fine here -- although trying to figure out what should balance a strong fighting char, if social problems aren't it (and also finally getting a measure of engagement with my character's social flaws, for one)
Perhaps one element you're struggling with is defining balance?
"Balance" can mean many different things, but it's often treated as some kind of objective truth.
For some, balance can mean "story-breakingly competent in one area, provided they're crippled to uselessness in another area." For others, it might be "good at a few things and competent in many, but neither auto-win nor auto-fail in any."
in real life, someone might be an exceptional jiu-jitsu practitioner. this is a martial art which is extremely hard to deal with; masters of other martial arts have been crushed by jiu-jitsu practitioners. that person could also be a perfectly socially functional human being who's a good conversationalist, fun to spend time with, gentle with people, a good listener, knows all the good places in the city to hang out and get a meal or a drink, and so on.
this is a completely probable human being, and could also be a fun character to play, and i could make him right now and play him in our atomic robo fate game and we'd get along just fine.
he doesn't need any sort of balancing, because i don't foresee him creating any problems, overshadowing anyone, and so on.
This is partly because the ARRPG skill point/mode system has built-in safeguards to avoid hyper-competence across too wide a set of fields (something the FST talks about explicitly as a balance value).
yeah. even putting that aside, in atomic robo, he excels at combat and banter, but there are areas of expertise he doesn't cover, like science, vehicles, and so on. he's not inherently a master at everything the game is about, so nobody will feel overshadowed by this guy who is at least as good as they are at everything they can do.
he doesn't have any flaws with regards to his technical or scientific capabilities - he might be pretty competent on his computer at home and might've gotten an A+ in all his science classes through high school - he just won't be an expert on physics to the same degree as the guy who's spent his last 20 years studying environmentally friendly weaponry.
@BESW yes, this too. he can still be tripped up socially and physically. someone can get the best of him. he's very good, but there's no concept of him being unbeatable.
@Shalvenay yes, and that is a well-explored problem you need to deal with (and which is currently banned from this room, so let's not go into it)
in general the solution to balancing your character who auto-wins too often is to stop auto-winning. in this case, this comes from your approach to the game at a meta level, and no level of in-game handicaps is likely to make up for it. if it were an in-game trait, i'd try to diagnose the cause by reflecting on play, then take a look at my sheet, see the contributors, and think: "Hmm, maybe Babbage shouldn't have Attack +4 and Weapon:8."
but if it's how I am playing, then I need to change how I'm playing - no amount of changes to my character will fix how I play. Like, I could take this martial arts guy then find a way as a player to force every conflict into a physical one or a social one, i.e. his domains of power, but that would upset the dude whose area of power is neither of those things and instead doing science.
Right, we can't delve into specifics there too deeply here. But if your mode of play is overwhelming others by engineering the situation to suit whatever you're given -- if you're driven to find a way around any problem no matter what -- then giving your character problems won't help. You'll work around them.
Grah. My attempt to order adorable plushes was foiled by probably overwhelming site traffic in the last half hour of their free shipping promotion. C'est la vie.
Not that I really needed more anyway. :v I made the semi-mistake of ordering a large-sized Alpacasso recently. It's bigger than several of my dogs. What will I even do with this giant alpaca? Only time will tell.
These aren't new ideas--Ganymede's been suspected of having an internal ocean since the 70s--but it was unprovable until less than a month ago, when it was confirmed twice over.
As dismaying as it was to have our manned space expeditions curtailed so abruptly, it's really pushing people to see what unmanned expeditions are capable of.
i recall there are a lot of other events in scientific history where two people in two places relatively isolated from each other have nearly simultaneously come up with the same concept or found two different proofs for the same one
This is really inevitably going to put manned missions back on the table, by ramping up our understanding of the Solar System until we just have to go out ourselves because there's so much awesome stuff to poke at.
Knowing more about the nature and content of the SS means manned missions won't just be exploratory: they'll have very deliberate, actionable agendas to "go here, do this" rather than "go here, see if it's there."
@doppelgreener It's actually a fairly common theme throughout human innovation, not just in science.
i for one plan to bring my proposal for an intercontinental ship railgun to the UN sometime this year, only i am concerned that the paperclipped set of cocktail napkin doodles may be considered somewhat brief
stellata becoming druidic is going to be a natural development of her abilities and senses. she's already intuitively intimately connected with the natural world around her, and probably feels her best walking on living soil.
however, it's also possible that it'll become a natural development of her ambitions. i know and she knows there's places that the natural world is being destroyed, like the amazon rainforest's logging. but if stuff is becoming endangered in general, she might start to feel she has something to fight for - a world of fauna that can't fight for themselves as easily, at least, not against invasive species and the humans who move much faster than them.
however this would carry her in the direction of potentially annoying character traits, so i would want a sensible way for walking that line. she won't be someone who flinches if you step on a daisy, but she might just quietly encourage growth in the places she goes to.
I wish people wouldn't downvote first questions by new users without some kind of explanation. There's been a rash of it lately, and all it does is make the site feel unwelcoming
@Phil Probably because there's been a rash of really awful posts, and people aren't willing to put the effort in to explain downvotes on all of them. (Disclaimer: "people" here includes me.)
plus she could like... encourage a root system to engorge so she can use it to her advantage. and then leave it there, healthily (mostly) grown and stronger than before.
When I logged in today hoping to see new answers, I was surprised when I found that my question was on hold. The notice has flagged it as too broad. There was one comment suggesting that system-agnostic is an inappropriate tag, but that is it.
To the six users who put my question on hold, what...
my friends recently moved out of a house that was a total wreck
then the real estate agent sent them a big repair bill with all sorts of problems which would've eaten up most of their deposit
they replied back saying: the house was in terrible shape when we got there, prove based on the entry report that we did it.
... turns out someone hadn't followed up on the paperwork properly and there was no entry report completed. if there was, it still would've listed the house as being in a mostly irrecoverable state in the beginning.
they got out just paying for some water bills and that was it.
(also i dunno about there but in Australia, if you can't agree with your home's property manager over what portion of the bond should be refunded, you can fill out a bond form yourself, and if the property manager disagrees some processes get followed. probably the house being made poorly is going to put things on your side.)
in my own previous tenancy the owner got some gardeners and cleaners in, and from the itemised bill it looks like they did proper cleanup which we didn't have the time to do but the gardeners and cleaners also did a bunch of work which improved the house beyond what it was like when we started the tenancy. we worked it out and split things 50/50 rather than 0/100 (which seemed relatively fair, going off the cleaning descriptions).
break into the house next year as an april fool's joke, the cops will understand i am sure
anyway i think i was saying some of that in part because i hadn't spoken much about that and i was involved in both things happening and it felt so good
Secretly I'm hoping Gen Con does move farther east & closer to my home, although in truth Indiana is probably close to the "center of mass" of RPG players in the United States.
So 5e is going to release later in the fall, theres this big level 1-10 adventure using the final playtest ruleset with a bunch of the world lore built in that they decide to release a gen con exclusive
no word on an eventual digital release
months go by
PHB comes out
then in late decemeber they release the adventure via drivethrurpg
Whatever happened to the company that was going to publish a digital character creation sheet for 5e? They couldn't meet a deadline, or their product was too buggy?
There was no full disclosure of the reasons, probably for some very good legal reasons
from the roundabout way some of the laid off or still with the company employees talked about it though it seems like they had lots of delays and WOTC had the option contractually to kill it
From my experience with their "beta" and the fact that baseline PC building features were lacking right away and the UI was the worst I can fully understand why
I mean they were and are a digital book licensing and accessibility platform developer, not an RPG manager developer and it showed
I mean I like that they had an open ticket system for their beta to create a user driven experience, its just like, why did you not have test groups far, far earlier
the beta also felt kinda deathmarchy, like they were trying to show WOTC they could still do it
Many RPGs provide a detailed game system for combat, which determines the limitations of various characters and provides a metaphysics in which equally 'powerful' characters-- characters who are equally 'good at combat'-- can be differentiated from each other.
No system I am aware of provides a ...
@JoshuaAslanSmith Yeah, but it took them all the years of 4e's life to get there, only to shut it down once it was decent. I can't imagine the money pit that was.
@JoshuaAslanSmith Oh, it's thedarkwanderer. As in, should know better. I noticed the "I would like an overview" at the end, but man alive, the number of games that do what they're looking for is a mountain.
@JoshuaAslanSmith Is it? I knew they were going to keep it going "as long as it's feasible". I wasn't sure how long that would actually be, so good on 'em for that.
Yeah there is a good system optimization question OR a system recommendation question in there, somewehre
yeah I mean I dont have an account, I let my payment lapse when I got a new bank card since I wasnt playing and was only using it to answer 4e questions here (which dropped off with 5es release)
@JoshuaAslanSmith I don't think a game-rec can be pulled out of there though. I sense a lack of further requirements, which would make narrowing it clunky and artificial. SE might be an excellent hammer, but this need a wrench and a forum is an excellent wrench. "I want a game that does non-combat stuff awesome" is something a forum will excel at.
Id like to hope WOTC somehow releases the library as a paid product at some point, I'd totally throw them dollars to get access to the compendium, the character builder, and the monster builder
@JoshuaAslanSmith users can lump it. I don't like trying to accommodate the impulse to use SE for all things. I do think it's awesome and I understand the impulse, but that impulse is bad for the site.
While on the topic of game optimization... have you guys ever tried competitive player vs. player campaigns in D&D? Or is D&D better suited to cooperative games where the players work togetehr to beat up on the bad guys?
@JoshuaAslanSmith I'd be very surprised if they did that, given Hasbro overlords. But, with Hasbro backing off the WotC division and letting them do their thing, maybe it'll happen?
It works a bit better if you have team vs team, because the micro-scale swingyness gets smoothed over. But if one side is more charoppy than the other, the macro-scale swingyness can be magnified.
There are some very well-made tournament/gladiator boardgames out there. I've been out of the loop for too long to recommend any (except Gladiator (from 1981!)), but they're out there.
Boardgames would work, and there are plenty of PvP dungeon adventure/hex crawl boardgames. But D&D does have the advantage for encouraging out of the box tactical solutions.
For PvP that's not exclusively combat-based, there are a bunch of good RPGs too. Houses of the Blooded is one.
Most of the *World games are also good at PvP conflict (conflict as opposed to combat, mind). Burning Wheel is awesome for PvP conflict and combat, as is The Riddle of Steel.
@RobertF The last two take a lot of player skill though, and it's completely unlike the skills needed in grid-based games like D&D though. Oh, and TRoS is OOP. For its in-print successor you might look at Blade of the Iron Throne.
What about a scavenger hunt type D&D campaign, where teams are racing to collect the most treasure? Suppose there would have to be rules curtailing players simply murdering each other at the start of the game for the quick win. Maybe they start out in different villages.
@SevenSidedDie I suspect he's phrasing things like that to further justify his views on the couple of meta questions about idea solicitation questions and game survey questions
which would also explain the 'overview' tag he's just created
@RobertF D&D would probably work really well for that. In fact, AD&D tournaments worked much like that, with parties competing to do the same dungeon best.
@Phil That's how it's done, so fair enough. It's a bit questionable to take it to main when it's not got support on meta, but there's sorta support for a different pro-overview view on meta...
yeah I get that - it just bugs me that he seems to be deliberately constructing questions in such a way to support the view rather than waiting for them to naturally occur
I can see a tournie style game would work where there's no interaction between teams. Yea, things get complicated once you introduce PvP options. The other option is have one player or team running the bad guys based in the dungeon while the other team plays the dungeon delvers.
In the past I've thought about running a game where one player designs the dungeon & populates it with monsters, traps, etc. The only problem is that all designed dungeons may end up with a trivial Tomb of Horrors style design, right? The first 50 feet of corridor will be a series of deadly traps.
That would be pretty hard to do in a balanced way in D&D.
There's a lot of dungeon design that's dependant on the specific group, and you can totally hamstring certain groups with simple traps or creatures, depending on their composition.
I think the main problem (assuming you were allowed to build your own characters) would be the actual deployment of things like pun-pun. There's not a hard line between theoretical optimization and practical optimization you can really point at in rules. That could probably be solved by premade characters I suppose.
@IgneusJotunn or you can just play a system with reasonable limits on optimization (4e/5e perhaps)
(most of the truly broken things in 4e have been patched or can be easily outlawed. Less aware of 5e's optimization subculture right now, but the design of the system allows for less of that kind of broken by default)
@DuckTapeAl - Good points. Although there is one big advantage a PvP style game has over conventional cooperative gaming. When you're playing in a team of PCs against the DM, a typical D&D adventure is "rigged" a little bit by the DM so that the players don't die prematurely but are still challenged just enough. It's a tough balancing act. (Ok, unless a player makes a really dumb decision that justifies getting axed.)
But with PvP you're playing against an opponent who's really out to get you, which ratchets up the tension and (hopefully) the fun.
@DavidReeve yes, the Adv League supplement helps some, introduces some house rules and provides some solid ground for the DM to stand on re: rulings. But yeah, if I had my pick right now, 4e all the way for tourney type settings
@DavidReeve You might be able to get around that by using the same DM/adventure combination. That way there's a kind of consistency to the subjective stuff.
@Phil I've overhauled my answer to that meta, given some more pondering on why overviews are (sometimes) a problem. Same message, more details and cutting to the heart reasons:
Why overviews can't save "looking for a game" questions
There are two kinds of overview questions:
I want to understand an aspect of the hobby. This is an existing aspect of the hobby that is worthwhile understanding for its own sake, not for the list of games that it generates.
I want to see ...
@Phil The problem is that most RPG handbooks and GM's guide don't talk about these issues. Social issues aren't "game issues", they're "people issues" and implicitly out of scope.
I asked a question that got closed for not being suited for the Q&A format that RPG.SE uses, and was told that my question would work better on a roleplaying games forum.
Where can I find an RPG forum?
I asked a question that got closed for not being suited for the Q&A format that RPG.SE uses, and was told that my question would work better on a roleplaying games forum.
Where can I find an RPG forum?
The biggest selling point for ENWorld seems to be their industry connections, so there's always news and stuff that's there. But I suppose that's more of a point for it as a community, less a place to send people 'cause they have a question.
Eh. The idea isn't to sell the community, so much as its direct utility for "I have a question, where do I take it."
They might like it and stay for a while, but people can figure out that part themselves. I'd rather the pros and cons focus directly on helping them figure out which link to click for a specific forum-style question.
It's a big reason why I dropped 4e weeks after release despite being psyched for it for months. It works great for some people, but for my RPGing needs it doesn't. Too much work to figure out what an event looks like (which is core to what I play for), and that's not where I like to spend my energy.
@William'MindWorX'Mariager I have a PHB1 that was converted into a "hidden thing" book by a former player of that first and only campaign. There are cutouts for chocolate inside.
@William'MindWorX'Mariager I wouldn't destroy it either. But he had moved far away and was never going to use it, and he's irreverent like that. So he glued it together, carved out space for a pair of Green & Black's, and mailed it to us. Now it holds the household stock of "emergency chocolate." :)
I really feel for the asker wanting other people to run new RPGs. I am totally in that boat. And I'm really not surprised that there is no magic bullet in the answers.
I feel like one-shots are probably the best solution there.
It's pretty unrealistic to convince someone else to run a game if you are the only one promoting it, but a one shot might get it in the door enough that someone else will pick it up.
A lot of people won't see the point of trying something new if they're happy with the current system - or even if they only think they're happy with the current system.
I've successfully introduced new games via one-shots, especially when it's a filler because we don't have quorum for the ongoing game. That's step one, and a whole challenge of its own.
Step two is yeah, getting someone keen on that new game after the one-shot, so they want to run it.
@Miniman Which is why I think one-shots are a good way in. The stakes are low for everybody, because it's only one session, but then they get some exposure to other systems and might think of them later when the next slot opens up for a long-form game.
Though the querent would probably benefit from being a part of another group of gamers, where he is more a player than a GM. Always playing with the same group can get anybody jaded over time.
@Grubermensch Hmmm. For some reason I read that as him being the one who did most of the GM-ing, with other members of the group only pitching in occasionally. Probably I parsed "I'm most of the time the guy that will GM new roleplaying games"
I do think neither of the answers on that question are addressing one of the most important issues here. They both talk about resistance to change, but a more potent problem is that GM-ing is a lot of work, and GM-ing a system that is entirely new to you is a metric buttload of work.
@SevenSidedDie Couldn't say, I just remember when I first looked at the question yours was the only answer, with 1 upvote.
With that said, the reason I hadn't upvoted any of the answers there was because the question is so trivial, but yours and KRyan's are good answers, so have an upvote.
@SevenSidedDie I generally see it when the asker has asked something, someone's given it the quick-and-dirty answer, or the functional-but-horrible answer (or even the looks-like-it-works-but-is-actually-garbage answer), then the asker accepts because they don't know any better, and the community does its best to make it clear that that answer isn't something you should do.
@SevenSidedDie Next time on "Intriguing Mysteries," we look at unexplainable downvoting. Is it just random noise on the internet, or an international tobacco conspiracy? Or could the answer be not of this earth?
The PDA question is hilarious - but does the poster really not know what to do in this situation? I think he just wanted to tell fellow gamers a fun gaming story.
Never underestimate the extent to which the RPG context can cause people to forget they can use basic social-group skills to solve problems at the table.
The contrast in learning times between the player in my group who learned by watching groups play online and the player who learned by reading the rules was staggering.
'cause best as I can make out, my success came from a long, slow process of crafting the gaming environment so players felt more empowered to influence the game as players, and demystifying the GM's role, so the leap to GM was less daunting.
In addition to giving players more agency in campaign design and making the GMing process more transparent, I groomed one particular player who was already better at the mechanics of our current game than I was and accompanied him to run a short game in the existing system.
Then I invited others to run single sessions of our main campaign, and simultaneously I started running one-shots of simpler systems occasionally.
Recently we've reached the point where people volunteer to run parts of the main campaign, or ask for help to run a one-shot in a system they really liked.
I've had similar challenges, both with getting player buy-in to try new systems and with getting players to feel comfortable GMing anything at all--much less new systems.
My solution was a long-game process of changing the "landscape" of how people at the table viewed their role in the game. I d...
@BESW I like especially your conclusion: "My group feels more like a group of friends who play RPGs, than like a GM who runs players through his games."
Though probably replacing "my" with "the" in that sentence would remove a slight contradiction.
When I logged in today hoping to see new answers, I was surprised when I found that my question was on hold. The notice has flagged it as too broad. There was one comment suggesting that system-agnostic is an inappropriate tag, but that is it.
To the six users who put my question on hold, what...
Why overviews can't save "looking for a game" questions
There are two kinds of overview questions:
I want to understand an aspect of the hobby. This is an existing aspect of the hobby that is worthwhile understanding for its own sake, not for the list of games that it generates.
I want to see ...
