Yeah. That's.... not really bang on target for this site, I think.
Leaving aside the content/context issue, it's still "give me campaign ideas and I'll see which I like."
Welcome to rpg.se! I'm glad to see a FiM-based question here, but I'm not sure this particular one is a really good fit for the site. SE isn't a forum, it's a Q&A site, which means we can't just throw out plot ideas hoping you might like one of them. Please take a look at the about and the help center; they're a useful introduction to the site. Maybe that'll help you re-phrase the question so that every answer wouldn't be equally valid. And once you have 20+ rep, feel free to join the chat! — BESW1 min ago
I just realized, I'm used to Stackoverflow, Serverfault, etc. There aren't nearly as many people on rpg.se... that's why I'm surprised stuff goes unanswered for a couple of hours.
Can't remember when we last caught up.... I'm doing Fate Core twosies with @trogdor, focusing on short campaigns that last no more than three sessions apiece.
@CarlCravens Thanks. I wouldn't be surprised if it's closed given the nature of the question, but I really wanted to get a "why you shouldn't use rape as a plot device" answer in before that happened. While I was in there, I just decided to answer the rest of it
when I finish this campaign I'm going to take a break. After that I hope to find time to run something that people don't play much around here, like Fate
Also, I have one player who came from a WoW-type background and loved 4e PC gen.... but then fell in love with the idea that in Fate he could make his own crunch.
@CarlCravens I've done some thinking about how to hack-and-slash in Fate. One easy hack is to have most of your aspects be about your gear and your fighting style.
So I'm a bit unclear on something. There's a VTC on the Fallout Equestria question because it's a plot idea question rather than a Q&A one. I get that.
Fudge was very "hack your own everything". But I burned out on it for a couple reasons... the community wasn't self-sustaining, and there were fundamental problems with the default dice + attribute ladder.
Option 1: Retcon It
Given the situation of a player basically going off the rails and sabotaging the campaign, the simplest solution would be to use a retcon. Wipe out the events of the last session entirely. They didn't happen. Write out the now missing player, and life goes on.
Retcons are o...
(well, the question. not the answer. Just happened to be the link I had handy)
Say I want to start GMing instead of just participating in others' games. I'm heavily narrativist rather than mechanics-oriented, want a system in which characters' sense of accomplishment can come from their development in-story more than lucky dice rolls, and want a minimum of page flipping in the combat scenes. What's the best recommendation for a newbie GM with big aspiritions then?
@CarlCravens It has been evolving, yeah. The stagnent parts in some ways due to players themselves not wanting to change. They're comfortable and want to stay that way.
I spent ~7 years in a bubble that consisted almost exclusively of D&D 3.5, with minor forays into other d20 System games (and a brief abortive exploration of oWoD Mage) before (about two years ago) branching out into 4e, Dogs in the Vineyard, My Life with Master, DFRPG, Fate... I feel like a kid in a candy shop.
(I posted a facebook picture of my baby playing with my 3.5 DMG, and the first comment was from someone complimenting on which book happened to be lying around for him to grab, because it wasn't any of "that new crap")
And I'll say something about having played 4E (the first D&D I'd played since the 80s)... moving from a poorly-supported system to the most supported system in the world is a huge difference.
But since RPGs are fluid and moldable, many people managed to do non-D&D things in the D&D system anyway. Which is great, more power to them, I was one of them.
But then 4e comes along and only focuses on what D&D is good at. It does tactical combat very well... but it sacrifices the attempt to do much of anything else.
The best games I've been part of had room for each character to have their Big Moments, where their participation was the focus of the session for a little while, even drawing the newbies and the technical gamers into making the story.
Me too. In fact we're doing that next week. One of the players managed to set up a peace treaty negotiation between two rival city-states. The other PCs are playing roles in that negotiation to help me out...
But I mean, I'm not using any 3.5 rules or systems at that point. It'll be players sitting around the table RPing for 2 hours
@Metamaterialgirl Princes' Kingdom is about a small group of people with authority traveling from place to place trying to solve knotty moral and social problems.
@Metamaterialgirl Every now and then my players do something to infuriate me. Then they create a situation like that, and I remember why I love them. :D
Having played Fudge for many years, where there aren't really rules for much of anything... just a die mechanic with graded results... I'm totally comfortable with "just roleplaying".
But I also learned that sometimes, I really like a rules framework to fall back on... making decisions all the time can be draining.
It's kind of a funny thing though, because that's happening in a D&D 3.5 campaign, so they're happy with the system. Yet to make that happen, I'm not really using the system at all. It's coming from them, and me setting things up to enable them.
@CarlCravens That's an interesting point--the brief GMing forays I've made in the past tell me that I am subject to decision-fatigue sometimes, and having a system to deal with that could be pretty helpful.
(If you're familiar with the Forge game Dogs in the Vineyard, Princes' Kingdom is a hack of that system placed in a setting less fraught with Unfortunate Implications.)
Go here if you'd like my take on one of Pathfinder's worst tendencies in that regard (though it's also liberally interspersed with my more personal take on my experiences with rpg groups and is looooong)
@CarlCravens It's helpful if the players are ambitious and creating their own content by trying to do things in the world. Anytime you can react to what they're doing, you don't have to come up with stuff on your own.
(I have a long-term goal of designing a simple FiM system. Working title, My Little Psyche: Friendship is a Fragile Barrier Holding Back My Seething Neuroses.)
Fun fact: I'm in training this week. The first day of the four day training course, the very first thing we did was take a test. I kind of giggled in delight at that. And at the moment I was relating to Twilight so very closely, we both love tests
One of Fate's strengths is that you can zoom in and out of the action as needed.
A conflict can be a blow-by-blow fight with turns and rounds, or a simple contest of opposed rolls, or a single roll against a flat difficulty, depending on how narratively important the outcome is.
@BESW You're right, they're all flawed. But I find Rarity to be a prime example... for the spirit of generosity, she can be so selfish. Even when she makes dresses for the other fillies, she does it out of fulfilling her own need.
I do enjoy the central conceit that the Bearers of each Element are not actually shining paragons of their virtue--their virtue is what they value, rather than what they're good at.
A game system that doesn't require massive discussion to gain agreement on how combat should go would be such a huge improvement that I could overlook a lot of failings otherwise.
@BESW Most of them actually are good at it though. Rarity is kind of the exception in that she has trouble with living up to it more often than most. Rainbow Dash faces that too, somewhat.
@Tridus Applejack lies quite often, Pinkie is often oblivious to whether those around her actually are happy, Fluttershy loses control of her temper...
@BESW but Fluttershy is so kind that Discord couldn't turn her through trickery, he had to just flat out use brute force. Twilight is such a good spellcaster that she accidentally race changed herself. Pinkie does (season 4 spoilers)
then again, maye an accidental race change isn't skill :)
Except when she was dealing with Trixie, in which case it was just her raw talent. It's been established that not many unicorns can use magic anywhere on her level.
One nice/interesting thing about the show, but which makes it difficult to abstract into simple game concepts, is that it's hard to find commonalities shared by all of the Mane Six.
And since I don't want my game to be about just the Elements of Harmony, there's even less I can take away from the primary show characters.
Biggest challenge: I want to defy the binary pass/fail outcome common to most RPGs.
I saw an idea for a FiM game once that was based around cutie marks. You can pick a couple of things you're good at, and then one thing that's related to your cutie mark that you're really good at. When doing those things, you have an easier time of it
...or attempt to help while unintentionally hindering, or vice-versa, etc. etc. Right, so a system that allows for on-the-fly combinations of the (sometimes GM-unanticipated) outcomes of player interactions.
And here's one of the big kickers: the system can only use d6s, and never need more than 5d6 on the table at once.
(I want it to be accessible to non-RPG groups like the show's main audience, so I'm setting the dice limit at "Do you have a couple board games or a Yahtzee set?")
Option 1: Retcon It
Given the situation of a player basically going off the rails and sabotaging the campaign, the simplest solution would be to use a retcon. Wipe out the events of the last session entirely. They didn't happen. Write out the now missing player, and life goes on.
Retcons are o...
