The book always describes them appearing back into the natural realm with the carriage on fire, body parts hanging off the carriage, and all the survivors get off, puke, and head to a bar
That sounds like it would be incredibly fun to be a part of.
(I have my own thing to attend to, but dang)
I'm personally preparing to run a Fate campaign with my friends. My attempts to wrap my brain around how Fate approaches things are on display in the FATE game room.
@KyleSykes we have a somewhat similar set up in our Ars Magica game, where we're charged with fixing issues for other magi as we travel across Europe, and the problem we came across is... Because we don't care about those magi or their situation, we tend to solve the adventures in the most efficient way possible. Which often does not equate the most fun way.
We used a grid for so long, and that was cool and all
But it sort of took away from other things we like about the game, and made it more of a "oh shit I need only the best powers even though they don't really make sense"
@Magician I do the same in my group, but I'm not particularly satisfied with that. Anything I want to make mechanically very significant generally comes down to creating a fight vs monsters of some form. I am very much valuing the fact I could use Fate to throw my characters into a situation they were never, ever made for and they'll still be competent.
@JonathanHobbs Yup, I've tried to resolve meaningful issues via combat, sometimes going so far as to personify someone's feelings into things others can hit :D
@Magician I suppose that's a decent way to do it 8)
I am super hyped up about Fate though and the whole thing where we get to create our own magic system and such.
I mentioned an example at some point in this room or the Fate one where I want to be able to, say, have a major antagonist assault the PCs via a psychic assault and throw them into a nightmare realm that runs on dream logic. In Fate, there's all sorts of ways that could take form.
And that would be one of the situations I could expect the PCs to succeed in even if they were never created with dealing with psychic assaults in mind. Some of them might crack. The strong-willed, or the socially or magically competent might fare quite well.
Plus fun stuff that should work well in D&D 4e but doesn't can work well here. D&D 4e's diseases are not a great system unless I completely replace it with homebrewed stuff. In Fate, I could have a disease or curse be an aspect or a character or an extra depending on how I want it to work.
Also, 4e's save mechanics meant that virtually anything with (save ends) on the end would probably only get one round to do anything, which kinda sucked.
@trogdor BESW advised me against tinkering with save modifiers since the system kinda depended on them working the precise way they did. He said on his own he just replaced (save ends)-anything wholesale with (ends at definite point or on particular condition being fulfilled)
Hm. Diseases in 4e. Yeah, they didn't work. Mostly because after level 8 or so they were simply a "spend a trivial amount of money for the cure disease ritual" speedbump.
Fair enough. It's just... a D&D thing. We didn't play in the era of 10-foot poles and rolls of rope, but cure disease and raise dead are still a must have.
(for the reasons above I consider myself very lucky to have BESW as a GMing mentor)
(I have said this at least once before and it is worth saying again)
He generally finds challenges that don't involve death as a consequence because it's boring; he probably picked diseases because he knew it would be a new threat the players had only limited tools for.
(middle of a dungeon, unprepared, have to stick with it, etc)
Was that actually a dungeon with Slaadi in it?
Was that the one with the giant teleporting brute?
that Kobold was the character that BESW has mentioned needed to be remade because he forgoed dealing damage to make any creature cry in a corner for the whole fight
the Kobolds intedned character progression was to have a near death experience, meet the Golden one in what may or may not have been a fevor dream, and wake up ok
and that was to be his motivation to mend his ways of thievery, and his attitude of being ok with sacrificing allies for his own survival
as it happened, that was also a good excuse to make him stop doing his "you cry in corner now" thing
so he switched from ranger, with feats to make all his various damage dice turn into crying in the corner instead, and a very selfish attitude, into a monk who was very self important
who gradually became rather charitable, not as in giving money, but in working to help others
he backslid into stealing things every once in a while
but it wasn't his default attitude for the rest of the game
@JonathanHobbs Yes, actually, it was the same dungeon. We spent several sessions in it and it was a year ago, so @trogdor may be justified in confusion.
@Magician Yeah. It's all very clever and empowering, but... the fact that the system necessitates such bizarre convolutions...
Kre-O seems to be Hasbro's answer to Lego's and the brand seems to be aiming to be fueled by Hasbro's existing IPs. Currently it's mostly transformers.
Also Mearls just tweeted the link to the first article I posted so that certainly gives weight to it being truth
4e was panned and turned out to be a very nice game
@AlexP I've been mixed on the playtest from both reading and actual play. But what I will say is that Mearls has been responsible for some of the really good improvements in 4e, especially along the essentials line.
nwod's mechanics are easier to use and more uniform across subsystems, while wod had arguably better fluff (IMHO) though the subsystems admittedly contradicted each other
And blog posts like this one indicate that for many groups, making major choices in a totally random way is desired.
So that when a GM for that kind of group runs into the rare instance where it's not desired, it's better to have a stopgap measure like "justify a re-roll" than to tear out the whole system.
@AlexP Yeah, it makes me kermitflail, but I have to remind myself that it's a legitimately appreciated approach by many groups.
For many GMs, I think, the point of GMing is in the creative circumventing of rules when the rules fail to support the gameplay.
And for that, the wider the gap the better.
Goodness knows, some of my favorite D&D moments sprung out of creative solutions to problems that only existed because of the system I was using.
Those moments wouldn't translate into any other system because the problems they were founded on didn't exist. There was a level of meta-narrative inherent in running a D&D campaign because of the constant struggle against its flaws.
It's kind of like watching Primer or Brick or Equilibrium. You not only appreciate what the film is doing, you appreciate that it's doing these things on such a low budget.
The film just wouldn't feel as good if it'd been done on a better budget.
@BESW It's kinda awkward when the entry path to the hobby is (or at least was, for 15+ years) that kind of thing, though.
Because I don't think you can appreciate Equilibrium working around its budget when it is your first taste of a movie and the only movie anyone around talks about.
(I'm excluding D&D 4e and subsequent here, because I do not think it fits the mold as much.)
(I'm tar-and-feathering everything from when they printed Dragonlance adventures to D&D3.5/PF, including Vampire when it was top dog and gateway game. That is "middle school" to me.)
Maybe I'm forgetting the part of the original "goblin dice" article that talked about when they do work well.
But basically it drives me crazy that "middle school" tends towards wanting to roll the dice all the time and then avoid what they tell you.
> You roll high, a goblin dies. You roll low, a goblin lives. No one doubts the eventual fate of the poor goblin. It doesn’t matter if it’s killed this round or the next. But it’s still fun to roll those dice, just as it is fun to fight the scrambling goblins. Hence, goblin dice: good for determining the fate of goblins. Not so good for determining the fate of heroes, or worlds. They are terrible for anything important.
> They are meant to be rolled a bunch of times over the course of killing goblins, not once to see if you can survive/convince the king to help you/save the world. Failing a roll is anti-climatic, but that’s ok, contingent on getting more rolls soon.
I think what I dislike is that the "middle school" style is still the culture of gaming that is presented to the "outside world," even as the gateway games and the pillars of various playstyles and whatnot have shifted away from that.
I like that I can basically hate all of these things: rolling a lot of dice, not rolling dice, dungeons, parties, character classes, magic items, experience points, backstories, immersion, chatty scenes, and "story" by at least half of everybody's definition of it -- and yet I still am playing and enjoying RPGs. It's a great hobby, deep down. :)
It's almost too broad to be considered all of a piece.
Because nothing you mentioned is inherent to the medium.
This is actually one of the great stumbling blocks for the community, I think.
That no matter what our experience with RPGs, there will be people in the set "people who play RPGs" whose experience is entirely alien to ours.
Even the idea that there's no such thing as D&D is hard to wrap our heads around; if we're all playing 3.5, why aren't our conversations making any sense?
