TRPG General Chat

4:04 AM

The former “Gaming Club” at my school is now officially the “Tabletop Role-Playing Games Club”, as listed on the website. Apparently the name change is because the “Video Game Society” was tired of having people sign up for the wrong club. sigh school politics...

linksassin

@BardicWizard I see that as a win for RPGs too.

BESW

Yeah, we get confused people on rpg.se and in this chat, looking to talk about CRPGs.

But of course, any attempt to specify our topic range, runs into pedantry because so many games are online and thus feature neither table nor pen nor paper.

Bardic Wizard

4:44 AM

I’m quite happy that it’s renamed. I’m frustrated that this wasn’t voted on or anything, mostly on principle. The teacher-moderator just sent out an email saying “Hello, Gaming Club! Most of you may recall a lot of confusion around our club and the Video Game Society last year at club day. I am happy to announce that our club is going to be renamed the Tabletop Role-Playing Games Club, in an attempt to minimize the issues. Please remember that our first meeting is...”

Bardic Wizard

5:05 AM

(Side note, realized when I’m supposed to be asleep: the reason this bugs me is that the email telling us the GSA’s pride week was canceled also started with “Hi All! Most of you may recall our discussion last week about our upcoming Pride Week...” so I guess it just reads like bad news to me)

BESW

5:27 AM

ooof

BESW

5:59 AM

My friend wants suggestions for D&D 5e Tier 3/4 (4 preferred) campaign/adventures, third-party, physically printed, to run for students (ages 12 to 18) at their local high school.

3

lisardggY

7:16 AM

good morning.

(For flexible values of "morning". And of "good")

BESW

[wave]

lisardggY

I've started working on my "RPG campaigns adapted to novels or TV shows" talk, and I'm wondering if Dragonlance is even a meaningful reference for people younger than I am these days.

Adeptus

@BESW I haven't tested them, but there are some adventures for those levels in Frog God Games' Quests of Doom (volume 1, volume 2, and book 3) which is available in print & PDF.

BESW

@lisardggY Hmmm, it was never a meaningful reference to me personally; the most attachment I had to Dragonlance was liking a Blind Guardian song about Raistlin.

@Adeptus I'll mention it! FGG is on my List Of TRPG Actors To Side-Eye but they're in the It's Complicated column.

lisardggY

7:33 AM

@BESW I'm not talking about attachment, more about recognizing the name and being aware of it in the cultural landscape.

BESW

Ah, hrm. Good question!

I'm not sure Dragonlance has been A Thing since 3.5 closed shop?

lisardggY

Me: "Obviously, Dragonlance is the classic example of an RPG adapted to a novel"
Audience: "Dragon*what*"?
Me: "Dragonlance? A series of dozens of novels? A popular D&D campaign setting in the 90's? Bad animated movies?"
Audience: "*what*lance?"

BESW

trogdor

lol

do not Dragonlance here mortal XD

BESW

Hmm. The Expanse comes to mind.

Hot RPG Questions

7:39 AM

2

Q: What tier are Path of War classes?

I know what class tiers are, and I know what tier most Pathfinder classes are. However, I have recently discovered Path of War, an alternative rule system published by Dreamscarred Press. It introduces many new classes to the game, and I don't think I know the system well enough to judge every on...

lisardggY

@BESW Yeah, I've got it in my list, though Ihaven't read or watched it.

Also, apparently the writer of the Book of Malazan would run scenes in GURPS before the final draft.

BESW

What about TV shows that used TRPG tools in the writer's room?

lisardggY

Interesting. Which?

BESW

May 15 at 0:59, by BESW

(I'm not just making that up, he's explicitly said that his writer's room uses TRPGs for inspiration when he's making TV shows.)

lisardggY

That show would be The Librarians?

BESW

7:46 AM

That's the one he's explicitly confirmed as using both Cortex and Fate tools in the writing room, but he's said he uses it for other shows too.

Once you know it, you can easily see the character aspects getting compelled and invoked. Sometimes I think they even say the character aspects out loud, especially in the first few episodes.

lisardggY

Excellent, that's exactly the bits I was still missing - the parts where you can see the dice rolling in the background.

BESW

And this screenshot is very Cortexy, and you can see those relationship lines in action: every time they split the group up it's like "okay, whose relationship dynamic is going to be most problematic for THIS episode?"

An easy example of character aspects, is the character Ezekiel Jones. He's got a Towering ego which gets compelled for him to make missions go wrong if he feels like he's being underestimated, or he sees an opportunity to show off. But he can also invoke it when, for example, they need someone as bait for a pride-eating monster.

lisardggY

Though that might just be a case of writing and characterization that we're shoehorning into a Fate mindset.

Adeptus

@BESW There's also The Great List - ~~you~~ they will need to dig a bit to find which ones are print vs electronic though

BESW

@lisardggY I'd think that, yeah. I've certainly done a lot of "how would I model this in Fate" thought exercises for a lot of the media I watch.

But between Rogers explicitly citing Fate as a source of writing room tools, and the way they occasionally describe each other with perfectly written character aspects which are then the pivots for the episodes...

It's not "we played a TRPG and then made it into an episode," but it's very much "these TRPG systems provide us with tools for consistent characters and dramatic character-driven episodes."

BESW

8:22 AM

@lisardggY I think one of the tricky things here is, you're more likely to "hear the dice rolling" in adaptations that aren't as "good," because a really proficient translation from one medium to another usually means smoothing out the signature tells of the original medium in favor of the new medium's tells.

So a really good "inspired by our campaign" TV show like The Expanse, is gonna be less obviously "inspired by" than a "uses TRPG tools because they do the thing we like" TV show like The Librarians. The Expanse converted to novels and then TV because they couldn't do what they wanted to do in a TRPG and so they abandoned all the TRPG structures. The Librarians uses TRPG structures because that's exactly what they want in their TV show.

kviiri

I've often expressed that I'd like to work on my skills writing prose, perhaps to even publish something one of these days. My TRPG friends say, "it's easy, just play RPGs and play each character yourself", which feels to me a lot like they misunderstand what makes TRPGs good and what makes literature good

BESW

Yeah, I've actually seen an interview with Steven Erikson where he says... exactly that.

kviiri

8:41 AM

Oooh, on a related note, I've long since realized I've been trying to emulate things that work well in video game and film narratives in short fiction, and they... generally don't work that well.

BESW

Oh yes, that was a breakthrough moment for me, and I'm still struggling to identify how to parse what I like in other mediums into TRPG-shaped implementations.

(For the record? WoW boss fight mechanic ideas actually DID translate pretty well into D&D 4e.)

lisardggY

@BESW That's a good point, and one I should point out.

BESW

On that scale, Dragonlance wobbles between "don't know how to get the dice out of our novels" and "our publisher insists we keep the dice in the novels because it's cross-media franchising baby."

lisardggY

I think early Dragonlance leaned more towards the first. TSR was a very young organization and I don't think anyone knew what they were doing.

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