I also don't use XP when I GM. It tends to cause power imbalances in the group, especially when some players are more active/interactive than others. Plus, experienced players have an advantage over new players in terms of knowing how to play well, and so the inexperienced players will lag behind even more.
@kviiri I learned this lesson the hard way. It was in one of my first campaigns, as a player, back when I was still learning how tabletop RPGs worked. I started at a lower level than the existing players, and didn't fully understand how my class (cleric) worked. Plus, some of the players were already close friends with the GM - including his wife - and there was clear favoritism.
So I leveled up slower than the other players, and then they blamed me for not being powerful enough to help out.
@MikeQ None of those things is a problem on their own. The problem in my groups was when some characters were so much better/worse at accomplishing the party's goals that there were members who felt like there was no reason for them to be there.
Depends on the game and group, obviously, but D&D puts combat front and center so that's the place we tended to measure these things in terms of mechanics.
I ran a game with a sorcerer who had an excellent backstory and was thematically melded with the setting in ways that should've been highly effective. But because of the way 3.5 is structured it meant that he had to waste a lot of build resources on useless abilities to get to the ones he wanted.
Meanwhile, the same group had a warlock whose player had gone for all the awesome "I deal massive damage that no one can resist" options, so the sorcerer who wanted to deal a lot of damage... wasn't, in comparison to his fellow teammate.
@MikeQ That's not an easy thing to do. Every GM in our rotating GM party has said they want to emphasize non-combat stuff and they always find not having had enough of it, or good enough.
And the same group had a monk who attacked base armor while the sorcerer and warlock attacked touch armor, meaning it was very difficult for me to give him enemies he could fight effectively without the others being able to roflestomp them.
Emphasizing social situations doesn't fix the problem in my books either, even if done successfully. The initial problem is that the combat guys are happily involved 90% of the time and the non-combat guy is happily involved 10% of the time. We're aiming for 100% for both, not a fifty-fifty division.
@BESW I didn't say to ignore the combat. I was just suggesting that if the GM supplements the combat with some non-combat challenges, then the non-combat characters will be more able to contribute.
One of the reasons I like 4e's design is how they strongly encourage every character to be built primarily for combat. It helps avert the situation where four people are happily smashing goblin heads while Liero the Social Rogue impatiently waits for a chance to utilize their smooth-talking skills. Preferably in a situation that doesn't deprive the rest of the party of combat they'd enjoy.
@MikeQ We started a sci-fi western game in a no-magic setting, and a player joined late and wanted to be a mystical druid that could raise plant minions. I wasn't sure how to handle that, so I let it slide as long as he could make it scientific, rather than magical. he took off with that and started trying to grow trees through people in order to roll off every encounter. Nobody felt that it was a cohesive environment, so we tried building another setting the next week
And, to return to the original subject: they were always all at the same level. It was their character build choices which differentiated their ability to contribute.
Nobody during that session was willing to say no to anything so we ended up with a half-assed idea that nobody was a fan of but nobody explicitly hated
I've been trying to encourage another go, to get some real experience in the system, in a very traditional setting (Standard fantasy or standard sci-fi)
@BESW Isn't that often considered one of the flaws of 3.5? That casters gain power exponentially while martial characters don't? That's probably how the tier system was derived.
Of course, the price to pay is that 4e doesn't lend mechanical support Liero the Social Rogue as a character. Personally, I don't mind, as if I didn't want tactical crunchy combat I could always play something else. Besides, Liero the Brutally Stabbing Rogue Who Is Also Social works just fine.
@THiebert Just out of curiosity, did you have a session zero and did you use same page tool? That sounds to me like you weren't fully in on each others' expectations.
The group starts by defining a broad historical arc ("An empire of dragons rises and falls") and some things they'd like to see ("Cybernetics") or not see ("Elves").
Then you each take turns defining a part of the history, in broad sweeping terms of an entire era or drilling down to a particularly important scene that everyone roleplays to discover the answer to a question.
You can add new elements at any point along the timeline. You can't give other people ideas during their turn and you can't ask for ideas during yours (only roleplay is actively collaborative during a single turn).
This means that you can blow up Atlantis, and people who still want to do stuff with Atlantis can go back and add more elements before it blew up.
At the end of each round someone gets to pick things they like and want to see more of later, and at the start of each round someone gets to pick one of those things as the theme for that round.
Whenever something goes south regarding RPGs for me, I try my best to consider the failure a learning exercise to be cherished. I think I manage it far better with RPGs than with other things I regularly screw up with.
@THiebert In Microscope, everyone has to come up with something on their turn, and nobody else can interfere at that time or ever negate their contribution--though other elements added later can change the context of the contribution, they can't alter what was actually stated.
My original point, though, was about the potential pitfalls of relying on XP distribution, especially when different players end up earning different amounts.
@MikeQ I am not an expert on 3.5e nor on the tier system, but there's actually a component to it that ties again into the "combat power" vs "utility" thing in a way you might find interesting
And at the end you get a rich, complex setting which everyone's familiar with but isn't quite like what anyone originally expected, and you can pick an era of the history to play a "regular" game during.
@THiebert Ah, yeah. You can do "anything" with Fate, but probably not all at the same time.
@MikeQ The tiers, as commonly presented, are not just about power, but also about versatility. To illustrate, consider Tuikku the Thiefy Rogue and Tuhnu the Wizard.
Two things which helped my group ease into Fate: first, we started with a silly one-scene test to get familiar with the system. They played a clown and a mime fighting a hitman in a bar.
Second, for our first "proper" campaigns we used existing properties (particularly Dresden Files) which we all knew and liked.
At early levels, Tuikku is a very useful character for the party. She can pick locks, spot hidden things better than the rest of the party combined, disarm traps and sneak into locations undetected.
I think one of them wanted superheros, another one wanted to be in school, anotehr wanted to be a priest of some sort, so they ended up as college-aged superheros that were part of a religious group to fight crime as an extra-curricular or something
And then Tuhnu learns knock. Bam, there goes the utility of lock-picking. Invisibility, and who needs mundane stealth. Fly, Tuikku's ability to scale walls is obsolete. Detection spells to sense the monsters and traps way before Tuikku even had a chance.
Of course, this is a bit of a caricature, as the wizard probably won't have enough magic to constantly outdo Tuikku in everything she would've previously done. But after learning the relevant spells, the wizard can do it for every particular instance, reducing Tuikku to a sort of plan B. It's not cool being reduced to plan B.
Nobody but the one guy wanted to be religious, and nobody but the one guy wanted to be in schoool, but nobody wanted to shut down ideas, so everyone was a little unhappy with it after it was all said and done
(It's a series of novels by Seanan McGuire, about a family of cryptozoologists who broke off from a rabid cult of monster-hunters and devoted themselves to learning about cryptids and treating them like people whenever possible, while also not getting hunted down and killed by fanatic cultists who consider them heretics.)
Two of my players have offered to DM 5e games so that I can be a player for once. One of them is one of the guys who doesn't have enough time to play consistently, and is spending the majority of his "planning" time coming up with a rich history for a world, while neglecting to know either the geography of the world, or the rules for the game.
@THiebert I've had several games and several kinds of stories with @trogdor and @BESW, and a couple with another group, and I'm beginning to learn & appreciate that it really, really helps to have a vision everyone shares and agrees on. We've played a few sessions in a Stargate SG-13 game (a team invented to explore some plot never touched on in the Stargate SG-1 series) and I think it's our most successful yet; we understand all its tropes and what we can & can't do.
It's a fiction where there's tons to explore -- there are so many villains who only show up in two episodes, the first to be introduced and the second a season or two later to be defeated, and our team's exploring all of that. But the way the world works is well-defined for us and it's fun to play in.
I definitely think if there's major disconnect in how the world should work it really, really shows up, and Fate won't be able to handle that for you very well.
@doppelspooker That's primarily why i want to try again in a traditional setting. I think the system is less to blame than the obscurity we're forcing into it. Everyone knows and likes the traditional mideaval fantasy settings, so those should be effective
Its text goes on the very permissive side, and probably for good reason, since if it talked about the GM being able to really exert a "i don't think you can do that so I'm going to veto that", the game would probably be interpreted as being run like a D&D DM runs their games.
Traditional medieval fantasy can be very ill-defined itself though in its tropes and what's possible. Lord of the Rings medieval fantasy is very, very different from Harry Potter medieval fantasy, and both are different from Dark Souls.
@THiebert One of the things I like to do when approaching something untrodden (new system, new people or such) is playing everything very simple in the setting. Almost to the point of laughable simple. And sometimes way beyond that :)
(Nobody knows much about them, but they appear to be cryptids with a symbiotic relationship with dragons. They all look like beautiful women with a thing for gold and an immunity to fire.)
@THiebert part of why i'm cautioning about that is that it'd be the kind of thing where you know what you're thinking of, and you're not sure where it lies with regards to what others are thinking, but everyone seems to be sure they're thinking the same thing, in part because nobody's quite sure how to express what kind of fantasy they're thinking of.
it can help to describe it in terms of story intersections.
I have gotten lazier in my prose reading too. The last novel I read was the web serial Worm (superhero deconstruction). Currently I'm reading Kebra Nagast, but I can't bring myself to map works of legend or religious texts into "fiction" even if I don't believe in them myself.
"hellboy meets atomic robo" was a pitch that got me into a weird fantasy game BESW and trogdor & others organised. later "x-files and warehouse 13" were added, and i didn't know what they meant, but over time i realised they were expecting a different game to what i was trying to play because of what those two stories meant. and people who had a different set of 2-3 of those stories may have had different expectations again.
Eventually we decided we'd picture our major, moderate, and minor influences for the story (i knew my major influences were atomic robo + hellboy, and my moderate influences were avatar the last airbender; plus others i hadn't analysed yet), find the ones we could all overlap on that would fit well together, and make a central influence map of those stories -- so we'd be in rough alignment on the kinds of narrative we would be drawing on.
@trogdor there's a lot of games i've had a total blast with, so there's a lot of competition, but amaterasu let me do so much & have so many memorable fun scenes.
by raw unbridled fun value it gets beaten out by our great ork gods game, our lasers & feelings game, and a couple of others.
but by how fulfilling and consistently enjoyable was, and by the volume of exploration and self-expression via roleplaying i got to do, and the characters i got to craft and explore, and all of that, our amaterasu campaign was amazing.
@doppelspooker our lasers and feelings game is punctuated for me by the fact that you guys sorta forced my character to steal the spotlight to a degree
stargate sg-13 nudges it outta first place because i feel we're able to apply all the things we learned in amaterasu as well as run on a super fun set of clear tropes
@trogdor that was so great.
(for those reading on, trogdor's character was a space alien who kept failing stuff horribly, or succeeding but doing something horrible in the course of it, and wound up appearing to single-handedly nearly destroy the ship, and had to evacuate, and around halfway through all of this the narrative turned to his own species finding out he was there and trying to capture him because he was a war criminal via sheer catastrophic blunders)
Many of my friends who play or would like to play RPGs have too tight schedules for a single long campaign, but want more continuity than what a single one-shot game would allow. I've been thinking of running Apocalypse World as an "open party" game that would work as follows:
every session is ...
I believe a GoT-ish setting requires a GoT-ish story, in which people are moving about and dealing with drama and settings in different parts of the world regularly. The way I see a rotating cast work best is if there's a home base and each session ends there.
@THiebert Hm, good point. It's not as easy that way. The way I'd start cracking this tough nut is figuring out the assumptions that make it problematic, and find a way to waive those assumptions.
Or, you could make a question about how to have a rotating cast game with lots of travelling :)
First thing that popped into my head is that the characters travel all the time. Especially between sessions. Each session begins with the PCs of the players present having chanced together in a place where something interesting is about to happen.
@THiebert They don't have to travel together. Maybe there's months between sessions, and they just happen to visit the same place regularly enough to meet each other.
hrm, anyone care to dig up a copy of Dragon Magazine #331 for me please? need the Grassland Environmental Weapon List from p.87 or thereabouts, to be precise
trying to build a Druid, but stuck with a deep double dump in a kick-in-the-door campaign
dumping INT seems character-breaking (due to having nearly nil skill points to work with) while dumping DEX would work against the racial bonuses (Strongheart Halfling btw)
leaving STR and CHA as dumps
but dumping STR is impractical at first level b/c it'd render the char crippled re: doing damage until wildshape comes online
Many of my friends who play or would like to play RPGs have too tight schedules for a single long campaign, but want more continuity than what a single one-shot game would allow. I've been thinking of running Apocalypse World as an "open party" game that would work as follows:
every session is ...
