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This is very interesting. Most successful social hobbies have some kind of downtime involvement - a way to "do it while not doing it". And there is a strong tendency for communities to form around the downtime activity rather than the active activity. Thus the tendency for many creative communities to end up revolving not around the creative activity, but around the gear used to do it. But I have a suspicion that this ends up working much better for the rules-heavy games than the rules-light ones. If you're discussing a particular "build" or feat in Pathfinder, say, then the value of that feat is defined by its experience in play. You can relatively easily try it out in a campaign, and if you don't play, then it doesn't have a lot of value. On the other hand, think about Unknown Armies. The online community for Unknown Armies for a long while revolved around user generated content - there was a popular site for posting your own Schools, Adepts, Artifacts and so on. But many of these were just the equivalent of creepypasta fiction, and in many cases they'd never work in actual play. But you don't need to play - you can get the reward of being popular on the community site. The items being created are so large and story-defining that you'd need to play over 100 campaigns to experience them all. And making up your own reality-structuring concepts and imagining exclusively their perfect moments and scenes can make it a bit difficult to come down to frantically planning an escape route because you fumbled your stealth check to sneak into the cult warehouse. Which could easily contribute to UA as "the game everyone loves but no-one plays". The worst modern example is probably Vincent Baker's game Under Hollow Hills. It has a friendly, fun Discord community. One of the channels, which is a lower traffic channel, is called #we-played-the-game. Imagine a chess Discord where the part of the server for people who actually play chess was a tiny corner! Now, granted, UHH is a very niche game and it's an understandable decision, but it never struck me that this could go further and actually teach visitors that the game is not in the play, because even the author thinks playing is an exception.
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Apr 17, 2023 22:00
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hyphz posted:Thus the tendency for many creative communities to end up revolving not around the creative activity, but around the gear used to do it. This a pretty strong statement that is also vague enough to be unfalsifiable.
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Apr 17, 2023 22:19
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hyphz posted:On the other hand, think about Unknown Armies. The online community for Unknown Armies for a long while revolved around user generated content - there was a popular site for posting your own Schools, Adepts, Artifacts and so on. But many of these were just the equivalent of creepypasta fiction, and in many cases they'd never work in actual play. But you don't need to play - you can get the reward of being popular on the community site. The items being created are so large and story-defining that you'd need to play over 100 campaigns to experience them all. And making up your own reality-structuring concepts and imagining exclusively their perfect moments and scenes can make it a bit difficult to come down to frantically planning an escape route because you fumbled your stealth check to sneak into the cult warehouse. Which could easily contribute to UA as "the game everyone loves but no-one plays". An interesting example of this for me is Chuubo's Marvellous Wish Granting Engine, which is another of these games that is famous more for existing as an artefact that getting played (though it certainly is played in certain quarters). It has absolutely wonderful pre-generated characters and a lot of the activity I see for the game revolves around... I guess kind of fandom type activities for these characters? Fan art? Fan fiction? Even when people come up with new campaigns, it's often to place at least some of these characters in a new context or to put a new spin on them. In a way, since Chuubo's sets out, in very broad terms, the story of its only pre-published campaign before you even begin, even the experience of play can feel like a sort of fanfiction. Channeling these specific characters and doing what they would do in the situations you put them. It's kind of a fascinating phenomenon for a game that is itself essentially a highschool AU of Nobilis. Since Chuubo's has a very freeform structure in some ways, it could be argued that producing fan content is - in some sense - playing the game. It's quite normal in the game itself for these characters to exist in multiple versions and contexts, and you end up with a kind of play that is almost a community wide reification of what is consistent about them across their various portrayals.
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Apr 18, 2023 00:02
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That’s a really interesting point. It was fairly clear that one factor in the rise of WoD was how easy it was to make new splats. People like hobbies they can invest creative energy into.
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Apr 18, 2023 00:19
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Xiahou Dun posted:This a pretty strong statement that is also vague enough to be unfalsifiable. Gearheads are commonplace in most communities, tabletop games included. Premium and official franchise gear have very much turned a hobby into a lifestyle statement. One of the most memorable things someone told me was that D&D was like Harley Davidson. It mattered more that you identified with the brand (and thus the lifestyle) even if you never participated in the act of whatever the lifestyle provided at its core (mechanisms for tabletop play, motorcycle riding, etc).
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Apr 18, 2023 00:47
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hyphz posted:The worst modern example is probably Vincent Baker's game Under Hollow Hills. It has a friendly, fun Discord community. One of the channels, which is a lower traffic channel, is called #we-played-the-game. Imagine a chess Discord where the part of the server for people who actually play chess was a tiny corner! Now, granted, UHH is a very niche game and it's an understandable decision, but it never struck me that this could go further and actually teach visitors that the game is not in the play, because even the author thinks playing is an exception. I'm pretty sure that isn't the part of the server you go to when you pollute the abstract majesty of the game with the dull reality of actually running it. If I had to guess it's the server's equivalent of our own, like, notable experiences thread, which is not everyone's log of every game they played but just the stuff they cared enough about sharing to post.
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Apr 18, 2023 02:35
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Localized communities often do not see a huge need to project outwardly to the wider community space if they are playing - most people would rather be playing, but being reminded of something they don’t have access to tends to be a bit of a drag, illustrated in part by why I’m not a fan of Actual Plays — I’d rather be Actually Playing instead. Creative expression can come in a variety of different forms in tabletop RPGs but can at times be quite overwhelming as discussed earlier. Thinking more on this, I had originally come to a theory (or perhaps, conclusion) that the rules structure are what helps teach and guide people how to play and provide some context in how to play creatively, with or without a referee. I should revise this since it isn’t strictly the rules of the game itself, but the social and sometimes physical rules (or, constraints, better assessed) which have interesting ramifications for creativity. To make a nod to Andy Kitkowski and the Japanese TTRPG scene, “TT” in the local parlance not mean ‘tabletop’ - rather, it is referenced as ‘table talk’, something that Andy (if he ever takes a gander at these forums again) had once reminded me. The implication here was that the role playing games provided a format for social engagement and conversation, but the rules were secondary to that social experience - or, to look at it another way, the rules were in service to the social experience, not the other way around. A large part of this was due to the physical constraints for play groups in Japan - private spaces with large amounts of table space are hard to come by in dense urban areas, and during the wave of games that came out following TSR’s withdrawal from Japan in the early 90s over legal nonsense, dice also became hard to come by as well. Many games which came out of this prioritized fast pick-up play that was easy to teach and required very minimal gear to get up and running, as is the case with Ryuutama. Some games that were more directly inspired by D&D from that era put a larger focus on longer term narratives such as Sword World. It’s no wonder that given some aesthetic inspirations but the constraints of no easy access to the original inspirations (the D&D ruleset) nor the physical tools of play (the dice and books) and the geographical constraints (the lack of private spaces) you ended up with a high amount of novel attempts at a fantasy heartbreaker. Combine that with a healthy dose of the domestic media that was available from sci-fi and fantasy dominating the anime, manga, and tokusatsu landscape and you ended up with no shortage of things to inspire creativity with. In the same way that people will have a moment of panic when being given a blank slate to work with for improvisation, it can be looked at from a slightly different perspective (wherein my allergies may mean I’m repeating myself a little too closely) in that restrictions and constraints of play are what encourage creativity. When you combine this with sufficient complexity (breadth, depth, or both) you have a game system that is fairly ripe for creative expression, interpretation, and community building. Something that can provide enough inspiration to the right people who are already creatively inclined can lead to further inspirational material - actual plays, replays, anecdotes, artistic expression, and so on all end up reinforcing community activity and in turn encourage further play. I don’t really have anywhere that I’m going with this other than the encouragement for onboarding new players and referees to games by giving them constraints and paths through the structures of play so they can innovate in some way. This is part of what I happen to find interesting about character discovery through play rather than character creation before play, or other such creative elements like procedural generation for dungeons, worlds, and so on - however, if you place procedural generation tools in great detail into games which do not gather strong communities, you may end up with a series of tools designed to be exported and used in other games instead (of which Worlds Without Number immediately comes to mind).
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Apr 18, 2023 03:46
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As far as how fan engagement leads to active and invested communities, LANCER has another majorly notable thing going for it: the free character generator that helps smooth over one of the major hurdles of teaching a moderately crunchy new game. And one that's also had care put into being visually interesting and is semi-diagetic to the setting itself in how it makes the prompts feel like in-universe data, plus other background text that's tied to the lore of the setting. It's really remarkable and it's been available for a lot of the early development cycle of LANCER, which allowed it to build interest and for people to quickly generate characters they'd then become invested in playing within the game itself.
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Apr 18, 2023 04:10
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Xiahou Dun posted:This a pretty strong statement that is also vague enough to be unfalsifiable. From my own experience, highly subjective:
What this tells me is that my own experience of hobbies doesn't perfectly fit Hyphz' (sorry) hyphzpothesis, but it doesn't break it either. Food for thought.
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Apr 18, 2023 05:11
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PurpleXVI posted:Aside from what the GM wants, there's also the question of what the group wants, and something that it feels a good number of older RPG's miss is pointing out that you should have a conversation with your group before you stop adjusting the dials. wait what the gently caress GMs want stuff? I've always and only set up a few minimal dominoes and let things play out however. When I started it was the original gnomes thread, somebody made up a bullshit plane of fire situation that i jumped in with a mage for like 1 second, and then i was like "gently caress it if nobody keeps this rolling i'm gonna start one." When nobody did i was like "ok i never played any ttrpg so uh alright what are we doing here," just arbitrarily thought of how lovely the jarl of falkreath was. I knew I wanted the whole thing to be just a total piece of poo poo. So I made up Kegslamnr & a lovely ruler dude, and needed a reason for him to need adventurers, and it self-assembled. The whole setting, all the threads, everything that happened, it all grew out of that seed + like 1 other thing which nobody in any thread has ever investigated at any point (lol). When the gbs goons were wandering off I took a random thug and retconned her into Zlata. They basically never got back on track even after she beat them up and killed some but, whatever. I need to re-fix these threads more or they'll just languish and die tho. The players are writing the story, i'm just interpreting it, really. I still never played any ttrpg except my threads and idk does PL count? CRPGs?  hell i'll just chain on some more crud i vaguely have input on, this post is chunky and something to dig into: hyphz posted:Ok, I'm just going to brain dump all of the "indirectly learned" things I've encountered among D&D players and grogs and myself. Bear in mind that I'm not arguing that any of these are gospel truth, only that they are attitudes which especially D&D players have picked up over time that are not explicitly part of the rules of the game. Gonna disregard the first one but the second: Imo this is pretty crap, which is why i do stuff like for example Zlata knows fighting, which means she can use this knowledge outside combat, like looking at the castaways and knowing who can fight and how skilled they might be in what ways. Generally combat skills have noncombat use, like some wizard can use their spell knowing to role knowledge, fight stuff is lore stuff. All skills are applicable in any situation that a reasonable case can be argued. Magic is a skill and when you make your character you can decide how much magic you want and the only thing this does is lessen your hp and increase the leeway you get when trying to say what you're doing. I tried to set up Zlata so it's mostly fuckin around doing poo poo and sometimes punctuated by fights, where people get mega hosed up. One of her retainers got his arm ruined by her picking a fight she shouldn't have, and this lead into a whole big rear end side quest. That dude could have died and her horse def did. If she had pulled that poo poo in the same situation but with additional enemies, or if she had botched or pushed too far, she might have game overed right there. If you don't have consequence then what's the point? I will let PCs totally die for real but at least set it up so they can reasonably guess if they're in too deep or not. Maybe i'm too lenient in this. I let the players decide how much combat they want unless I gotta pull a trigger on em, & I can cop to have fallen into the trap of not making PCs get serious wounds etc. Once a character did get killed but got to keep playing as a ghost. My combats don't really resolve well unless it's all dead / all ok which i should examine. I suppose i do goal feeding. Zlata is fed goals by her aunt, but this is a core part of her thread. Her job is to do what her boss says good enough to stay out of trouble -- she's a pretty high ranked hench, a minor villain. In other threads the players tend to do the first quest and then gently caress off messing around. I've scrapped goals the PCs don't bite on, so they have no long term goals. The players have uniformly ignored any longterm storyline and kinda half rear end their own goals when they feel like it i guess. So currently one thread needs to get to this magic lake to cure their crippling curses. I keep letting them try for various curse resistance things to string them along without them getting fully brutally hosed up, and have shot down some shortcuts they've tried to pull. On the other hand they basically just need to finish escorting these traders they signed on for and then they can literally just walk directly into the lake already. I dunno if i should have let them shortcut it or not. Dicking around with time limits is something that gotta be avoided, and i think i need to be more strict with time. With the curse, the one dude got blood rot and it will cause him to lose levels until he hits 0 and dies. If he gets the cure he will fully level back up to normal. Except instead of letting them shortcut i half assed it and let them sorta stave off this process instead of getting the full cure. He's in limbo and won't really progress or delevel unless something wild happens. in another case there was a patron who wanted some stuff investigated, the players dicked around too long and he was like "gently caress it i'm hiring somebody else, no hard feelings good luck" In-party conflict and all that is something i have never purposefully bothered with, but when designing a thread i basically gave a side pool of npcs that can cover some skill gaps -- i've probably done this a few times tbh. I don't think i've had players want to tussle with each other altho i have had some people quit altogether. In my setting magic sorta can do anything, def is never FF1 menus of spells. Almost reversed. Magic is the same as all other skills, except if you take it you get less hp and more flexible narritive control over what your spells do. You make up your spells like you make up your skills. I have set it up so that there are no stats except like physical bulk size and how magic someone is, everything else is skills. This possible Traveller thread i'm experimenting with is the only case of stats that aren't a hp vs magic tradeoff and literally all other things are skills anybody can learn. Having more magic be less hp is kind of weak tho. My games have been almost all abstract map and only use gridmap to compute travel time and help players visualize the environment, because it's all on the forums and doing 50000 posts to move is a pain in the rear end. Crimes is a i don't think it's come up except with menacing brigands trying to rob the party, and i got a paladin one time around who has to do god of just rule stuff periodically. Zlata straight up is legitimately a criminal who has murdered people repeatedly. Gatwo was a borderline psychotic extremely illegal wizard doing bad poo poo. I've had parties sign on specifically to solve crimes as a piece job before moving on. Idk all my poo poo is really idiosyncratic because it all came out of nothing, like i played Baulder's Gate and never got to any interesting plot points, never played tabletop, no nothing, really. Morrowind, poo poo like that. at the same time half my games are CYOA instead of more normal rpgs tho. aldantefax posted:One of the things I'm interested in seeing in the future is games that have rules which have a go at scaled play - that is, play that has an intent to be done with not just a single group in a single setting, but multiple groups in the same setting and timeline. To date, the only game that I know of which has this as part of its original design is the early versions of D&D, and even then does not clearly draw this out. Such a project (which I may personally attempt to tackle someday) would be of remarkable value because it is probably the paramount thing that tabletop games fall short on. I think Traveller at one point had a mechanism to let all refs weld all their campaigns into the setting, if it doesn't still have it. "it's 3023-04-18 now" or something like that, where what happened in games was just bolted together. All my games have always had this since Zlata first woke up and started hunting the GBSers. A lot of times threads bonk into each other and either don't realize or don't care, tbh.
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Apr 18, 2023 08:57
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Thanlis posted:That’s a really interesting point. It was fairly clear that one factor in the rise of WoD was how easy it was to make new splats. People like hobbies they can invest creative energy into. I feel like the odd one out in that I tend to never really engage with fan-made or user-created content, in part because I only very rarely find it to be particularly good, and in part because it adds another thing to reference during and between play outside of the one, two or three "core" books the game already has. SniperWoreConverse posted:wait what the gently caress GMs want stuff? I've always and only set up a few minimal dominoes and let things play out however. I mean, this is my setup as well. I know what's going on, I know what the major NPC players are doing, I know what the starting hooks are to draw the players into the situation, and then we just roll from there. But like... I understand that some folks, and some games, require planning it out in more detail. Especially in games where the narrative parts have actual stats and can be mechanically affected by the players and sometimes even the GM is bound by certain actions they can take. It also doesn't usually work super well for mysteries because, well, few mysteries are genuinely mysterious. To have a proper mystery that takes a while to fiddle out and where new things come to the surface slowly over time, THAT absolutely takes planning and dedication, especially since it also has to be resilient to PC's who will often happily find their most-suspicious person, break into their home and rifle through their drawers to find more evidence or simply throw a fireball once they feel they have enough evidence, never mind anything that would stand up in a court. It can also often lead to a feeling of wasted work if players don't interact with domino #3, which you had a lot of good feelings about and was excited to throw at them, but they somehow found a way to make #2 drop directly into #4, bypassing it. Some groups also have terminal ADD and glom on to every single new thing, investing all their energy into it, without ever finishing off a previous thing, which can leave a Domino GM who doesn't engage in even mild railroading with a lot of pieces to keep track of in case the players suddenly remember about Glorbort's Farm that they saved from fifty angry mole rats before being distracted by some smoke they saw in the distance and never returned for their reward.
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Apr 18, 2023 10:09
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PurpleXVI posted:I feel like the odd one out in that I tend to never really engage with fan-made or user-created content, in part because I only very rarely find it to be particularly good, and in part because it adds another thing to reference during and between play outside of the one, two or three "core" books the game already has. I very rarely use fan material at the table. But I think it’s the act of creation that generates satisfaction here. There’s maybe something going on with required effort; it’s ten times easier to create and show off the playbook that you made up yourself than it is to record and share the gaming session that you had to reschedule ten times before Billy could make it.
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Apr 18, 2023 15:50
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hyphz posted:. I don't have access to the discord, but that sounds more like a channel for posting after action reports, I.E. telling people how your game went. I've run hundreds of game sessions at this point, and I've only done an AAR two or three times. Also, the Lumply games folks have always struck me as focused almost monomaniacally on table play with everything else being a distant second.
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Apr 18, 2023 20:26
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hyphz posted:
A good solution to this 'problem' if the DM is honest is to make the time limit very obvious and interactable. Here is how I do it: DM: "Oh no! The THING will happen in 20 days!!!!!" * hands the players precisely 120 Poker Chips split equally between Blue + Yellow. Each poker chip represents 4 hours of in-game time. Yellow is for daylight hours while Blue is for night time hours. They have an open world map, and if they want to travel across it I basically make it cost X amount of chips (traveling by night takes 2x as long due to difficulty of navigation). Doing some important thing like shopping in town, or going to meet a noble, is gonna take a yellow chip. The players can see their pile of chips diminishing before their eyes, and even over long months of real-time they still have that clock ticking til the big disaster happens. Obviously most DMs are lovely railroad conductors and would not allow their players to miss the deadline, but this is a way of keeping both the DM and the players honest. This poo poo is absolutely gonna happen on Day 20, and it is up to them to use that time how they see fit.
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Apr 19, 2023 04:46
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As for in general: Personally, I find it way easier to play (the games I DM at least) with complete newbies who have no experience whatsoever with tabletop RPGS. Obviously there are some veterans that are really cool and good to have and can elevate your table, but more commonly many of them seem like their brains have been broken by whatever system they have been playing in (mostly 5e) and are very geared towards staring at their character sheet to solve problems. I think the extra crunchy rule-sets with loads of character building options incentivize people to go on reddit to find power-builds or whatever, which really ultimately leads towards in-group competition over who gets to be the coolest (whoever spends the most time building their character to be OP). At my own table I try to run a 'harsh-but-fair' style of DMing in which I roll everything obviously in the open, and if I as the DM have allowed a roll to be made, then I am absolutely gonna go with the results of that roll, whatever the outcome may be. I don't really balance anything. A dragon encountered at level 1 could be a team-wipe, or could be a stealthy burglary, or could be the start of a new dragon-cult, or could end up with the players as its slaves. I didn't plan an outcome, we play to find out. As for long-term injuries: The way HP works in my game is that the only hit that really hurts you is the one that brings you to 0 HP or below - the rest of it represents you getting worn down, exhausted, demoralized. Once you hit 0 or below, we roll on my D100 Oh gently caress I'm In Trouble Table. We roll this publicly and openly so even if I really want the PC to live, it is entirely out of my hands once we reach that table. Every HP below 0 you are will put a Minus 5 modifier to your D100 roll. So, if you get knocked down to -4 HP and you roll a 65, you actually end up with a 45. The lower the number on the table the worse it's gonna be. Effects of the table can be mental trauma, destruction of property, loss of limbs, and of course death at the lower numbers. It lets people be a little riskier than a game in which 0 HP = Death, but they know they are always taking a great risk. This leads to lots of PCs losing limbs, sanity, etc which leads to interesting gameplay in which they retire PCs who can become interesting NPCs further in the campaign. The old legless Dwarf that used to be Bob's character is now a source of grumpy information in town. Obviously the usual caveat of every table does their own thing blah blah blah but I also think every DM runs the game in which they wish they could actually play.
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Apr 19, 2023 05:03
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Mr. Grapes! posted:As for long-term injuries: I toyed with this sort of mechanic a while ago in a homebrew, the way I handled it was that if you got knocked out in a fight, it would never kill you, but you'd get a permanent wound that had a malus. After X time, that'd turn into a scar, which was instead a sidegrade as you adapted to the injury or got some sort of prosthetic, and of course there was also a mechanic for paying very large amounts of money to remove both injuries and scars. It'd have been easy to have a mechanic that went "oh, you got knocked out, you've lost both your arms and legs, roll up a new character." but injuries that change characters rather than just making them unplayable seemed more interesting to me.
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Apr 19, 2023 11:11
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Pathfinder has a lower level version of this, which is that if you get knocked below 0 hit points and then brought back, you gain the Wounded condition. Wounded means that being knocked below zero again makes it more likely that you will die, and persists until either your wounds are treated or you get back to full HP and rest for a while. It's not longterm damage but it makes short-term damage more risky.
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Apr 19, 2023 12:08
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Lamuella posted:Pathfinder has a lower level version of this, which is that if you get knocked below 0 hit points and then brought back, you gain the Wounded condition. Wounded means that being knocked below zero again makes it more likely that you will die, and persists until either your wounds are treated or you get back to full HP and rest for a while. It's not longterm damage but it makes short-term damage more risky. Wounded in PF2e is more to avoid the "as long as the cleric's up no one is going down" effect, as it specifically refers to magical healing. (It also avoids an exploit with the Dying condition that would otherwise exist.) hyphz fucked around with this message at 12:23 on Apr 19, 2023 |
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Apr 19, 2023 12:18
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I guess you have to have that in there when you lave a level 1 spell that basically acts like Mass Healing Word.
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Apr 19, 2023 12:46
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Lamuella posted:I guess you have to have that in there when you lave a level 1 spell that basically acts like Mass Healing Word. That, but there's also the exploit. 5e and PF2 basically work the same regarding death - when you hit 0 hit points, you fall unconscious, and each turn you have to make a roll. If you fail 3 rolls, you die. If you get hit whie dying, that counts as a failed roll, or two failed rolls if you took a crit. If you get healed, you get back all the hit points you've healed. PF2e basically duplicates these rules but describes them using the Dying condition. The difference is that in 5e, if you're healed by any means, all of your failed rolls for written off. In PF2e, if you're magically rather than mundanely healed, your wounded condition goes up by one, which gives you one less failed save before dying next time. The reason for the difference is that in 5e, there's sometimes a screwy strategy where a healer deliberately uses their weakest possible healing magic on a downed character, because it completely resets their failed saves, and although they might go down again in a single blow that's just one more of the weak heal - the Paladin was popular for this as they can heal for just 1 point at a time from their Lay on Hands pool. Unless the encounter design is capable of hitting the downed character 3 times in a round, which many in 5e would not be just because of the action economy (especially single large creatures), and assuming that the healer has the standard defensive tricks, they're pretty much safe. The PF2e method prevents that.
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Apr 19, 2023 13:29
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ah, that explains why Battle Medicine doesn't remove the wounded condition too.
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Apr 19, 2023 14:00
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That reminds me of Darkest Dungeon, where losing all your hit points puts you on Death's Door, where any subsequent hit might kill you. Any healing at all removes Death's Door, and I made it through several boss fights not by actually healing through damage but instead just removing death's door, repeatedly. In D&D, in every edition, the rules of combat are so much of the rule book, and always the most well defined mode of play, that they're obviously the focus of the game. And I'm fine with that because a lot of people want basically a light cooperative war game as an anchor point in their ttrpg, and that's fine. But what I increasingly look back on as a problem is the introduction of skills like diplomacy, because they don't empower the social character so much as limit the characters not built for it. In older editions combat may have been rigid, but it was counter balanced by so much else in the game being free form. I can't tell you how many times I've seen a player just roll the dice to complete a social encounter instead of role playing, or how many times I've seen a player make an impromptu speech, and make it well, only to remember a beat later that they don't actually have any points in the relevant skill. I despise seeing a player naturally arrive at a good plan or decision and then look at their sheet and get told "no". I can address it in my games, but I can't change that d20 d&d systems have enough skills to rigidly define what you can or can't do.
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Apr 19, 2023 15:42
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I guess that's where your discretion as a GM comes into play. I'll often let something happen with no roll if it was well thought out and well described, or tweak a DC because someone showed consideration and preparedness in what they were doing. But being able to do this should be much more specifically in the rules instead of being implied.
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Apr 19, 2023 16:14
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Right, that's what I do, but I've noticed that making non combat actions more concrete doesn't seem to empower the players but instead do the opposite.
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Apr 19, 2023 16:17
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Yeah, I can see that. It moves things from being "this is an actual interaction" to "roll this dice to see if you hosed up".
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Apr 19, 2023 16:25
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And it's like, you can describe what you want to do in combat, and it's part of the fun, but there's a generally accepted understanding that you're either going to hit or miss, and missing is OK because it's a robust little wargame with several rounds and setbacks are supported. But the problem with using the same basic mechanic in non combat is that there's not the same robust system buttressing the interaction - there's not diplomacy hit points, or a diplomacy action economy. But playing the game, particularly the combat, is going to teach you that the dice, and their results, are the foundations of the interaction. And that's a lesson you might apply to non combat, and it won't work as well because they aren't supported mechanically to the same extent.
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Apr 19, 2023 16:41
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Lamuella posted:Yeah, I can see that. It moves things from being "this is an actual interaction" to "roll this dice to see if you hosed up". Turning social interaction into a dice roll does have that problem but I think it's actually a combination of two factors: a) most social systems don't have a defined DC for interactions, and just ask the GM to eyeball the result based on the roll. b) most players and GMs can't accurately rate what a professional negotiator would be capable of (along the same lines as "I couldn't catch my mouse so a fighter can't catch their weapon") and certainly have difficult imagining a superhuman negotiator as anything but equivalent to mind control, which most rules explicitly state Diplomacy should not be. Although the alternative to that can also be uncomfortable. Pathfinder 2e is unusual in that it has precise quantification of social actions and fixed DCs, such as "roll Diplomacy and beat the other person's Will save"' (although it does throw in "modified as the GM sees fit"), which means that it is actually possible for a PC with a high enough score in Diplomacy to just talk down the villain. Which can be a neat twist in the story, but potentially unsatisfying as it happens without explanation, and potentially uncomfortable as it triggers the "I just replaced group-inclusive combat with my one man show" situation. Some games do have Diplomacy hit points (I believe that A Song Of Ice And Fire did). But they don't deal with the issues of group inclusivity and understandable strategy which are brought about by game design and by the importance of positioning. Even in games without positioning, everyone knows that you can't hit someone standing on the opposite balcony with a sword. Is there an equivalent for diplomacy? I want to say not, but I have never actually studied negotiation, so maybe there actually is. hyphz fucked around with this message at 16:50 on Apr 19, 2023 |
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Apr 19, 2023 16:46
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I suppose part of it comes down to one of the oldest problems in writing: it is very hard to convincingly write a character who is smarter than you are. Or in this circumstance very hard to RP a character who is more convincing and diplomatic than you are.
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Apr 19, 2023 16:59
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And the dice DO help with that! A shy person can play a flamboyant flim flamer and that's a kind of power fantasy, and it's completely valid. So it's complicated, it's not just that having a mechanic substitution for pure roll playing is bad.
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Apr 19, 2023 17:02
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Lamuella posted:I suppose part of it comes down to one of the oldest problems in writing: it is very hard to convincingly write a character who is smarter than you are. Or in this circumstance very hard to RP a character who is more convincing and diplomatic than you are. It is, but that can generally be worked around at the table in the same way it's worked around in writing. What's difficult is estimating the limits of what is reasonably possible at a given skill level. For social skills, this is - by and large - all over the place; partly because any numerical quantification of real social behaviour is profoundly uncomfortable. D&D 4e loved to say that authority figures could never be intimidated by anyone in any circumstance. On the flip side, one of the scenarios for EotE allows a PC to make a diplomacy roll to single-handedly resolve a decades-long conflict between races on a planet. Asking the player to say something just to fill in the gap would probably be OK; the problem is trying to judge the player's role-play as to whether it would work, and the problem isn't just that the player doesn't have that level of skill, it's that if they somehow did the GM would have no idea how to recognise it. (And the fact that any diplomat is going to have entire volumes of intelligence on the other party, while most RPGs have nothing like the subtlety or depth of world modelling to support that.) For physical skills, on the other hand, it's almost universally underrated. That's why I commented that "physical skill modifiers aren't about what you can do but the circumstances you can do it in."
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Apr 19, 2023 17:25
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Mr. Grapes! posted:As for long-term injuries: I like this idea and our table rolls on a D100 table as well and we have to deal with the effects. It's probably the same table now that I think about it. It definitely is a group only thing because if you go into the game thinking you're gonna be a superhero, it feels weird to have permanent negative effects or effects that are super hard to remove. It does lead to great gameplay though and a way for the DM to work with a player concept in an adversarial but also rewarding way. We had a monk in a 5e game who's character concept was that he was a bodybuilder who was handsome and wanted to be good looking. He got some weird magical head defect from being downed and it turned into a campaign about our group trying to make this guy look good again. I think it works for tables who aren't trying to go through a defined story but more of an emergent one where they may start with some quest to get things rolling but everything compounds on itself. If you're not busy trying to save the world, which is a lot of role playing, you can spend your time fixing your deformed monk character.
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Apr 19, 2023 17:30
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hyphz posted:D&D 4e loved to say that authority figures could never be intimidated by anyone in any circumstance. Anyone can be intimidated by the right leverage. In one game I attained this leverage by running into a duel with grenades held in both hands and threatening to kill us all if they didn't settle down and talk it out. Not sure what I would've done if the roll had failed, mind you.
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Apr 19, 2023 17:46
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PurpleXVI posted:Anyone can be intimidated by the right leverage. learned a valuable lesson! Briefly!
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Apr 19, 2023 18:03
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PurpleXVI posted:Anyone can be intimidated by the right leverage. Exactly. But in D&D 4e, pretty much every extended social test in the printed adventures - in fact it may have actually been every single one - had the note "the target will not let themselves be intimidated, so any attempt to use intimidation counts a failure without a roll." Which is both lame and ridiculous (I mean, literally the point of intimidation is that you don't get to choose to "let yourself" or not) I mean, you can guess this is one of two reasons: a) the authors couldn't describe how they would intimidate a king with their own army and a room full of guards, or a dragon ten times their size (but then they probably also couldn't describe how they could successfully intimidate a rowdy drunk of above-average fitness, even though bouncers do all the time) b) the authors don't want "double our pay because if we can actually slay the dragon then you and your family would barely touch the sides" or "leave, dragon or we'll tear your scaly rear end to bits but you are free to continue existing and being evil elsewhere" to be part of a heroic story. Which is understandable, but implies that Intimidation really shouldn't be in the system and is presumably a leftover from when combats had numerically managed morale values
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Apr 19, 2023 18:12
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Some things that games are better about now but people are not is clearly communicating risks and stakes. Rolemaster and Middle-Earth Role Playing System by extension had an extensive series of tables for critical hits and critical failures. It clearly telegraphed and provided quite the spectacle, such as when someone rolls something in combat like a critical fumble that was so remarkably bad they pulled their groin and everybody laughs at them for 1 to 3 rounds. That's a real effect on the "E" crit fumbles table - it would be so rare that play would probably stop because a spectacle was building from the dice. You could also injure someone so badly that they instantly die, or certainly will not last the fight since they're truly mortally wounded. When a roll is or is not called for and what the rules themselves encourage take a backseat to what the social construct calls for. Sometimes that's a direct model from something someone saw somewhere else - including the rules. "Well, I can roll for all kinds of stuff and I can only do social things if I make a roll because that's what the rules say, so I'm going to do that." This might actually be an incorrect assessment, but accuracy to the rules is not really a huge deal for some people, while it is for others. Since this is communicated poorly and can become a habitual behavior, finding experienced players who are new to a given social group and also game will carry in their previous experiences and assumptions. When you take the local social rules constructs and other homebrew stuff and surface that to a wider (read: online) community, because this is subjective and contextual it means that there will be people who agree, and also who disagree. The character/player separation is always something interesting to me since it assumes that players have somehow surrendered a certain form of critical thinking and relegated that to a dice roll abstraction. I run and play games where rolls only take place when an outcome is uncertain, but they are "earned" - players and referees come up with situations and solutions, and then the roll is to find out what happens. Particularly for non-combat situations, this makes very little sense because players are interacting with the world using their characters - thus, their characters are inert without the players doing something as them. This runs counter to a lot of modern narrative-driven play, because it doesn't prioritize the narrative. Players and their agency instead are prioritized rather than their character's agency - which is also why when attempting to onboard players to narrative-driven games which themselves model some narrative character capabilities poorly (as in the social skill roll example) then it causes a pretty sharp increase in friction at the table. Can this be solved though through a more clever middle ground instead of completely abstracting away social interactions to transactional dice rolls? Sure. Rules can provide more structure in how to handle dramatic encounters that aren't combat quite handily. DramaSystem provides an excellent framework, but explains and implements it rather poorly. The core of having, effectively, "social resources" where acceptance and refusal generate a clear social economy makes for. D&D and other such games do not feature this prominently because, at their core, social interactions are not treated with as high of a priority as something else in the game construct. To its credit, D&D 4e's Skill Challenge system was a good middle ground for folks who wanted to use more dice rolling. It's often overlooked due to the fact that most D&D 4e games prioritized combat, but it leveraged the skill system in a way that made sense for the rules structures. Use one skill for one roll - you need a certain number of rolls to succeed before you got to certain failures. The outcomes of the rolls could influence what the overall outcome is, and all players at the table can leverage their critical thinking to find novel uses for skills, or just use an easier abstraction to say "I sweet-talk a guard with Diplomacy", while someone else says "I'd like to use Acrobatics to swing from the balcony I'm on to where the king is talking with a diplomat." Generally, any form of play is good for the social group it was developed for, but when trying to bring those experiences to other groups along with underdeveloped communication of wants and needs will often lead to frustration. This is also why people account for this (in some case, overcompensate) by having a session zero for every new group and new player that comes into that group to develop a deep social contract before play begins. That session zero does tend to create a much higher barrier to entry but encourages smoother play -- whether or not this is sustainable play is another question entirely.
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Apr 19, 2023 18:41
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hyphz posted:Exactly. But in D&D 4e, pretty much every extended social test in the printed adventures - in fact it may have actually been every single one - had the note "the target will not let themselves be intimidated, so any attempt to use intimidation counts a failure without a roll." Which is both lame and ridiculous (I mean, literally the point of intimidation is that you don't get to choose to "let yourself" or not) Rather than "they won't let themselves be intimidated in the moment," because even a King would be afraid if you told him you'd left incriminating information on him and his court with someone else, which would be revealed if he didn't pay up, or a dragon might be worried if you told them that you carried a vial of gold-eating bacteria you'd drop into their hoard if you didn't get part of it, a more appropriate note would be something like: "These targets are long-term planners, if intimidated or otherwise publicly forced to back down and lose face, they will look for some way to get revenge." Like the King might send his assassins after you to keep the information suppressed, the dragon might strafe your camp while you're leaving the valley or pay other adventurers to dunk on you, or so forth. You can also choose to be flexible with the definition of a "successful" intimidation. For instance, while it might not convince the dragon you can kill it, it might convince the dragon that you're dangerous and/or confident enough to be annoying if not paid to go away, or to be paid to go endanger/annoy someone else like a long-held rival somewhere else. Like, a successful intimidation can be defined as either an intimidation attempt that intimidates, no matter the eventual consequences(i.e. being noted as too dangerous and worrying to be allowed to live) or it can be defined as an intimidation attempt that works out positively, even if no one actually ends up terrified of you as such.
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Apr 19, 2023 20:11
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PurpleXVI posted:A more appropriate note would be something like: Both true, but this is what the 4e adventures told you to do, and how they implicitly taught GMs to interpret the Intimidation skill.
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Apr 19, 2023 22:24
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Taking subjective things in any tabletop RPG rules system as an absolute, in my opinion, is a bit silly. I was never a massive fan of the monolith serial adventure setup that later D&D ended up doing (the tabletop RPG equivalent of a cinematic universe that you experience rather than create); it was more commonplace to explore campaign settings during the AD&D 2e era where "campaign setting boxes" were more regular as well as "modules" - things that you could socket into your own location-driven campaigns as saw fit. It also need be highlighted that the act of massaging published works together into a milieu that works for a given group is a creative act. If there's anything that I have developed over the years in terms of game sense, it's to question every single thing that "the rules" or "the text" says. Or, to paraphrase: "Screw the rules - I have a game to run". Assuming that the rules, and also, extensions of the rules in things like adventures are anything other than opinions on how to run a game I feel is a missed opportunity - which is also why that if a referee especially is not being given tools to create something meaningful right away, I think a given system probably is better suited for more advanced tables. Part of why B/X D&D was successful was because it provided a good framework for referees to create stuff right away - Greyhawk, such as it was, didn't come out until AD&D 1e. Creating dungeons and wildernesses (sometimes with structure from wholly other games like Avalon Hill's Outdoor Survival) meant that referees were engaging in creative play before players came to the table - and then players got a chance to create their own stories by exploring what was created by the referee. Compare this method to D&D 4e's back of the book adventure, which - for a lot of reasons - was quite poorly written and balanced. That the game included something which provided some expectations of how the game was to be played is laudable, but its implementation certainly sucked -- monster math and encounter balancing didn't really hit its stride until the later era of 4e. Compare also to D&D 5e, which does not explicitly include an adventure with the core rules, but provides a "basic set" that has a lighter version of the rules - it has a very different approach and just hands everybody, including the referee, everything they need to play. No need to do any creation, and that's terrible. There will be endless arguments about how to structure rules for guiding people into roles wherein they become a teacher through experimentation, perhaps until the sun explodes five billion years from now. However, providing relevant cues for referees and players to learn and play is something that can be constantly challenged - and, knowing when to challenge the written text is important for tabletop RPGs. Even games like LANCER, wherein the combat rules may fall apart if disrespected out of hand completely, still has parts about it that can be challenged, such as when players are locked out of being able to participate meaningfully in a turn because of a disabling effect. Mechanically somewhat important, but not THAT important - better to let a player stay engaged instead of waiting perhaps 20 to 60 minutes to do anything at the table.
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Apr 19, 2023 23:09
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On one hand, comparing all of Basic to just the adventure in the back of the 4e DMG does feel mean, because it is one of the only Dungeon Master's Guides to put significant thought into guiding new dungeon masters instead of being a collection of DM-focused rules. I'm mostly mentioning that because stuff like "how do I even start to prepare for running a session" or how do I cater to what my players like" are things most games overlook when it comes time to teach games, and D&D as the de facto first game for everyone that has a whole book for GMs is the best place to put it. But also, 4e is a great example for why you really need good adventure designers who have internalized what it means to be a good GM when you're making a game like D&D. Because skill challenges were half-baked and quickly abandoned, but the section on skill challenges also says you should be encouraging clever skill use and cool ideas from your players whenever you can. In other words, the adventures going "your players can't intimidate the king" instead of "your players can't intimidate the king, unless they come up with a better idea than just pointing a sword at him" is itself going against the best principles they gave, and people are going to remember the examples from a premade adventure better than the advice in the book. I think I got away from my original point here, but hopefully I made enough sense anyway.
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Apr 20, 2023 00:04
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| # ? May 9, 2024 19:42 |
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The common criticism of 4e skill challenges (besides math issues) is that it became a process of "mother may I" in which players attempt to shoehorn their best skills into each scenario. Left sort of unquestioned is whether that's actually a bad thing. It can lead to creative gameplay, right? It can become absurd at an extreme, like most RPG things, but when everyone at the table is willing to engage in good faith, I don't know that it's really a problem that one PC is trying to use their History skill to help the party descend into a canyon, or another party tries to use Athletics to parlay with the duke, when the result is interesting descriptions, fun questions asked of the GM that can add flavor and detail to a scene, and player interaction. Where it falls down IMO is actually that it encourages players to max their best skills and ignore their worst, along with the other structures in the game that do the same, so that a level 8 character taking a point or two in a neglected skill still feels like a waste even if it's appropriate and thematic for the character's current situation in life. This slots into a larger issue with many games, the "dump stat," and what that teaches about gameplay and characterization. IMO the original sin of D&D was placing the entire scope of human capacity and ability onto six linear axes that always represent oppositions - dextrous or clumsy, wise or foolish, strong or weak, etc. The mechanics edge out character concepts in which a person might sometimes be wise and sometimes foolish (not "average" mind you, but rather, consistently wise in one domain of life and consistently foolish in another); this feeds into the skill systems which have also always been founded on the ability scores, where a strong character simply can't be terrible at any athletic endeavor, a highly intelligent person can't have an abjectly bad education, and so on. The economy of attribute and skill points, at character creation and then through leveling, reinforces these notions and in turn they influence play. (We do not actually need to revisit "death to ability scores" debates here, I'm just mentioning where I think this issue originates.) Attempts to subvert the system - such as by creating intentionally suboptimal characters - have long been derided in the gaming community as, essentially, sabotage of the party. If you make a cleric with too low of a wisdom score to cast spells, you've just created dead weight to be kept alive by the other characters through hardships. While the opposite impulse, to create maximally optimized characters, has rightly been examined at great length, I feel the problem with skill challenges I discussed above is actually the same as the problem with optimization vs. characterization: effectiveness is pitted against I guess you could say roundedness, the desire to make a fighter who spends all their skill points on learning languages, a rogue who is the most pious, a sorcerer who lifts weights. I would like a skill challenge system that rewards players for play, rather than for maximizing the skills their ability scores and class features emphasize and then shoehorning them into the challenge, even if shoehorning your best skills into a challenge is an act of creativity. What if "which of your skills is best" mattered less than "what idea for your character's contribution to this challenge is most fun or creative or interesting "?
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Apr 20, 2023 00:27
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