I'm gonna say now, carefully, that there's no version of this conversation that ends well. I was angry when I left, and I am in no sense any less angry at any of the people whose presence and behavior encouraged me to leave.
@Miniman - As for how things are, I published a novel, spent a year and a half writing an interactive story, have been continuing as an RPG designer and am working on the next book. Also I work slave wages for a business that doesn't value me in an industry that exists as a parasite upon society
So, y'know, the usual
Long stretches of rage interrupted by fits of creativity
Surgadores still needs a lot of playtesting and tweaking, but the foundation is solid: you're luchadore surgeons who take turns wrestling Death away from the operating table while your co-workers save the patient.
@Lord_Gareth The mechanic involves drawing your luchadore mask and coloring it in as you use your different moves.
I also wrote Too Much Bubblegum for the 200 Word RPG Challenge; it's about trying to chew waaay too bubblegum as fast as you can before you and all your friends are replaced by alien infiltrators and nobody's left to fight for humanity.
@BESW I was specifically talking about the animation though
@BESW also, if avatars could be animated I know which one I would still be using (and yeah, I don't think it is necessarily a good idea if they were, but I can dream anyway)
that is a good point, yes -- I could see it being a great way to do episodic PbP though that doesn't suffer from the nightmarish time-commitment problems that a long-form PbP game suffers from though
I may be overthinking this, but I'm at the same time super curious about OSR and also find it lacking in stuff that I find fun. I'm more about the food and culture in fantasy than I am the swords and looting. So of course I want to try making an old school-like game that supports the angle of lighthearted, pastoral adventure.
But hoooooow? What does the chassis for that look like? I mean, there's Ryuutama, sure. I could just play that. But there's a design challenge in there.
@doppelgreener When I say "pastoral fantasy" it's in the literary sense. Tolkien is pastoral fantasy -- the hobbits are little country folk who are mostly interested in food and friendship. Pokemon is very focused on peaceful, countryside settings where adventure is less often about violence and more about relationships.
The early ones were definitely better; Martin the Warrior and Matteo in particular, I think.
Eventually they approached Nancy Drew levels of formulaic.
There was a major focus, though, on the charms and virtues of peaceful rural life, with war an unwelcome but often unpleasantly necessary intrusion in order to safeguard that life.
Mouseguard is about preserving peaceful rural life, but I don't think it's really about that life--the focus is on those who sacrifice that peace for themselves so others may have it.
Since they're mice, there's a struggle to overcome their mousy natures in order to make that sacrifice; but I'm not sure that's the same thing.
The pastoral fantasy genre isn't without its problematic elements, either. It's romanticizing a quality of life that's not realistic -- real life rural communities are practically apocalyptic.
Hmmm. Yeah, I don't think I'd call Mouse Guard pastoral, even though it has pastoral elements.
I recently read something saying that in your typical agrarian/post-apoc society you need 50 to 100 full-time workers in basic food-and-necessities jobs in order to support one full-time non-basics professional like a knight or a gemcrafter.
(the discussion had a through-line of talking about how stories need sources of food and other materials, and someone pointed out the cozy dystopian teenage stories which appeared to have, say, 500 kids living in one place, and none of them were farming.)
@BESW Yeah, that post came to my mind too. It's a good point, and in a world with magic there's a ton of ways to play with that basic fact. Like, what if this culture pushed automation via magically animated machinery?
There was a recent Kickstarter update on the state of Ryuutama, and they said they were very likely going to put it in the Creative Commons. So I may actually go ahead and hack that, considering it's one of my favorites that I don't get to play nearly as much as I'd like to.
Do: Pilgrims/Fate of the Flying Temple comes to mind as a mostly lighthearted (I think?) sort of RPG where people are trying to resolve challenges that in no way necessarily involve violence
Like, would it be about learning the culture from an outsider perspective (the GM knows the culture and the players are exploring it as their characters?), or managing the culture as administrators (supervising a transportation system?), or taking on expert tasks in professional fields in the culture (catering the prince's wedding)?
Probably unrelated:
I want a high-fantasy Fast and Furious movie. Cars in a medieval setting. Cars (not carriages or chariots) made of wood, iron & dragon magic
@BESW The ups and downs of travel, meeting new people and resolving differences, and taking on gigs to maintain your lifestyle and make something for yourself would be the big things. As GM, I'd make heavy use of a technique I use where I ask the player questions about the particulars of a thing. "There's a story about this tower. XYZ happened. What was the fate of the princess who lived there?" "The rules just call it rations. What exactly is this food that you bought? Have you had it before?"
A middle-aged noblewoman is widowed, and announces she's taking a pilgrimage (just to avoid being forced to become the stay-at-home head of house for a little while longer). Her family starts planning an extravagant and stifling caravan, so she grabs the nearest priest and a few of her friends and says "I'm going now bye!"
That kind of premise might make for a fun episodic game, where you get to visit roadside shrines and hear stories about the towns you visit, join other travelers on the road, and so forth.
@JuneShores It's a great book, though the pilgrimage gets waylaid by impending war. She winds up taking refuge in a border castle beset by sorcery, and has to struggle with her faith in order to resolve her own internal crisis and stop the war.
@JuneShores Sounds fun. Hmm. Social mechanics, probably some resource tracking, and some structure for collaborative improvised worldbuilding.
I highly recommend it. Paladin of Souls by Lois McMaster Bujold.
It's the second and best in a trilogy of books that can each stand on their own but take place in the same world with some overlapping characters; the main character of the second book is a background character in the first.
i'd definitely advocate structured and/or collaborative worldbuilding, including with guideposts and constraints because creativity is proportionate to constraints, and the blank page effect would be a game-stopper here
because a game about travel and exploration & learning new things means a game where new material is regularly being developed, and that's too much to put on just one person
Yeah, collaborative worldbuilding is a must, and I'd probably use some kind of guided prompts--maybe even different sets of prompts for different scenarios/settings.
I was just spured to think of like, a game about being peasants and warriors and maybe ninjas or mages, and all being drafted into a war and having different reasons to really want to stop the war
For each new scenario (arrive at a new town, pick up some new travel companions, etc), each PC picks a goal: something they want to learn, acquire, accomplish, etc.
When I was younger, I made a number of hikes with packs weighing between 25 and 35 pounds. (Including Pack Frame). I found that how you pack the pack is important, as well as how well you adjust the strap. The key bit for me, though, was my shoes/boots. Good boots made all of the difference. My core muscles were very strong, but on the hikes with the less than better boots the price I paid was significant.
@KorvinStarmast and the all, and often forgotten, need to adjust the pack so the majority of the weight is supported by your hips and not your shoulder.
@nitsua60 It also has some roots in Gygax's abstraction for weight. The weight values in 1e, and later 2e, are often artificially and even ludicrously high because they're also meant to represent how cumbersome and awkward the items volume makes it
@Lord_Gareth Yeah. I recall a post a few years back where Gary explained why they went with GP weight in OD&D rather than pounds. Can't find it, but it was an interesting point on game making more than simulation.
@Lord_Gareth I hate to say this, but it worked well enough to play, and it worked well enough. (Fast forward to the Diablo II inventory carrying five suits of mail back to town for the gold for gambling ... ) Snort
@Shalvenay Pretty much, yeah. The issue is that at no point did the game bother to explain this, as it failed to explain quite a few ideas that it enshrined, and now the tradition perpetuates because the industry trends towards being intellectually incestuous and self-referential
@Lord_Gareth the only inventory system I've fallen in love with in any sort of game whatsoever is EVE Online 's, but that's an outlier even in the computer game world.
mainly, D&D players expect D&D to keep "feeling like D&D" or "looking like D&D", so subsequent editions have to implement all the mechanics that are now tropes of D&D, which greatly limits the system's ability to evolve (see the widespread backlash to D&D 4e) and which ties it down to some of the worst ideas over its history because they're widely recognised features of the game.
@doppelgreener Not just that, it normalized quite a few of those ideas to the point where they infect other games. The martial/caster disparity thing, f'rinstance, has a shockingly large...let's say "fanbase" of people who think that magic obviously makes you better than other people and any system where it doesn't is "unrealistic"
My discourse may be colored by the fact that I idolized Gygax growing up only to later learn in my teen and adult years that he was sexist, stole his defining product from its co-creator, actively drove women out of the hobby, and enshrined ideas I don't like in the industry.
That kinda revelation makes a guy feel a certain way.
That's reasonable, but I gotta ask you to tone down the spice factor on those descriptions, since we have a Be Nice policy that also applies to people offsite.
We've also got a policy of avoiding expletives in chat, even if we might feel someone's earned them.
@miniman the problem is that we're more if a 1-2 encounters/rest group. The warlock is going to burn through their stuff quickly and be left Eldritch Blasting because that's all they've got left.
@Yuuki Paladin seems like a pretty easy class to reskin as "I worship a patron, and I'm a warlock". That requires coming from a perspective of classes being mechanical entrapments that might have nothing to do with your in-game narrative: a character who describes themself as a cleric could also just be a rogue mechanically.
@doppelgreener Yeah, I'm rather flexible with which Patron I'd go with so I'm tempted to just write a one-line description for each one and pass it to my DM and let him decide.
The only thing I find key to describe paladin is the oath. I like that 5e's distanced the paladin from the "holy knight" archetype it was in previous editions.
You can obviously still play it that way, but you don't have to anymore, which is nice.
@NautArch Yeah, this is what I hate about multiclassing. "Ooo, maybe I should postpone the multiclass because I get this cool feature here... but wait, I get an even cooler one next level... and then..."
(do you follow a personal code? do you have to follow the law of the land you're in? the law of the land you're from or choose to associate with? what laws do you follow when you're in the Infernally Evil Torture Citadel ruled by the Cursed Murderarchy -- do you have any obligation to honour or behave according to the local law? does the answer differ depending on whether you're there to do business or slay evil?)
So my Paladin has sworn an Oath to the Crown. This obviously means loyalty to royalty. While this means things like deals with devils aren't a moral quandary as far as the oath goes, choosing whether to disobey an unjust king is.
And just because I swore an Oath to the Crown doesn't mean I can't play the holy knight.
There's always RP-based personal codes.
@NautArch Yeah, I definitely like the flexibility.
@NautArch also sounds like it'd thoroughly clear up what the paladin's meant to care about: you don't care about laws or necessarily even a code, you just have a Cause, and it can be very clear whether you're acting in the course of that Cause or not.
@Yuuki I have a deep voice that is very well suited to cliche male villains and scary situations, but I have to make an effort to portray women or men with higher voices without it sounding completely incongruous. Though I also have been told I can manage a rather unsettling pastoral singsong.
> Backup has arrived! Because you're a member of the Scout Forces, while you're outgunned and in danger, you may spend a fate point to have reinforcements arrive. Place a Scout Force Reinforcements aspect on the scene with no free invokes, and then you and each other player each name a boost that represents how the newly-arrived reinforcements are helping to turn the tide in your favour via actions they're taking or things they brought with them.
Now I'm really curious: https://rpg.stackexchange.com/a/99373/4173 How is one supposed to choose when to use their torches and when to go at a faster pace, and how can they turn this into maps that are good, but not too time consuming? I understand the time management constraints being a thing, I just have no idea what strategies are effective.
Quick question for everyone who has played 5e before. I am being conscripted to DM, and I don't think any of us have much if any 5e experience. I've played other versions. What resources/books do I need to have all the basic rules of play?
Also: Is there an easy to run premade campaign? Hopefully one that won't take longer than 2-3 sessions?
I guess saturday morning isn't a great time to ask this
@Grey's age if say the PHB and DMG, with the latter not totally necessary, but helpful. I don't know of any prefabs, but making up a short story shouldn't be too hard, but a monster manual would help :)
I had never dm'd before I tried and it's not as hard as it sounds. You don't need to develop a whole world... This can be a learning campaign for everyone.
I have GM'd several RPGs before that are not D&D (Fate, Deathwatch, Star Wars). We first tried to play D&D using the 3.5 edition and it went horribly — too many books and too many options with no idea of where to start.
I have been told that 5E takes care of all that and is easier and more fun s...
It's got a pared-down version of the rules (no character creation, only cleric and wizard spells up to third level), pregenerated characters that nicely explain the class features' progression up through level 4 (hence no character-creation in the rulebook), and a short (30 pp.) adventure with greate notes for the first-time GM.
Is playing through The Mines Of Phandelver (hope I got that right) and looking things up in the rules while doing so an option?
The Lost Mines of Phandelver starts out relatively simple, specifically for beginners, so don't worry.
My group had several new players. Here's what we did, and i...
I'm new to playing D&D and RPGs in general, and I have a group that's unsure about the game.
Is the new Starter Set (5th edition) a good way to start? Is it even worth the cost when there are free alternatives for 5e? The character sheets for the pre-gens and the Basic Rules are online and I cou...
@ACuriousMind I'm playing a character in a persistent world, which means there are a lot of players who interact with some other people one day, some different ones the day after and so on. There's two characters I really, really like, but my character, or any character I could roll, is not compatible with them. And this frustrates me to no end, especially since one of those characters I like has started to play with someone else exactly the things i would have liked to play.
Well...that kinda sucks, but it also sounds as if you might want to re-evaluate why you're playing the characters you play in that world. (I mean here both taking a critical look at your character choice and at your choice of world)
So, the first character is evil beyond sanity. She's the kind of masochist that should not get access to D&D-like regeneration but has it. If people around her do not give her what she wants, she threatens them. The idea is wonderfully executed, but giving here what she wants would be tantampount to torture, and torture is an evil act even if the other character likes it. So my only option would be to turn my character evil (and I'd benefit a lot if my character became disgustingly evil as well, mechanically speaking), but this means I'd have to change my behavior with all other characters …
The second one is from a guild that wants to demolish the social pyramid and have everyone fight for their own good. This includes actively fighting all other guilds, sabotaging them, and I happen to really like the façade, but I also adore the layer of secrecy - I'm one of those players who would like to be part of all sorts of secrets, but learning this one is not going to turn out well.
@ACuriousMind I play the character I play in that world because I don't want conflict, and who cares if this does not further play, I just want to be an immersed spectator. (I guess?)
I guess I find it curious that both of the characters you really like and want to play with seem hell-bent on conflict, and then you say you don't wan't conflict.
@ACuriousMind That's why I can't interact with them properly. Their conflict presumes everybody getting in contact with that gets involved, and I would want to interact without the consequences (at least in the first case. In the second... I just like the character and how it's portrayed, and its abilities, but I don't like how it strongly believes that everything not in line with her aims has to be treated as a problem)
I don't know. I also seem to have a mechanical fascination with... ah, well, this needs explaining. Since in similar games every single character who was not ugly ar anonimous on purpose was unusually beautiful/handsome, the owners of this game decided to use a seventh stat to measure this. So we have very weak characters you'd die fore, very strong characters who are as ugly as hell and... ugly changelings mimicking supermodels. And this concept somehow fascinates me.
Zach, you've been having this problem since before I left. It's the same story every time, man. At some point you need to consider the possibility that you are the issue.
@eimyr the general sentiment of it being possible, or even common, to face this sort of "I would like to roleplay a character in a certain way but I don't feel like to" or "How I want to portray my character prevents me from having certain things I'd like to happen happen".
I mean, I know I'm very afraid of changing because after the change I might find myself in an even worse position, but I was not talking about the actions I'd need to take to solve the initial stimulation, I was talking aboout the rise of the initial stimulation itself.
I mean, the two characters I mentioned before? the second one I never interacted with it, not even once. I have a series of possible outcomes of the meeting in my mind, some I like but I don't think they will happen, some I dislike. Meanwhile, someone who embraces conflict is getting all the good outcomes I'm thinking about.
@Zachiel I believe you that you suffer from something here but I can't quite wrap my head around it. It sounds as if you want to do two different things simultaneously which are by their very nature mutually exclusive (engage with conflict-prone characters and stories while being conflict-averse), and you are frustrated that they exclude each other?
@ACuriousMind well, wouldn't you be frustrated if that happened to you? (In any case, there's nothing wrong or weird with me being frustrated. I guess I just need to do something else to distract me.)
@eimyr Did using different characters solve it for you?
@Zachiel Oh, it would frustrate me. But in this case it seems to me the solution is right in front of you: Keep playing your usual character and also start a new one where you engage in the conflict you want. I would submit that if you can't see yourself playing such a character then you don't really want to engage in the conflict - you just like to hear about it and imagine what it's like. Which is totally fine, and you shouldn't tear yourself apart over not participating in it.
@Zachiel I decided against it, in the end, because I've grown dissatisfied with the game in general. I didn't have enough time to put into a secondary character and got my kick elsewhere
Particularly, I changed games some time later and entered the new one with a fresh mindset, one that makes my characters follow the fun, instead of forcing the fun to follow my character.
OK, at this point I cleared my mind and my curiosity is sated, I'm still talking just because I don't like to leave you hanging and I feel some sort of closure is needed. The reason I don't want to create a new character for that is that this is a high level character that I leveled up in years and the set of abilities it got over time is crucial to how I would like to interact with these other characters. One possible solution would be asking this players to play some scene out of continuity, just for the sake of playing it out, but nobody wuold be gaining any XP for doing so, nor progress…
@eimyr This sparks a new question in me. Was it also harder to use? I mean, If i turned one of my current characters into something more conflict driven, it would mean actively looking for things to do, rathr than reacting to enviromnet shifts.
specifically because my first character was risk-averse and good narratives come from tension and tension often comes from conflict it was harder to have a satisfying plotline with her
Like, right now I just wait for things to happen, or I just meet people and talk about nothing important for a while. I imagine that looking for conflict would have me making some plans
Because they would have an inconvenience to solve, which is spending time they might spend doing something more productive and fun like solving inconveniences caused by NPCs
I don't really like my character being in trouble. It makes me anxious. Maybe having a better system mastery would solve that, because maybe then I'd know how to get out of troubles,,, but then, I recognize other people might not be like me.
@eimyr Eh, most traditional RPGs are the players running around battling inconveniences caused by NPCs (or the GM, depending on how you want to look at it), so I'd not say that
Look, Zachiel, plot is like politics: you need skin in the game to stay in the game. You can't have it both ways. This is still the same song and dance over and over again; you want to play but without the effort or risk of participation.
Is playing through The Mines Of Phandelver (hope I got that right) and looking things up in the rules while doing so an option?
The Lost Mines of Phandelver starts out relatively simple, specifically for beginners, so don't worry.
My group had several new players. Here's what we did, and i...
