There's a user who has been trolling in questions and answers around the network for the past week or two, and their post this morning just exploded and landed them with a suspension within an hour of arriving.
Mm. I'll probably be running Fate at least once for my usual group in the coming week or so, but I'm not sure the usual process of figuring the setting out together suits them. Anytime I try to go through it, they seem to draw a blank and basically indicate that if I run it, they'll play it, almost regardless of what it is. I think pre-established settings may be more engaging to them.
@Shalvenay Nope. :P Right now it is more or less a process of me asking "Hey, I could do this, are there any themes you all would like to explore?" and not getting much of answer, then presenting some ideas and getting "any of those." xD
@BESW Yup. I'm just trying to decide what, exactly, to do. xD
@Shalvenay Our problem is that... we're all really chill about everything and playing together because we like playing together and the rest of it doesn't matter that much.
@Pixie There was a time when my group and I decided D&D was not for us. (Combat was the least interesting part of our stories.) Faced with the possibility of doing ANY kind of story in ANY system and setting, my group of four said: "I want hard sci-fi space exploration. No magic." "I want sci-fi or modern, not much magic." "I want fantasy and magic. I don't like sci-fi." "I'm easy with anything, but I prefer fantasy."
I think you're okay, your group's fine, and you have it going reasonably well.
What I have on my hands is not a disaster or anything, to be clear. It's a good group with a great rapport. It's just a kind of indecisiveness that's meant we haven't played or really thought much about a game in about a month now simply because we're all shrugging about where to go from here. History is repeating itself. xD
@BESW We never fully resolved it. But Dan plays in our games now, the other fantasy guy has a D&D group he attends at his University, and the other two have found other things that interest them more than tabletop RPGs. Maybe one day I'll run something sci-fi flavoured for them.
@Miniman Three hours into studying the rulebooks and character creation, one of Pixie's players is shellshocked, another has already thrown his seat through the adjacent window and escaped, and the third will not come down from the ceiling or stop chanting in ancient Sumerian.
I did get a very rare chance to hang out with a couple of the players in person recently, and we talked about some of the extant Fate modules as well. And looked at the prettiness of 5e books. 5e is an option (some of the players do rather like D&D and one definitely likes 5e), but none of us can run it as quickly as we would like to play a thing, so it's not a current option.
@Pixie Get everyone together for a one shot. Don't incorporate any of your current or past games' continuities, and use a system that no one's ever played before. Sounds like y'all need a nice infusion of newness.
> COMMON PARLIAMENTARY RULES Your Parliament may have different rules, but these ones are common: • Don’t spy on each other from the astral plane • Don’t maim or kill another member of the Parliament except in self-defense • Never sacrifice a sapient being to power your magic
For a little more context, this group had a very long-running Pathfinder game that dissolved because one of the players left. They didn't leave for reasons that had anything to do with the game or group, but they were not pleasant reasons and we just couldn't keep going with that game.
Since then we've done a handful of other things, like M&M and Spirit of the Century. These games tend to extend from one-shot to three-or-four-shot, but they don't stick enough to turn into long-running campaigns.
@Grubermensch It's not really that we're tired of oneshots nor that we're too impatient for a big story. Oneshots are more ideal mainly because of scheduling issues. We all have shift work, a couple of us are in school, and some of us have chronic illnesses that sometimes impact our ability to play. We've considered doing Pathfinder again, for example, but if we do that we are just going to have to draft another player or two.
Maybe what you need is an episodic game? Something where you can knock out a whole story in a couple of sessions, then stop for a few months, then get back together with the same characters but a whole new adventure.
@Sandwich Luckily the Shaping skill only lets you change your own shape, and while the Naming skill exerts control over the subject named, it doesn't allow shapeshifting either.
But for the time being, I don't think we're expanding. Pathfinder is also not the best game for situations where you just cannot know ahead of time if someone will be gone because fatigue decided to be killer that day.
@Pixie We're still learning pacing, but the basic idea is to model the long-form story as a collection of small episodes of one or two sessions each, with a "return to base" between each episode. PCs are pooled at the "base" and "assigned" to each adventure based on which players show up.
@Sandwich Were it that polymorphing actually existed as such in secret of cats, I would estimate this would be a deeply interesting plot to explore on its own. (Whether as the main plot or a running subplot.)
@BESW @Pixie Another format which can work for this is if all the characters are plausibly reachable at any time (either because they are all Important, Powerful People who can be anywhere, or because your setting is limited to a small region, like a city).
My gaming group has very fluid attendance. From week to week it's been known to fluctuate between ten and two players, usually hovering around three to five. I've become reasonably adept at building encounters to accomodate unpredictably sized groups in D&D 4e, but as we move into the DFRPG I'm n...
Pre-made or shared characters just don't yield the personal experience with/control of character that I know at least several people in the group enjoy. We'll sometimes have the GM puppet a character out of sheer necessity (someone was there last session, is suddenly unable to attend the next, and cannot be handwaved out of what's going on), but even this is not our favorite thing.
Just a necessary evil to compensate for the fact that if the game is to move at all, we have to keep going sometimes.
For my last D&D campaign, PCs would "no-clip" out of the scene if their players were absent, spending time alone in some other part of the world. It was both convenient and foreshadowing.
It's not one I can see working in all situations (like, if you don't want some weird reality-bending stuff going on), but it definitely works for some.
In our situation, the Pathfinder GM also prefers to run modules, which tend to assume that a fleshed out party is present at all times. I really only play PF, not GM it, but I can see it being pretty hard to adjust on the fly from a battle that challenges the whole group yet doesn't spell certain doom for your party of 4 when the barbarian has suddenly poofed in the middle of it.
I know I've mentioned my "cool items" idea before. My group is now asking about that and giving me a little more. Not a lot, though. We'll see where it goes. Going to have to review our discussion on how to do that mechanically in Fate and think about the role items will play in the setting... and maybe see if I can get the group to express a preference for fantasy, sci-fi, or both. :P
@BESW This musing ignores the fact that the humanizing attributes of pain and emotion are battle-tested over 3 billion years of evolution, and that our present computer systems are only capable of functioning as they are because they externalize almost all aspects of their maintenance to us.
@Adeptus My point is that those attributes are useful. You can cheat around them by passing them off to an outside actor, but that's not a viable survival strategy.
Pain is a perfect example. Pain is not a mechanism to inform you that you have an injury. Pain is a mechanism to force you to stop and tend to it. Otherwise you would just ignore it and die.
And if you say "well an AI could just have a supervisory system that told it when to stop and fix injuries" well....
@Grubermensch Exactly. Something like a condition monitor. Left arm is destroyed? That's OK, I'll keep using my right arm at 100% capacity with no impairment. I'll get repaired when I'm done. As opposed to the human, rolling on the ground and screaming.
@Adeptus Well for starters, if your left arm just got ripped off, as a human, you're probably not going to use your right arm "with no impairment". You're probably going to bleed to death.
I'm not saying an artificial intelligence will have the same pain causes. I'm saying it will need to have some.
@Adeptus Do you know how many people keep driving with a check engine light lit? For months? Sometimes for years?
Also worth pointing out: screaming is a herd behavior. It's about protecting the rest of one's peers from falling victim to the same danger. Which I hope we can agree is another desirable trait for an AI.
@Grubermensch Yes, but that's people who don't know/care about the workings of a car. An AI would want to continue to function, so it would act on it. (and I didn't mean it literally, I meant some sort of "I need maintenance" indicator, that doesn't interfere with normal operation unnecessarily)
@Grubermensch if (others need warning) {give warning} else {don't}
(also, "Warning: Beware of (whatever)" is more useful than "AHHH IT HURTS!")
I gave my group some ideas to start out with for how items could relate to character and story in our game. So far this has gotten some immediate feedback, which is a good sign. I don't think everyone is around anymore, though, sadly.
Now to think about how these things could be accomplished in Fate... some are easier to envision than others.
It comes from my own inclinations as a player... I love cool stuff. We've talked about MUDs before, and honestly, just seeing what turns up in stores is one of my favorite parts of the experience. xD But you can't structure a game entirely around that. You've got to have both flavor and a context that makes things important.
If not, you're just flavoring something your player will sell or forget about in five minutes, and there's no reason they shouldn't.
Oh, I love all my nifty items in MUDs. I must seek out pieces to create the coolest outfit ever and hang onto arbitrary junk because it suits my character. :P But that's just me, and I still wouldn't be playing the MUD at all if not for the gameplay. xD
So far I have one vote for the "magic flares" option, but everyone else is pretty tired, so they'll give their opinions later. I'm avoiding doing a ton of work before I know what they want, but I'm at least thinking about how I might approach it.
Evolving items are neat, too. In Magic Knight Rayearth, the girls get weapons and armor made from a material that will evolve based on their wills, so as they get stronger and their resolve grows, they get corresponding upgrades.
Fate is more about change than leaps and bounds of advancement, but I could still work the angle, I think.
@Pixie One option in Fate is to give every character a Fractal slot for their item, with its own dedicated Aspect(s) and/or Refresh. You can then give milestones to the items that are separate from the milestones given to the characters, for advancement like you're talking.
The hat is three separate ideas--hat, "donkey ears," rainbow--and the earring is also three separate pieces (heart and two stars), and the star on the rainbow vibrates with the stars on the earrings to create tension rather than unity.
Throw in the ruffles and whatever else she's wearing, and the eye doesn't know what to look at, or have a path to follow.
It's a lot clustered in one area, yeah. I know it's her cutie mark, but if you scratched the comet tail and made it a star pin, you could get away with a star earring. It looks okay as is, but the comet tail still seems a little unbalancing to me.
There's a burst of yellow in the centre of the headwear which isn't supported anywhere else, and that attracts attention to... her ear, instead of her face.
See how RD only has one accessory on her head? The shape of it is reflected in her wings and the trim of her gown, while the colour is repeated in her sandals.
The paragraphs are written so they fit together to mean different things depending on order and context--to the point that they can actually change your perception of who your character is in relation to the story.
user61230
Mm. The story I got wasn't particularly hopeful, @BESW. It was more... giving-up-on-life in desparation.
It would be like reading The Unfortunates, a book where you intentionally scramble the chapters (physically; they're unbound) and read it in the random order. Reading it a second time feels like it almost defeats the purpose.
Like, the first time I played it, I got a line about the writer of the letters suffering from leg wound sustained during a fall into a cave system. Later during that play-through I found the caves, but never fell down them.
The next time I played, I fell into the caves and then got the same line.
@Sandwich I mean the official English pronunciation. Such things exist. Although I agree there's only one way to read the katakana, I also can't expect people in the US audience where the game is heavily localized to know how it's read. xD
Hmmm actually Bulbapedia reports the Japanese spelling as スイクン (su-i-ku-n). So the 'e' is actually to bring the Anglicized pronunciation into line with the original Japanese.
@Grubermensch That may be the official spelling. It's not wrong, per se, because if you wanted to render Suicune in katakana, that's how you'd have to do it. But I don't know if that's the intent.
