TRPG General Chat - 2014-03-04 (page 1 of 3)

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12:00 AM

So far as I can tell, Michael Dobbs wrote House of Cards, and the BBC adapted it to television. The novel concluded with a strong note of finality and no real sense that a sequel could be developed, but the television show changed the ending sufficiently that a sequel would be possible.

So Dobbs wrote a sequel novel, To Play the King, set in continuity of the television adaptation of his first novel.

To Play the King was then adapted into a second season of the BBC show, and again it made significant changes to the story.

And again, Dobbs wrote a new novel (The Final Cut) following in the continuity of the television show rather than in the continuity of his previous novels.

And that novel was, again, adapted for television.

The notion of an author adopting an adaptation of his work as the canon for future works is not unheard-of, but it's not exactly common either and this is an especially obvious example.

It must be very challenging to people who feel that an author has absolute authority and control over his work, when the author so blatantly replaces his own canon with someone else's.

2 hours later…

2:23 AM

@3Doubloons Hi!

2:51 AM

Long answer is long:

0

A: Alternatives to death in a character and narrative-driven campaign?

Simple Answers These are simple answers based on a proven track record in several games. If you don't want characters to die, take death off the table mechanically! I mean, that's just basic logic, really: outcomes you know you categorically don't want aren't worth including in the set of poss...

Hah, both you and @Bankuei link to his list of combat stakes.

I'd love to come with a kinda-detailed example of a goal-based scene but it's kinda been years with D&D.

I remember having a couple (kinda inadvertantly) and they were awesome compared to regular fights.

But it's hard to distill them down to the core thing.

2 hours later…

4:33 AM

HOW ELSE will we win hearts and minds if we cannot invite the priests of evil gods over for cookies!? I ASK YOU! #dnd

Tweeted by UrsulaV on March 4, 2014 at 3:51 AM

2 hours later…

6:35 AM

This. This is gold.

7:30 AM

@BESW nice tweet.

@BESW Amusing. Though in my experience it would be 1790 -> numbers going up, and in easier flow to the hand. Plus the splotch is biggest around the 1, indicating it is the first number pressed (First press is the heaviest).

Ultimately I think it mostly serves to show how Holmesian deduction is built on the flimsiest of foundations; in real life any number of equally valid theories can be built from such few facts, and it's only really useful in fiction, where there's a presiding author to ensure that the protagonist chooses the correct one.

This is one reason I like Trent's Last Case so very much.

What is that?

The first novel of the "human detective" genre.

It was written specifically to show a detective protagonist who makes mistakes, lets personal bias influence his work, and doesn't wind up with all the answers.

Prior to that, detective novels (a very new genre) were almost universally written in the Holmesian vein: a superhuman intellect whose success hinges on almost utter omniscience, who mistakes and missteps arise from external forces rather than being his own fault.

7:47 AM

I started watching the show "True Detective" which is captivating.

The dialogue, cinematography, and the narrative are all amazing. Heard of it?

Only vaguely.

I'm passingly familiar with the pulp subgenre.

hm ?

True Detective (TV series)

|format = |creator = Nic Pizzolatto |writer = Nic Pizzolatto |director = Cary Joji Fukunaga |starring = |narrated = |theme_music_composer = |opentheme = "Far From Any Road" by The Handsome Family |endtheme = |composer = T Bone Burnett |country = |language = English |num_seasons = 1 |num_episodes = 7 |list_episodes = #Episodes |executive_producer = |producer = Carol Cuddy |location = New Orleans, Louisiana |cinematography = Adam Arkapaw |camera = |runtime = 60 minutes |company = |distributor = |channel = HBO |picture_format = |audio_format = |first_ru...

"True Detective" was the name of a number of "true crime" story magazines starting from the mid 1920s.

It's a rather poorly defined subgenre, but generally it's used to describe sensationally fictionalised accounts of real crimes.

Dragnet is a somewhat more sedate inheritor of the genre.

Well.. That is not what I am talking about. :P

Yes, its reference to the pulp genre seems to be ironic, according to the article you just linked.

7:57 AM

So it does.

Really good show btw.

Duly noted.

Netflix thinks I'd give it 3 stars out of 5.

It is not for everyone.

And has some very bizarre themes.

I have been thinking heavily about the dawn of worlds minigame.

It really got my attention.

oh?

Yes, been thinking of "mods"

Anything in particular?

8:01 AM

Many ways to modify, and standardize it.

First of all - the format at the moment is very open - which is great, but I think something that would help a lot would be a grid. In that way instead of having rules like "create terrain in a one inch area" it's "create terrain in one tile"

That can be one inch, or it could be on a computer....

Yeah, that's something we did right off the bat; expand the unit from "one inch square" to "a square of reasonable unit."

I would suggest a hex-grid, and then also it would be easy to do things like adjacency, and stuff.

Because here's the thing: if you have an 8.5''x11'' paper, 1'' squares are very different from 1'' squares on paper the size of a D&D map.

Standardize the rules a bit - have a list of terrain types, and their exclusions. Like you can't create a mountain in the same tile as a lake.

@InbarRose Why not? That's an island, or an underwater mount.

I think one of DoW's great strengths is the many holes in its rules, because they let you do things like that.

8:05 AM

Okay, fine.. I will hold onto that for now.

The reason 1'' squares should go is that they're too standardised.

Unit size should be tuned to the size of the map, the number of players, and the duration of the game, as well as the kind of game you want.

But one of the things I was thinking was that if this was "computerized" it could make a cool game/tool... One thing that is discussed slightly is "ownership" of races, occults, eetc..

In this way - why not have "creator" slots for the terrain as well?

If you've got a lot of players and only a few squares, you wind up with a world whose history is full of squabbling gods bickering over every inch of the world.

Then if another god comes to chance one players terrain it could cost slightly more, changing his own area already is cheaper - and neutral areas the regular amount.

If you've got a lot more squares, the gods are more likely to claim their own domains and only come into conflict when there's something at stake.

If you've got a lot of squares and a few players, you run the risk of having swathes of the board that hardly get touched at all.

8:08 AM

With this, you introduce a vengeance (or something) score - if one god does something against another - that god gets vengeance points he can use as power points only if it's against that other god.

Without getting into to much details - I thought of many ways to make the alignment aspects of the game more interesting - the avatars - and the difference between the ages more interesting.

brb

back

I want to write all this down and then start working on a prototype program to manage all of it - that will handle the history log / power distribution / ownership / etc etc...

Even a prototype gui/ai for the program.

Could be really cool.

Indeed.

I can't speak to it much practically.

8:27 AM

?

I've only played one game of DoW, and I've no experience or knowledge of programming.

Oh, that's okay - I wasn't asking you to do anything. :)

Also, the sun's almost down.

Dinnertime, back later.

ciao

1 hour later…

9:34 AM

hrrrnngh

so often I see a bounty for a super good question and it's only at +50 or +100 and I wish I could boost that bounty with some of my own rep

but every time I remember that would make the bounty system way too important on SE when it is a marginal feature that receives very little focus and it is a good thing it stays that way

@JonathanHobbs You are allowed to do this.

@JonathanHobbs Why would it make it "too important"?

@InbarRose If there's a bounty currently running I can't do anything bounty-wise to do with that question until the bounty's over

@JonathanHobbs True.

I mean turning a +100 bounty into a +200 bounty, not giving someone who earned the initial bounty another +100 through a separate "Exceptional answer" bounty

Guten morgen.

9:39 AM

Morning!

Hafa adai.

Hello there.

Hey

Oh, hey, @Kethryweryn. [wave]

Would Roll for Shoes be a good answer for this? rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/34581/…

9:41 AM

@InbarRose No, because of the "roll only one number" thing.

So he's looking for a system to have his RPG characters play RPGs with?

@lisardggY Indeed.

@lisardggY Yes. It's not uncommon for MMORPG players to use the game chat as a venue for in-game RP independent of the MMO's own mechanics, but I don't usually hear of them using tabletop-like rules.

Cool.

@InbarRose You could suggest RFS, but you'd need to include the caveat. Also, tracking skills might be troublesome.

9:43 AM

@BESW That's different, that's the players playing as their characters. I was wondering if in this case they want their characters to play other characters.

@lisardggY Which would be most delightfully meta.

I have a friend who delighted in those sort of games.

Inception.

I may have also tossed one of a pair of teleportation rings into the ocean, with interesting results.

He ran a game at a con a while back where you play (stereotypical) D&D players playing their (stereotypical) characters.

9:45 AM

Yes

I know something about this

I heard it from a friend

Which of course recursed back on the (inner) characters realizing they're characters, finding their own character sheets.

"Gamer The Game: The Game about Gaming"

Discovering they can change their own sheets and affect the world around them.

No

That is not what I heard.

But that sounds cool too

This was about 10 years back.

9:46 AM

There was an Indie RPG game that came out recently.

Anyway - what I heard about was that the outer game has a GM and players like any normal game, and the players choose characters like "cheater" "lucky roller" "rules lawyer" or even "dungeon master" and then the inner game is played however they want whatever game you want.. and the outer game abilities can affect the inner game.. so a character who is a "cheater" can "cheat" once per session or something, and the "lucky roller" can improve his dice rolls and stuff... etc etc...

Kind of like.. playing players playing characters.

I did that once as a GM...

I had a party of four NPCs whom I built and ran like PCs played by exaggerated versions of a previous group of players.

(The actual PCs in that game were the evil henchmen of an NPC villain the four NPCs were trying to defeat.)

Way to turn everything on its head.

user image

Oh! Oh! This is your evilness game where your actual players knew they were doomed but were totally cool with that, isn't it?

@JonathanHobbs Yes.

9:52 AM

I liked that concept :D

I am going to do that thing in Dungeons of Fate at some point.

They said "We want to play evil characters," and I said, "Okay, but it's still a D&D story in a D&D world, and that means evil loses."

So they got the chance to really ham it up as the semi-competent henchmen of a troperrific evil villain, enacting and often hamfistedly bungling his schemes, then scrambling to put things right so he wouldn't punish them too severely.

I don't think it would've worked with a larger group, but this was just Trogdor and his brother as the players.

They made an excellent evil comedy duo.

The necromancer got them into trouble with his impetuous and poorly thought-out brute force attitude, and his undead soldier minion came up with the clever plans to get them out of trouble.

... what about a campaign following four servants of Orcus as they pave their God's way toward killing Primus?

@JonathanHobbs A bit beyond our scope, really.

...and I'm back. Entire office lost internet connectivity for some reason.

@lisardggY Huh.

9:58 AM

@BESW Well, it's a way to have evil win. :) But then, having a campaign in being doomed evil henchmen is also 110% fantastic.

As an example of their antics:

@BESW That's pretty funny.

In the middle of the final battle between Good and Evil, the villain's long-term plan to capture the soul of one of the heroes in a sword, turning it into a powerful artifact, came to pass.

Unfortunately, the villain underestimated the strength of the hero's will, and the artifact promptly took control of him, forcing him to attack his own henchmen and repeatedly fireballing his location (the hero had been a fire-focused sorcerer).

The necromancer cast spell after spell to free his master, attempting to disrupt the sword's magic or give his master an opportunity to overcome its control, but the sword was far too powerful.

The undead soldier, upon seeing this, walked up and disarmed his master.

(Even though he had eight fewer levels, his master was a caster and he was a melee martial class. Disarming was easy.)

Was Trogdor playing the undead soldier?

Yes. Yes, he was.

10:04 AM

This makes sense. x)

This kind of "overanalysing the problem" thinking on the part of the necromancer actually derailed the entire campaign in the first session.

The artifact sword was supposed to be a very early-game thing, with most of the campaign being about fighting over who gets it.

So the first session, the warlock master sends his minions out to capture a particular hound archon, a famous weaponsmith who forged blades for heroes. He wanted to use the archon's soul in the artifact sword: a soul with an affinity for blades would be more easily bent to that purpose, and using an archon's soul had the right tinge of irony.

It should have been a rout: the archon was about four levels lower than the PCs and unprepared while they were armed with archon-specific items given them by their master.

But faced with a warrior angel, the necromancer panicked and started throwing negative levels at it. And he crit.

They hauled the dead archon back to their boss, who angrily explained that you cannot resurrect the dead by force: the soul must choose to come back and there was no way in the Seven Paradises of Arcadia that a hound archon was going to allow itself to be resurrected under these circumstances.

To keep from having their own souls tested as artifact fodder, the undead soldier (with some prompting from me) came up with a plan for getting a new target: one of the heroes.

The rest of the campaign was based around the fact that to get his soul to bind in the sword on his death, they needed the hero to have a bond with the sword in life.

Sounds like a lot of fun.

They travelled to his ancestral home (it was an exiled drow, because clichés were absolutely necessary in this game) to find out about his past, and "just happened" to meet him on a solo mission to kill the vampires which had overtaken his family. Being a necromancer who could control the undead and a zombie who was immune to the domination and level drain of vampires, they teamed up and helped him.

There might be a lot of interesting ways to take a game when one of the conceits is that you are a bad guy who will fail... the game becomes a bit comedic.. but you have a whole give-and-take with the "big bad master" and the evil tasks you need to perform.. probably descending into tropeville.

The drow's "player" figured that the GM had kindly offered him some NPC allies to help with the solo mission, and cleverly persuaded them to come back to join the main group--using RP to get some permanent NPC allies.

Doing their best not to giggle manically as the hero fell right into their trap, the henchmen played along and presented him with a brand-new sword (yey, new loot!) as a token of their friendship and support.

10:18 AM

Reminds me slightly of the 2 characters you meet in Baldurs Gate... (Which I just remembered you mentioned you never played)

After doing a few missions with the heroes, the henchmen arranged for an ambush by their true master. It was a hysterical slaughter.

The drow sorcerer was tricked into killing himself via exploding kamikaze zombies, the master spent half the battle dominated by his own artifact and calling down fireballs on himself, the cleric was so cheesed that she was casting ranged heals through a wall from another room...

In the end, though, the Master stood triumphant having killed all the heroes and acquired his artifact sword. His henchmen were dead, but this was an acceptable sacrifice.

...and as Master Moloch walked away from the rubble-strewn remains of the paladin stronghold his minions had slaughtered to bring the heroes to fight (it had been the heroes' favourite home base), the cleric's contingency-resurrection-and-teleport kicked in, and we ended the campaign with the cleric raising her fallen comrades (except the drow), vowing vengeance against Moloch and swearing to rescue the soul of their fellow adventurer.

That makes a cool short story as well.

role players can so easily become writers :P

Well.. I won't say that.

They have a lot of content to turn into writing.

It's never "easy" to write. I won't make light of an honorable and noble profession as a writer.

mmm. Basing written stories on one's games, though, is generally a bad idea.

@BESW How come?

Especially D&D-type games, which are usually dice-driven and subject to a lot of genre conventions about ignoring logic and reason and sanity.

Besides, campaign books tend to be self-indulgent and not half so interesting to others even if you can't "hear the dice rolling."

10:28 AM

Well.. I never said verbatim - but the stories and the ideas in them are numerous. One of the draws is that it is a collaborative process, with multiple inputs - all working to make the experience of the game - and therefor the story - more enjoyable.

@InbarRose But not as coherent.

Well... everything in moderation

Good games usually range wide, exploring this and that and the other, with a fairly flimsy plot holding them together. It's the continuity of player which makes a campaign cohesive.

I am sure that there are extremes in every case - but a majority of games probably don't have too many logic flaws.

At least not relating to the main story.

(I am just very optimistic - don't hold it against me)

Divorced from the context of "the same people at the table," a typical campaign's tendency to derail itself and drop/add major characters with little fanfare does not make for compelling reading.

10:31 AM

As I mentioned, I don't mean a verbatim retelling - I mean using the materials and experience from games as raw product for your writing.

I'm not saying the stories aren't interesting, but they're a very different kind of story, and storytelling, than most novels can support.

So if you can use elements from them in your writing, that's great, but a lot of the skills of storytelling one picks up in RPGs are actually not especially useful in writing novels.

I say this as a person with experience and study in RPG- and novel-based storytelling, both on the creative and consumer end.

Specifically, I've had stories I tried to tell in campaigns which should have been written down, and stories I've tried to write down which were better off as campaigns.

Gaming doesn't lend itself to the same kind of structure and foreshadowing that novel-writing does. Depending on the kind of narrative time you want to depict.

But I'll stop there, unless you want the great long-winded "narrative time" lecture. Which, if you're wise, you don't.

...someday I shall get my thoughts in order and write a monograph on narrative time, RPGs, and video games.

This is really interesting though.

However, I think that some game systems lend themselves better to "novelizing" than others.
Even if the genres (do you have this word in english too?) are, as you said, quite different.

And to be honest, I've read a LOT of fantasy where I thought : "Oh my god. This is SO dnd. WHY did the author do that? This is so bad." :D

@Kethryweryn I think in English the word you'd use is "medium," perhaps. "Genre" in common practice is used to indicate the style of content more than the form in which it is expressed.

I've done retellings of my campaigns before, sometime "formally" (as in, writing down the entire campaign's narrative) and sometimes informally, summing up to a friend.

@Kethryweryn There are a number of popular (though not well-respected) series which are quite explicitly based on the authors' gaming experiences.

10:43 AM

Some lent themselves very well to retelling. One Amber Diceless campaign wasn't any less disjointed than Zelazny's own narratives. :)

D&D style games... not so much.

The notion of narrative time has dogged me for years now, and I think it's crucial to why I dislike D&D in all its forms.

@BESW Please do.

We had such a wonderful website for that Amber campaign, and I'm pretty sure it's offline. And it never really worked well on anything but IE, anyway (my fault. It was 2003 and I didn't know any better!)

@InbarRose My thoughts are rather disjointed on the topic, but I can try.

@BESW Well you said "someday" - you have time! :)

10:46 AM

heh.

@BESW Then I was indeed using "genre". Because it is a question of content and not merely form I think.

But just briefly, what do you mean by the term "narrative time" ?

@InbarRose It's a melange of philosophy, personal identity, political/national/religious identity, destiny, fate, and the way one interprets the events of life.

@BESW erm... in simple English?

Basically, it boils down to this: "What kind of a story are you living in?"

10:48 AM

How is that transferred to the term "narrative time" ?

"Narrative time" is a term I've adopted from certain schools of literary theory.

The idea is that we interpret the things that happen to us in light of the kind of story we think we're in.

Maybe there is a language barrier/thing going on - but I would think "narrative time" is related in some way to time or pacing or era and the narrative or story or telling of ?

It's a funny phrase, yes.

@BESW Are you referring to Chronotopes or something similar?

@lisardggY Similar, yes.

Imagine this:

You are driving toward the mountains and stormclouds appear on the horizon.

What does this mean? It means that you should put up the canopy on your jeep or you will get wet.

It means that you should anticipate bad weather, perhaps find a place to stop for the night early.

But now, imagine this:

You are watching a movie and the character is driving toward the mountains, and stormclouds appear.

user image

10:54 AM

(Do they print the total sum of your se account rep in chat now? oO)

@Kethryweryn (I think they always did, or at least for quite a while now)

(Ok, never realized it ;))

Now the stormclouds do not mean bad weather: they mean that Skynet will send another Terminator in the next movie.

@Kethryweryn Only if you type a big enough text block to give them room for it. As I often do.

Sarah Connor lives in narrative time: these stormclouds are foreshadowing. They are caused by future events.

If Skynet were not going to send another Terminator, there would not be stormclouds.

In narrative time, things do not happen randomly. They happen because they have meaning, because the author has chosen to put them in.

An obvious example in real life is belief in omens: that a black crow appears because you will have bad luck. The crow is not the cause of the bad luck, the bad luck has reached back in time and caused a crow to appear.

Many of us believe in this to a greater or lesser extent, that by examining the events of the present we can presage events of the future which are not directly caused by the events we examine.

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