@BrianBallsun-Stanton Rumor has it that my college's server once went down because someone left a spliff wedged into a mainframe and it burned down to the circuits.
@BrianBallsun-Stanton If you want to send it my way, I'll spin up an EC2 instance and let it party. Unless I need a window manager, in which case I'll have to download an image.
Wanted some help sculpting a question. I'm looking for advice on how to teach my players to think tactically (in those systems such as 3.5, Pathfinder, and Legend where it's important)
@Lord_Gareth Present explicit, well-defined tactical challenges to them. "The archers on the walls will keep shooting at you until you get to cover" (get to target). "The goblin chieftain is clearly the only thing that keeps them fighting" (kill target). "The wizard is working on a ritual, and will banish the ghosts in 5 rounds" (defend target).
Of course, all this is so much easier to model in 4e...
@Magician - Mm, bit simplistic. And in any event that doesn't cover ideas like making tactical evaluations, situational use of combat manuevers, etc, etc
@Lord_Gareth Aye, but now that they have an explicit goal, they can try and make tactical decisions to attain it. As opposed to the general unstated goal of "kill shit".
Hrm. Would be easier to do in Legend where I can provide enemies with tracks like Bastion or Virtue; abilities that make them clear and present high-priority targets
Bastion's the big one - turns every buff on that enemy into an aura
Needless to say this is extremely painful to face down.
start training your players by bloody ordering them to achieve those goals
and set up the narrative environment such that it's supported
don't try to simulate with any deftail, either. There's insufficient granularity in D&D, and everything assumes that everyone stays and fights until one side is dead and dusted.
And sure, to a point, these all presume support is nearby and on the way.
So if players are operating on their lonesome, some... adapatation (read: magic) is necessaary
everything in D&D, by default, is operating on the Clear objective, save for some stealth runs that don't clear until they're discovered.
The trick is to clearly describe the objective, the environmental triggers that support the objective, and let the players go to town. Infinite minion spawners tend to be very useful in this regard.
@BrianBallsun-Stanton @Lord_Gareth At about level three I gave my 4e players an escort mission. The escort was nice and solid, hard to kill, but unable to kill (both narratively and mechanically), so he couldn't mow through the hordes of enemies between him and his objective.
I presented it as a set of encounters in terrain-heavy maps, with the individual objective "get everyone in the party including the escort to the other side of the map."
@BrianBallsun-Stanton Oh, I made sure that would happen because while the general goal was "get the king out of the currently-being-invaded city," the first step toward that goal was "convince the king he shouldn't stay in the city."
@BrianBallsun-Stanton Ah, shiny death. About two missions in, they stopped to "clear this road of enemy soldiers."
Every round I added soldiers equivalent to "a number of minions equal to the number of rounds they'd been fighting."
That is, first round: 1 minion. Second round, 1 standard. Third round, 1 standard and 1 minion. Fourth round, two standards. And so on.
It took them about five rounds to catch on that I could and would do this forever, because they were in the middle of a full-scale city invasion.
At which point they booked it and played it very smart and fast for the rest of the escort, but they'd lost so many resources by trying to turtle that it became dicey.
@Lord_Gareth I hope that helps you get some ideas. Also, it's 4e but Kobold Quarterly 16 has some lovely concepts (though the mechanical implementation is a bit rough) around making the use of minions tactical. You might see if any of those ideas could translate.
The basic concept is to make the death of an easy-to-kill opponent complicate the (literal or metaphorical) landscape in ways that smart tactics can mitigate, avoid, or take advantage of.
But yeah, Brian's right, the big issue is how to present narrative contexts that make "kill everything and let the gods fight over them" a suboptimal choice.
user61230
5:08 AM
I'm looking for some help phrasing a question in a constructive way. I'd like to ask about the effectiveness of group world creation.
user61230
The idea being that the GM doesn't always capture the feel/mood the players are looking for when playing a game, and can let the players guide the creation, history, magic, and culture of the world as they want, at least in its creation. Then, of course, the GM creates the actual campaign and world detail - but the framework and tone have been set by the players.
user61230
But I'm having trouble thinking of a constructive way to ask this question. Any ideas?
In the past, I've developed histories, theologies, and factions with a combination of Microscope and Kingdom.
In the living history I've developed, you can see the records of a game of Microscope which developed the history of the world, and a game of Kingdom, which detailed the factions and his...
user61230
5:17 AM
Though I was leaning a bit more towards world history than character creation
@KnightswhosayNi There's some pretty good stuff out there, but if you find you want to discuss anything particular to your situation, I'm sure there are plenty here (including myself and Brian) who would be happy to oblige.
Electronics-based gaming of all kinds, including CRPGs, is something that some of us are familiar with as individuals but isn't the focus of this venue.
@Problematic Narrative time in the causal sense is about the perception of reality as storylike: That is, if you think of yourself as being part of a certain kind of narrative, you interpret events in that framework.
Are you the suave hero in a drama? The tragically downtrodden underdog who will get his reward someday?
The kind of story you're in will influence how you interpret events and how you make decisions.
Narrative time is something I come back to every now and again, because it's at the heart of a lot of human interaction. Right now i'm thinking about narrative time in terms of how RPGs can be structured/designed/run to explore it, or its lack.
FATE obviously believes firmly in a kind of narrative time: your failure now guarantees a success in the future.
Narrative Time Cliff's Notes: Anna has some unhappy things happen to her when she's young.
She decides this means that she's the beleaguered heroine of a tragedy, and behaves like it.
Everything good that happens to her, she expects to be ripped away untimely. This, of course, is a self-fulfilling prophecy as she fails to care for her worldly goods because they will be taken away from her, she fails to maintain her friendships and family and so they abandon her...
In the end, she realizes that the only way her tragic story can end is with a noble suicide.
A split second before the train hits her, Anna realizes that her entire life, all the horrible awful things that happened to her, are her own damn fault. Then she goes splat.
Whereas if you look at it from a cynical outside observer's view point. These guys are people who cause untold destruction with the side effect of occasionally cleaning up after themselves.
but only because they can then extort the town mayor once they've cleaned up.
@BrianBallsun-Stanton We tried that once with punches on the shoulder. The kind that does not really harm you but makes you feel real pain on the nerves. The real problem was that I was running all the NPCs. We stopped the experiment in 3 minutes.
A good novel that intends to be a series should have several untied hooks and several subtle details that can be built upon in further detail at a later date. A good story teller has those ideas roughly mapped when he finishes the novel (at least in my mind). And subsequent novels should include further potential hooks for future novels. If you don't then you're really minimizing your potential success. The same is true of D&D campaigns. You may never get back to that skull you gave that NPC
Way back on your first adventure. But if you need a quick plot, you've got a ready made hook.
She was probably at least 1/3 of the way through before she figured out specifically how it would end, but by then she'd dropped so many "Maybe I can use this later, but it's interesting/amusing/dramatic enough to justify itself if I don't" elements that she could tie the whole thing together.
We were talking about a story where you let the hero feel bad because you know it's gonna change in the end, right? If there's no end, the whole thing ceases to be that interesting. A good subplot end is not going to shine that muck, knowing things will start again from bad experiences.
that's why some series should just end at the end of a plot
And I was trying to tie that with some people on italian RPG forums telling me the pre-4e tendence to write stories that could never end was really an obstacle to enjoyment
The bright point can't be so bright if it's doomed to end
@Zachiel No, I don't. How can "we defeated the vampire who was going to enslave this entire village" be a bright point doomed to end? You won, and now you're moving on to the next challenge.
You want the characters to retire? Retire them when it makes sense.
Why do you need a rule about when your PC is done adventuring?
That... rather implies a desire for a mechanical indication of when to stop playing a character.
Also, the fact that you're talking about it in terms of "pre-4e," which means "pre-level-30-cap-that-mechanically-tells-your-character-what-his-happily-ever-after-is."
