TRPG General Chat - 2014-04-12

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12:00 AM

And that's bad, because he's not writing logical stories so the explanations always... lack... and often contradict the emotional necessity. Besides, fans can come up with better, more logical explanations in their sleep than he can on his best day.

The most obvious example is The Angels Take Manhattan, which was emotionally devastating... except that he gave us just enough "logic" to let us sit there going "wait, but couldn't the Doctor just... or Amy and Rory could simply...."

If the Doctor had simply and firmly told us that it was impossible, without giving us details as to why, the story would've been much MUCH better.

12:22 AM

Heh, well I got to go to bed ttfn

ttfn

3 hours later…

3:31 AM

@BESW He has an overwhelming preference for scenes over plots and telling over showing.

I think "telling over showing" can actually be pretty awesome. (In particular, I am thinking this today because we just saw and enjoyed Grand Budapest Hotel.)

@AlexP I don't have a horse in that particular race, but his problem is that he still wants to give logical detail despite being bad at it AND being really good at another kind of story which doesn't need it.

If he could just accept that he's telling emotional stories which don't need logical detail (and indeed often suffer from it), a good 2/3 of the problems I have with his TV shows (not just DW) would vanish in a puff of ambiguity.

Yeah. He could make them work better by just saying less, in a sense.

Exactly!

More handwaving, please.

And it's not like the franchises he's best known for are known for logical detail.

Sherlock Holmes is famous for claiming logic while actually making wild assumptions based on far too little information, and then happening to be right.

And Doctor Who has laughed at logical detail since day one, and never stopped.

It's not like he's allergic to eliding details, either. He does it all the time. Just sometimes he doesn't at the weirdest times.

Yeeeah.

His other primary challenge is that he doesn't have a lot of variety in his storytelling: the same characters and plots, reshuffled, pop up more often than can be ignored.

His secondary challenge is a driving need to periodically create superlative episodes: first, biggest, best, most shocking. And he often does it by retconning entire swathes of previous storylines, or indeed the entire franchise, so that you can't watch them without thinking of his newest contribution.

3:46 AM

I mentioned this to my wife and she yelled "Now Rory is a robot and Amy is the REMEMBERER OF ALL THE THINGS. Oh, wait, now that part is done so they are just gonna die like normal again later."

The Angels Take Manhattan is seriously silly, for something that takes itself so seriously.

Again, going back to your notion that he writes scenes rather than plots, The Angels Take Manhattan is itself a scene largely divorced from the wider story arc.

@BESW My wife says the big showy episode that makes no sense but you have to buy into it to give yourself some catharsis is still better than the episodes that don't make any sense and there's not nearly as much payoff but instead it's padded with themes that don't get addressed again.

I guess I have a bigger problem with being blackmailed into feels.

For me a stupid one-off episode is just a stupid one-off episode.

But "This is the last time you'll get to see these people, so FEELS ARE MANDATORY" is offensive.

I think it's more the season-long themes that just peter out.

@AlexP Ah, yes. Well, his season arcs are kind of--SQUIRREL!

3:52 AM

@BESW Yeah.

So, comedy movies targeted at, like, 13 years olds. Or 10 years olds and their families.

(Or some other kinds, too.)

There's a pattern where every single worthwhile joke is just shown to you already in the ad for the movie.

So if you actually go to the movie you just get padding.

I feel that way about a lot of recent DW.

I have been actively avoiding promotional material for unaired episodes for years.

I was kinda sad that I went into the Winter Soldier knowing who the Winter Soldier was.

Well, it doesn't so much matter whether you see the promos or not. It's more like the work itself is designed around being a promo.

A few highlights strung together with a bunch of gunk to make it fit the appropriate media shape it's supposed to be in (e.g. a 1:20 movie or a 0:44 episode).

Ah, that. Yes.

Hey guys, what's the haps?

4:07 AM

House of Habsburg

The House of Habsburg (; ), also spelled Hapsburg, was one of the most important royal houses of Europe. The throne of the Holy Roman Empire was continuously occupied by the Habsburgs between 1438 and 1740. The house also produced kings of Bohemia, England, Germany, Hungary, Croatia, Ireland, Portugal, and Spain, as well as rulers of several Dutch and Italian countries. The House takes its name from Habsburg Castle, a fortress built in the 1020s in present-day Switzerland by Count Radbot of Klettgau, who chose to name his fortress Habsburg. His grandson, Otto II, was the first to take th...

Can't stay long, gotta early day tomorrow. But if you guys have the time can you chime in over on my Rap Sesh? chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/13829/mc-hambones-rap-session

@BESW LOL, nice

....but as to the Rap Session.... I know we talked about the question I posted in there in this chat a while ago, but i would like it all over there if I can.... & I dont think I can move the convo

I can do that, if you show me the bits to move.

(I think; it may be hard to move older chats.)

it was a few days ago (maybe a week or so)

it was all about what to do with my situation where my cleric is in possession of a journal that I dont want him deciphering the entire thing

Hmm, yeah, I'm having trouble figuring out how to move things off the transcript.

we discussed an assassin would come in to his room and steal and or destroy the book

I feel bad asking you guys to repeat yourselves over there, but it would be really helpful in the grand scheme of things for me :D

and I feel doubly bad about asking y'all to discuss it while I am not here( i need to get to bed ASAP as I have a 8-10 hour long engagment tomorrow for which i need to be awake for in like 5 hours)

but yes, have fun with it, I posted as much background info i could think of earlier today. I should have my tablet with me tomorrow and if i have time I might be able to answer questions in any downtime i might get

thanks a bunch guys! like I said, have fun with the scenario: a Cleric has a journal that has info in it that I don't want him to have quite yet. I want a fun story element that allows him to get a partial transcript of the journal, but not all of it.

ttfn! Adios! cya tomorrow!

9 hours later…

12:48 PM

@MC_Hambone 14244, tenth doctor. The seventh doctor being less colorful than the sixth always tricks my brain. I work by saturation.

And despite trying to follow a best path algorythm, I always get stuck in situations where the only possible move is to take a huge chance of messing the whole sequence up

You lose when you start getting new doctors created in two separate (and therefore small) areas of the board, and second doctors show up between firsts or the opposite.

1:22 PM

@BESW chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/14901940#14901940

speaking of which, I'm trying to concoct a question about how to use skill challenges

But I can't quite wrap my head around it, or what the idiom was.

Oh?

There's this thing that worries me, which is that how skill challenges were used varies wildly from manual to manual and from adventure to adventure

Ah. Yes. This is a truth.

And then there's stalker0's

which apparently works better but in my experience didn't work at all

And now I'm trying to understand if it's just incompatible with my playstyle or with how the adventure's skill challenges (both official and not) were planned

So I've used the "4e style" skill challenge by Stalker0, not his alternate system

which should basically be "the same that's in the manuals, but with better numbers and some extra spice in the form of extra options when you're losing.

Provided I understood it correctly.

1:37 PM

The official ones are very different because they don't really work out of the box.

Like 4e's monsters, they're best when customised.

The first skill challenge I faced was "talk with Sir Keegan", from the (in)famous and freely downloadable adventure module Keep on the Shadowfell, which you already know

So each adventure adds little unique bits to its skill challenges.

In the book, it is presented as "he asks you things to decide if he trusts you"

Each time you answer, you might score a success or a failure.

Stalker0's 4e-style skill challenge system standardises the customisation with keywords like "bold" and "helpful" (and if you read enough official adventures, you'll find similar mechanics used as one-off add-ons in certain challenges).

And I'm ok with the idea, it's basically the "no goblin dice on this diplomacy check"

@BESW Ok, but that's not the real problem - I was just setting the bases for discussion by saying I understand what I used is basically the same as the official riules, dynamic-wise.

1:40 PM

Okay.

And for the Sir Keegan one, um. That whole adventure kinda stinks of "new system we don't totally get yet," and the skill challenge is rather misplaced. I turned it into straight-up RP... let me see if I still have the notes.

So we get to play and... I have some skills that do something, some that do nothing, some you can only use once or twice and a "let the player with the highest modifier roll" advice.

> Sir Keegan’s ghost haunts Keep, and has been pushed back to a remote corner of the crypts by Kalarel. There he sulks in despair. If he is given hope, he conjures a level 4 magic item and tell the party how to enter the hidden shrine (H1-B5). He will also tell them that Kalarel has a thick book of spells.
> Sir Keegan can be cheered up in a number of ways: the party must find three different happy things to tell him.
> Any justifiable concept is acceptable, but they include:
> - That Samrajya still fights the good fight.

Ok, I played it from the book and while awkward, it worked.

(In my version, Keegan was a half-orc knight of the half-orc kingdom Samrajya, tasked with running the titular Keep; instead he went mad because of a Far Realm rift in the basement and slaughtered everyone in the keep, then killed himself.)

Then, I had a completely different skill challenge. This time it was from a pdf file called "Keep on the Shadowfell Orcus Conversion or something like that. It's an homebrew that modifies the plot of H1-H3 to tie the three adventures togheter.

1:46 PM

Quick tip: never ban a skill unless the group agrees it's totally inappropriate. Encourage creative justification of non-obvious skills.

This one played as the "several skill rolls the characters make during the campaign are actually a skill challenge in disguise"

@BESW [takes notes]

(Like, I allowed Athletics as part of a raising-the-dead skill challenge because it implies knowledge of anatomy, and it let the fighter participate.)

(I also allowed History and Diplomacy, so the warlock could talk to the spirit and coax it back into the realm of the living with tales of heroes who did the same.)

So in the Forgotten Realms adaptation of the adventure there was this cult of Orcus that was hidden in a spoiler. The conversion makes it so Kalarel isn't so dumb to give their position away and instead has an old woman, ex-owner of the place, discover some chanting and getting disposed by the cult.

Also, rather than limiting some skill checks to only being useful once or twice, instead consider requiring "at least X number of successes must be from this skill."

(For the raising-the-dead challenge, Athletics and Diplomacy were great, but at least one success had to come from Religion and one from Healing.)

@BESW I've done that with the close the portal challenge during the fight with Kalarel

That was smooth because it just was "and as a free action in your turn, you can do a check on these skills to chant a counter-ritual, but you need two religion and two arcana successes"

So, why was this investigation skill challeng strange?

Because you activated the rolls only if the players did some specific actions, like asking about it to the people who actually had the clues (success in the challenge allowed them to gain enough clues to string them togheter)

1:54 PM

That feels a lot like "wait for the players to guess what you're thinking of," which I personally despise and is very bad for 4e.

I got the feeling (even from the original adventure) that part of it was "go talk with all the NPCs".

@Zachiel Yes. I disliked that; it may be part of what fuelled the "like an MMO" jabber.

Anyway, I must abed. Goodnight.

2:11 PM

@BESW goodnight!

@BESW I really liked how all the NPCs were detailed and there were informations on how each one had something interesting to say - mostly because I'm bad at improvising. And I see why people sometimes say it's a game for those who are not able to play "RPGs"

2 hours later…

3:49 PM

0

Q: Voting on Subjective Answers

We have a lot of meta discussion about Good Subjective, Bad Subjective and asking the questions. We also have just as many on answering. But we don't have as many on voting. It may come down to a personal thing, and that's fine... I just wanted to bring it up. The specific question that came ...

7 hours later…

11:12 PM

@Zachiel Yeah, that's fine, but it also felt like the players had to talk to everyone, which I disliked.

@BESW I made that into a living world. Instead of having PCs wander to go to places, I had NPCs organize meetings (and meddle, and have them meet people they didn't want to, to put more weight in their requests or ideas).

That's cool.

I learned that from Dogs in the Vineyard I think

the NPCs want the PCs to solve their own problems

It's a pretty cool notion that I've used a lot.

But when 4e adventures try it (and they often don't), they usually wind up stilted and awkward and more like giant golden !s.

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Apr '1412

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