TRPG General Chat

AncientSwordRage

12:44 AM

@bobble I love Mythcreants, I'll have to read that later

Hot RPG Questions

1:24 AM

3

Q: How do Enlarge/Reduce spell interact with the Oversized Weapons rule when you Enlarge a Medium size creature with a medium weapon to Large size?

The Enlarged option of the spell (PHB, p. 237) says about the weapon: "The target's weapons also grow to match its new size. While these weapons are enlarged, the target's attacks with them deal 1d4 extra damage." So in this case the weapon becomes Large and will add 1d4 to the damage. The rule...

bobble

1:39 AM

@BESW a friend is canvassing for tips on running Monster of the Week - would you happen to have any and/or useful links?

Hot RPG Questions

1

Q: Does the Poisoner feat interact with Druid's Wildshape?

Specifically, I'm looking for an answer to the first effect of the Poisoner feat: "When you make a damage roll that deals poison damage, it ignores resistance to poison damage." Tasha's Cauldron of Everything (p. 80) My question is: for a wildshape form that has innate poison like a poisonous s...

dnd-5e feats wild-shape

AncientSwordRage

@bobble this chat search might tide you over until he's online

BESW

Also this one

bobble

I don't want to misinterpret anything though

They already got one person shooting out ideas while admitting their experience is entirely seeing it played once.

BESW

I don't have a great experience with PbtA games. MotW was the best I've played so far, but my impression of it is wildly different from that of most people I've talked to.

Do you have prior experience with PbtA?

bobble

1:56 AM

Nope

Games I've played are just D&D 5e and RFS. If you stretch the definition of "play" to "created characters for but did not actually run a session", then MechWarrior 1e and Pathfinder 1e.

BESW

hrm. I'm not sure I'm the best person to advise you on this, the basic PbtA engine just doesn't work well for me.

bobble

Oh well, I won't butt into the conversation they're having then

BESW

Generally speaking, I find that PbtA is great for groups/GMs that are looking for guidance on how to break out of common mechanics-first, adventure-railroad play styles.

Especially on the GM side, where the idea that the GM is the final arbiter and can do whatever they think is best, just doesn't exist: there are more rules and restrictions on GMs than on players, in many ways, to push GMs into a particular frame of mind. These tend to be invisible to players though, so the experience is vastly different on either side of the table.

Do you have any particular questions? I've studied PbtA and tried to understand it.

I just... have never seen it in action in a way that made me happy. There's a couple newer versions, like Pasión de las Pasiones, which might be a better fit for me.

bobble

> Getting to run a monster of the week campaign for my friends!! I’m so so excited to make a world and gm again
I have 0 experience w this system tho so if anyone has tips hmu

from a club Discord

BESW

2:12 AM

That's... a wide swathe.

bobble

which be why I asked for generalized tips before :)

BESW

I guess my One Big Tip is to understand the text's aesthetic and lean into it as hard as you can.

Sep 25, 2018 at 14:03, by doppelgreener

PBTA games put you on some guide rails because of the nature of how PBTA games get run: they are very much unambiguous in how you should do things. The game rules are basically a manifesto that boils down to: FOLLOW THESE PRINCIPLES AND DO THESE THINGS THE WAY WE SAY AND YOU WILL HAVE A GOOD GAME FITTING THE KIND OF NARRATIVE WE'RE GOING FOR.

All the moves and skills and so forth in a PbtA game are (ideally) written to create certain beats or scenes that are associated with the kind of genre/story category the game's chosen to emulate.

The more that the freeform RP choices of the table also emulate those things, the more the mechanics will flow.

SmokeDetector

2:49 AM

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Chinese character in title, bad keyword in body, mostly non-latin body, mostly non-latin title, potentially bad keyword in body (334): 假破产玩弄司法敲骨吸髓，瘟龟饮鸩止渴自讨苦吃蹭热点假救援铁证如山，骗子武艺耍尽法网难逃‭ by OorahOo‭ on rpg.SE (@Rubiksmoose @ThomasMarkov @linksassin)

Hot RPG Questions

5:10 AM

3

Q: How does Arms of the Astral Self work with Strength ability checks and Saving Throws?

Way of the Astral Self Monk has a feature called Arms of the Astral Self. My question is about a specific section of it. You can use your Wisdom modifier in place of your Strength modifier when making Strength checks and Strength saving throws. So what I'm wondering is if it makes Strength (Ath...

dnd-5e monk saving-throw

GcL

6:02 AM

Hey @Ben. Want to schedule a time to chat about your corruption-redemption system?

AncientSwordRage

9:43 AM

@bobble The other thing (and @BESW back me up/tell me I'm wrong) is that it might be nice to have either an overarching thread or a some planned character arcs to intersperse as desired

things like Supernatural, Primeval, etc do that

BESW

PbtA usually gives the GM some tools (probably called clocks) to handle that, and some guidance on working with the players to establish them in session zero.

[glances through guidebook] Yeah, MotW calls them Arcs. pp147-154.

Thomas Markov

1:17 PM

If you have 10k rep and some time to waste, this spam post, when translated, is a pretty interesting read.

doppelgreener

1:59 PM

VTC pls, no system specified: rpg.stackexchange.com/q/198777/1204

@bobble My understanding is that Monsters of the Week might be a bad choice of first PBTA system to play. It apparently explains some fundamental rules fairly poorly such that you get what they're trying to say if you've already played PBTA, but if it's your first time it'll completely miss the mark.

I went and dug around in our past conversations about it for the bit where we were told this by someone much more experienced with PBTA —

Dec 14, 2016 at 6:12, by SevenSidedDie

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.

Dec 14, 2016 at 6:42, by Adeptus

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

Dec 14, 2016 at 6:45, by 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. :(

Dec 14, 2016 at 6:46, by SevenSidedDie

@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.

Dec 14, 2016 at 6:51, by SevenSidedDie

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…

Dec 14, 2016 at 6:51, by SevenSidedDie

and the agency of their player.

Glazius

Oh, 2016? Monster of the Week had a pretty bad first edition, lemme check my copyright...

doppelgreener

SSD also checked a second edition copy and found that these issues weren't fixed.

Glazius

Oh! Nope, that's the revised edition.

doppelgreener

Yeah.

It's really unfortunate.

@bobble Your friend ought to play a different PBTA system. I've had tons of fun with Masks: a New Generation and haven't heard about it teaching people wrong. Blades in the Dark is also fabulously popular, and is derived (and heavily mechanically modified) from PBTA.

Monsterhearts is also pretty good, albeit heavily interested in exploring the queer experience, and some people don't identify with that or would find some of its mechanics inappropriate for their setting.

Glazius

2:16 PM

Well, the best PBTA system to play is the one that tells the kind of stories you already like.

doppelgreener

Yeah that's fair, I'm just thinking of the ones I can vouch for as a viable alternative that don't teach the system wrong.

(I'd hope that's literally every single other PBTA game of course.)

Glazius

I really don't get SSD's objections, though. I'm not really seeing what he's talking about, though I think it's down to some bad editing and indexing. There's a quick and dirty agenda and principles in the keeper section but they get some air down in this kind of weirdly organized "first session" section later on.

Heh, so that's my advice for a prospective Keeper. Make sure you read the entire book, cover-to-cover. They elaborate on a lot of things they just sketch out at the start of the book.

doppelgreener

Ahh

Nice

That's a relief

Glazius

Though yeah, even there they're a little thin.

doppelgreener

@doppelgreener this question is now fixed but the title could be improved.

bobble

2:30 PM

I've passed this along, thanks!

Glazius

It wouldn't hurt to read the original Apocalypse World MC section, it's available free online at apocalypse-world.com

Or... huh.

I swear the first edition AW was downloadable from there but it doesn't seem to be anymore.

Regardless, it would also help to read the original AW MC section, but that's true for pretty much everybody who wants to run a game.

BESW

I haven't had the chance to play PdlP yet but it's the version of PbtA that I'm most excited about which is still traditional enough to have stuff like dice and a GM, though it's messed with things like roll modifiers significantly.

I certainly found MotW to be a rather impenetrable introduction to GMing the engine, and I've talked with people who feel the same as well as people who consider it one of the best introductions to PbtA.

(I do with PdlP hadn't kept the terms "hold" and "forward," they're a totally unnecessary level of legacy jargon)

doppelgreener

2:56 PM

What's PdlP stand for here? I can't find any search results on it.

I mean, I can find results about personalised digital learning programs, but I don't think that's what you're referring to.

Glazius

3:10 PM

pasion de las pasionas

kickstarter.com/projects/bleongambetta/pasion-de-las-pasiones

doppelgreener

Thanks :)

Glazius

(pasiones, also there's accents)

It's a telenovela roleplaying game, where characters don't have stats but roll based on how dramatically appropriate the action is to their character and scene

doppelgreener

That's kind of amazing

BESW

May 26 at 10:10, by BESW

I'm liking Pasión de las Pasiones' variant on PbtA move modifiers: instead of having stats, you have questions. eg, La Belleza's character question is Are you the center of attention? and any move where the answer is "yes" they get +1 to the roll. And each move has (usually) two questions, like if you're being "Hard To Pin Down," you get +1 for each yes to Are they being cruel? and Are you in public?

AncientSwordRage

4:01 PM

@doppelgreener Masks is something I really want to play, but I tend to bounce of YA/Teen Drama kind of stories which seem central

@doppelgreener it really seems it

Glazius

4:25 PM

I'm a little sad they've toned down the audience from the initial drafts. Each playbook came with an audience member that they were supposed to appeal to, as an alternative to their playbook question. I imagine that worked out to be a little too complicated in playtesting, both from including them in play and asking someone to play a weird gestalt audience character.

Using the audience as the system's open your brain equivalent is pretty great, though.

doppelgreener

4:38 PM

@AncientSwordRage I haven't played nearly as much Masks as I'd like, but it does fundamentally follow the story of teenagers trying to find their place in the world as they come of age and start being able to exert their own agency.

goodguy5

8:07 PM

I have a question that I think is stackable on a different stack, but not sure which.

English maybe?

There's a type of chart that is an n-agon (a hexagon, for example)
the center is 0, and the vertices of the n-agon are the upper limit for the value, such as 10.

connect each value to the ones adjacent to it and you make a shape.

What is that chart called

ah ha! It's called a radar chart / radar diagram

I swear I've looked before and couldn't find it - maybe I used better words this time in my search

KorvinStarmast

8:54 PM

@AncientSwordRage pictures or it never happened. By the way, never did find my Pirates and Dragons book.

Transcript for