@DuckTapeAl Yeah, no rolling for the GM. The GM is mostly reactive in DW, except that's not nearly as limiting as it sounds because you're also mandated to react to players looking at you as if it's your turn to do something.
Also it doesn't end up looking reactive to the players. There's some neat smoke-and-mirrors that the game's structure uses, but they're all there to enhance the players' ability to pursue their agency without making that intimidating to them, and to enhance the GM's ability to bring in both expected and surprising consequences for PC choices.
@DuckTapeAl Are you planning on running DW, or are you just poking it out of curiosity?
My advice then is to run it as a one-shot, promising nothing, explaining that you're still trying to figure out the weirdnesses of the game. It works really well as a one-shot, and then you can discard it and start fresh next time, taking some lessons and lightbulb moments from the one-shot.
Bonus, players sometimes choose a class without realising that they'd like a different one better, and once they've done it once, they're likely to know better what they want and can get from the game. And that's mostly OK because PC creation is super-fast.
hrm -- the only problem I see with it is that I'd wind up missing a lot of rule triggers with some of the downright weird dungeons and oneshots I come up with
@Shalvenay Generally, it's futile for a DW GM to plan much farther out than about, say, half a session. Any more than that, and it's either wasted, or you start breaking the GM's rules in ways that do not end well.
Sometimes it's better to plan no more than the first event, even.
@Shalvenay Yeah, no need to burninate. It was only on one question, which is fixed in one edit. Burnination is only really needed when it can't reasonably be done without the mod tools. Or when it's unclear enough to need debate first.
@SevenSidedDie -- I'm speaking less to detailed planning, and more to theme/location (throwing an elven ranger into a massive railyard socked in with predawn fog, for instance)
@Shalvenay Not me. I looked around and found the elf, half-elf, halfling and dwarf tags, and decided that it would only be fair to treat the orc tag the same as the rest of them. They seem like pretty crappy tags, but I've learned from experience that trying to get a tag removed is highly unlikely to succeed and not really worth the effort anyway.
@Shalvenay Look to the basic moves and make sure you catch their triggers. That's half the work done. When they miss on a roll you look to your GM moves and make one. When they look at you like it's your turn to talk (i.e., they hand you initiative), make one of your GM moves but softly. That's the game, mostly!
"You're in the middle of the street. There's a carriage overturned nearby and two dead horses. Someone is bleeding to death nearby. It is very important that this person does not die. There are people around you, shooting arrows at you. It is obvious they want you to be dead, yourself. Only the ruined carriage is protecting you. It is on fire."
Who is trying to kill you? Who is the dying person? Who paid you to keep them alive? Where are you? and, as always, what are you going to do?
@DuckTapeAl -- it's a style of RP that dispenses with a grid/mat and tokens in favor of relying on communication to convey shared mental states about what's going on
I was more referring to my case, though, where normally I'd have free choice, but the sheer scale of the map renders using a mat & tokens (or the digital equivalent) impractical
@Shalvenay Right, yeah. DW is all about perception and choice, so putting a PC in a fog in a weird situation and doing it Theatre of the Mind is right up its alley.
yeah, a lot of the scenario emphasizes just how mysterious such a thing'd be to elf ears as well -- I'd almost want a soundboard to get realistic retarders, couplers, horns, bells, etal
/me really cannot do an authentic locomotive horn emulation
@doppelgreener Hmmmm. I like making characters so much that I make characters even in the absence of having games to put them in. I wonder if the solution could involve emphasizing that they can create as many characters they want outside of game time without ever having to use them, unless they truly want to.
The other issue is that they put so much planning time into the character that by the time they get to play the character, they're bored of them already. I wouldn't 100% know how to diagnose this because why they put so much planning time into the character influences how I would handle it.
Like, is meticulous mechanical planning the fun part for them, in and of itself? (Again, maybe trying to get them to indulge it outside of game time would help.) Do they think they have to or they're not playing the game "right"? Are they afraid they'll die really easily if they don't? Are they just doing it because that's what they're used to doing?
Scrolling down, GMJoe's answer is pretty good. I'm not sure I could provide anything more robust. The only suggestions I have above and beyond that would be to maybe suggest they keep a roster of characters they can switch between -- instead of making a new character every time they get bored, they can revisit someone they haven't played in a while. This may allow them to invest more in the characters without feeling confined to only one.
example: spell says it creates a "poison gas cloud" -- I interpret that as "pick a Toxic Inhalation Hazard material and run with it" which gives me free reign to pull out things like dinitrogen tetroxide or chlorine trifluoride
@Shalvenay dude this is already a topic we hshe discussed to exhaustion in this room.
The general topic of introducing chemistry to magic, and why people get upset when you do that, was one of the first things we talked about and had been discussed many, many times since. I suggest you look back on those conversations instead of asking again, the answer has probably been provided many times over.
Have*, autocorrect seems to not like this chat.
When I say discussed to exhaustion, I mean with you directly. You were there and reading the explanations we were providing.
I'm going to be a bit more formal about this, @Shalvenay. Topics that have been beaten to death here, by you, are not to be further discussed, here, by you. Use not a bar or something. To be even more clear, "reality and RP" in any of its forms is no longer welcome in conversations here. It has joined its friends alignment, paladins, and physics.
A great deal of mathematics lies in finding interesting new ways to say things we thought we already knew, in order to discover what we didn't know about them.
@Pixie Aye. Greener and I had a conversation a couple weeks ago about how math and philosophy are effectively two ways of applying the same tools to the same goal, just with different operating parameters.
@BESW Just a lament that there wasn't a Stack for MS Word. It wasn't so much a conversation as an ill wind that made everyone shudder and throw salt over their shoulder.
/me would LaTeX just about everything if he had his dibs, and finds LyX to be a fairly suitable frontend if you really need something more than a text editor
Because it's ubiquitous. There's no other word processing software with the market penetration to let someone be confident that whoever their document goes to, it will be readable.
@SevenSidedDie I had to learn Word intimately in order to be able to handle the files I get from clients and translate them into something that InDesign won't laugh at.
...and then there was the time a client insisted that I design a 300-page entire anthology entirely in Word so she could edit it later without needing new software.
@BESW That is horrifying. But I can understand why; so few people appreciate that there is anything "hard" about publishing that requires the right tools.
@BESW Ah, so I failed my IIRC check. :) More pre-publishing stuff.
(Outlining fonts destroys basic formatting like italics and underlining, as well as removing diacriticals and similar non-standard-English characters.)
There are some very few reasonable justifications for that, but the reason they gave... was that while they print the proof on island, the full printing job goes to Taiwan and is shipped back. Which means the "proof" wasn't actually any indication at all of what the final would look like.
@BESW Embedded fonts can be a pain for printers, I hear, so I kinda understand that. But yeah, it sounds like InDesign makes that a bad idea. If they know InDesign enough to ask for the files, it's unfortunate they didn't know well enough to know it was a bad idea.
Unfortunately I couldn't just leave, because it was a government client and the pricing on the job was high enough I had to get bids for printing and take the lowest.
So I needed to at least get a bid. Eventually that particular printer demonstrated so much incompetence that I was able to write up "not a viable offer" and get the bid requirement waived.
We don't have a lot of on-island printers who can do the sort of printing that job needs.
But every year when that job comes around, I have to get enough bids that I can pick two which are higher than the company which can actually do it right.
@Shalvenay Actually, if I'd known it was going to go into a question, I would have waved my arms and said not to use abbreviations. That question would be more readable without them.
@Shalvenay Some abbreviations (like UMD and DMPC) are useful. The class abbreviations are originally for statblock printing costs though, so they're not so accessible. I edited it to put the paragraphed PC list into a formatted list too, since that makes it easier to absorb.
the other issue, of course, is adjudicating the damage a 143ton (or heavier!) object does when it hits you. I may just even punt and call that a scenario-ender: "you contacted moving equipment. the end."
@Shalvenay Some napkin math says that it would take over 1000 rounds to cross that play area. I'm pretty sure that it's not playable without zooming in and choosing a specific part of the railyard instead.
(Assuming a speed of 30 in D&D 3.PF and a double-move walk every round.)
@Shalvenay What I think that scenario would be most interesting to play through in a videogame with end-user editor tools. It sounds like the motive is some kind of vicarious-via-the-player space-experience-exploration kinesis/kenosis that won't be very satisfying in any RPG, but might be in a virtual environment.
> Empty room, all these votes and way too soon! Could it be a slow week on the Stack? And did I hear you say I'll get more rep today I just answered as I passed it by
@BESW illegal schmegal. You can only get in trouble if you record a music video too as evidence!
Otherwise nobody will seriously believe you if you perform an international grave heist just to feature a corpse in your orchestra then re-entomb him afterwards, even if you announce it!
The Dungeon Master's Guide on page 127 lists the costs of maintaining various buildings. While some of these make sense, of note is that Shops and Trading posts are listed. This means that, rather than being a source of money, these actually cost the player money to own. Below, under "Total Cost...
@Miniman well, there is the owner needing to pay themselves, possibly clerks, scribing or other materials, shop maintenance, having to buy things off adventurers so they can be sold back to them at least 10 times higher, etc.
As GMs, how do you guys keep track of everything in an encounter? The HPs, people's abilities, monster's stats, initiatives, status effects.. there's just so many things to track, I have no idea how this is handled.
I am playing a Wizard in a pathfinder game and despite several different reworks of his character sheet I've still not found a decent way to track his daily spells which can change daily (plus how many used) when some can be reused (pearl of power, resting, etc) and one/many shot daily items (han...
Can anyone recommend a good tool for keeping track of maps? I want to run an Eberron setting game, and I'd like to use the Eberron map, which I have as a high-resolution png, but be able to add quick notes and such as the game progresses. Something similar to Google Maps.
I have already consider...
Is there a good paper based solution to keep track of NPC stats so they are avaliable when you need them in-game but don't take hours to keep up to date?
I have a bunch of NPC notes and lists of names etc., but during a game I generally wing it as far as actual stats and skills for the NPCs. I d...
Details on your system and the specific things you're having trouble tracking would help us find a useful question, or provide fodder for you to ask a new one for the things the existing answers don't cover.
There's some pedagogical studies which show that addition is more intuitive than subtraction, which may lend itself to certain kinds of hp/wounds counting systems.
Then again I mostly play Apocalypse World, and Apocalypse World harm (which is counted up with increasing damage) is meant to be a lot more serious than the usual hit points.
@DavidReeve I'm not really a DnD / PF enthusiast but I'll have a look
I first ran into it in d20 System franchise products for Star Wars and Stargate. It did not impress; they billed vitality as producing a more fictional-adventure feel where main characters can survive a hail of bullets but still take mortal wounds when the plot demands. It... did not do this.
You get injured at the whim of the dice (critical hits) or because the other guy has superior resources (weapons/features that bypass vitality), not because it's dramatically appropriate.
In Apocalypse World, your character has six harm slots (represented as a countdown clock as usual). First two harm points heal passively, but slowly. The third one requires medical attention, and the fourth damage point and beyond are eventually lethal unless treated.
>.< I am going through review queues on SO, and came to an question that was answerable, AND I KNEW THE ANSWER, upvoted.... and it was a trap. the question was flagged unanswerable!
Fix your reviewers too, I stopped reviewing SO when I realized that so many reviewers are doing a horrible job and I'm making a better difference elsewhere.
Grups and hero are out... I mean, they are totes tactical for reals (i mean, the books are bullet proof), But who in their right mind actually plays gurps or hero?
I have noticed a disconnect between those who play gurps and those who play ANYTHING ELSE. I guess gurps and everything else are the same hobby, but IME there is little overlap between the two groups
Nah, just make it part of the banner art. You know, with the cyborgs shooting lasers at a dragon? Blazon "TALK TO EACH OTHER ABOUT THE PROBLEM" in there.
Actually, it's quite easy. In many groups, the GM speaks to player characters during the game, and to friends outside of it, but rarely engages with people as players of the game.
@Aaron Apocalypse World, Dungeon World, DnD (mostly 4e, though) are the "big systems" I know the best. For the smaller, lightweight ones, Roll for Shoes, Roll to Dodge and Lasers and Feelings.
But hey, at least I try to get the party together when I'm a GM.
Not the first time for this GM, but I should've known better than to assume he'd actually invest effort into it
In my desperation I've been thinking of mastering a Dungeon World game in addition to my AW party. Something light-hearted and splat-heavy compared to the relatively gritty black comedy AW we play.
I cant really say anything given the exact situation and my lack of knowledge of it, but in general Im going to side with a GM over players just about every time over this sort of thing
Sorry, what does anyone here know about single sheet systems? I've heard (read) about RPG systems that the rules literally fit on a single page and can be played easily in one session. I would like some examples of this
I like 1-sheet-systems, they are really nice to get players started. On the other hand, they essentially require that you know the appropriate tropes, which means they don't work for everyone.
