TRPG General Chat

doppelgreener

00:00

I'll give an exact example: Let's say there's a D&D 4e class that says a Barbarian goes berserk once they hit half-health, and while berserk they do not distinguish friend from foe and they attack the nearest character. This is not My Guy Syndrome. If that results in an un-fun game scenario; that's still not My Guy Syndrome. It may indicate poor player team strategy, or un-fun rules, or any number of other things, but it is still not MGS.

(I don't recall if such a class and feature exists. I am making it up.)

Baskakov_Dmitriy

Friends told me that it's "Frenzied berserker"

Something like that

BESW

@doppelgreener It's a thing in 3.5, for sure. My solution was to avoid it unless the group all agreed we were cool with the implications.

Baskakov_Dmitriy

He also couldn't get killed while in frenzy, as I recall their words

doppelgreener

My Guy Syndrome is not a silver-bullet method of addressing all scenarios wherein character actions create an un-fun scenario. It is only interested in one scenario which arises out of particular conditions (covered in the bolded section I mentioned earlier).

Shalvenay

@doppelgreener that raises a question for me though: how do you deal with situations where 1) the choices you come up with for your character are so inconsistent that the inconsistency itself spoils the game for other players? or 2) all of the choices you come up with for character behavior sit outside the Overton windows of the other players?

Anaphory

00:03

Overton?

Baskakov_Dmitriy

Basically, when you choose between an unfun action, an unfunner, and the most unfunnest

Yep?

doppelgreener

@Shalvenay Let's talk about that another day.

BESW

@Shalvenay That's symptomatic of other problems we've talked about before.

Shalvenay

@Anaphory "Overton window" is shorthand for "what an individual/group/society considers acceptable"

Miniman

@Anaphory A political term for "what policies people will accept".

doppelgreener

00:04

@Baskakov_Dmitriy No. Every single condition I mention here is part of MGS. All of those conditions are met, or it is not MGS. "You choose between unfun, unfunner, and unfunnest" is not necessarily MGS.

BESW

@doppelgreener You could just be playing deadEarth.

doppelgreener

@BESW [rolls for insanity]

d6

Dice Service

•

Miniman

@BESW I actually heard the badumtish just now.

3

doppelgreener

I FORBID DEADEARTH FROM THIS CONVERSATION AND ANY LESSER RPG

Baskakov_Dmitriy

00:05

Btw, is mentioning FATAL legal in this chat?

(Before you google about that RPG -- it's shock-content)

Miniman

Legal, but I really hope it's not relevant. Ever.

doppelgreener

@Baskakov_Dmitriy [grips chest, collapses]

Baskakov_Dmitriy

[Grasps rulebook to write 10 questions about FATAL for RPG.SE]

*Grabs

Shalvenay

@Baskakov_Dmitriy [VTCs, goes to meta with a tag burnination request in hand]

Baskakov_Dmitriy

One of them would definitely be MGS

BESW

00:12

@Shalvenay It'd probably go much like this thread.

Baskakov_Dmitriy

@Shalvenay Hello! I am looking for a system with strict alignment rules for Anal Circumference. No homerules, please. [game-recommendation] [system-agnostic] [rules-as-written] [FATAL] [Anal-circumference]

BESW

This is where we change the topic of conversation.

Anybody have experience making relationship maps?

Baskakov_Dmitriy

Did it in school

BESW

I have a really hard time getting them organised into useful patterns.

Baskakov_Dmitriy

On literature lessons

Why do you need them?

As for me, they were always useless

Shalvenay

00:16

@Baskakov_Dmitriy VtC...but I've seen worse things masquerading as Stack questions before (mostly because the querents in question could barely form words and use a spacebar, nevermind things like Shift, punctuation marks, or uploading pictures of the situation at hand)

BESW

Because we're playing Bubblegumshoe.

Baskakov_Dmitriy

Not sure what this system is, but whatever.

Do I need system knowledge to understand the problem with your maps?

BESW

I don't think so. I need to map complex relationships, preferably with a physical location component as well.

A lot of games suggest using relationship maps as tools for tracking complex social interactions, and it's a strategy I want to try.

Here's an example of the kind of thing I might want to have.

Is there a program you've found useful for this task?

Baskakov_Dmitriy

To be serious -- I don't support removing MYFAROG questions if they are asked seriously, even though it's like 99% nazi propaganda. Neither would I with FATAL, if someone tries to take it seriously and ask questions. By "removing" I mean "removing by mods".
Downvoting it into the hell is ok, though.

@BESW We did all that by our hands, was quick enough.

You may use any program that allows you to drag textboxes, there are plenty of them

Google Drawings will probably be ok.

Shalvenay

@Baskakov_Dmitriy yeah, I don't think I'd support outright removal, either

Baskakov_Dmitriy

00:27

@BESW Again, those maps never worked for me or helped me, neither did they help those who studied literature with me

So they are pretty much pointless

If you still want to use them, I suggest trying with very small amount of characters first

Or you get an outright headache

BESW

Lit's a very different beast, and the same tool is being used for a different purpose in RPGs.

Relationship maps are more useful when creating stories than when analysing them, I think.

Baskakov_Dmitriy

I also suggest using arrows of different types rather than of different colours

(I mean, of differen forms)

Because different forms are easily distinguishable, while different colours quickly start looking the same way

The Oracle

0

Q: How should we tag questions about making magic items?

In order of their folksonomic creation, we currently have the tags magic-items (May 16, 2011), crafting (Oct 1, 2014), and magic-item-creation (May 26 of this year). Notably, the more general crafting tag lays claim to “… smithing, alchemy, magic item creation…”, while the newer magic-item-cre...

Shalvenay

01:03

hey there @nitsua60

nitsua60

VtC unclear: edition needed

Adeptus

99% sure it's 5e

Miniman

Also, champion isn't a fighting style.

So even if it is 5e, there's some clarification required there.

nitsua60

01:26

@BESW I like Freemind for some things in this vein, others Graphviz. Depends on the use-case.

BESW

Yeah, I'm looking through a lot of different mind-mapping options...

nitsua60

@Adeptus Me too, but better safe than sorry.

@Shalvenay Hiya

(just got caught up)

BESW

I'm not very good at categorical organisation, is the problem.

nitsua60

Graphviz is very bare-bones, not too user-friendly. But it's great when I've got large and fairly "flat" data I want to represent--it's got a simple input format that makes it easy to whip up a script to greate the .dot files.

BESW

Yeah... BGS is complex.

nitsua60

01:36

Freemind is much nicer for some story-like elements: all nodes can be clicked on to expand/collapse, so you can attach text-notes to nodes and have them out of the way most times.

By "flat" I mean data where within a level of the hierarchy data look relatively similar.

(So, not really "flat" at all. "Cleanly-stratified," maybe?)

BESW

01:51

This is the info I've got to map:

> WILLOW WINTERPEAK
Wealthy; Jocks; Actors
TAYLOR HATCHER
Middle Class; Chicora-Kingston; Nerds
MARCO KINGSLEY
Wealthy; Activists; Latinos; Mechanics
ANDREW RYAN
Middle Class; Jocks; Journalism

ALISTAIR KINGSLEY
Wealthy; Jocks
The Hotel
Loves Marco
ANDREA WHITE
Poor; Chicora-Kingston
Kingston Falls
Loves Taylor
ANTOINE JUDE
Middle Class; Mechanics; Nerds
The Garage
Loves Andrew; Loves Willow
ASHLEY BENNET
Middle Class; Jocks
Bennet Diner
Loves Marco
BEAUFORD "BO-BOY" BOYD
Middle Class; College kids;

Locations are probably the first to go.

Adeptus

@BESW "Eddie Hitler"?

BESW

He's Marco's detention buddy.

I suspect a lot of his poor life choices stem from trying to be known for something other than his last name.

(Almost all of these characters are made by the players, not me.)

nitsua60

@BESW What's the purpose of the map? Who's the audience? Is it just for you to keep things straight?

BESW

> This tool helps keep track of the Sleuths and the people they know. It helps the GM create mysteries by seeing who in the town might be responsible or victimized. It helps the players remember who they can call upon for assistance, or have dealt with in the past. (BGS 119)

nitsua60

It seems like people are your principal nodes, and each person might have some membership(s), a location, and some interpersonal relationship(s)... is that likely to be all the layers/types of connections to track?

BESW

02:04

Yes.

nitsua60

@BESW gimme five min =)

BESW

[bates breath]

SevenSidedDie

02:16

Urg, yeah. Relationship maps like that are wonderful but a pain to work up in software. I've yet to find decent point-and-click software that represents the data the way I want. Last time I fell back to graphviz, again, because it mostly just works once I put in the effort:

nitsua60

@SevenSidedDie Do you mind posting (or linking) your source file for that, so @BESW could see how the back-end looks? (Also, which layout engine was that?)

SevenSidedDie

@nitsua60 Yeah, sure. I think I can just dump it in here…

digraph tribes {
	compound=true;

	// color palette: paletton.com/palette.php?uid=35D0u0kllllaRR3g5umqAckvP3k

	subgraph Elkoi {
		node [style=filled, fillcolor="#FFA9A9"]
		// label="Elkoi Clans"
		blackdog [label="Black Dog\n(Elkoi)", shape=hexagon, width=1.6, size=true]
		greatsable [label="Great Sable"]
		tiger [label="Tiger"]
		greywolf [label="Grey Wolf"]
		bluebear [label="Blue Bear"]
		snake [label="River Snake"]
		boar [label="Brown Boar"]
		cavebear [label="Cave Bear"]

		greywolf -> blackdog

~~Bleh, it killed all the indents.~~ Ah, fixed font button fixed it.

nitsua60

whoa!

(oh, did you just backtick the whole thing?)

SevenSidedDie

@nitsua60 There's a [fixed font] button you can press beside the send button, that looks like it just 4-space indents the whole thing.

nitsua60

Hmm... not for me there isn't... send and upload... are my only buttons

(chrome)

BESW

02:24

@nitsua60 It appears if you type in certain kinds of content.

nitsua60

jlkd;arhv
fdjsl;af
ah, there it appears.

SevenSidedDie

@nitsua60 I don't recall which renderer I used. I think it may have been the default. The blocks up top are mostly setting conveniences, like default colour and all the node labels, while the real work is in the simpler-looking lower sections that just say thing1 -> thing2. If I recall correctly, the subgraph stuff also helped the layout engine not splat them all over the place as much.

nitsua60

Interesting....

SevenSidedDie

The results are great, but the fiddling to make up the last 20% of the niceness of the output is 80% of the work. Graphviz really needs a good graphical frontend.

We have an old question looking for good software for exactly this, but the answers are dishearteningly almost-but-not-quite good:

16

Q: Tools for tracking NPC/PC relationships and attitudes

I have always had difficulty keeping track of NPCs, their attitudes and their relationships with each other and the PCs. I find relationship webs/diagrams are helpful, but find them difficult to keep up to date and accurate from session to session. Are there any tools that would help with this t...

gm-techniques npc tool-recommendation relationship-maps

nitsua60

@SevenSidedDie This. (I don't know what I was thinking, saying "gimme 5 min." Wait, yes I do. I was thinking "it's a program I've used before, shouldn't be too bad to punch something out in 5 minutes." Which often holds, but not in this case.)

The nice thing is, once you've sorted out that fiddling on a small set, it scales really nicely (in my experience). That is, taking an hour to get a twenty-element graph looking sensible pays off when you can upscale that one to hundreds of entries and need very little tweaking.

SevenSidedDie

02:44

@nitsua60 Yeah, that's true. Looking at BESW's data, I could slot that into my above file, tweak some labels, and get a nice representation of the directional relationships like X loves Y. But I have no idea how to handle the categories like Jocks, Wealthy, Mechanics, etc.…

nitsua60

@SevenSidedDie I was thinking the circo engine would be nice: set the PCs as one circle, NPCs can float in the interior with their directed edges, organizations/groupings in a larger concentric circle?

BESW

Yeah, I was thinking kind of a Venn diagram thing with a relationship chart on top.

SevenSidedDie

@nitsua60 Maybe…

BESW

Venn diagram for groups like Jocks and Mechanics, flowchart for relationships between individuals, and for wealthy/middle class/poor, probably just vertical position in the space.

nitsua60

The positioning of the organizations would gravitate toward the location that minimizes their edge-lengths to the PCs who belong to them, so you'd end up with the "wealthy"s in the UL quadrant, the "Jocks" tending to LR, &c.

PC-PC relationships could be nice heavy edges across the interior of the PC circle...

BESW

02:49

PC/PC relationships don't exist.

Or rather, they're not mechanised or mapped. They're just sleuths together.

SevenSidedDie

@BESW Yeah, that's what I'm picturing. I just don't know how to make software do that. I suspect they will be more ropey blobs of overlapping identity, like a map of the Galactic Empire, than neat circular Venn categories. Something that, given physical cards with string for the layout prototype, then pencil and pen on a large poster paper, I can imagine how I'd hand-make it. But software's supposed to be able to do these things now!

nitsua60

something like this:

=)

BESW

@SevenSidedDie There's no software for making Stalker Walls?

nitsua60

@SevenSidedDie invisible, equal-length, heavily biased PC-PC edges, forcing them into the central visual space, dictating that everything else in the graphs aligns to them.

SevenSidedDie

@BESW There is, but they all have quirks. The one I have won't let you put labels on the “strings”, which for my purposes are critical. Others don't like lack of hierarchy and insist you have a top/centre node, which also doesn't fly for relationship maps.

BESW

02:52

The best one I've tried thus far is Mindomo.

It insists on a centre/top node, but lets you just have it sit there unconnected to everything else.

SevenSidedDie

@BESW To create what I'm imagining in your data, I'd use one of these suboptimal bits of software to hand-fiddle the people into position, then transfer it to a vector drawing package somehow and hand-build the membership bubbles underneath.

BESW

But it doesn't seem to have the Venn Diagram option.

That seems about right, yeah.

nitsua60

That's the reason I will always love graphviz ^^

When my wife and I were... discussing names for our second child we couldn't get anywhere. So we made our lists of names we liked, I pulled social security database-research on most-common sibling names for the names we had on our lists, and generated that graph.

SevenSidedDie

@nitsua60 It does first-order layouts really well! If only it didn't fight so hard against you when you try to refine them.

nitsua60

@SevenSidedDie Clearly, it was written by physicists. "What are you talking about, you want it to look different? It minimizes the total strain in the connections whose strengths you specified! It's doing exactly what you said you wanted!"

SevenSidedDie

03:02

@nitsua60 Oh neat. It's interesting how it breaks into distinct clusters of unshared sibling names.

nitsua60

@SevenSidedDie That's what helped us break down the overwhelming-ness of the task and organize our thinking.

SevenSidedDie

@nitsua60 Yeah. ^_^ If only it had been written by data analysts!

nitsua60

@SevenSidedDie We were able to say "okay, all very Christian names, but there's a more Anglo-centric cluster vs. the more Biblical cluster.... Wait, what's that you say, Dr. Orli? It's a girl?"

"Nvm."

SevenSidedDie

@nitsua60 Did that actually happen?

nitsua60

@SevenSidedDie Yes, we spent months arguing over boys' names, only to have a girl =)

(We had a girl's name in hand, from month 1, no disagreement.)

SevenSidedDie

03:05

@nitsua60 Hah, nice.

nitsua60

Child after that, we skipped the arguing and went into the delivery room with a girl's name we both liked from the get-go and no boy's name. "Worked last time!"

Adeptus

@nitsua60 ...and had a boy?

SevenSidedDie

@nitsua60 We actually independently arrived at the same name, and it was one of the few gender-neutral yet traditional names. Clearly we were inspired. She's our only-born, so we won't have to see what would have happened for number two…

nitsua60

@Adeptus Lucked out. (Vis-a-vis names, that is. Would have been happy with any outcome.)

I'm intrigued by the asymmetric relationships. Like how Benjamin is one of the 5 most-common sibling names for an Andrew, but not vice-versa.

@SevenSidedDie I assume by "gender-neutral yet traditional name" you mean Alexand...?

Adeptus

@SevenSidedDie Our daughter has a gender-neutral name. My wife knew a woman who was studying law, and had a very "girly" name (and appearance). She didn't think she'd be taken seriously at first impression, and didn't want the same for our daughter.

nitsua60

03:10

[tails off at the end]

SevenSidedDie

@nitsua60 Nope! This one works unchanged. I'm not sure how large that set is, now that I think about it…

@nitsua60 Yeah, interesting that birth order correlates with certain names like that.

nitsua60

@SevenSidedDie I guess it depends on how you treat "traditional." Do you mean that it's been used for both for a long time, or just that it's been considered a traditional name for one gender, and has gained acceptance in another?

SevenSidedDie

Oh wait, birth order isn't part of the data you mentioned. Huh. What would cause that…

nitsua60

@SevenSidedDie Remember this is just the top 5 being displayed.

The count has to be symmetric, but position in ranking isn't.

SevenSidedDie

@nitsua60 I mean it's not Moon Unit or something gender neutral by virtue of being newly-invented. :) An existing name that's been around for ages, yet that is recognised as being both for boys and girls.

nitsua60

03:15

(IOW the 100,000 Andrew-Benjamin brothers out there get counted equally in either direction; but the 200K Andrew-Matthew, Andrew-Nicholas, &c. drive Andrew-Benjamin down Andrew's list, even if it's high on Benjamin's list. Because there are so many more Andrews than Benjamins.)

Adeptus

@SevenSidedDie Moon Unit is clearly a female name. 100% of its uses that I'm aware of are female. (all 1 of them)

SevenSidedDie

@nitsua60 Ah, right, so commonality differences between two names would affect the symmetry in the top 5.

@Adeptus Well, true. Not an excellent example of a gender-neutral name, but a good example of a recently-invented one!

nitsua60

I guess I'm asking, is it "traditionally gender-neutral" in the sense that Jean or Adrian might be considered, in that it's a "traditional" name both for boys and for girls? Or is it "traditional and gender-neutral" like Reed which might be considered a "traditional" boy's name, but is currently common among girls, too?

(And I'm scrupulously not asking you to divulge your daughter's name to a stranger on the internet!)

(Not that you would, but I wouldn't want you to, either.)

SevenSidedDie

@nitsua60 These people are OK. :) It's the great Google looking over our shoulder that stays my hand…

nitsua60

Are we indexed here?
[covers ears to drown out the laughing]

SevenSidedDie

03:21

It's a traditional name of the first sort, but only sorta, because it's somewhat like the second sort, but which way depends on whether you're in North America or the UK.

@nitsua60 Yeah, fully publicly indexed and searchable forever…er…er…<sub>er…</sub>

nitsua60

04:10

@BESW ^^ the "circo" layout; not the best, I think, for your use, though it might be worth a look.

BESW

Wow.

nitsua60

This one looks bad now, but I think it might actually be the right one, once all the data's in.

Believe it or not, those nodes currently lie on concentric circles.

PCs innermost, then things they're 1 edge from (NPCs), then things the PCs are 2 edges from (groups and locations)

trogdor

@nitsua60 this one does look,... worse than the first one currently

nitsua60

More entries will push out the radii, and (I think) it'll end up looking pretty good.

In my file browser, shrunk down to "unreadable, but you get the sense of it" it looks pretty good =)

This is a thing I like about Graphviz: it has different layout engines, so you just write up the underlying connections and then see how it looks when laid out under a dozen different rationales.

For instance, that ^^ is not a good scheme for these data =)

trogdor

no, it is not

XD

I like the "square" layout for a lot of things, but those things don't have this many points that need to intersect in such intricate ways

nitsua60

04:41

@BESW this ^^ might also hold some promise.

Now we're at the point of tweaking attributes, which would be better left to you.

(Since you have to use the thing.)

BESW

Hrm. Maybe I should reduce the variables so it's more legible.

nitsua60

@BESW No, the data should reign supreme.

(I think there's probably a way to add some vertical padding, which would do a lot to improve that last one.)

I'm heading off to bed. Here's the .dot file in case you want to play with it yourself:

digraph BGSBESW { graph [overlap=false]

subgraph GM{
GM [style=invis label="Awesome"]

GM->WW [style=invis]
GM->TH [style=invis]
GM->MK [style=invis]
GM->AR [style=invis]
}

subgraph cluster_PCs{ node [shape=doubleoctagon]

WW [label="Willow\nWinterpeak"]
TH [label="Taylor\nHatcher"]
MK [label="Marco\nKingsley"]
AR [label="Andrew\nRyan"]

WW->TH [style=invis]
TH->MK [style=invis]
MK->AR [style=invis]
AR->WW [style=invis]

graph [style=dotted]
}

subgraph locations{ node [shape=box]
Hotel [label="The Hotel"]

There are any number of ideosyncracies/artifacts, so don't judge it too harshly.

For instance, the totally-invisible GM graph exists to provide a "center" which is important in the twopi layout.

The currently-unimportant PC-PC edges could have lengths/weights specified through attributes, which would do a lot to change how each layout ends up looking.

&c.

BESW

I did find a conspiracy wall generator.

Looks like it wants me to log into FaceBook, though. Bah.

trogdor

yeah, I was interested until it asked for that

SevenSidedDie

05:10

Something I love about Dungeon World/Apocalypse World and their good spinoffs is that they're like zen koans: I keep learning new things as I study them.

BESW

What's new?

SevenSidedDie

Like, TIL I realised that the Fighter's Bend Bars move triggers when destroying something with pure muscle. The move doesn't determine whether you demolish it, but how. Demolishing is something that, in any case that isn't a Danger to Defy first, the Fighter just does and we only care about the fallout, not determining the fact.

BESW

Cool.

I have trouble with triggers.

trogdor

same,... partly because it is encouraged for the GM to hide them from the players (or at least some of them(some triggers, not some players))

SevenSidedDie

@BESW Yeah. I find I have an easier time with triggers when I fall back on the default concept of the game as a “what if” conversation. Makes me less ready to jump to shoehorn a move into every turn of events, and just let them come in when the fiction is actually properly ready for them.

(That just leaves remembering them, which is another challenge).

trogdor

05:17

I DO kinda like that they are supposed to allow for you to try to do just about anything,.... but then they also have hidden "traps" that are not necessarily always going to be clear when you can't peek at the list of triggers

SevenSidedDie

@trogdor I seem to recall you mentioning this before in chat ages ago. But I'm not sure what you mean — which triggers are hidden? Do you mean the two triggers for making a GM move?

BESW

I also have trouble with figuring out what gets triggered without interrupting AW's vaunted "freeform feel" play.

trogdor

it brings me back to the way that D&D often assumed the DM and the PCs were antagonists rather than colaborators in a game

@SevenSidedDie yeah, GM moves, I assumed at least, are triggers are they not?

also, for example, PC's, at least in Monster of the Week, don't have anything detailed on the sheet about trying to give some kind of non-magical first aid to team members who are injured

SevenSidedDie

@trogdor The moves themselves don't have triggers. GM moves are different — they are permissible types of things to say/do/add to the fiction. They all trigger the same way: everyone looks to you to find out what happens next, or a player hands you a “golden opportunity” (basically, missing on a roll or doing something willfully, knowingly, and deliberately ~~self~~ anything-endangering).

trogdor

@SevenSidedDie this isn't the only thing though, as mentioned right above this

even something as simple as my example of mundane first aid is,.... obscured from the players

SevenSidedDie

05:22

@trogdor I don't think I follow the bit about first aid. What's hidden about that?

trogdor

which is odd to me

@SevenSidedDie no skill is called out for it's use

not on the player sheet at least

SevenSidedDie

@trogdor Hm. I think I see. You're thinking of moves = skills. But they're not like skills at all. Here, try this:

@trogdor “Your friend is down, looks like a broken leg. Whatever just flew out of the forest at you both is gone though, at least for now. Looks like she's going into shock. What do you do?”

trogdor

@SevenSidedDie well, there are moves, but there are also the set(s) of modifiers you are supposed to use for all rolls

BESW

Monster of the Week's generic player moves are Kick Some Ass, Act Under Pressure, Help Out, Investigate a Mystery, Manipulate Someone, Protect Someone, Read A Bad Situation, and Use Magic.

trogdor

and Help out is specifically for helping someone else on a roll, as I recall

so it isn't so obviously for first aid

SevenSidedDie

05:26

@trogdor Yeah, but moves aren't buttons to push. They work the other way around: when you move around in the fiction by actually doing stuff, sometimes that pokes a button outside in the mechanics.

trogdor

@SevenSidedDie part of my original problem was indeed the exact mixture of this freeform "style" with specifically called out mechanics

BESW

Right, but figuring out what button is getting poked is the problem.

SevenSidedDie

@trogdor It's definitely a style. The way to approach a PbtA game is to assume everything is freeform, until a trigger jumps in and lays a move down.

trogdor

@SevenSidedDie this was part of my issue, I was most certainly not used to doing things this way

SevenSidedDie

@BESW That's unfortunately, far as I can tell, just a matter of building familiarity and remembering them. :/

trogdor

05:28

I still wouldn't say I am, but at least I have tasted it a little now

BESW

"I rip a strip off my shirt and splint the broken leg with a branch from a nearby tree." What move would that trigger?

SevenSidedDie

@trogdor Yeah, it's an engine that coughs and sputters when it's approached by grabbing at the mechanics first. They're really firm mechanics, but that's deceptive, because they can't be engaged directly like most games with firm mechanics can be/require.

trogdor

@SevenSidedDie yeah, a second part of the problem is "ok what happens when I figure out all I need to say is I splint the broken limb and bandage it, and maybe let her lean on my shoulder"

SevenSidedDie

@BESW No move yet. “Okay, you've got a strip of cloth and a stick. Have you ever splinted a bone before?”

BESW

"No, but I've got scout training and I teach first aid at the local Y."

SevenSidedDie

05:31

@trogdor That's pretty much just what you do. The game is Magic Tea Party, except where it has erected a framework of things that aren't allowed to be just discussed and agreed on between the participants. The particular moveset a PbtA game provides defines the things that are pregnant with potential risks and consequences and adventure. The rest is just "Yeah, that seems reasonable."

trogdor

@SevenSidedDie but the point is that they had a list of moves that they expected you to rely on for most actions ,and then didn't explain the way the rest of it worked, at least sufficiently in my opinion, when you were just narrating actions for things not specifically covered by anything

I still liked it, it was fun, but we hit one or two snags where we had to look really hard to figure out how a particular action was supposed to work

SevenSidedDie

@BESW “So you've read about this and you're pretty sure you understand what you're supposed to do, but this will be the first time doing it. Cool, okay. So you've got the stick and cloth ready and you have to straighten the leg so it'll heal right. The danger of course being that you'll do it not quite right and do more damage. What do you do to mitigate that?”

BESW

So, at this point what I was imagining to be a quick moment in a larger scene has turned into 20 questions about first aid in a game about hunting monsters.

trogdor

yeah

SevenSidedDie

@trogdor Right. I can see that. The expectations of how to interface with the mechanics (or rather, how to just not unless necessary) is mostly on the GM to finesse with new players, and that's tricky for a new GM whose still getting the hang of it. That's one place where the game has to really hold the GM's hand to give the best chance to convey it to the players. Not every PbtA game is as well-written as some.

trogdor

05:37

the problem, as I see it, is that anything that doesn't obviously fit into either a skillset or a moveset, or whatever, starts to lag the game a lot when you try to figure out what a particular attempted action is supposed to do in this game

SevenSidedDie

@BESW Yeah. The games are deliberately designed to zoom in and out rather dynamically, so you can have tension at all scales. Normally there would be a lot of context involved that makes the first aid matter, and how the GM handles it tends to scale to that context.

trogdor

@SevenSidedDie fair enough there

I will accept that it is possibly just an oversight of Monster of the Week itself. that being said, even if it is, it is a pretty strange thing to have either no guidence, or really obscure guidence, for first aid in a game about doing really dangerous stuff

SevenSidedDie

@trogdor Most actions just work. Or if they're obviously impossible, don't. And when it's not obvious either way, the GM has tools to elaborate the details until it becomes clear and play moves on (or a move was triggered by the PC's actions in response to the elaborating situation). The cycle is talk-talk-talk until a trigger is met, evaluate the trigger, then get back to talking. Hunting for moves to resolve a situation feels awkward because that's not what the game is asking for then.

trogdor

@SevenSidedDie yeah, I understand this, I didn't when I went in, for sure

part of that was my own experience, but part of it was also the seemingly paradoxical way that some moves were set up in a forgone way, while others were nonexistent till you tried to do a thing

SevenSidedDie

@trogdor I haven't run Monster of the Week itself, so I can only guess at which moves those are.

BESW

05:44

@SevenSidedDie Part of the problem with this is that moves are also permissions: if I'm a paladin who can lay on hands, I only know that because I have a move which tells me so.

trogdor

fighting was clearly labeled as Kicking Ass whenever you tried it, first aid of any kind other than some types of magic that not everyone would be able to do,... not so much

SevenSidedDie

@trogdor I think first aid makes more sense after reading the Healing section of Monster of the Week. Basically, without unusual healing abilities, you either need real medical attention, or not, and if not, wounds can still inconvenience you, and what do you do (narratively) about that is “first aid”.

trogdor

@BESW yeah, that tripped me up for sure

@SevenSidedDie well, part of the problem was "does this have any mechanical effect, if so what is that?

and to be fair, that could be considered my fault,.... but I sincerely doubt no other player would ever ask that question

the ability to ask if what you are doing is a mechanical effect seems more or less un-encouraged by the system, at leas in Monster of the Week itself

I get that that kind of thing isn't what they are aiming for, but actively discouraging that kind of question is confusing to me in and of itself

BESW

Trying to do something I the player think my character can do might be giving the GM a golden opportunity to screw with my character because the GM doesn't think I can.

SevenSidedDie

@trogdor Mechanical effects are mostly absent in PbtA games. Even moves are just a flowchart for getting from fiction A to fiction B with the use of dice (sometimes).

@BESW That's the sort of thing the GM's really discouraged from doing, for that reason. Asking questions to be on the same page is super-important.

trogdor

05:51

@SevenSidedDie well, there are still "mechanics" in there though, moves are mechanics, health is a mechanic, fighting is a mechanic

SevenSidedDie

@trogdor Yeah, but they're minimal. The direct interface in the games are deliberately only the fiction. Like, you can't touch a move directly, you have to have the PC do fictional things that happen to trigger them. If there are mechanical effects on a PC, the GM will let you know. Etc.

The first aid, for example: doing first aid, the response will be what happens next generally. If there's a health effect, the GM will take care of it and let you know. Especially in Monster of the Week, healing is much like real life: it's either something you can walk off, something you need to rest for, or you need a hospital.

trogdor

@SevenSidedDie that just wraps back around to why I was confused, I get what you are saying and what it means, but it still confused me, and maybe even still does a little in practice

SevenSidedDie

@trogdor I think I understand broadly why, but I think I'm missing the important nuances of why.

trogdor

@SevenSidedDie I might be able to explain that in some possibly sufficient way

I am very much used to mechanics based games, that also make some allowance for role play to be sure, some more so than others

so when I went in to Monster of the Week, I see all these moves, and skills that are supposed to cover a wide range of actions, and the moves and skills I see look like they are supposed to be called out as you are doing them, similarly to the way you might do the same thing in D@D

the game itself didn't seem to attempt to do the job of explaining how I was supposed to decide how my character was deciding to do whatever it was she was doing

or how that would progress the game in general

from my mindset at the time, it looked a lot like any other system that had constraints on what you were allowed to do mechanically

in a way that is still the case,... but coming from the opposite side

it "looked" like there were specific things you were "allowed" to do, because all the character types literally had mechanics and "permissions" for doing particular things

SevenSidedDie

@trogdor Right, so here are a pile of mechanical bits, but they didn't present an obvious entry into their mechanical flow, and maybe even how they flowed into each other wasn't obvious. Like that?

trogdor

06:05

but it fell through when I wanted to do something that seemed like it should have some kind of effect, but there were no mechanics, however broad or specific, for doing it

@SevenSidedDie yeah

afk for just a bit

SevenSidedDie

@trogdor Oh, I see, yeah. Like, here are all these things, but there are gaping holes and no explanation or rhyme to them.

Hm. Skimming my Monster of the Week PDF's Keeper section (I haven't run it yet), I'm not super-keen on a few things. The sorts of things that are supposed to fill those gaps are in the GM/Keeper's hands, and it badly flubs at least one of them (saying that player's choices are restricted in unsure circumstances, and that's what moves are, is completely backwards!). Hrmm.

I think this is the first edition, too. I thought I had a 2nd edition copy from a bundle somewhere… I wonder if this is fixed there.

Augh, it isn't. ;_;

trogdor

06:38

"shrug" I don't know why they would do this thing

SevenSidedDie

Augh! And it explains “be a fan” really badly. That one is a linchpin; not conveying that one will break the game in all kinds of places. I understand what it's saying, but it's preaching to the choir of PbtA cognoscenti, not teaching how to follow that Principle.

trogdor

I did get an impression that it was doing something of that sort

Adeptus

@SevenSidedDie So, to properly understand MotW, you need to read other PbtA rules?

SevenSidedDie

@Adeptus Unfortunately, that's what it looks like. Especially the bit about what moves are for looks like a game of broken telephone, where what's in Apocalypse World was taken, not quite understood well enough to teach, and taught in a form that is destructive to the game. :(

@trogdor MotW definitely does say to be a fan, but its explanation seems somewhat cargo-culty, in that it's making the right noises but missing the explanation of the underlying purpose of the Principle.

It tosses off in a blithe, short paragraph what AW devotes multiple paragraphs to explain in detail. It says we're here to see the hunters do awesome things, by putting them in hard situations, because seeing them awesome out of hard situations is point of the game. Close, but not quite: Be A Fan is a Principle that's there to ensure the GM builds on the characters in the improv sense, to look for how the PC is awesome and celebrate that, reinforce that, and ultimately respect the PC…

and the agency of their player.

trogdor

@SevenSidedDie fair enough, I wouldn't fully understand the scope of that seeing as it is the first thing in the overarching system set I have ever messed with in any way

SevenSidedDie

06:53

@trogdor Yeah, and nobody should expect anyone to. The most important thing a PbtA game can be is a complete and accurate teaching document for the GM — that's one of the engine's secrets, that the engine is mostly in the GM rules, not the player-facing mechanics — and MotW is profoundly disappointing me on that count.

I mean, I love its take on the genre, and I would run it for a group that wants a horror-hunting campaign, but I couldn't force myself to play its GM rules as written. They're just … made wrong.

trogdor

@SevenSidedDie to be fair, the philosophy of the GM being the only one who can peek at all those engine rules also confuses me to some degree, but I could have probably accepted it if I wasn't confused by the rest of what I saw too

SevenSidedDie

@trogdor Technically players are allowed to see the GM rules. It's just that none of them are really useful except for curiosity, because they aren't player-usable. The advice to not read that stuff is more a matter of not seeing how the sausage is made. :)

trogdor

that is fair enough

but on some level, I feel like a grand secret is being kept if I am told not to look at something

heck, I have seen this kind of response in plenty of other people

SevenSidedDie

@trogdor Yeah, fair. One of the neat illusions of a PbtA game is that the GM can run a game that looks completely prepped, but with it actually all being tailored on-the-fly to the players' chosen direction(s). It's not a necessary illusion though, just a cool one.

trogdor

most recently, during my trip to Japan, the rest of us noticed a tiny insect behind my mom, we all knew she didn't need to see that thing, and my dad quickly brushed it away from her. she didn't even entirely want to know what it was, but she still reflexively asked

SevenSidedDie

06:58

@trogdor Yeah, I do that too.

And the first time I ran Dungeon World for one particular player, she enthused at the end, and with some amazement asked how I had all that dynamic stuff prepared before the game. She was slightly deflated when I said I didn't know any of it going in, and it was all made up on the spot. I've known other players who really value the appearance of an independent game world.

trogdor

I do value that myself

at the very least, it can help everyone involved keep a feeling of immersion

it's a big reason why I like acting in small plays sometimes, as well as playing RPGs where you role play characters

another being that despite the fact that doing said things can garner more attention than I typically like being directed at me, I am literally pretending to be a different person altogether, so that deflects some of the anxiety without removing the thrill of people paying attention to what I am doing

they are great ways for me to do a social or semi-social activity

without stressing the heck out of me in the process

SevenSidedDie

07:42

@trogdor I value it quite a bit too. I've always had a strong world-builder bent as a GM, and I have a strong urge to explore free-standing worlds as a player and having a world conform to me as a player is somewhat disconcerting. (I find it rather odd now to so often run an RPG where the GM doesn't/can't build a world to share it with the players.)

trogdor

it is a strange thing

the few times I have run a campaign as the GM I have had trouble with the fact that I couldn't just craft the entire world for the players

not withstanding the logistics and work involved with that, let alone my lack of much experience with GMing in general

SevenSidedDie

It's very satisfying to craft an entire world. But in practice I haven't had the free time for that since high school, and I've also reluctantly learned that it's easy for a perfect jewel world to actively interfere with facilitating an enjoyably interactive play experience.

That's part of my love affair with Dungeon World: it gives me a curious toolbox, which when I use it reveals a world a bit at a time, and one that is both responsive to the player group, but also has a life of its own beyond them and their PCs.

BESW

08:10

Yeah, PbtA sounds so perfect for me and my group, but it's never actually clicked.

In part, I think this is just because a lot of its GM mechanics seem to boil down to "Do the stuff BESW would be doing anyway, but with the added complication of rules to make sure you do it."

SevenSidedDie

@BESW Yes, that's an issue I've heard before. Much of the GM rules are baking a particular set of GMing best practices into hard rules so that most anyone can pick up the game and run it in that tried-and-tested style consistently. For GMs that already operate that way it's often perplexing or actively interfering.

BESW

And for me, it's just--added weight.

SevenSidedDie

@BESW Deadweight, and attempting to “do it right” just throws off the existing doing-it-right.

BESW

Aye.

I spend time figuring out what the game wants me to do... and it's what I would've done anyway.

SevenSidedDie

Myself, I have enough of this style to appreciate it, but enough bad habits that I get a lot out of it being codified into a framework.

BESW

08:18

I suspect I've got bad habits it could help me with, too.

But between the confusion Troggy describes and the frustration with rules that often feel unnecessary...

SevenSidedDie

@BESW Maybe. But maybe few enough that it's too blunt an instrument. :)

BESW

If I'd gone straight from D&D into PbtA, I think it'd have been a valuable eye-opener.

But instead I teethed on Fate.

Maybe PbtA would've been easier.

SevenSidedDie

08:43

I suddenly realise I am up way, way past my bedtime. Or suddenly admit to myself, possibly. I should skedaddle!

BESW

ttfn

Thanks for the conversation!

trogdor

09:06

@SevenSidedDie this works more or less as similar reasons for me

in any case, it was an interesting system, if only seen via MOTW

I wouldn't mind seeing it through other subsystems, but I have the feeling it isn't my ideal overall system either way

Trish

10:44

uhm... need some help with anydice... I want to simulate mekton: 1d10. Explode endlessly on 10. If the first roll is a 1, reroll ONCE and substract the second roll.

ahhh, found...

Trish

11:42

sometimes the solutions in anydice are oddly simple... sometimes oddly complex.

I am grateful for the existance of loop, but a proper if-then-else or case A{}B{}C{} would be soooo nice...

Trish

11:58

headdesks reading the documentation helps... there is ELSE and ELSE IF

Powerdork

12:09

Math check: If I have a player roll a saving throw at 1d20+8, trying to meet or exceed a difficulty of 23, and I want to invert it so that it's magical assault of 1d20+13 trying to meet or exceed a numerical defense, what do I use as the base that I tack the +8 onto for the defense?

Trish

ok... 1d20+8 has a chance of scoring 9 to 28. Chance for 23+ is... 25%. The 1d20+N as its inverse needs to have a 75% chance to succeed then. This would happen on a 1d20>5, or a 1d20+5>10, or 1d20+13>18, so 1d20+13>10+8.

or, if you want to check other numerals: anydice.com/program/a160

Powerdork

oh whoops

Trish

the second test is made as an "inverse", so the 'roll' has to be "-1"

or... wait...

is hitting exactly the difficulty successs or failure?

Powerdork

It's success for the party performing the roll.

With the saving throw, a result of 15-20 on the die (30% odds) leads to the boring (success) outcome. With the magical assault, to get the boring (failure) outcome 30% of the time, it'd have to be 7+13 (20) or better as the successful (interesting) roll, leaving the defense as... (20-8) twelve base?

Trish

11.

Powerdork

12:20

How are you getting 11?

Trish

or... eh... error...

yea, 12. that first output should read ">=" instead of >

anydice.com/program/a163

Powerdork

Thanks.

Trish

run that a few times on other cases... different difficulties.

another oversight... anydice.com/program/a164 - forgot to put Bonus as a variable to the output... but a +1 on DIFF is a +1 on BONUS, so pretty equal...

trying to get rid of players rolling their saves? ;)

Powerdork

Trying to get rid of monsters rolling their saves, actually. Players roll all the dice.

Trish

same thing, different side. Keep in mind that you might need to test this for many many ability/difficulty cases: there are sometimes multiple saves on the same effect!

Powerdork

12:35

How do you mean?

trogdor

is having the players roll the saves for the monsters basically a time saving measure?

Powerdork

Not just so, because it alters the offensive or defensive nature of reroll abilities.

Trish

Think... Prismatic wall in a vertical shaft & tossing down someone through it. d20srd.org/srd/spells/prismaticWall.htm - they have to make multiple different saves for each step.

trogdor

@Powerdork so you give a monster's possible re-roll option to the player instead? or just decide they aren't using them anymore?

Trish

pushing all these saves into one roll would be not a solution.

or would rerolling force to take the worse outcome?

trogdor

12:40

@Trish well, I was thinking more, "the attack and the save can be rolled at the same time"

Trish

@trogdor to me it sounded more like "The attack is also the save roll."

Powerdork

@trogdor Oh, right. No, I was mistaken.

trogdor

but that is also an interesting case

@Trish ooooh the exact SAME roll

ok I see what you mean

Powerdork

@trogdor Mostly it's a drop off of GM load.

trogdor

@Powerdork that is fair too

our group had to have PC's take some slack off of our GM for initiative tracking and a few other things

Powerdork

12:44

Minimal cost, since it's asking the players to substitute "10" in their save DC calculations with "1d20" and adding opponent save bonuses to 12.

trogdor

there is, often enough, a little too much that the one person (being the GM) traditionally has to do

Trish

I handwave what I don't want to handle...

nitsua60

@Powerdork rpg.stackexchange.com/q/69064/23970 has some answers that might help, I hope.

Trish

13:00

I think I will cobble together a survey on dice-rolling for game club tonight...

by far not representative, but something akin to giving them 60 seconds for each test-block that has them calculate the results of a number of 2d6, 3d6 and some pool rolls.

nitsua60

13:40

@Trish If it's for the answer you recently posted I'd suggest, then, deleting that answer until you've got the results to add in as evidence/backup. Right now it just reads as "my experience/thoughts/impressions," which is exactly what the questions didn't want (and which is counterindicated by SSD's comment). I was tempted to downvote, personally.

Anaphory

Eyup!

DForck42

14:14

mornin

UrhoKarila

Mornin'

BESW

Oh gosh, it IS morning. Goodnight.

DForck42

@BESW lol

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