@Magician I was thinking the name "botch blog" may be evocative of events and lessons more severe than we're actually primarily interested in documenting. It has sounded to both myself and SSD like it's documenting total screw-ups, as opposed to times things didn't go as well as we could or we had made mistakes and been able to learn from them.
I have lots of things I can document and none of them are me botching anything after all.
They were successful stories in successful sessions and campaigns and people had fun, only there were things I could have done better. Like a scene where I let player talking & my own talking overwrite rolls where instincts told me and another player it felt like a roll was missing.
Right. Well. I think those stories can still fit in a "botch blog", but I'm not married to the name. It was something quickly picked out of a few options brainstormed in the chat. Do you have a different suggestion?
yeah, it's just like uh... it's like if I picked a book off the shelf that said "TERRIBLE DISASTERS IN HISTORY" and it listed the time Fred took a while to change the tire on his car and he was ten minutes late for the work meeting
"Things that went slightly worse than they could have but still mostly fine" wasn't how this was first pitched, hence the name. We're still figuring out the identity of the thing.
anyway, mind's mostly been on other things this morning - some ideas floating through my mind are things like "GM Confessions" or "A GMing Lesson is Learned" (there's an old webcomic i enjoy that is called "a lesson is learned but the damage is irreversible", so i may just be slightly attached in seeing that as a nice name)
@Magician oh, gotcha
but then this blog might also feature player-perspective stories, so!
@Magician Received! I'll sign up/whatever tonight. Also I'm happy with the name Botch Blog now if we can reinforce various types of content as valid & first-class citizens using stuff like tags. :) (cc @BESW)
Hmm... Can someone point out why my answer might have a negative score? I'm not seeing a reason. Maybe its a duplicate answer based on the tweet? http://rpg.stackexchange.com/a/83246/19464
the whole thing tends to beg the question of why you'd cast that spell if there wasn't another target to hit (I'm not immediately aware of any reactions that move people around)
The question is asking about targeting when "no other creatures are available." Mearls says, "you can always choose nobody for an effect worded that way," while you say, "you could always choose to target a different creature." Which isn't what the question's about.
@BESW I'm not so sure about that. I feel like there's the occasional question that's best answered by "go read the books and explain what isn't clear for you"
Speaking of mechanics hacking, there's an official supplement for exalted with four extra settings. I'd never seen it before. The modern one is completely stupid in a way that's growing on me.
It's definitely smugly condescending, but it is relephant.
He's reading the vagueness of the spellcasting language differently than you are, seeing "as if it had cast the spell" as being a broader transference than you are.
To be more specific: how does it justify his previous statement? Because I got the same meaning from that as you did, but his latest comment just seems like circular reasoning. "A different person delivering the spell changes effects based on position because delivery depends on the person doing the delivery."
Yes, exactly. It's circular because for him it is a tautology. From his point of view you're looking at "A, therefore A," and saying "But why does A result in A?"
So all he can respond with is rhetorical flailing.
Alright, here's the leap you made that you don't see as a leap but is giving him trouble:
The rules line says "when you cast a spell with a range of touch, your familiar can deliver the spell as if it had cast the spell." You read that as obviously saying "for the purposes of determining range when delivering the spell and ONLY for the purposes of determining range when delivering the spell, use the familiar's position instead of your own."
Since you thought this was obvious, you didn't clarify that you read it as an exclusive statement about positioning for determining range rather than a general statement about modifying the nature of the caster.
I think I agree with you on the reading (though not being a 5e guy my opinion isn't worth much), but the rule's actual wording isn't explicit enough to block other interpretations from being reasonable.
I think your reading is the most likely because the whole section is focused on range-based targeting and doesn't mention any other qualities of the spell which would be changed by treating the familiar as the caster.
But that's support through omission, which is admittedly shaky ground.
@Miniman the enemy getting pushed away from me, the caster, and not the familiar, who delivered that source of lightning, is pretty weird to imagine. Seems more like rules funking up than in-world logic.
@doppelgreener Oh, absolutely. But the same is true for a bunch of spells even without funky familiar shenanigans.
For example, you can Call Lightning down from the sky, striking an enemy from the opposite side to you, which will throw them away from you nonetheless.
Might want to acknowledge the narrative/mechanical dissonance (imagine if the other dude is around a corner?). It'd be a scenario I point out "hey so the ruling says this, but this makes little sense and the spirit of the game would be happy with you doing it this other way that makes more sense."
This isn't so much about realism as narrative congruity. I can buy a narrative that says when someone gets hit by lightning they go flying away from it. It's harder to buy into a narrative where they go flying sideways / into the source of the lightning / etc. Stretches my suspension of disbelief enough that it snaps.
I hope what I'm about to ask does not devolve into something that belongs in Not a Bar, but I'm aware bits of it might.
I have recently encountered some discussion by role players of sexist, racist and similar negative action. This includes the question “So what do I do in that situation?” – Do we know role-playing-poems, micro-larps or other gameoids that would allow us to experience and try to manage such a situation, taking care that it won't escalate between the players?
@Anaphory Focus on the person targeted. This is imperative. You are not doing whatever you are doing to fix the bigot, but to protect the victim. Whatever you decide, make sure that the person B is OK with it.
There's lots of social-group-level actions that can be taken, depending on the situation and the people. But @Anaphory's specifically asking if there are RPGs designed to mimic the experience so people can role-play various ways to handle it.
ie, he's not asking "What can I do?" he's asking "Is there a game that lets me practice some of the things I could do?"
@BESW Depends on where you draw the line. For fairness, I assume there will be part of it where I need to play the bigot, in which case I need some way of structure I can cling to.
I still assume it would be mostly a LARPoid, not a dice-rolling mania, to be close enough to allow bleed.
I have seen poems that might employ useful structure, but curiously haven't seen one that handles this topic. (There's some about abortion making interesting use of bystanders, and there is one about sexism, male police officer vs. female victim, played cross-gender.)
So, I'm reading Bubblegumshoe with a mind toward using it instead of DFRPG for a college town mystery game about teens developing magical powers.
Thus far it's looking VERY appropriate, except for the "magic" bit obviously. I haven't gotten to the chapter with alternate settings for superpowers and dark magics, but I doubt they'll be quite right.
I'm thinking, though, that the Relationships mechanic might be very appropriate: Sleuths have Love/Like/Hate relationships with NPCs, and each of those NPCs has a skill the Sleuths would normally never have--like Sport Fishing or Forensic Investigation or Speaks Chinese.
I think all I have to do is let Sleuths take on Relationships with magical mentors/sponsors/etc, and mechanically treat "I can create illusions" as roughly equal to "I can 'borrow' my dad's car."
The Sleuth may not even know their magical ability comes from the person they have a Relationship with, but mechanically it still works the same.
@eimyr [amused] Yes, but it depends a lot on the player's baseline.
Dogs in the Vineyard is utterly alien to people who don't have experience with the moral imperatives and concepts of external forces of evil which drive the Dogs.
Ehdrigohr draws on traditional Native American values and worldviews, including concepts of time and destiny which may be exotic to Westerners.
Of course there's Eclipse Phase; it's not about cultural foreignness, but bodily foreignness, and struggling to define personal identity in a world where mental and physical identity are independently fluid.
Paranoia is about buying into selfish doublethink.
How much of the worldview axioms are challenged? I'm thinking that say in DitV very low-level cultural ideas (aggression deserves punishment, help should be returned, death is to be avoided etc.) are generally upheld.
I dunno if it's "value systems," but My Life With Master is about exploring what it's like to believe yourself subhuman, and to give away your agency because of that.
@eimyr Sooort of. The Dogs would consider those to be good things for other people to do, but that Dogs have a bigger picture which means they need to sometimes act in horrible ways "for the greater good."
Super-simplified, Dogs consider selfish behaviour an infection which can destroy their entire way of life, and Dogs have a divine mandate to do anything they deem necessary to prevent that infection from spreading without reprisal.
So while, yes, death is to be avoided, the Dogs consider it preferable to kill an entire town than to let that town's misbehaviour spread to another town.
@BESW That's generallly what I'm probing for. I know a small change can have great consequences but I'm trying to grasp how the game delivers the necessary guidance on how to adjust.
For example, if a game has a small worldview change, let's say "punishment is pointless" as a cultural axiom, this can probably backfire by not settling well within player's mindset.
oh, perhaps it governs how much dice she gets for specific affections
I think that is it,... they spent so little time explaining that part, but it does mention getting the number of dice you roll from the corresponding stat tied to the type of affection you want,.....
@trogdor That reminds me of the Conflict tokens in The Quiet Year. They don't do a thing, they are just there to remind you that conflict is about in the community.
But in that game text, it's made explicit that that's what they are for.
> So there it is, from the developers' mouths: if the stat isn't in here, feel free to grab something similar and re-skin it. Knowing almost nothing about either species I'd say grab a Goat (MM330) and run with it.
Why reskin the mechanics of a Goat into a Sheep when you can surprise and delight all your friends by reskinning a Tarrasque or a Bulette for that Sheep?
So, we're talking about Shark Elemental, and it sounds pretty awesome... But last time I suggested playing the male counterpart of TinkerBell, a lot of people found it a really stupid idea
@eimyr I can't locate it again, but I found a chart, describing the measurements for each size classe. Small creature are around 30 cm, so I can't help but picture a flying garden gnome
I thought either a cleric or a rogue could be interesting. A cleric healing his allies, providing bonuses could be helpful. A rogue able to lockpick something almost his size make me laugh, I don't know why
Any time he was using his abilities to get a job done, the rest of the group had to just watch the GM and I do a scene together because their PCs couldn't join us.
@doppelgreener Yes, well. The week before I was going to switch over to the can't-prove-I-exist pixie bard, another player showed up with his own pixie bard that he was very proud of.
After he spent all session bragging about how he'd made the best, most powerful bard possible, it would've been cruel to bring mine to the table.
@Francisco Pixie's the best Charisma bonus for your buck, especially with the house rules we were using, and there'd been talk about needing another buff character.
So it's quite reasonable to go "buff--bard--pixie."
@BESW Ah. Yea I was kind of salty about my latest campaign. I'm playing a rather interesting Tiefling Paladin. But didn't want to play it with having another Tiefling in the party, just because I don't want to screw over the party by having 2 Tieflings in a party of 5. So I would change. Come in on first day after working over my characters backstory. Another person shows up as Tiefling.
Well, the problem of not stacking to many characters from the same species (apart from humans) seems fairly common. So far, with the groups I had, we try to discuss what everyone wish to play, and try to come to a compromise
Oh no I didn't let it go. I kept it for sure and we're going to roll with it. Just my two cents of salt. But in any case It's going to be a great game for sure. :)
I thought you had to change, as not to have two Tiefling. Well, I hope you have fun with it. I always find frustrating to be forced to abandon a character.
We recently closed a game where the DM allowed "any" races. 1 Tengu, 1 Tiefling, 1 Gob, 1 half elf with an homebrew class and 1 (mandatory) human. We went a little bit overboard with the possibilities.
However the worst thing about that game, even my DM is not happy with. Is there's one person who in this group we've had trouble with before ranging from changing dice rolls, to hard core meta-gaming. Who showed up on day one with no chracter sheet, even though this has been a campaign months in development. And many times the DM asking us to get concepts to him over those months.
Well, I'll tl;dr this as much as possible. Basically there's 6 people in the group including myself. I met the DM in RPG club in High school, he's a few years older than myself. He has two friends who are also part of the group, both are fine and great people. One person I brought to the group, and she's great. However number 6 I met once I started hanging out with the DM and his friend.
However both of them have been on wits end with this guy in real life, many times. But I've only known the guy for about a year. However I can feel it from the DM that he is really not happy. And probably if this guy screws up one more time he'll be kicked out of the D&D at least
@Nyakouai It's perfectly fine. Why would you play a bog-standard regular old Joe if you can play an awesome frog, a cool half-demon, a ravenous pyromaniac midget or something you just literally made yourself?
@eimyr I knwo, right? I forgot, we had an ifrit too. The public relations were complicated, to say the least. But I really wanted to try the racial only archetype of the Alchimist for goblins.
So, after a few sessions, the new player I'd invited has been a bit of a disaster. He doesn't get on well with any of the other players, laughed when someone's character died (in our campaign that's permanent at the moment), and generally has been a nuisance. However, he doesn't seem to notice th...
This too. Now I sleep. @magician the blog could have a few generally useful links like the five geek social fallacies and same page tool and making the hard decisions, might be useful to people. Ok that's me done, goodnight!
@doppelgreener Thanks for the read. But trust me when I say that my DM and his friend will remove this trouble player should they need to without hesitation. This isn't the first time, nor will it be the last. My DM even took him aside later into the first session, to tell him to stop meta-gaming.
Was considering trying to answer, but nothing from what I have to offer seems to suit you, judging by your question. Nonetheless, I suggest you read the link posted by doppelgreener
The only qualm I have with the link is that it and the answers all fall into what I think is a fallacy: "it's the GM's job to deal with it because it's too icky for me, the player, to say something."
Ha, it might be a fallacy but it's been how our games tend to operate. I guess I'm not entirely against asking him to leave, but I want to make sure that I've exhausted other options as he's a member of a smaller group of friends.
'Logic of Cool.' I asked him what skill check he'd be doing and how he'd doing it, and that was his reply, he also redirected me to a Youtube video of the main character of Metal Gear Revengeance who stabs some sort of flying transport with his katana and pulls it off.
Well, given that the protagonist from that MG is some sort of cyborg, if I remember correctly, there is an explanation in game. Logic of Cool seems to be the way to say "I want to do it, and you shouldn't question it"
I mean you're absolutely right, emiyr, but I'm not sure he'd take that to heart, being that he thought that the battle he was fighting was 'pointless' and that battle they ended up protecting the 150 objective all but 5 HP even without his help for the second half.
Like he doesn't seem to hold equal standards for the two sides, I don't think?
@NexTerren But really. The guy comes to the game, disrupts it, takes away the fun, dismisses his friends suggestions and refuses to play by the rules. I'm not asking why he is still playing but rather why is he still a friend?
So to be honest I don't see what others see in him, besides we've known one another for years. I act civilly/friendly around him but myself I don't make contact with him unless in the context of the group.
And I feel bad saying this (and didn't want to say in the question) but I think he has some sort of mental deficiency? He talks strangely, and doesn't seem to follow some things that I think are more basic, and that other players follow just well. I'm no doctor though, so I'm not trying to diagnose him.
So I'm now 26. He came into our group back in... middle school or high school, I don't remember, via somebody else.
@NexTerren OK, so in a group that I used to play with there was a guy who had some mental issues. He was aware of it and so was everyone else. The bottom line was that he was fine to play and/or hang around in certain games, and in others he would become easily irritated and disruptive. It was considered normal and reasonable to avoid playing THOSE games with him.
It was not only a courtesy to the organiser but to other players too.
@eimyr Yes I agree with this. It's a different playing field when you play in an RPG. Especially when dealing with your party which sounds like they want to do more RP, rather than dice rolling for combat.
I am all for inclusivity and reasonable adjustments, but if a person's behaviour is infringing on the fun of others repeatedly and without improvement, then there's no point in playing anyway, is there?
Imagine you all go to play basketball and the guy repeatedly kicks the ball, ignores the dribbling requirement and quits halfway through only to rejoin when his team is winning, would you continue to have him on the team?
Exactly. There's no point in pushing people to not have fun, just when the there is one problem person who ruins it. People will start to rue going to game night, and before you know it your campaign will come to end.
@NexTerren Friendship isn't an exact science. If he can't understand what his problem is, and won't adjust because he's selfish and wants to be the "hero". Not a good friend in my books.
Well I guess I was defining drama a something along the lines of "hurt feelings, feelings of guilt, tension in the group, etc" which I would say are things, do you think of something different when you hear "drama?"
I'd myself approach this from a slightly different angle. I'd say to everyone "look, we have this problem. I will not be happy until we solve it. I believe this XXX is the reason. What does everyone think?"
If the group shares your view then you can say "Bob, look, we don't like the way you behave. We all like you etc. and you're a friend but you're spoiling our fun. If you're not willing to change or think that we're exaggerating, that's fine, but it doesn't change the way we feel. If you can't change your behaviour, we can't play with you anymore."
And that's it.
make it about the behaviour, specific issues that make the game unfun, not about the person in question
If the offending player tries to pull a "you don't like ME" card, respond with "we don't like you doing this X thing that is clearly bad behaviour. I'm sure that's not what makes you who you are"
@NexTerren There is one thing that will positively make it not work. That thing is a sense, notion or a hint that there is a third way out of this which allows him to continue the behaviour.
Clearly, RPG are meant to have fun. If he is spoiling everyone fun, that's a problem that need to be adressed. As Francisco pointed out, losing fun in a game is not a good omen
I removed myself from a game (with advice from this chat, actually), because the GM, while my friend, ran it poorly and targeted me unfairly. It was a good decision.
Yes and on the other end of this coin. If I am ever a DM/GM and doing things unfairly or things that ruin the mood of the group. I would love to know, since chances are I am not realizing it.
@Fibericon Sometimes it's better to end relationships. Like for instance, this one rather recent. A group of about 5-6 people I got together with nearing the end of High School, because we played a lot of Dota 2. We must've played almost every night for about a year.
However over time, whenever I would say something in the chat, like if they want to play a new game that's on sale, if they want to play a round of Dota 2, etc.... They would either never respond or give the bullshit answer of "If you can get other people to play"
It was never a yes/no answer. Needless to say I asked them for yes/no if they can so I can better organize stuff. But nope, they did not follow through. It all boiled over about a month ago, and one person said I was being passive aggressive, a self-centered asshole, a drama queen. It pissed me right off. And I just left the group the next day and haven't talked to them since really.
I feel better now and can move onto different things.
@Anaphory No. What I mean is that he pushed me above 200 on the day, so as to have me "hit" the cap and put another notch in my epic belt.
A while back SE told me, via my profile, that that was the badge I should be caring about next. Now any day with 150 rep just feels like a missed free throw =\
Alright, all. Hitting the road for a week. I'll see you when I see you. (@Shalvenay Traveler book arrived in the mail today, so that's my passenger seat reading!)
> Those hit by a fire elemental’s slam attack also must succeed on a Reflex save or catch on fire. [...] Creatures hitting a fire elemental with natural weapons or unarmed attacks take fire damage as though hit by the elemental’s attack, and also catch on fire unless they succeed on a Reflex save.
By inference, mere proximity to a fire elemental doesn't give you a chance to catch on fire; you've gotta touch it.
