The DM sent out an email detailing his policy on table talk (namely, let's start enforcing that exactly one person talks at a time, and if you have questions during turn-based play they need to wait until your turn) that is sufficiently thorough and compelling that I'll see how that affects the dynamic before proposing anything else.
Release the Wombat of Discourse!
This is my default strategy for the first time a group starts talking over each other so much it hinders play: I bring a stuffed animal to the session, and name it The [Animal] of Discourse. The GM may speak at any time, but only the player with the Animal can ta...
Up until now there's been a lot of chatter - one person asking me a question about rules, another asking the DM a question about the room so they can plan their turn while the player whose turn it is debates out loud what to do - the effect of which I was probably underestimating and so failed to convey before.
@BESW Yeah he's actually super experienced, just hasn't had to deal with either a new group or new players in a while, and doesn't know 5e as well as I do
Hoping that last will stop being true soon, though
@BESW I think people usually hear the plans as we argue about them for a bit, but they may miss some description, and also just the chaos contributes to frustration and slowness which leads to further frustration.
The GM also made an interesting point about letting people make mistakes and letting that drive the drama of the story if need be instead of having players tell each other what to do, so he's going to keep communication between players to what you could shout over a battle in six seconds (in character). Otherwise everyone's on their own during combat.
While I think that in the short term, when the question is not "what is the optimal tactical move" but "I want to do X, what do I roll again?" it is a bit faster to have us advise our neighbors so they can plan their turn during others' turns, after thinking about it I think it'll probably stick better if they can be on the spot a little and deal with the consequences of their actions, as well as hear the answers to other similar questions.
We're also through the introductory dungeon and into more of a sandbox mode (he'll still provide plot options, but we're free to ignore them). All in all it'll be a different game next session, that's for sure.
@nitsua60 I wonder what she'd think of being introduced to who just happens to be my richest char -- he's more of a cross between roguish fighter pilot and Texas oil patch baron than anything a socialite would find familiar though ;)
@nitsua60 Ah, a C5/C5 makes a good vacation spot I find -- bonus points for roomies on va-ca to shack up with, capital escalations take more than one pair of hands you know?
There was that one time I took a little overnight trip to Nova, though....*winks*
@trogdor [hyperbole--just overstating how hard it actually is to figure things out. Our P&R page has links to maps to the other towns' locations, but those don't provide names or addresses, just a screenshot of a Google Map someone pulled up once.
The other town's P&R page has a calendar of events which doesn't indicate at which of the eleven parks any event is being held.
Consider the wizard who remembers as a new youngling (lvl 1) being absolutely useless in a knife fight. Picks on up 40 years later (having never touched one since) at lvl 20. Now with his BAB 10, he can defeat all but the finested knife fighters in the rogues court.
But that is cos DnD does not treat weapon use as a skill, but rather part of your ... idk.... fundermental nature
@Oxinabox Exactly my point. I want to RP my character as "I need to train hard, I have no time for fun" but when everybody else in the party is slacking and they improve the same, it's hard to justify without going "I'm worse than you, I need to train to keep up".
I agree, so go find a good system. DnD is one of the only systems with this kinda flaw **(other systems have different flaw)** where there are things that are affected solely by your Level and not by training. In DnD this is your BaB and Saves. L5R is the other systems I can think of that does this, and it is does it with defense.
Tonight we played Lasers & Feelings. By the end of the session we'd cured the crew of cyber zombism by shooting the cyborg bits off with medical laser guns, in the process smashing all of the ship's power crystals. Unfortunately the cyber virus adapted to the medical laser just after the doc who invented it got infected, so he can't help us figure out how to cure him.
Also our alien pilot is careening through space in an escape pod, being chased by a ship of his own people who want him for war crimes. They're unaware that he filled their ship's hold with alien cyber zombies.
Now we're drifting, powerless and without communications. But we stopped the cyber zombies from using the ship's crystals to rip a hole in the fabric of the reality, so we've got that going for us.
Yesterday me (clr17) and a wizard (wiz10 master of the sevenfold veil 5) fought against a bunch of yuan-ti abominations (six CR7 and two CR15). Meanwhile, a level 24 barbarian/warrior is fighting against six yuan-ti abominations acting as slow-him-down mooks, two mariliths casting defensive spells between the boss and the party and one of those youan-ti demigods with six heads, whose falchion alone is now 12m long. I have no idea if I should feel underperforming or not. Maybe I should decide which magic weapon to get.
@Zachiel That begs the question "What is roleplaying?" Gaining talents through study is a common simultationist goal, not one necessarily inherent to roleplay.
@BESW I guess my environment likes simulationism, but with a sane dose of just enough abstraction to let D&D work (we're playing in the Forgotten Realms, not in the Tippyverse, after all).
Basically, I need motivations for my character to be believable and the character to be pleasurable to play with (for other players, acting jerky to others is ok as long as it doesn't do much harm to their characters or overall plot and it feels like it belongs in the fiction).
And once again my character is slowly drifting towards "who cares, there's too much evil in the world, we can't win this war anyway and we're going to die anyway sooner or later, let's just relax until the apocalypse happens" (basically, real-life me)
It is different systems for different folks, and different games. Like the system I am currently working on takes DnD's inability to get better at combat by training to the next level. It is outright impossible for you to get better at combat, or even for anyone to be better or worse at combat. All that matters is weapons and if you are ganging up on a person (/beign ganged up on)
What is the point representing fine detail of combat skill when there are so many things that are literally invincible and/or can kill a person by looking at them
And more so, when the player characters have the ability to create such monsters, easily.
@SevenSidedDie This question isn't really a duplicate, because it includes "that the effect will last for a whole day", which isn't addressed anywhere in the dupe target.
According to the community FAQ, backticks and inline links are available for the bounty remark.
What other formatting features of Markdown are also supported on Bounty remarks?
There is a lot of material written on random generation of dungeons for play. But inevitably characters have to return from the to spend those ill-gotten gains. And where else but a nearby settlement, be it village, town, or city?
Obviously the larger the settlement the more involved or recurs...
@SirTechSpec on your question about picking a 5e module, I've had some real writer's block on my promised answer. So I'm going to just post some notes/thoughts over in the Not a Bar if you want to take a look.
@nitsua60 That all looks great, thank you so much!
It doesn't directly address "how do I find an adventure that has these qualities" but I'm guessing the answer to that one will turn out to be "go to progressively less-friendly, less-local game stores until you find one big enough to have a selection you can flip through and check"
What are some good ways for mechanical things to fail forward? I'm creating a "The Mechanic" character. One ability is that he can fix anything, however grand, but that ability will always fail forward and the thing he fixed will need even more fixing afterwards.
Most Stack sites have found that "shopping" style questions are a very poor fit for this site's format, while other sites do it pretty well. We tried doing game recommendations for several years, but eventually the noise-to-signal ratio got too great.
So for example, he could get a car running in no time even if it's been out for years, but doing so breaks the car and it's unlikely to be repairable afterwards.
The car in the example would work for plot hours obviously.
Yeah... So I wanted to ask a question if, there is a setting in a specific convention...
I want to try some Tabletop system in which characters can be like Altair, Ezio Auditore, Zorro, Musashi Miyamoto. However it doesn't matter how powerful you are, when somebody holds a knife against your throat. All they need is one cut and this is your end. The best option would be, if there was no magic or the magic was weak.
I'd prefer something more strict. One of my players would probably kill boss, his minions, destroy his castle and get the princess with a single wag of his whip...
[shrug] The only example you gave that I know well is Zorro. I'm going on quick Googles here.
And none of them seem to fit the "traditional" RPG party concept.
Some systems cater to that more than others.
Like, The Princes' Kingdom is about a group that can succeed on most anything if they work together, but it's designed to present moral challenges which divide the group's focus and makes them get in each others' way.
I gave their examples, because of their "heroism". They could go 1 v 10 without a special problem. They run over roofs jumping from one building to another. etc.
I remember when someone was talking about Feng Shui. I remember throwing a firtruck against somebody who makes 50 feet high somersault and a few buildings behind him explode.
So, I am feeling a bit insecure about this idea :D
-Mechanics more dependant on one's skill, not luck. -Be able to perform amazing dodges, staunts, attacks. -Characters may be powerful, but still they are mortals and will die in a hopeless situations.
Can't find Unisystem samples. I mean something more detailed about skills etc.
@Momonga-sama I agree, now that I know that's an important thing for you.
(See why this would be really hard to make fit on a strictly Q&A site? This sort of back-and-forth is required to make suggestions that are anywhere close to helpful, but the Stack proper doesn't do that.)
Burning Wheel is coming to mind now, but I'm not personally experienced with it.
@Miniman I suppose it could be shortened to just asking how long it lasts and then reopened, though the other Q's answers do say it works just like the spell so I'm not sure it's necessary.
Unisystem is like the d20 System or pre-Core Fate: it exists only as applications to settings or conceits, not on its own as a generic engine with the serial numbers filed off.
I"m not sure I've got the ability to turn that wall of text into an answer =( I've already tried a few times and fallen short. But I hope it helps, and I guess I misread your question as "what are the things to look for...?" Sorry.
According to the community FAQ, backticks and inline links are available for the bounty remark.
What other formatting features of Markdown are also supported on Bounty remarks?
There is a lot of material written on random generation of dungeons for play. But inevitably characters have to return from the to spend those ill-gotten gains. And where else but a nearby settlement, be it village, town, or city?
Obviously the larger the settlement the more involved or recurs...
