sided with fat fluffy crispy chips, drizzled with malt vinegar and lightly dusted with salt, served in a wad of (uninked, please) newspaper and wolfed down steaming in the cool night air along with your fifth pint of beer. *Points to Greggs' Sausage Rolls* Mind you, I've never been one for cod....
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Jan 27, 2021 20:45
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drrockso20 posted:Speaking of British junk food; Don't forget https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munchy_box
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Jan 27, 2021 22:23
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Also don't forget that "put up and shut up" is more of a cultural value in the UK, whether it is appropriate or not. Plus, there’s heavily gendered events around the wars - it’s difficult to imagine how the Order of the White Feather would have gone if gender was a spectrum. And I don’t know if the US got Emily Howard, Kenny Everett and Julian and Sandy but the UK got them all... hyphz fucked around with this message at 02:05 on Jan 29, 2021 |
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Jan 29, 2021 01:48
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I still want to hear about the Monte Cook Google story  Gort posted:From a little while back, but I'm from the UK and I've never heard of anything in this post The Order of the White Feather was the source of the infamous story about how during the World Wars, women would give male-appearing civilians white feathers or secretly pin them to their clothes as a sign of cowardice - actually a deliberately incited movement. I'm surprised you haven't heard of it as certainly when I was growing up everyone had, and it was still mentioned a lot in History classes. But it does give a hard gender distinction - obviously someone who argued that they should be giving out feathers rather than recieving one would be very unlikely to be well recieved. The listed names were all comedians who made fun of effeminate or homosexual men and were known at the time. Emily Howard, especially, was a character on Little Britain - a very popular show for a while - a negative stereotype of a trans woman who achieved meme status for a little while (although some made the excuse that she wasn't a trans woman but a clueless trans woman, but I don't think that's how anyone took it) . Warning: Googling anything related to that character is likely to turn up seriously offensive stuff.
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Jan 31, 2021 19:06
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aldantefax posted:Anybody playing any games recently? Just wrapped up another GURPS session and gonna run D&D tomorrow, then more GURPS on Friday. Hooray! Mostly PF2e at the moment, running through the third part of the police adventure path. Was pleasantly surprised that the "heist" section has an ending twist that deals with some of the system problems in doing that. Still very unsure about the system personally, but the argument tends to end with "it's better than 5e and people who only play 5e will play it".
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Feb 4, 2021 17:08
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Tulip posted:More of a board game thing than an RPG thing but I have a vague fascination with the legacy mechanics in stuff like Risk Legacy. I say "vague fascination" because I don't live with anybody I could boardgame with, the people I boardgame with the most often are very disinterested (and I haven't seen them in person in over a year), and the people I do game with the most often have nearly no interest in boardgaming, so I haven't gotten to play with them and I don't think I ever will. Legacy can work well in co-op games, but in competitive games it can be very easy to break balance. Charterstone just about gets away with it but Risk Legacy can very easily break down quickly, in part because missiles are a terrible design.
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Feb 8, 2021 19:19
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Tsilkani posted:Monsterpunk does this. Outside of combat, you're rolling a D10: 1-4 is a Twist (something goes wrong), 5-7 is Success with a Twist, 8-9 is Success, and 10 is Success with a Bonus. In combat, however, 1-4 is Base Effect, 5-7 is Base+1 Bonus Effect, 8-9 is Base+2 Bonus Effects, and 10 is Base+3 Bonus Effects. A lot of powers have a condition as the base effect, and only do damage with bonuses. It definitely has some 4e DNA to it, but also does some neat things on its own. That’s a Strike variant.
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Feb 10, 2021 03:11
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If it was viable I'd be totally up for gaming in-person while sharing maps on tablets (or one of those big screen tables if they weren't ludicrously expensive and/or mythical)
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Feb 18, 2021 18:10
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UA 1st and 2nd edition basically said that all PCs are obsessed with something as their base character hook, but not to the extent of being unable to function. It also added that "only people obsessed with magic ever get good enough at it to make it work", but there was no requirement to have any more severe obsession with it than any other PC (although in order to learn magic during the game you had to inflict madness meter points on yourself, although they eventually went away)
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Feb 20, 2021 18:48
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Then of course the Monte Cookbook added a new dimension to this.
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Feb 22, 2021 22:35
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There’s the famous trap in Return to the Tomb of Horrors where the PCs explore a cold, dark, underwater cave. At the end of a deep one way tunnel, there’s an inscription that, if read, dispels all magic nearby..
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Feb 25, 2021 20:55
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Did the PCs have an opportunity to scout ahead or assess enemy resources in some way?
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Mar 1, 2021 01:27
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And it’s an overhang in D&D too. The reason I asked about scouting above is that D&Ds resource management at base is still designed for a wargame where the other side has a similar number of points to you and you are allowed to consider that as part of your tactics - on top of the old heist style D&D where the objective was gain optimisation over narrative climax. As it is, if the other side has no certain resource limit and you can’t learn anything about their allocation, and the consequences of running out of resources isn’t “less loot” but “total failure”, it’s not surprising resource management goes haywire.
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Mar 1, 2021 06:14
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:But that doesn't erase the problem that a) D&D is a lovely crock pot, and b) Crock Pot Inc. hires serial abusers. I think this is a bit of an issue as well - D&D is a lovely crock pot but too much of the actual innovation is going into colanders. I'm not sure what'd be a better crock pot. Pathfinder 2e, maybe, but that's an Internet-enabled e-crockpot that requires three levels of activation and registration before the lid unlocks.
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Mar 1, 2021 17:16
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:ultimately there are some things that unfortunately do work better with the funding and manpower of a giant company behind you Neither TSR nor Paizo were giant when they started. Not that their existence as giants doesn’t make competition harder, but tactical design by small firms is totally possible.
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Mar 1, 2021 20:17
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Splicer posted:TSR era D&D is a very different beast to 3.x+ D&D. Paizo became The Other D&D by piggybacking on WotC's work and grog outrage, with changing as little as physically possible being considered a good thing. That's a very different situation to trying to steal market share from D&D (and now Pathfinder) with "The game everybody knows, but good". On the one hand I agree and also with theironjef that the modern pressures are different, on the other hand even TSR D&D supplied a Monster Manual and Keep on the Borderlands, etc, which are usually the kind of thing significantly missing from newer games which significantly increase the inertia involved. quote:e: Which is why I really wish the not poop version of SotDL would come out so it wouldn't be "Do you want to play D&D but good? OK first off, please ignore all the poop jokes no wait come back" Ditto.
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Mar 1, 2021 23:32
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SkyeAuroline posted:It wasn't even the first, didn't Over the Edge do it in the first and second editions? It just benefited from being generic (and hence unfocused enough to make aspects a problem and not a help, for me). OtE used freeform skills, which were a bit like Aspects, but omitted the “invoking for effect” option.
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Mar 5, 2021 01:09
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You should also make it clear than 0 is an option if it is, perhaps by using "may" in the introducing line.
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Mar 19, 2021 17:44
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Agent Rush posted:
Superhero gaming as a whole is a very different ball game from many other genres. It’s where tactical and narrative experiences clash hardest, as does power fantasy and group narration.
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Apr 7, 2021 04:35
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Leperflesh posted:I think the superhero genre is a lot like most fiction, in that it's not actually about the trappings and mcguffins of the genre, it's just stories, for the most part. This is the tension that causes the major problem - the actual story against the strength of the character, both in the visual sense and in the power fantasy sense. Kids pretending to be Spiderman in the playground do not pretend to be torn apart by moral quandaries between their heroic duties and their ordinary lives. They pretend to climb walls, swing on webs and shoot bad guys with webs. They also do not think they might as well have a ray gun and a teleportation belt instead because that is basically a nonlethal ranged attack and fast aerial movement so it's the same. And this can bleed through into comic books as well, usually when a popular character gets a series and then the authors can't fit them into stories - at least Zatanna and Joker had this problem, and Harley Quinn's been futzed with every which way to avoid it. In fact the shift towards edgy superheroes might be to do with wanting to bake the character's story conflict into the character more explicitly. In RPGs that's doubly the case because the players implicitly know that if they don't bake their trouble into their character, the GM will come up with it for them. (It's one of the reasons I think Masks is a neat system, because it forces the player to think about their character in those terms.) The opposite side is the one that HERO System embodied, of trying to force character immersion through rules complexity, where you have to immerse yourself in the universe and your character's mindset because there's literally no way to comprehend the system or the character sheets if you don't. It's awkward but it's sad if it's missing. I remember that for a while the OSR-ish term for lampooning indie/Forge games was "a supers game with only one stat" - which I think was actually suggested by Ron Edwards at one point - because of the implied loss of IC thinking.
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Apr 7, 2021 16:30
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Len posted:I got that book at Origins one year and it seemed neat but I never played it. It came at a 4 for $20 booth and I got the BESM D20 Trigun book, Godlike, Red Dwarf, and Solid the D20 Blacksploitation Adventure I did run the demo adventure, as I recall there's some breaks in the system with the different purchasable dice types and stacking multiple actions. The initiative system is also a bit weird by modern standards as it has selection and resolution in different phases. Glazius posted:I thought, "surely, the Lasers and Feelings hack Power and Responsibility must exist", and lo, the Internet did deliver. There really should be a lasers and feelings hack called "low effort". You know, where the sides are Low (doing things in an underhanded and sneaky way) and Effort (doing things by actual hard work).
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Apr 7, 2021 17:49
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TiddlyWiki is an effectively-semantic wiki with an expressive query language that doesn’t need messing about with hosting as long as you can install node.
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Apr 23, 2021 03:06
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slap me and kiss me posted:What are good ttrpg discords these days? TG Goon server 1, mostly RPGs: https://discord.gg/5BpxAQ6NPd Rowan Rook and Decard for Spire and now Minerva: https://discord.gg/jMfpzqq3Kv PbTA semi-official: https://discord.gg/fbndujrmqt FitD semi-official: https://discord.gg/ntYXCW4Kcn Largest one I know, but don't know what folks are actually like there: https://discord.gg/dsGNgRU The second Goon server (which is mostly boardgames) and the Goon Indie server don't have public invite options ATM.
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May 3, 2021 19:02
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Leperflesh posted:This of course makes me reconsider Fantasy Fantasy Football, in which a fantasy-football game (like blood bowl) takes place in the setting and the players assemble their fantasy teams of various units on different teams for points across a season, which could potentially take place as a meta-game at a game store where blood bowl leagues take place. Don’t forget Virtu, the role-playing game of playing the perfect role-playing game.
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May 13, 2021 22:16
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Asterite34 posted:I still love the apocryphal story of some convention tourney running Tomb of Horrors and one of the players putting the cursed crown on Acererak and touching it with the wrong end of the scepter to insta-kill him, and the GM had to go consult Gygax himself to determine if that would actually work, with him ruling that the Tomb's death traps were so bullshit that even Acererak himself wasn't immune to them. That was the module artist and it was Gygax GMing. He thought that was intended to be the final puzzle of the module and was a bit surprised when the printed version banned it.
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May 26, 2021 01:43
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TK_Nyarlathotep posted:lmao @ "if you run the interesting, flavorful adventure in an interesting, flavorful way rather than just copying old Gary Gygax GM advice columns, you might as well play something that isn't the interesting, flavorful adventure. you RUBE. you absolute MORON." That is decidedly bad writing, though. On a read-through, I had assumed that character did instantly die if they were left alone in a room with the wizard (although the wizard is not automatically present if a PC is left alone), but not that they were instantly killed by killing a wizardling (although the argument that "..the wizard will kill them" is not a statement of future intent since he was always planning to do that anyway is understandable). It always strikes me that in these conversation people focus on the lethality of Tomb of Horrors, ignoring the fact there's at least two less-lethal reprints and ignoring why people do seem to like it, which is that it's a filler-free funhouse dungeon with lots of exploration potential. No corridors full of empty storerooms, for example.
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May 26, 2021 11:50
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TK_Nyarlathotep posted:Nobody is forcing anybody to run A Wizard, much less run A Wizard the specific way that the book (allegedly) demands. If you don't like it and your brain can't find a workaround for the parts you don't like, run something you do like instead. Nobody "ran it wrong" because they didn't get married to the rules as written. Fair point, but the author's responsibility for the playability of what they have written is non-zero. It's also worth bearing in mind that a big positive factor of Tomb of Horrors was the shared experience.
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May 26, 2021 12:22
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TK_Nyarlathotep posted:For all that gets touted about the ubiquity of nega-dungeons, it seems mostly that LotFP makes them. Hell, A Wizard AND Tomb of Horrors probably aren't nega-dungeons, there's a way to win them and more ways around them than simply "show up, get hosed up by the """"plot""", then die, probably having made the world worse". So "nega-dungeon" means things along the lines of Death Frost Doom?
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May 26, 2021 12:58
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Imagined posted:or the dungeon is literally a huge sentient sandworm that rolls around gobbling up random magical places, and you're exploring his guts trying to get to his brain (Stone Thief). Yea, "there are literally living creatures that form themselves into random dungeons" is pushing it a bit as an in-universe explanation!
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May 26, 2021 21:42
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Subjunctive posted:Stone Thief? I think Meikyu Kingdom had a similar setting too?
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May 27, 2021 02:44
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