How's it going?

pretty good

first meet for the group tomorrow with the new guy as DM. excited and terrified. his concept for the world was incredibly interesting, but im worried his newbie-start will make it alittle rocky for the newer players

any suggestions for helping soothe the nerves for a new DM? I didnt really have any when i started. I just got thrown into it

So guys guess what I found at Second and Charles today

@Nemenia Very cool!

@Nemenia I'd tell him to try not to sweat any errors that arise, as hard as that can be. As long as everyone (including himself) is having fun, just keep going with the flow. Organization and notes help, whatever system comes most naturally to the DM.

Be enthusiastic. Set a good example for the other players--pay attention, keep track of your own stuff, etc.

So yeah

I found

The full guidebook for Heroes Unlimited / Palladium Books at 9 dollars

Nice!

There's so much book here

Its 352 pages big

i should pick him up at notebook, or get him to buy one probably. they really do help

one of the players is new to DND but he loves RP as much as me, so he'll pick it up fast. It shouldnt take too long

When he offers a hook, bite it.

Encourage moments for players who aren't getting a lot of spotlight.

his world is fascinating, but Im worried his acting is what's going to kill it. I may look for hooks too

he's bad at adding depth to the NPCS

There are things you can do to help with that, but which ones will work I can't really say without seeing the group in action.

One common tool, though, is to ask questions or simply assume things about the NPCs that give them more depth.

thats true. I hadnt thought of that

Yeah. P: The most general suggestion I have is asking questions, but I also wouldn't want to put him on the spot too much in his first game.

as players, the group is really bad at meeting the DM halfway

they expect way to much of him

haha

Classic example: one of my players stopped to chat with a travelling salesman and asked, "Doesn't it get lonely being on the road all the time?"

(This ultimately led to them buying him a dog.)

that's so adorable

Aww.

I'm not bad at it. but how do you talk other players into it? Alot of the time me and the other RPer get backlash trying to help the other guys get into RPing with the NPCS because of defensive reactions or nervousness

how do you ease someone into it when they treat fictional characters like they're threatening? lol

Teach by example, first and foremost.

true

If it's especially bad, you may have to take the GM to the side and ask him to provide more NPCs that aren't secretly or overtly wishing the party ill.

"Treat everyone as an enemy" makes sense in a hostile world.

well new players tend to treat it too much like a video game, where people are walking cash shops, quest givers, or something that needs to die, and that's it

that's my biggest complaint usually

You can have your own character react neutrally or positively to NPCs when appropriate. "They seem trustworthy to me." "Maybe we should give them a chance." "I think we should help them." But if doing this tends to come back to bite you, like @BESW says, the other players are just behaving as expected.

But I think they'll learn, and Leading by example is definitely something I'll work on

@Nemenia are you playing D&D?

Oh right. I probably should have explained. I forget that this is all RPG games sometimes. its DND 5e

okay. your players are treating NPCs that way because that is what NPCs amount to in D&D. there's also a fourth category, which is "not important enough to be one of the other three categories yet".

this takes some work to subvert.

I disagree with that horridly. that should never be all NPCs amount to be in DND

@BESW You may want to weigh in here, having many many many times more D&D session experience than me.

My favorite way to get an NPC the players will trust is to have one of the players introduce the NPC.

That player will lead everybody else into interactions with the NPC, and because it came from their side of the table, the players won't be afraid of getting turned on.

My veteran group brings them to life in ways i rarely expect. relationships. partnerships, political intrigue and governmental chaos

It could ultimately be a playstyle mismatch; they might simply prefer to play this way and be uninterested in alternatives. But a lack of exposure to other ways of doing things could certainly factor in, especially in a system like D&D, where NPCs often are treated as insignificant quest givers and/or targets.

(Which is not actually true, but it works. I played in a game where this NPC turned into the big bad. And we were all astounded when it happened.)

one time i had a player playing as an incubus, and was trying to get into the town armory but refused to charm anyone. the two guards were some nondescript guys i made up on the spot, and He ended up deciding to become one of their best friends and eventually kidnaps one, charms him, escapes the entire town by breaking out of prison with him and fleeing to the country side, ending in an epic horseback battle with swords and lances in bloodsoaked plains

it was one of the most hilariously epic moments in the campaign and didnt even remotely relate to the story

Something that can also help is to make each NPC relevant in multiple ways to the story.

now that really DOES take skill. alot of work and effort

One of the hallmarks of the "videogame-style NPC" is that they have exactly one function with respect to the players, and outside of that, it's over.

Actually, it doesn't. All you have to do is list out the NPC roles in your adventure, and condense them down to half a dozen actual NPCs.

One of the most common situations is i try to make an NPC like that, interesting and involved, and the players somehow end up interested in someone entirely different, usually the person working as that "one function NPC" like i mentioned. Then i end of scrambling for a whole new plan

Ah, well the secret there is to get good at rewriting the roles on the fly.

Which is tough, to be sure.

yup :P

That's a thing I try to keep in mind. It's really hard to anticipate which NPCs a group will get attached to. Often, it's the inverse of what's expected. It's important to pay attention to what is engaging the players and keep recalibrating for that.

that is a strange thing

our group had this goblin NPC in 4E

and some of us wanted him dead, some of us really didn't care, and a few others treated him like their best friend ever

he ended up founding an army of goblins that fought for the same cause as the PC's because of the example of our single-minded friend-making half-cat slayer

there was also a Kuo Toa who most of the party wanted to tie up, but my character was against it just on principle

goblins can be adorably malicious when they're on your side

kuo toa are kinda creepy though

But feesh!

but weird fish god people

you know who they remind me of

those asshole fish people from Manaan in Star Wars

so i was wondering the other day

i almost posted a question about this

since kuo toa can make their own gods by believing in them

what if you set yourself up as their god

and convinced them they came up with you

would you get powers? would an alternate version of you who is a god appear?

@Nemenia LOLOL

that sounds like a planescape campaign waiting to happen

im really curious

That's up to the group in which it happens.

as a DM i wouldnt know what to decide

maybe you get the powers but since its kuo toa you slowly become more fish-like?

lol

or insane?

the reason I spared that kuo toa was not out of some need to be freinds with him, it was more because I was literally a paladin of freedom

and treating the Kuo toa like a prisoner was bad enough, tying it up and forcing it to carry something for the party was way too much

I would look at the context.

Does becoming a god make it hard to adventure with the others? Is the player actually trying to game the system?

Or is this part of a story about the PCs getting ridiculous power and attendant ridiculous problems?

Maybe becoming a god means retiring your character into an NPC, or turns the game into a different genre, or just creates new venues for problems and problem solving in the existing paradigm.

It's not, for me, a question of in-game logic. It's about what's good for the game and the group.

being the god of a mad race of fish people would be quite a challenge

unreliable as they are

in one of my friends campaigns, there was a paladin who worshipped neutrality

of which there was no god in that campaign

at the end of it he ascended to godhood and can now be chosen from the pantheon by other players

it was such a funny concept, but interesting

DnD 4e has a similar concept as a built-in endgame retirement option.

Personally, I'd love to run a game about wrestling with becoming strange gods. But it's not something I'd use DnD to run.

me and my friends arent really very versed in other RPG games. what would you suggest?

Hmm. Depends on the tone I wanted.

Fate, Don't Rest Your Head, maybe even Lasers and Feelings, could be hacked for it.

I suspect World of Darkness could do interesting things with the idea, but I'm not familiar with it.

Exalted has several built-in mechanisms for this sort of thing

There you go.

Depending on what you mean by "ascending to godhood"

ive heard of fate before

where can i find some information on these?

The tag wikis on this site are a good start for most of them.

I'll be more chatty when I'm off my phone and back on my keyboard.

Online information about Exalted is kind of scarce nowadays.

The publisher did this weird restructuring and destroyed their web presence (imo) unnecessarily.

...now I'm imagining a Katanas & Trenchcoats hack for Mythos characters.

Congeries & Tentacles?

lol. im off to bed. night

ttfn

Hmmm

The alignment system in heroes unlimited isnt bad

Thats a lot less complicated than C/L G/E N

@BESW right now outside it is about as bright as it gets on Pluto during the brightest part of the day

NASA's Pluto Time: give it your location (or any location), and it'll tell you what time during dawn or dusk the illumination at that place matches how bright it is at Noon on pluto.

This may be relephant to your Pluto plot, @BESW.

Hmm.

There are precedents for sympathetic magic creating gateways between realms based on similar ambient conditions in each location.

@Nemenia So, the concept Doppelgreener was trying to convey, and which my ideas about not using D&D to run that particular kind of game are also based on, is simply that each RPG system supports or fails to support different kinds of playstyles and storytelling.

Regardless of what anyone thinks an RPG "should" be like, systems like D&D dedicate the lion's share of their mechanics to the details of physical conflict. In that context it makes sense that players assume most of their interactions with NPCs should be violent.

I'm not saying that's a good or bad thing, simply that "most interactions are probably fights" is a harmonious ludonarrative for D&D-style mechanic systems.

When I imagine a game about human-like beings turning into Lovecraftian god-things, I don't think dramatic physical conflict should be a primary focus of the narrative anymore: I'd prefer it to be a game about the inner struggle of seeing one's humanity drip away. As a Mythos creature ordinary physical conflict becomes trivial; Lovecraftian struggles are of the soul, they're about wrestling with having your position in the cosmos (or your perception of it) dramatically re-defined.

Also, "Harmonious Ludonarrative" is a good name for a Mad Max character.

Oh, @doppelgreener. Remember the Rule of Fantasy Apostrophes?

It's been invoked for Umdaar.

So the Starblades were forged by Su-boing-ul to defeat the H-boing-rthmaw, and one of them is called T-boing-Gyan.

lol

This is a plant whose seed pods are still designed to hook onto mammoths for dispersal.

@BESW Spectacular.

(Because seriously, H'rthmaw? I tried to say that twice with a straight face and just boinged from there on out.)

@BESW I appreciate the Rule of Fantasy Apostrophes for the fact that anyone aware of it would probably be discouraged from concocting such unpronouncible names.

Well, from now on I'm going to be peppering Umdaar with apostrophes at a rate of roughly one per adventure.

[searches for random generators of Pern dragonrider names]

(Fantasy apostrophes are especially ...weird? for me because the native language of the Mariana Islands DOES use the apostrophe as a letter. But that doesn't make any of those fantasy apostrophes any more pronounceable.)

I know that in many languages' Romanized forms, they are used to represent a click of the tongue that English speakers would need to learn. In others, they can be used to indicate a syllable break and correct us from how we might otherwise pronounce it: Goa'uld means "pronounce goa, then pronounce uld. Don't pronounce Go-auld."

But no English speaker should be expected to know how to pronounce a click, so H'rthmaw is just silly.

In Chamorro, it's a glottal stop--which is actually how goa'uld is often pronounced.

Oh, that's the name for it!

It's not just "stop, then start," it's an abrupt pause, like "uh-oh."

Something like a glottal stop is actually how most fantasy apostrophes are intended, where we can discover the intent.

For example, dragonriders all adopt apostrophied names when they first bond with a dragon. The apostrophe represents an elided vowel from their previous "normal" name.

However it cannot be taken very seriously in a system that offers a name as unpronouncible as H'rthmaw.

Indeed. The problem there, though, is that the apostrophe is merely distraction from the unpronounceable gabble that is "rthm."

yes.

I would just call him Rhythm-aw, lord of the dance.

And given the presentation context in the flavour text, they did it totally on purpose:

> According to the tale, the Demiurge were besieged by the H’rthmaw, beings so full of hate that they could kill with a glance. Thus, the smith Su’ul forged a weapon that could attack the H’rthmaw from afar; he crafted the Firerain Wheel, which wiped the H’rthmaw armies, crafts, and cities off the face of the planet.

Oh, they are a general set of beings.

Well, that was a fun little power outage.

is it over?

we had one here too

on generator power atm

It's over for us, but we watched various parts of the island come back on piecemeal over the hills outside our window, so it may not be over for you.

ah

Fun & excellent medical science news: Some US Defense scientists have made an implant that helps a certain type of memory, and some new developments in identifying that cancers could basically be starved to death (but there's yet to be a drug that actually does this).

Oh lordy. New user is necroing old questions, and causing my rep to go into a landslide...

unclear if should downvote. the answer to the querent's question is on the page after they quote....

@Tritium21 SE has automated defenses for that, it should get corrected if they're just downvoting a ton of posts in sequence.

@Grubermensch What? No, new user is necroing old posts and I am having to blow rep to downvote them

Oh, that's different. I guess you'll get it back when the answers get deleted though.

tosses said user into a naked singularity

...What the hell. Who calls someone to ask if they can work in a department for which they have zero training?

I work at a grocery store. I do not have a uniform. My job at said store does not require me to have one. I work maintenance. Need me to come in early and paint a wall? yup, will do. Need me to come in and fix or clean something? Sure, its what I am here for. Need me to stock shelves overnight? Eh, I've done it and its a job that requires no training. Need me to cash? Run a counter service department? Are you on crack?

oh, and can you manage the store while you're at it?

Have done.

I have been the only person on the clock.

My job was to keep the doorways shoveled out and smoke for 6 hours.

and tell people coming in that the store will reopen when it is not actually christmas day

reminds me of staying overnight when i was working at a video rental place to babysit the computer system while its upgrade ran for 6 hours

I have stumbled across white wolf magazine...from pre-vtm

very ad&d focused

I'm about halfway through reading Donjon, and it looks like it might be fun when I'm in the mood for dungeon crawly stuff. I have some pet peeves with it, and there's still a little more rolling and calculating than I might desire, but hmm... maybe someday.

@Pixie I'm usually suspicious about games trying to "recapture the sense of wonder you had as a kid". I don't think it can really work.

It seems more like an attempt to codify a personal sense of nostalgia, which might work for some people and not for others, based on whether they have similar nostalgia.

Also, I committed myself to giving two 90-minute talks in a convention later this week. I have one of them ready, and practically nothing of the second one except a great big jumble of ideas. :-\

@lisardggY This is fair. The framing of the game isn't something I really care for, either.

@Pixie What, the whole "The GM is your enemy" thing?

@lisardggY I consider the idea that the game will "recapture the sense of wonder you had as a kid" part of the framing. But that too, and there's also some snark that pops up throughout the text. It's meant to be humorous, but it irks me.

@Pixie I agree. It seems like it's a tone that would fly better in a closed group of friends, but for us strangers on the internet it comes off as douchey.

@lisardggY Yeah, that's a good way to put it.

The "Humans and other races" tip box, for example. I'm reading through it going, "Oh, good. I probably would have done this anyway, but here we go..." Then it concludes with, "In all honesty, this is an inferior way to play Donjon and should be frowned upon, but the good heart of the author forced my pen to give you the option." Ah. Thanks.

This seems to be the product of contradicting motives. On one hand, the core seems to try to recapture the feel of old-school D&D, with humans as the primary race. On the other hand, the dials seem to be there to allow you to play differently.

Maybe it's due to multiple authors.

I have material ready for, I think, about 15 minutes of talk so far. Ugh.

Eek! Good luck putting the rest of it together.

@lisardggY In this case, I think it's more of a wink and a nudge. I don't feel like you're meant to take that line that seriously; it's just a part of the authorial persona. The dial is there so it can be used, after all. But it's pretty easy to read it literally, too, and even if you don't, it's just a reminder of how deadly serious that perspective can be elsewhere.

I'm giving it on Thursday afternoon, but the con runs from Tuesday and I won't have too much time, and the child is sick, as well. :-\

Anyway, I starred all sorts of interesting comments on hte topic here on chat, so I'll be digging through my history here. :)

The talk is about RPGs and the Murderhobo syndrome.

Aww. :( I hope your child feels better ASAP.

I want to talk about what it is, how it's been with the hobby since its inception, talk about games/meta-games/commentaries about it, from John Tynes PowerKill to Greg Costikyan's Violence,

and then to point out that while D&D claims to be inspired by stories such as Lord of the Rings and so on, it really owes a lot in feel to Robert Howard's Conan and, especially, to Jack Vance's Tales of the Dying Earth, where the fantasy world is eccentric and nihilistic, and the so-called protagonists are a bunch of murderous psychopaths and rapists.

@Pixie I have a personal aversion to the "Self-aware douche" persona, which all too often simply hides a real douche trying to slip in douchiness under the guise of ironic douchiness.

@lisardggY Oh yes, I agree entirely. That wasn't a defense of it. I find it unnecessary.

@lisardggY reading the stuff re: murderhobo syndrome -- I feel my problem is that when I go away from hack and slash, I go full engineer, which causes tons of other problems in many RP contexts -- there are far fewer people who want to span rivers or devise building codes than there are who want to hack and slash or do socialite plotlines

@Pixie That does kinda undermine what they're writing. :'(

@Shalvenay that was referring to a talk he's providing at a convention.

@doppelgreener yeah I know that

but yes, you are right that most people do not want to devise building codes when they're sitting down to play an RPG.

@Shalv Also, I should point out that when you say "I feel my problem is X", that's usually the thing that starts the many types of conversations that have been banned from RPG General. Articulating things you're learning about yourself is a pretty healthy thing and I encourage doing so, but you should probably do it in NAB, not here.

yeah, I tried cuing it over to the NAB already :)

Right. I also however mean that the articulation you posted there should probably occur in NAB, and not be posted here in this room.

aah

can you post cross-chatroom replies here?

I do not believe you can reply directly to a message. You can copy the permalink to their message and paste it in any room, and it'll onebox as their message. You probably should not be pinging the person though.

@doppelgreener Yeeeah. I think the rules could be useful to me if I wanted to run a certain type of game, but I first had to push past my annoyance at stuff like that. I couldn't blame someone for stopping right there.

@Pixie there's a chance I'd lose faith in the book right there and be that person who stops reading.

"This is a horrible idea but my inherent goodness forced me to mention it." Wat.

-15 Coherency.