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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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| # ¿ May 20, 2024 09:47 |
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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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I always made them start over as feeble level 1s, but get big xp until they reach parity. They're learning from seasoned adventurers 
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Apr 27, 2023 15:53
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PurpleXVI posted:Let me tell you about our Lord and Savior the 2nd edition AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide which presented this exact perspective of Encounters as being merely any situation in which the players had agency and could make meaningful choices that affected things, and where "random encounter tables" included everything from passing patrols to merchants and other oddities rather than merely an exhaustive list of angry wildlife. traveller also has this but traveller has 6d66 tables for every subtable so better pray RNjesus takes the wheel. Probably a good idea to use them lightly if you have any kinda plan for a campaign that isn't just let er rip, but at least even if you leaned hard i don't think you'd get too many repeats.
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Apr 29, 2023 13:16
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