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Lurks With Wolves posted: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. And moreover, the question of how the GM or players learn what is a "clever idea" or a "better idea" for these purposes. I've bought caught myself, and seen others, using three rather dysfunctional answers: a) an idea is good if it comes as a surprise to the GM (which is tricky as one person's mundane idea is another's surprise and vice versa) b) no idea is good enough (which is usually unintentionally caused by real life comparisons, as in the GM doesn't believe that someone at their table could come up with a way of robbing a bank that would actually work) c) any idea that isn't obviously ridiculous is good enough (which is usually the result of overcorrecting for the previous two) c) can work wih some groups and some systems, but can deny some groups the problem-solving aspect of the game which they might enjoy. Leperflesh posted: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. The version of 4e skill challenges in which every PC was required to participate in the skill challenge when their turn came up, or else contribute a failure, was errata'd very early on. This inevitably turned skill challenges into the one PC with the best relevant skill modifier soloing the challenge. The errata threw in a kind of hopeless "try not to let this happen" informal guideline for the GM, but I never saw it really come up much. Part of this was the dreadful tendency for modules to want to make skill challenges be lip service exercises that the PCs could not practically fail, which came up in 4e (a skill challenge involving rescuing people was a big warning sign), but the worst culprit is Group Actions in No Thank You Evil.
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Apr 20, 2023 01:01
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PurpleXVI posted: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. That sounds pretty cool. On my table the higher numbers on the D100 OH poo poo table have some positive effects like immunity to pain or a really intimidating scar etc. I don't have any "lose all your limbs" but losing individual limbs is fun because players are always obsessed with getting hook hands and other such groovy appendages. Trying to re-grow a lost hand is a good way to get my players to go to my hosed up bio-punk city or worship some toad idol they find in a slimy cave. Okay I've mentioned my table enough, here is the actual link if anyone wants to steal from it or use it: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zTn4mFGmUHaMnjKoQRcwMUvKl2pEhvgnUzwv572GPsI/edit?usp=sharing The table itself is a collection of stuff I've written, stolen, collaborated on, etc. It's a mishmash that has been modified over and over again and never really exists in any final form. When a player dies I let them write/change a new entry. They are somewhat color coded by theme. Mr. Grapes! fucked around with this message at 01:50 on Apr 20, 2023 |
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Apr 20, 2023 01:40
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hyphz posted: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. I specifically added my own D100 table because I was tired of seeing the players say "Oh he's fine" when someone dropped to 0 because they knew they could heal 1 HP to bring him up as long as it was done before the predictable clock ran out. The players lost their most favorite NPC while doing this simply because he had the extreme bad luck to roll 1 twice in a row on Death Saves. They were really put off by it and I told them it was entirely their fault for metagaming because only the most callous rear end in a top hat would just let their friend bleed out on the floor for a little while longer so they could get one last hit in on a retreating goblin. Don't play 5e at all anymore for a variety of similar reasons and have since permanently moved to the OSR stuff, but back then 5e was the only thing I knew and all the protections against death rankled me from the very beginning, even as a player. I was obsessed with XCOM when I learned DnD as a player and I always thought it upsetting that our group had a 100% survival rate no matter how stupid we got.
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Apr 20, 2023 01:44
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Leperflesh posted:A post full of words I think about the only way to get around the issue of players trying to min/max in some way is to reward being bad at things or punish being too good at stuff. Like... I think an excellent example is, unironically, Disco Elysium where your stats are all essentially part of your brain. One of them, Half-Light, is the lizard-level "make a quick and violent response to sudden stimuli to save yourself." It's usually good, because it means that if someone tries to punch you, you might punch them first. But if that particular part of you is too good you might not be able to hold back from making an instinctual violent response to something innocent or accidental. But I also think a lot of it's just kind of... a natural outgrowth of the way RPG's work. Players have things they want their characters to be able to do. Being able to do these consistently is locked behind having the right numbers. So players are going to want to have the right numbers so their character functions, and also so they function as well as all the other characters(or better) so they aren't suddenly unable to participate. The only way you're going to get around players identifying what matters to their character concept and what doesn't, and prioritizing respectively, is to have a game without numbers entirely. Even if everything was all sidegrades, and there was no objectively best assignment of points and values, for each given player's chosen character there'd be a subjectively best one, that they'd try to "min/max" their way towards.
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Apr 20, 2023 02:18
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Combat: The way I (and others) disincentivize combat as the default is to make combat loving brutal. Combat is war, and not a sport. HP totals are relatively low across the board. I don't put 'level appropriate' stuff anywhere like in Oblivion, I just put stuff where it makes sense within the fiction and if the players run into it, that's on them. I give morale scores to things that should have them and I try to play the opposition realistically. A hungry wolf is going to try to drag away the smallest/weakest one and be satisfied with that. A giant spider protecting its eggs will not pursue them if they run off. Human enemies are not suicidal for the most part and will recognize a losing battle and attempt to retreat, negotiate, or surrender. Most monsters will attempt to flee if they are reduced to 50% HP unless they have a really good reason not to. I think a lot of DMs encourage combat encounters because they spend ages making battle maps and collecting minis and goddamnit I painted that beholder so the PCs are gonna fight it. gently caress all that. It is up to the players to stack the deck in their favor before they even begin combat. They should use the environment, ambushes, betrayals, and all their cool one-shot items. I usually tell them that if they are in a balanced combat then it means they have hosed up. Smart soldiers don't take even odds. Which leads me to : ITEMS: Bags of Holding are an abomination. They are Bags of Delaying The loving Game as players look through their dozens of items to find the solution. I have lots of cool treasure and potions all over my dungeons but my players have rather strict encumbrance limits. On the surface this seems like it is not fun but it has proven to be the opposite. If you can only carry a handful of items it means the players are actually going to use them. We have all played the RPG where you face the final boss with 200 potions in your backpack. My players have limited carrying space, and encumbrance affects their speed. Want to be nimble and stealthy and move really far/fast? Travel light.
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Apr 20, 2023 02:20
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I find that overly brutal combat tends to result in two issues. Firstly, it usually means that there's a "you explode like a grape an elephant stepped on"-eventuality with every roll, either because of exploding dice or crits from a large hamster biting your plate-armoured battle ogre on the toe. This can kind of make a mockery of players' preparations. Secondly, it usually disincentivizes actually interacting with the combat system and instead finding solutions that don't interact with any game systems. Flooding the dungeon, caving in parts of it, knocking out all the orcs with smoke inhalation and other things that usually aren't given clear rules but instead left more or less up to GM fiat and judgment calls. And to my mind a game that incentivizes not actually playing the game, but finding creative ways to not play it, has somewhat failed at its purpose. As for not putting "level-appropriate" things in places. Obviously if the players decide to go to Helldoom Forest in the Land of Skulls, they should expect that there are tough things there. But once again, plopping down super-tough encounters just for the sake of verisimillitude isn't exactly... making things fun for anyone? Players have the choice of not interacting with them, and living, or interacting with them, and dying, and there's also the fun third option of players misjudging the threat of these "believable" encounters and going in, then getting TPK'd which... just ends everyone's fun in most systems.
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Apr 20, 2023 02:32
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PurpleXVI posted:I find that overly brutal combat tends to result in two issues. I'm going to refute you in a way that I intend no offense. I've been playing with Brutal Combat for years and just don't have these issues, though if we assume the average DM is pretty terrible then Brutal Combat is only going to make things worse for their players. I get that you're exaggerating but I'd probably just say "the hamster couldn't hurt you" unless it was somehow possessed by a demon or something and aggressively tries to tunnel up your rear end while you're asleep. The point of 'morale scores' is that weak little shits like hamsters won't even bother fighting at all, unless it's trapped and it bites your hand when you try to grab it from a pot or something. I still wouldn't have a hamster-bite do any damage unless it was obviously rabid or something. Part of the job of the DM I believe is to put their foot down on Stupid Gamey Bullshit like the infamous Peasant Rail-Gun or whatever. If something does 1 HP damage to you and kills you I'd argue it was probably your fault for being in that situation in the first place. Frodo doesn't get stabbed to death by some chump goblin but he also uses all his skills to avoid getting in a fair fight with some chump goblin. PurpleXVI posted:Secondly, it usually disincentivizes actually interacting with the combat system and instead finding solutions that don't interact with any game systems. Flooding the dungeon, caving in parts of it, knocking out all the orcs with smoke inhalation and other things that usually aren't given clear rules but instead left more or less up to GM fiat and judgment calls. And to my mind a game that incentivizes not actually playing the game, but finding creative ways to not play it, has somewhat failed at its purpose. I think we have differing opinions on what 'playing the game' is and in the nicest way I'd consider your definition of it to be somewhat poisoned by rulebooks full of combat rules that you must then consider the Main Game and everything else is some sort of distraction or subgame. This is probably a bigger problem in games in which all the rules and abilities are based around doing your combat daily abilities and stuff, like 4e and 5e. Flooding the dungeon, caving in parts of it, and knocking out all the orcs are things that I would allow if the players could manage it. I suppose you could call it 'DM fiat' but I run a relatively low-magic setting without Jars of Infinite Water or whatever so if the players want to spend all their money hiring peasants to spend months digging a canal or something then it is something we can play with. Usually, they don't. My players wanted to attack a castle which was a 'dungeon' I had written out room by room and all that jazz. Instead of tackling it right away they instead followed some old treasure map they had found loving ages ago, which led them to some other dungeon wherein they looted it and got filthy rich. They then spent every single penny they had on a literal army of mercenaries who helped them besiege and storm the castle with catapults and all that fun stuff. Some other DM might get annoyed that they had somehow subverted my cool dungeon by knocking down the loving gatehouse with siege weapons when I had 'intended' them to sneak in through the secret passage in the caves below, but to the players (and me) this alternative was loving awesome. PurpleXVI posted:As for not putting "level-appropriate" things in places. Obviously if the players decide to go to Helldoom Forest in the Land of Skulls, they should expect that there are tough things there. But once again, plopping down super-tough encounters just for the sake of verisimillitude isn't exactly... making things fun for anyone? Players have the choice of not interacting with them, and living, or interacting with them, and dying, and there's also the fun third option of players misjudging the threat of these "believable" encounters and going in, then getting TPK'd which... just ends everyone's fun in most systems. Again, I think it takes the right sort of DM to do this stuff correctly, while CR and all that stuff is helpful for people who aren't willing to put in the work. Verismillitude is fun for lots of players, because it is empowering to them. Their decisions are their own, as are the consequences. If the players find out that I have the Goblin Assholes attacking Shitburg Village on the night of the Full Moon, then how the players interact with that is up to them. 100 Goblin Assholes is probably too much for the party to take on alone. They know when the Full Moon is. -They can ignore it. -They can show up at Shitburg Village early and help shore up defenses. -They can show up at Shitburg Village early and evacuate people. -They can show up at Shitburg Village early and find out the Goblins are trying to get their Slimy Idol hidden in the church. - They can possibly side with the Goblins and steal their idol in hopes of avoiding the attack, or sabotage the defenses from the inside. - They can possibly find some aforementioned Way Too loving Strong monster and somehow lead it to the goblin camp, or negotiate with it to eat the goblins. - They can show up during the attack and have all that going on - They can show up later to the ashen ruins of Shitburg Village and go try and rescue the remaining captives before they become goblin soup - They can show up later and loot what remains for themselves - They can somehow get some crazy rear end Moon-Magic that fucks with or obscures the face of the moon to avoid or subvert the attack entirely I don't have a conclusion to the Shitburg Village written out - we're gonna play to find out. I have a calendar of events and a bunch of rival factions on the map and it all looks like a powder keg. Players are the spark. I have random encounters. I'll have random encounters with stuff that is probably beyond their ability to fight. It is also not gonna happen that I'm gonna just BAM drop a dragon on them and tell them to roll initiative. Usually the encounters have some clue that something is coming. Usually everything has some goal that isn't always "Murder everyone in the party" so if they run into something tough at low level they can try to negotiate, run away, come back later with more force. I think a lot of players get forced into TPKs because they are trained to treat every encounter as something that they can solve with their typical combat script on a gridded combat map, and they are no longer engaging with the fiction of the setting and instead just assuming the DM has put this there for them to smash it. I play with brutal combat and I never fudge the dice and over several years I have had zero TPKs. Deaths? Sure. But we've also had players survive entire campaigns and they know that survival means something when death was always on the line. I think telegraphing what is or isn't dangerous is a skill that some DM's lack, and I think it is exacerbated by the type of DM that will decide the Weapon Shop Owner Guy is actually a Level 15 Paladin or something. I tell them straight out before the game that 95% of the people in the world are gonna be Level 0 with a total of D8 HP. Magic-Users are incredibly rare and often presented in a way that it is obvious that This Guy Is loving Weird And Probably Sorcerous but even still, HP totals across the board are gonna be low. The best way to kill the enemy wizard might be to find out where he sleeps and smother him with a pillow. I understand that it is not for everyone, and this is why I mentioned upthread that I prefer players who have never played a lot of TTRPGs before because the 'veterans' often come in with expectations that are formed by heavily scripted games while ours is more emergent. If someone plays nothing but DOOM for years and you present them with Deus Ex they might have some problems adjusting, especially if they think DOOM is the only way to play an FPS. It sounds pretentious I guess but I give my absolutely new players a bit of a primer just as a basic comparison if they're coming in from a different system. If DnD is Star Wars, we are Alien. Don't get me wrong. I like Star Wars. It's just a way of priming them for tone, challenge, and expectations. Mr. Grapes! fucked around with this message at 03:10 on Apr 20, 2023 |
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Apr 20, 2023 03:02
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hyphz posted:The version of 4e skill challenges in which every PC was required to participate in the skill challenge when their turn came up, or else contribute a failure, was errata'd very early on. This inevitably turned skill challenges into the one PC with the best relevant skill modifier soloing the challenge. The errata threw in a kind of hopeless "try not to let this happen" informal guideline for the GM, but I never saw it really come up much. Part of this was the dreadful tendency for modules to want to make skill challenges be lip service exercises that the PCs could not practically fail, which came up in 4e (a skill challenge involving rescuing people was a big warning sign), but the worst culprit is Group Actions in No Thank You Evil. That is a bit silly given that aid another actions exist; even if your PC has no applicable skills and you can't creatively shoehorn in your inapplicable ones, it should usually be possible to contribute by helping another PC. Also it's a little ironic that the great majority of combat encounters are things the PCs should not fail (as the default assumption in 4e), but we think that they should frequently fail noncombat encounters (skill challenges). Of course there are reasons for that: failing a combat encounter sounds like getting killed, although of course it doesn't have to be and in many games it never is: whereas it may be easier for D&D players to conceive of skill challenge failures that don't result in game over for one or more players. That said, a module that assumes failure is impossible for any given scene has made a mistake, clearly. If rescuing someone is the goal of a skill challenge, there needs to be something to do if you fail to rescue them; try again, have a fight instead, a key plot point advances and now the PCs have something else they need to do, whatever. PurpleXVI posted:I think about the only way to get around the issue of players trying to min/max in some way is to reward being bad at things or punish being too good at stuff. Like... I think an excellent example is, unironically, Disco Elysium where your stats are all essentially part of your brain. One of them, Half-Light, is the lizard-level "make a quick and violent response to sudden stimuli to save yourself." It's usually good, because it means that if someone tries to punch you, you might punch them first. But if that particular part of you is too good you might not be able to hold back from making an instinctual violent response to something innocent or accidental. I agree that players may use a character concept as a goal and then optimize towards that concept; but with some games, the optimization pre-empts some character concepts, or directly works against them. A good example is the notion of "cross-class skills" in 3.x, where if you take the character class that best fits your concept, you are wasting points and can never get decently high if you also wanted to know one of the skills the game designers decided weren't for you. I've played at tables where folks did it anyway, and felt good about it: but it became glaring at some point, that one player's decision to make the choices the game designers "intended" for their class led to a more effective character in or out of combat than the player who made choices that fit their concept. I think you can have a game with numbers that doesn't force you down paths this way, and that might better support things like the notional skill challenge. A simple example is PDQ - you have numbers for your Qualities (in the base game, from -2 Poor up to +6 Master), you get to use descriptive prose to define them, you have limitation on character power set by the total of all your character's Qualities, and you roll 2d6 plus your Quality vs. a Difficulty to succeed or not on things. Your character concept is unlimited, and "combat" or "noncombat" are more of a distinction between scenes where you clearly have an "attacker" and "defender" or not, but otherwise work the same way: try to use your best Qualities to do things, sometimes as a team or sometimes solo, and sometimes you need multiple successes to achieve a larger goal. Notably, PDQ also requires "mother may I" as a central question of every complicated action. Of course, PDQ is a very lightweight game, but I believe this gives us clues about the potential for middle or heavyweight games to provide a "skill challenge" experience where players aren't incentivized by the game system to potentially min/max against their own character concept in order to be more effective in a party.
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Apr 20, 2023 03:03
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Mr. Grapes! posted:Don't get me wrong. I like Star Wars. It's just a way of priming them for tone, challenge, and expectations. The way I would fit this into the premise of this thread is that you and your players have decided to enjoy a game that plays a lot more like the original D&D of the 1970s and less like the modern versions seem to "intend" to be played as-written. For 4e, for example, players have spent a lot of resources (personal time, at least) putting together detailed tactical combat engines, and playing in a game where they rarely get to engage with those mechanisms could be frustrating. In old school D&D, as me and my friends understood it in 1985, you wanted to avoid combat (as a low level character at least) and also constantly check for traps and try to subvert the deadly poo poo laid out before you because it was all far too deadly to take head-on. I do not think those modes of playing D&D being "old" makes them "bad" or anything. I think old versions of D&D have stuff like less consistent rules, lots of typos, and lack some modern game inventions that are cool and good, but the play mode itself to me is a matter of preference rather than playing games correctly/incorrectly. One thing that can happen with that older play mode, if you're using any version of D&D really, is that you make it tough for players who used character classes aimed squarely at combat and not much else. If fighters have poor skills, poor mental ability scores, and poor or no access to noncombat magic (via items or otherwise), what do they get to do to contribute to a game that mostly isn't about fighting? It may be that you just... avoid building fighters for this style of came, or multiclass. Or maybe you're not even playing a version of D&D, I'm making an assumption.
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Apr 20, 2023 03:14
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Character Building: I avoid min-maxing because in the system we use it just isn't possible. You pick your Class, and on Level Up you get: - HP increase based on class - Some other standard stuff based on class - One roll on a D100 table full of random level up stuff based on your class. No one could ever construct the same character twice and two human fighters are going to look vastly different at Level 5 based on the random poo poo they rolled. In my previous 60-something session campaign, the Biggest Baddest Wizard was an enemy that had infiltrated their party as a hireling (plenty of clues). The players gradually figured out who he was in essentially the final dungeon of the campaign, which was a giant city-sized drill they were using to tunnel into the body of God itself (at the Earth's core) and set off essentially a magical nuke. I had given him all sorts of kick-rear end spells and he was now found out and gonna wipe the party out. I had zero plan as to how they'd beat him and I assumed the odds were very much against the party, since they were weakened and also in the middle of fighting off some gribbly Cronenbergian stuff spewing out of the body of God. Dozens of sessions and literally a year before in real-time one of the players had rolled a weird level-up ability on her D100 Witch Table. I had forgotten about it entirely. The Big Bad Wizard, who did feel some empathy to the party but had to kill them to protect his God, asked them who wanted to die first. He promised to make it quick, and to save them the pain of being absorbed into God's biomass. The Witch volunteered and I had him blast her to loving bloody mist with a high-level spell on his turn. She gave the biggest smirk and showed me the Level Up power she had earned like 14 months before, which stated that "If someone kills you, they will disappear and reappear in the same place D100 days in the future". Well, that same spot in D100 days would be somewhere in the Earth's core. They wiped out the toughest enemy I had spent hours statting out without taking a single swing at him. Is that avoiding the game? Is that a lovely end? Some people might think so. My players still talk about it a year later as the coolest thing that ever happened. I understand that for many people character-building is the 'fun' of the game but unless the entire group is into it, it leads to shittier games with cookie cutter OP characters that must be built a certain way to be 'viable' rather than just roleplaying a cool concept and seeing what happens. I know our way is not the popular way, but I see lots and lots of people complaining about all these problems with the more mainstream systems and I'm trying to say it doesn't have to be that way.
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Apr 20, 2023 03:19
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Leperflesh posted:
Yeah we are absolutely playing an OSR retroclone. It's based off Lamentations of the Flame Princess, but I've modified the hell out of it over the years such that it isn't exactly that either. Yes I'm aware that LotFP has an edgelord reputation, I just like their Spellbook and simple back-to-basics gameplay and I use their free rulebook and don't support their dumb edgy takes. No one has inherently poor anything scores. Players roll 3D6 on their stats and that's what they got. The stats aren't nearly as important in Old-School stuff. A wizard can use a sword if he wants to, there is nothing stopping him. It's just a tool. The game can be mostly about anything. We have sessions of just political intrigue. We have sessions of mostly exploration. We have sessions that are straight out wars. I would compare it more to Fallout New Vegas in that I have a big rear end map with lots of dungeons and factions and how the players engage with it is largely up to them. Nothing stops the fighter from negotiating or disarming a trap. If players want to disarm a trap they can try to tell me what they specifically do to disarm the trap and usually it won't require a roll. I'm not really a fan of the Magical Funhouse style of play where you walk in a room and the gravity goes off if you didn't say the magic word or whatever. I go out of my way to have things 'make sense' and the players trust me to do so and can thus engage with the world in a more logical manner. Fighters are the only ones who get + combat bonuses on Level up consistently, for anyone else it might happen on their D100 table but they are likely to be at their initial combat bonuses for the entire campaign.
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Apr 20, 2023 03:27
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It sounds to me like you and your group have a ton of fun and have found play modes that work well for you. That's awesome. Is this the first game you learned, or did you come to it later? How did you "learn" to play this way, I guess is what I'm getting at.
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Apr 20, 2023 03:35
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Yeah I'm not trying to convert anybody in a System-War or anything. I just saw a lot of complaints about: - Overemphasis on combat - Players using their character sheet to solve problems and not thinking creatively - Players min-maxing - Players competing amongst the group for glory/screen time when it should be a co-op game - Sloggy combat - Player expectation of railroading And these are all problems I agree exist and have found a solution to all of them, at least at our table. My history of the game: Around 2015 I was forced to play DnD 5e. Not like I was dragged from my bed, I was into some dorky stuff and my friends and I were playing lots of heavy boardgames like Game of Thrones and Axis and Allies and stuff. One of the guys said that he always played in our overly complicated games so we were gonna play in his. He started us off with the Phandelver DnD 5e adventure. I had tons of fun, but I got the impression that we were basically invincible and the DM wouldn't kill us, and I slightly resented it. I didn't want to die, but sometimes someone would do something incredibly stupid and we would survive it and it left a bit of a bad taste in my mouth. Eventually he had some family emergency and had to leave the country right when we concluded that adventure. I stepped into DM role since because of this even though I had no idea what I was doing. I was cool with 5e but I did kind of hate the generic fantasy Ren-Faire stuff. I have a pretty deep historical background (I am a history teacher) so I was more interested in grotty folklore (like the Witcher) or grittier historical stuff. My favorite sci-fi stuff is Aliens, The Thing, and other kind of bleak grimy stuff. I also like old Fallout and New Vegas for being relatively open-ended and non judgmental about player choice. I made my own campaigns for awhile but kept running into the problems described in this thread: - Overlong sloggy combats with little danger to the characters - Every 5e published adventure kind of sucks, at least in my mind. I'm not into Magical Ren-Faire and railroady stuff, though I understand that some people love it. - Players being very cavalier about getting to 0 HP because its not a problem. I discovered OSR blogs and saw some of the adventures that really wowed me like Deep Carbon Observatory, Lair of the Lamb, Tomb of Serpent Kings, Kidnap the Archpriest, and its ilk. 75% of my world is my own homebrew but I like to scatter some premade dungeons around and make sure that my players never know which is which. I got absolutely tired of modifying OSR stuff to fit 5e because it was an utter pain in the rear end, until I just sat down and looked at some OSR rule systems which seemed to solve the problem. I kind of hated how it seemed that 5e stuff was written for a loving idiot. Like I'd constantly run into passages such as: "The steps are treacherous. If a character uses their action to move up the steps, they must make a DC 14 (Dexterity) Check. If a character fails this check, they fall prone and must use half their movement to stand up again. If they fail by more than 10, the character slips and falls down the stairs and must take 1d6 (bludgeoning) damage and remain prone." A good OSR adventure just says "the steps are slippery" and trusts me to loving handle it. I'm a fan of 'rulings not rules'. Switched to LoTFP for a one-shot that was a session within our 5e campaign. (The players found an ancient journal describing an expedition somewhere centuries ago. I had them play out the expedition itself using the LotFP rules, then depending on how it ended, they could venture to this same dungeon and see how 'the expedition' had changed the situation and loot it in the 'present'.) We all found the new system more nail-biting and less clunky and we could get through 4-5 combats in the same time it took to get through one of them in 5e. So we went with OSR and never looked back. That was about five years ago and I have since mutated LotFP to be more of my own thing. I don't think it's for everyone, but I do see people constantly running into the same problems and trying to kludge these big chunky systems into fixing them when the solution is just to play something different. Mr. Grapes! fucked around with this message at 04:11 on Apr 20, 2023 |
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Apr 20, 2023 04:07
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I’m not Mr. Grapes but I’m currently running Electric Bastionland which is very much an OSR game in that it’s unforgiving and high lethality. This is fairly new for both myself and my players. So how did we learn? There’s an example of play early on in the book. Bad things happen in combat, including a PC going down: that helps set the scene. But the really key thing is the two pages titled “A Player’s Handbook: Strategy Guide.” It makes it really clear that you need to play carefully, then goes into some useful detail on the implications of the mechanics for players who aren’t into figuring out optimal approaches themselves. It’s simple stuff but it’s really handy. Imagine if V:tM had set expectations like this, rather than scattering them through all the fiction and assuming people will pick it up? And then I emphasized the point by putting a character down in my best PbtA style. An NPC said “hey you can’t be here,” and she kept edging into the room, so the NPC pointed a gun at her, and she kept talking instead of leaving, so he shot her. In Electric Bastionland attacks auto-hit and do damage. She had 1 HP. Critical Damage saves ensued. It was great. Which loops back to the social combat question, actually. The PC’s attempt to get past the dude was absolutely social combat and under other circumstances I might have called for a Charisma save. But I knew this NPC’s motivations and I wanted to stay true to them. It’s hard for humans to say no, on average — I’m literally drawing on my corporate politics experience here, because I’ve had to learn to say no and be comfortable with the resulting shock. So there’s probably some value in reading those annoying airport books on how to negotiate. I don’t know which ones are good though.
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Apr 20, 2023 04:10
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^ Yeah Bastionland looks pretty cool and if I wasn't balls deep in whatever we're doing now I'd probably try it. Would love if I wasn't forever DM. I think a lot of people are hesitant about the OSR stuff until they actually try it and find out that drat, you can just get so much more DONE in a 4 hour session. Player death stings really bad the first time it happens but that's because people who are trained in World of Warcraft and the usual stuff just aren't into it. But, rogue-likes are cool and the best player deaths lead you to laugh and think up your next character. No one should get attached to a Level 1 character, and you should probably save your 20 pages of backstory until you see if Bob has survived a few battles. I think when you play with the expectation that the DM will place balanced combat encounters in front of you that always end in party success then the players begin to prioritize Spotlight Time and Looking Cool. After all, they're gonna win the fight anyway. The fight isn't about victory vs defeat. The fight is about how Cool My Guy Is and he Does The Cool Thing. When the players know that things aren't balanced in their favor, then victories are all the sweeter because they loving earned it. They didn't just show up and execute their combat script, they fought tooth and nail and scraped their way to victory and it feels GOOD. The cooperation between the players becomes much much more profound because gently caress, they are trying to survive! They cheer each other's victories far more rather than compete over who can Hit Biggest Number on the Bad Guy Of The Week. When they sacrifice their lives it is something meaningful, rather than something they secretly planned with the DM so they could have their amateur theater hour moment. Since I'm trying to make each post useful, here is: How To Make Player Death Sting, But Sting Less: We of course have no easy resurrection in our campaign. Death is permanent. Bringing someone back to life is gonna be more like Pet Semetary than Gandalf the White. Anyway, if a player dies then the others can have a Funeral. Funeral Rules: - You must have the body, or some important object that is directly related to the dead character. (Like if Indiana Jones died by drowning in the ocean maybe you could bury his fedora). - You put ALL their worldy goods into the grave, or bonfire, or whatever you do. This is how you end up with tombs full of cool poo poo to loot in DnD worlds! All these goods are gone, burned, sacrificed, buried, whatever. The only exceptions to this are very Plot-Centric stuff like a map, a letter, etc. But all their weapons, armor, etc is gonna go. - Players may additionally sacrifice as much treasure as they want to on the tomb, funeral pyre, etc. I play some chilled out Ennio Morricone music and everyone can say a few words over the body. The new character can show up at the funeral. Maybe they are someone who knew the old PC, or they wandered in. The new character starts with XP equal to whatever treasure the party threw away at the funeral. The party 'throwing away' treasure is of course anything they care to describe it as, such as buying an awesome boat and lighting it on fire, throwing a gigantic festival in the dead player's honor, or just burying them with a pile of coins. 1 silver piece = 1 xp (we use silver standard rather than gold). So new characters can come in with some levels, but even still, in our system Level 1 characters are not worthless whatsoever, and can contribute to the group since the game is way less stat-dependent. Mr. Grapes! fucked around with this message at 04:28 on Apr 20, 2023 |
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Apr 20, 2023 04:20
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Mr. Grapes! posted:"The steps are treacherous. If a character uses their action to move up the steps, they must make a DC 14 (Dexterity) Check. If a character fails this check, they fall prone and must use half their movement to stand up again. If they fail by more than 10, the character slips and falls down the stairs and must take 1d6 (bludgeoning) damage and remain prone." A good OSR adventure just says "the steps are slippery" and trusts me to loving handle it. I'm a fan of 'rulings not rules'. This isn't the game treating you like an idiot, it's offering you a resolution to "the stairs are slippery", a trivial scenario that most people find neither joy nor interest in resolving themselves. Like, this is a thing I often don't see addressed in "rulings not rules" rhetoric. RPGs are full of cases that rules may or may not cover, and while a lot of them are fringe and interesting a lot are relatively mundane and while as a GM deciding what occurs via fiat isn't necessarily onerous it certainly isn't freeing either. Saguaro PI fucked around with this message at 05:05 on Apr 20, 2023 |
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Apr 20, 2023 04:56
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I would be remiss to point out both interpretations of stairs being slippery are just as mundane but one says it in less words and allows for more wonder should it be interesting, which is something I will probably do the next exploration on later.
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Apr 20, 2023 05:27
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Saguaro PI posted:This isn't the game treating you like an idiot, it's offering you a resolution to "the stairs are slippery", a trivial scenario that most people find neither joy nor interest in resolving themselves. The big thing about Rulings Not Rules is to just get the gently caress through it, and say "Whatever, 50/50 chance" or something. If it is REALLY IMPORTANT you can check back later, or make a new rule. The important thing is to keep things moving and keep the players engaged in the game and not flipping through (poorly written) rulebooks. But in a game in which every single thing has a nitpicky little rule, what you are wasting time on is looking up rules for something that ultimately comes down to just some arbitrary percentage anyway, that still covers realistically the scenario of slippery stairs. My players can see the fiction as 'real', and know that doing risky stuff on slippery stairs carries a risk of falling down them, and they trust me not to make up something really stupid on the spot like 30 damage. I guess a lot of these rules are meant as a check to lovely DMs, but lovely DMs are gonna manifest their shittiness no matter how many rules you put in the way. I can see your point, but I think a good pre-made adventure is written so that it should be simple and easy to use at the table, and being full of this kind of drivel makes it less so. Whether that needs a whole paragraph to pop up every time it arises is a difference of opinion. I think any experienced DM can come up with something fair on the fly that isn't exactly 'fiat'. I think if the DM is pretty open about it and only require a roll when failure is both possible and interesting is how I go about it. Ultimately that big paragraph of bullshit is just saying that the stairs are slippery and there is a percentage chance of something bad happening on them. I think a lot of time can be saved by the DM just outright saying "I give a % chance" because it is all rather arbitrary anyway. Personally I'm a favor of just "Roll under your Dex on a D20" for something like sprinting up slippery stairs and the only reason to apply further modifiers is in really extreme circumstances like there's also an earthquake and the stairs are full of smoke and the player is drunk. If my players just say "I go up the stairs" I wouldn't have anything happen because any normal person would take careful steps if they are on slippery floors. I treat the players as if they are competent. When would the treacherous stairs matter? - Their torch is running out soon and they want to move quickly ( I have purged darkvision from my game. Light and darkness is cool and interesting!) - Combat happens on the stairs - They're running away from something up or down the stairs - Etc Mr. Grapes! fucked around with this message at 05:38 on Apr 20, 2023 |
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Apr 20, 2023 05:36
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aldantefax posted:I would be remiss to point out both interpretations of stairs being slippery are just as mundane but one says it in less words and allows for more wonder should it be interesting, which is something I will probably do the next exploration on later. One interpretation does nothing, it's just an offhanded description. In my experience, these kinds of resolutions are about 75% trivial, 24% annoyance, I can concede that maybe the best gaming of my life exists in that 1% or whatever.
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Apr 20, 2023 05:39
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PurpleXVI posted:Secondly, it usually disincentivizes actually interacting with the combat system and instead finding solutions that don't interact with any game systems. Flooding the dungeon, caving in parts of it, knocking out all the orcs with smoke inhalation and other things that usually aren't given clear rules but instead left more or less up to GM fiat and judgment calls. And to my mind a game that incentivizes not actually playing the game, but finding creative ways to not play it, has somewhat failed at its purpose.
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Apr 20, 2023 05:56
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This thread is doing a good job of reminding me why I don't play OSR games. They are absolutely for some people, and I hope they bring them absolute joy, but pretty much every part of the game description here just made me think "yeah, I'd hate that". And let me just stress: that's fine. More than fine, it's wonderful that there are different styles of play for everyone. I just know what I enjoy.
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Apr 20, 2023 06:00
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Coming up with interesting ways of bypassing fights is fun, but if getting in a straight-up fight is something you're meant to actively avoid I question why you're playing a game with an armed and armoured warrior, likely running headlong at a monster, on the cover.
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Apr 20, 2023 06:01
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The stairs may be insanely sick nasty and overgrown with cavern mold & it is literally impossible to go up without risk I have a one where there's a certain passage that is absolutely a clusterfuck if not done well, but I wouldn't weep if someone scrapped the concept of this thing being harrowing without climbing gear and possibly dangerous with it. That's in there as an option and the intent is the gm doesn't need to sit down and populate the cave with obstructions and bullshit, and they can already easily scrap what they dislike and keep what looks good. Hopefully the whole scenario isn't jam packed with cruft to the point it stresses usability, if it is that's a writing fault on me.
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Apr 20, 2023 06:02
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Saguaro PI posted:Coming up with interesting ways of bypassing fights is fun, but if getting in a straight-up fight is something you're meant to actively avoid I question why you're playing a game with an armed and armoured warrior, likely running headlong at a monster, on the cover. To be a sneaky rogue, or a squishy wizard, or a wispy elf--none of which can afford to put themselves on the frontline of danger?
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Apr 20, 2023 06:03
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Saguaro PI posted:Coming up with interesting ways of bypassing fights is fun, but if getting in a straight-up fight is something you're meant to actively avoid I question why you're playing a game with an armed and armoured warrior, likely running headlong at a monster, on the cover. Because they're gonna happen at some point anyway? Sometimes the players want to get into a fight, but it's usually when they've tried to gain an advantage to make it easier. Leave a trail of bloody goblin-bits to lure the Ogre from his lair to the placie where we've prepped an ambush, etc. The armored warrior running headlong into the giant monster is a lot more interesting if he's risking his life to do it and not because he's got 3 Daily Power Action Surges or whatever and by golly he's gonna use them.
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Apr 20, 2023 06:07
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Saguaro PI posted:Coming up with interesting ways of bypassing fights is fun, but if getting in a straight-up fight is something you're meant to actively avoid I question why you're playing a game with an armed and armoured warrior, likely running headlong at a monster, on the cover. It's also a game that has a running gag in the art of the same human fighter (Regdar) getting murdered over and over again.
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Apr 20, 2023 06:13
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Before I go to bed I should expand on the broader topic. I have three core verbs which will likely map to the more ‘old school’ or ‘folk’ way of playing D&D, but is applicable to all games since I don’t play or run exclusively old school D&D (though I am personally fond of it): Wonder: This is something that I want players and referees alike to do in a given game. “Rulings not rules” is an easy but perhaps now hokey way of trying to note this down just like calling all bread you buy at the store artisanal. Wondering about something encourages critical and creative thinking. It can, and should, be applied to all aspects of play during a session or in between, or even before a game group starts down that path. It happens first and foremost with the individual but can be a social activity. This is where the questions come from and the desire to seek understanding. If a game does not encourage this, there is a missed opportunity. Explore: Extending the wondering where ideas are here and there gives an opportunity for things to be created that don’t have fixed outcomes - intended purposes, perhaps, but most players and referees are crafty and they often use anything and everything at their disposal for anything but an intended use. To me, this is cool and good and also feeds into my preference of “show, not tell” and “respect the play group, and have a healthy disrespect of the rules” - to understand the boundaries of play which prioritize social experience over whatever the rules might say is supposed to happen. Some games take exploration in a more literal sense of the world being unknown, but other games and groups will make an attempt to explore something wholly different, and that’s a worthy thing in and of itself. Create: This is the metaphorical ‘rubber meets the road’ thing that helps to take all the context and ideas from wondering and exploring and to put that into actual play. As a referee, I like creating situations and generally prefer to leave options open or have no solution devised for players. I will listen to players and offer reminders and hints if it seems like they are feeling stuck or helpless, because often when they are stuck they are using some past assumptions that disempower them. So, care is taken to help remind - and in some cases, explicitly grant - agency back to players as a referee. Referees grant themselves agency by indulging in the selfish act of creation for creation’s sake - making dungeons and worlds and characters that suit their whimsy, or mixing what they see others have done and personalize it to their tables. Remember: A lot of words are written about what is and is not fun, but instead of asking players if they have had fun or not in a given game, I like rules and social experiences that have some impact for players. Already in three pages of rambling in this thread have we seen quite a few anecdotes that have stuck with people for some time, perhaps decades. Even if those stories are ones of tragedy, un-fun-ness, or whatever, to me they are still worth celebrating, lamenting, but at least sharing and remembering. Everybody appreciates a story that has success and failure both - or, great success and great failure. When looking at game systems and their collections of rules, or stories and things taken out of premade content, I use the questions I posed earlier in the thread and also layer the context of these things in bit by bit. All four things are verbs that everybody at the table, including me, ought to participate in on some level - and, if the rules instead suggest that it is somehow against the grain to want to do something, my top instinct is to poke and prod at it and start down these thought threads. Thus, I know that if I were for some reason to assume the role of referee for such a module that talks about slippery stairs in great length, I would wonder. Why is this here? Perhaps this is supposed to be a large challenge for players in some way, and so I should consider not the text in as literal a way as possible for the rules, but rather to seek understanding on why it’s there in the first place. I would at least describe the stairs as slippery to players, because it is up to them and their sense of the world. They might decide to do any number of things with the stairs. It may lead to something interesting in the future, but it may not and that’s okay too. I believe that designing games, playing and learning them all engage with these in varying degrees, but where game systems may fall short in one or more of the actions noted it will instead be compensated for by players and referees - if there is a struggle to do that and the game discourages these things in some way, particularly the first three (Wonder, Explore, and Create) then it’s a good time to take a step back and re-evaluate if that tabletop RPG is worth taking to a table.
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Apr 20, 2023 06:17
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I find this thread very interesting because it seems to have immediately (and I should stress that this is just an observation, not an attempted own) replicated the very phenomenon raised in the OP of, shall we say, unconscious D&D-influenced thinking. With basically zero nudging, this thread immediately turned into a discussion of issues like, how do you adjudicate skill checks, and teach DMs how to do so well? What's the right way to handle character death? What do we make of min-maxing? What is the right way to structure and pace "encounters"? etc. etc. And these are all questions that pretty much presuppose that you are playing D&D or a game like D&D. But there's all kinds of games out there (Polaris is an easy example I'm decently familiar with, or Fiasco for an example I'm way less familiar with) to which those questions are completely and totally irrelevant. And I think this comes down to what hyphz pointed out: hyphz posted: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. (even the rules-heavy vs. rules-light distinction here, I think, reflects sort of a D&D-influenced frame. A game like Polaris or Fiasco has plenty of rules, but it also doesn't really fit this style of discussion at all. It's sort of hard to say what it does lack, because it does have mechanics, and you can't even really say it's not game-y, it's just a different type of game! I don't totally love this wording but I would perhaps say that what it lacks is a space for "system mastery," in the specific way that term is used in already D&D-influenced communities) D&D (and its progeny and rivals), is always going to dominate and inform discussions in places like this because 1) it's easily the most popular and organized form of play in the "community," such as it is, and 2) there is more stuff to talk about that is comparable between campaigns and sessions (encounter design, character builds, and so on). This isn't the worst thing, but I often wonder what other forms of play would emerge were the D&D framework, such as it is, didn't loom so large as what players immediately learn. My own current game of Fellowship includes a lot of elements that I think would ping as obviously wrong in D&D play (formalized player control of various NPCs, an extremely collaborative approach to both character and campaign arcs, some other stuff), in part because some of my players came in with experience in collaborative storytelling and imagination games but not modern video or tabletop gaming. And there are plenty of games that draw on storytelling or imaginative play as their foundations, but it's much harder to get any kind of ecumenical or comparative discussion of them going online in the way that we can all happily edition war until the end of time, and it's hard to ask for advice about how to run them generally. And I think any given D&D game features a lot of the kind of stuff I mean, though it takes different forms (formalized player control of narrative elements would I think strike many RPG people as "wrong," even if we're all down for the idea of "a player made a funny joke in table talk and then we formalized it as an aspect of play," though those are imo very similar things). But somehow all that stuff is something other than the parts of gameplay we have a collective vocabulary for discussing, even though it's easily equally or more important to the mechanical things that usually are the subject of discussion. So even though I'd like, in my own play, to get deeper into the elements I'm describing, the soft narrative control/collaborative storytelling elements, I feel like I lack the vocabulary to even start asking real questions about them. Like, I know A Quiet Year exists, I'm vaguely aware of the works of Jenna Moran, probably I should read about GUMSHOE, but there's not a lot of writing I'm aware of that talks about the things linking these games and building up a way to talk about aspects of the hobby that exist more at the level of collaborative storytelling and narrative control. I feel like I'm having a hard time even articulating my point here because I lack a way to talk about it. And things are a lot better than they were 20 years ago in terms of how these things are discussed online, but I feel like most places you can talk about RPGs lack a collective vocabulary to discuss, e.g., not just how distinct Fiasco and Polaris are from D&D, but the ways in which they are similar and dissimilar to each other. I think an easy example of how fully D&D-ified our thinking is that there aren't really any prominent games out there that invoke the idea of "playing house," even though that's often the most basic form of imagination play kids start with, or that draw heavily on long-form improv traditions, even though extended improv with some dice rolling is what a lot of RPG playing boils down to. It feels like everything is either a direct descendant of the wargames tradition or sprung directly from a storygames designer's head, with at best occasional reference to how other storygames have handled things. I'm sure there's game design writing I'm not aware of on this point, but I guess part of what I'm saying is that I've been reading tradgames forums for 20 years and I know all kinds of arcane pointless poo poo about D&D design and know exactly where to go to learn more arcane pointless poo poo about D&D design, and no idea where to go read about, say, GMless or PCless play generally, or how to learn to think about collaborative storytelling as not just a goal of play, but a design principle and paradigm in itself with its own rich history. I guess what I'm saying boils down to 1) I think we, the nebulous online English-speaking RPG community, are so thoroughly and deeply infected with the D&D paradigm that people have real difficulty conceiving of games outside of the broad categories of "like D&D" or "not like D&D", and that feeds off of and into 2) a severe lack of collective vocabulary to discuss and envision games that are not like D&D. Which has made a hobby that prides itself on limitless possibility feel paradoxically quite bounded in how we discuss it! Valentin fucked around with this message at 06:22 on Apr 20, 2023 |
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Apr 20, 2023 06:19
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Lamuella posted:This thread is doing a good job of reminding me why I don't play OSR games. They are absolutely for some people, and I hope they bring them absolute joy, but pretty much every part of the game description here just made me think "yeah, I'd hate that". Yeah, I get it. It's good there are all sorts of wildly different systems out there that ultimately cover the basic Go In Cave Kill Monster Steal Its Stuff game. We had a guy join who was very excited and very keyed into 5e and he got really frustrated with our group. When making a character he asked "Okay who's DPS? Who's healing? Who's tank?" and he got a bunch of blank looks. It was a good laugh seeing the slowly dawning horror on his face as everyone revealed their character sheets and they were all a bunch of squishy halflings with zero spell casting abilities and largely improvised weapons. He asked about professions and got "Food critic!" "Gardener!" "Depressed and suicidal!" "Stableboy!" He was not ready for that. Perfectly cool guy and he's welcome at our table for other games but I could tell right off he was gonna be miserable.
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Apr 20, 2023 06:19
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Mr. Grapes! posted:Because they're gonna happen at some point anyway? Sometimes the players want to get into a fight, but it's usually when they've tried to gain an advantage to make it easier. Leave a trail of bloody goblin-bits to lure the Ogre from his lair to the placie where we've prepped an ambush, etc. The armoured warrior running headlong into a giant monster is *inherently* interesting, that's why they made games like Dungeons and Dragons (1974-Present) about it. Modern games have those abilities because it's cool to do a bunch of stuff in a turn, the same way Original D&D fighters could strike down one 1hd opponent per level. Coming up with and executing a clever plan (or trying and loving up and having to deal with the fall-out) is fun, but so is walking up to the orcs, drawing your sword and saying "come have a go if you think you're hard enough". Does the guy on the cover of Basic look like he's tried to gain an advantage before squaring up with that dragon? I bring this up because as someone who plays a lot of games that aren't D&D it perplexes me how many people play D&D, or D&D offshoots, while seemingly hating its main thing.
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Apr 20, 2023 06:26
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Valentin posted:
Not able to tackle the whole post, but I think a lot of why "Playing House" doesn't really factor so much into modern RPG type games is that the 'dangers' associated in Playing House are probably going to hit closer to what players have actually experienced. Paying taxes, spousal or parental abuse, death of pets, and all other Bad Stuff involved in roleplaying a domestic situation are things that the players at the table might have real experience with. Children are often ignorant of these thing (but plenty are sadly not) so playing House often is a bit more playful while with adults, the stuff that happens at home is often some of the worst things that happened in their life. Playing a blissful happy family can only go so far, players usually want obstacles to overcome. How to get past a moat full of angry crocodiles is fun to brainstorm solutions to. How to get past an abusive spouse is gonna get dark quick.
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Apr 20, 2023 06:35
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Saguaro PI posted:The armoured warrior running headlong into a giant monster is *inherently* interesting, that's why they made games like Dungeons and Dragons (1974-Present) about it. Modern games have those abilities because it's cool to do a bunch of stuff in a turn, the same way Original D&D fighters could strike down one 1hd opponent per level. Coming up with and executing a clever plan (or trying and loving up and having to deal with the fall-out) is fun, but so is walking up to the orcs, drawing your sword and saying "come have a go if you think you're hard enough". Does the guy on the cover of Basic look like he's tried to gain an advantage before squaring up with that dragon? It is strange that you think I hate this main thing, when I just think it doesn't have to be the only main thing. If you want to look at 1974 Dungeons and Dragons the combat was lethal and you were expected to use advantages and come up with crazy solutions. The game had a hefty exploration element. I assure you that you can totally stab dudes in the throat in the OSR games, they just have the caveat that you are more likely (but not guaranteed) to die while doing so. These OSR games are very much aiming to recreate the 1970s style of DnD with some cleaned up and modernized rules. In some ways it is easier to stab a dude in the throat because hit point totals are lower across the board, so we don't have combats of people wailing into each other for 2 hours of real time. If you're familiar with it I'd say a good comparison is XCOM. You're definitely getting into lots of fights, but ideally you are getting into them on your own terms because things are dangerous. You can absolutely charge that Sectoid with a samurai sword but it could end up with your brains splattered all over the sidewalk. I agree that it is cool to do stuff on your turn. A problem brought up earlier in this thread is that when players have a sheet full of Official Abilities, they tend to get tunnel vision and think that their character can do only those things. In some systems anyone can try to do all sorts of cool stuff without it having to be pre-written on their sheet, because the game is about Rulings Not Rules and you don't need a Special Ability to rip the deer head off the wall and charge forward with it. A 'problem' of modern 5e and such is that the special abilities are so strong that it disincentivizes doing interesting stuff. Like, you can have a big fight in a room with a blazing bonfire. It is cool and good and fun to try and shove a guy into the bonfire. But in DnD 5e, why would you? As written it's gonna be maybe tough to do and you'll do like D4 damage off of his inflated hit bar, when instead you could just spam your Unlimited1d10 Warlock Cantrip for the entire game unto eternity. I think survival aspects are Fun and Cool and Good and judging by the existence of the entire survival videogame genre, many players do too. DnD rather trivializes all of this and lets the entire party create infinite food, light, water, and safe resting places with rather minimal investment. Sure, that might get rid of stuff that others find boring. Cool for them. But that tends to slowly funnel the campaign into pre-planned combats in arenas that the players better not leave because the DM spent all day planning this drat encounter and you are going to fight it. Mr. Grapes! fucked around with this message at 06:45 on Apr 20, 2023 |
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Apr 20, 2023 06:40
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Mr. Grapes! posted:Not able to tackle the whole post, but I think a lot of why "Playing House" doesn't really factor so much into modern RPG type games is that the 'dangers' associated in Playing House are probably going to hit closer to what players have actually experienced. To be clear, I don't mean to draw on it as a genre to be emulated or adapted, but to draw on its own basic structure and "mechanics," such as they aren't. Like, if we wanted to, we could describe "House" as a GMless play format where players claim/create a playbook based on a family role and create their own goals and obstacles, as well as other players' goals and obstacles, and then proceed to think about it as its own game and try to draw lessons from it. It probably sounds obvious to the point of stupidity to say that playing D&D is a lot like playing house, and yet that point is rarely ever raised, and I think that is partly because one inheritance from the wargames tradition is that we do not ever think about the similarities between the two, even though "it's sort of like playing house except we're knights and wizards" is by far the easiest way you can ever explain D&D to basically anyone.
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Apr 20, 2023 06:48
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I wrote up a whole thing but then realised I'd fallen into the trap pointed out by Valentin's (very good) post. I have days where I'll see people do big arguments on what are very clearly D&D issues that are spoken about like they're very general role-playing discussions and shake my head and then on other days just get sucked into them immediately. Something I will offer to that effect: I think beyond its cultural ubiquity part of the reason why games like D&D can so easily dominate these kinds of discussions is the way they are so focused on, when compared to the broader range of RPGs that are out there, fine-grain details, which offer ample opportunities for discussion and argument that other games can't really speak to. Saguaro PI fucked around with this message at 07:27 on Apr 20, 2023 |
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Apr 20, 2023 07:14
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Valentin posted:To be clear, I don't mean to draw on it as a genre to be emulated or adapted, but to draw on its own basic structure and "mechanics," such as they aren't. Like, if we wanted to, we could describe "House" as a GMless play format where players claim/create a playbook based on a family role and create their own goals and obstacles, as well as other players' goals and obstacles, and then proceed to think about it as its own game and try to draw lessons from it. It probably sounds obvious to the point of stupidity to say that playing D&D is a lot like playing house, and yet that point is rarely ever raised, and I think that is partly because one inheritance from the wargames tradition is that we do not ever think about the similarities between the two, even though "it's sort of like playing house except we're knights and wizards" is by far the easiest way you can ever explain D&D to basically anyone. I guess this can work with the right group, but the appeal of DnD and its ilk is the idea of the referee, someone who can adjudicate if something happens or doesn't when the result would be unclear. Kids love to play Cops n Robbers but it often devolves into an "I got you!" "No you didn't!" argument. DnD adds God to this dynamic who can say that you didn't get shot, and also that a surprise blizzard is coming through. DnD type games have the advantage of being able to have a functional game even with a bunch of squabbling manbabies because they at least all have agreed that someone is playing Mom and the game stops if you annoy Mom too much. Even DnD has plenty of dysfunctional groups that totally collapse but I guess the DM Dynamic leads to more long-term stability than the free-form games which can be really cool but require no one to try and dominate. Mr. Grapes! fucked around with this message at 07:38 on Apr 20, 2023 |
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Apr 20, 2023 07:33
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mellonbread posted:Nah, it rules when the players do this. See, it rules when players come up with creative solutions, but! Most RPG's have clear rules for what happens when you run into the orc camp and start swinging your sword around. Few if any RPG's have clear rules for what happens when you start sabotaging the supports for the old mines the orcs are encamped in, in order to collapse it on their heads without ever engaging with the combat system. My thesis is that if engaging with the game's actual rules is the wrong thing to do, then something is wrong with the game. Because it's like at that point I could just toss the rulebook into a nearby creek and free-form roleplay with my friends. The system is then offering no support whatsoever except for how to punish my players if they play "wrong" or "suboptimally." In my opinion a game should have rules for the intended ways of solving things, not for the un-intended ways of solving things. It'd be like if Golden Sky Stories only had rules for getting shot by guns. Or if Mage the Ascension had rules for everything except using magic.
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Apr 20, 2023 10:09
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PurpleXVI posted:Few if any RPG's have clear rules for what happens when you start sabotaging the supports for the old mines the orcs are encamped in, in order to collapse it on their heads without ever engaging with the combat system. Though you know, I realize that the two games I've been playing most recently do have pretty clear rules for that - not in the sense of "a mechanical subsystem for how to handle that precise situation" but "general rules for handling something whose scope entirely leaves what the game mechanics can directly handle." In a Worlds Without Number game, you'd make a call that sounds reasonable and keep going. (This is also what you do if there's a rule and you forget about it and don't want to spend ten minutes digging for where you read it in the moment. The book talks about that!) And like, in the worst case, that's pure GM fiat - but what's actually interesting is the bit where you actually make a call, because that makes it... impure GM fiat. Like, in order to make a call that sounds reasonable, I have to say "Given what I know of the situation, it feels like there's a pretty good chance of a catastrophe, the problem here is getting out in time..." And go on to inventing some bell curve roll or percentile chance or what-have-you, and associated consequences and maybe an explicit timetable, and saying it out loud. In the course of doing this, I might have my players go "what, really!?" or "Yeah that sounds about right-" or "well, what about-" -- It's my call, but there's a little bit of back and forth, and the end goal is to end up in a situation where everyone is going yes, that seems like a reasonable enough consequence of what's been established in the world so far. I play with friends and I've never had anything particularly rocky come out of that, though I do think I run an unusually easy table of WWN*. Where did I learn that? I think it's mostly like - reading the books, and reading people talk about the books on the forum, and probably my own dose of "I am very interested in a game where it feels like we're handling the natural consequences of the established world, but not especially interested in having that actually require extremely challenging play, so negotiating with the players on how they want the rules of some stuff to be handled feels OK to me". On the other hand, over in Fabula Ultima, the rules say "if you're handling something big like that, build it out of clocks like in Blades in the Dark", which kind of means that, yup, whatever (reasonably in-genre) cockamamie plan the players come up with will work if they succeed in pulling it off, and - according to the narration genre - will play out in the way that it happens if that were a planned plot beat in a heroic fantasy videogame. But it also means that if they start a fight, you can't skip it without filling up a whole clock (and a "win the fight outright" clock is explicitly stated to be a big one), and given the math of the game, doing combat normally is usually the better idea. That flows from the rules in the game book, which include those mechanical systems, but also directly tell you "the heroes will achieve the impossible!" is one of its basic setting assumptions. Which, huh. I think, when I was younger, I did kind of skim over the stuff that felt like "fluff", philosophy of playing, that sort of thing, in my RPG books? But these are two examples of games roughly in the same genre (heroic fantasy adventure) that have vastly different ideas about what you should be thinking about while playing, and do actually state those assumptions in the books, and playing according to them... makes different, unique experiences that I can enjoy and tell the difference between. Both books contain a lot of writing about the mood and approach they expect from a GM, explicit and implicit. If I completely overrode those with my gut of how a game Ought to Work, I'd be running the games worse. (*: I did actually begin my last WWN campaign with "I'm not going to let the PCs die, probably, if you get wiped out I'll just write in some nasty plot twist, but if you pretend that I would, that'd make me happy. Similarly, I think the encumbrance rules are cool but if you ignore them within some approximation of what feels reasonable to you I won't care, really." Stuff like that. I got to be a player at the same table and was going "I'm counting my arrows even if no one else cares...!") DNE fucked around with this message at 12:28 on Apr 20, 2023 |
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Apr 20, 2023 12:25
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PurpleXVI posted:
I'm kind of confused by this. What would be the big drat problem if the players collapse a mine on some orcs? They'll think it's cool. They'll think you the DM is cool. It'll also have consequences. Uh-Oh. Good luck getting that loving treasure out of the collapsed mine. You guys ready to spend months and cartloads of gold on hiring an army of dwarves to excavate it? Oh, you do? Well that could be cool, too! Maybe the orcs inside start cannibalizing each other and the last survivors are loving horrific overpowered cannibal ghouls. Maybe they start digging for a way out and uncover some new deeper ancient cave full of fungus-men and now the players run into that poo poo when they finally open the mine. Maybe they start praying to their horrific god to save them and it demands they sacrifice each other and stack the bodies, and then the bodies all fuse together into some horrific John Carpenter flesh monster that eats the remains, and starts digging up towards the players. Sounds like a fun game. I'm pretty sure most tabletop RPGs just straight out say that players are allowed to try to do anything that their characters could conceivably do. Often this is covered under some stat checks or something, but the usual rule for doing something not covered by the rules is "The DM thinks of something." If it is something that is happening on the fly, it is often best to just make up something reasonable and move it along. If it is completely unreasonable, I expect my players to say something and then we end up with something that everyone agrees fits the fiction. If it is something that is going to come up a lot, you can make a more 'complete' rule for later or probably find someone on the internet who put in a lot of work to make something cool. This is, as far as I'm aware, one of the biggest plusses of playing a tabletop RPG as opposed to a videogames. Just because there is no specific rule about cooking, if one of my players makes their background as a chef and they want to cook up a feast to impress some hoi polloi, I'm not going to shut them down. Some games have rations you have to eat. These rations have prices. You can buy them in the shop. BUT, my players are starving out in the woods and they are days away from any settlement. "Let's cannibalize our prisoner!" they say! This is where I behind my DM screen quickly google how many calories are in a human body while asking them if any of their characters conceivably have butchery skills, and depending on their answers I would quickly come up with some sort of roll to determine how many useful rations they get out of it. I'd then tell them how long it would conceivably take, and away we go. What would you do? Tell them to gently caress off, it's not in the rules? Handwave some Doritos that fall out of a tree? My job is to make the world come alive, and I'm never going to shut them down if they're coming up with interesting or creative ideas that can 'realistically' be applied in the campaign. Mr. Grapes! fucked around with this message at 12:58 on Apr 20, 2023 |
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Apr 20, 2023 12:39
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DNE posted:
This guy gets it! For anyone looking for a good writeup on this sort of philosophy of play, I'd check out the link below: https://lithyscaphe.blogspot.com/p/principia-apocrypha.html Mr. Grapes! fucked around with this message at 12:46 on Apr 20, 2023 |
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Apr 20, 2023 12:40
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Saguaro PI posted:Coming up with interesting ways of bypassing fights is fun, but if getting in a straight-up fight is something you're meant to actively avoid I question why you're playing a game with an armed and armoured warrior, likely running headlong at a monster, on the cover. The cover of a game is absolutely one of the ways players learn what the game is about. I’m not sure it’s a major one though. 
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Apr 20, 2023 14:13
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