Another in the group enjoys being the DM, but his grasp of the rules and his inventiveness are both lacking. We've tried getting him to run pre-created games, but... it ended with less than ideal results

I have always been the default gm in my groups; it's how I started playing at all, I was lassoed into going for some friends after they heard me do dramatic readings.

*into gming

The third player is good with the rules, and really seems to enjoy being the DM, but his schedule just doesn't allow him the time he would like to have to DM a game the way he'd want to

Sounds like you guys new to collaborate.

*need to

For example, having a non-gm rules expert is pretty common.

Maybe use Microscope to create a setting together.

We've done that. It worked well, back when we had our fourth player

Three is pretty minimal for d20 group functionality.

I'm impressed at what success you've had.

lol

non GM rules expert

She was inventive as a GM, and enjoyed the task. I and the other player helped with rules issues. The problem was that she hated to improvise, but also hated to plan ahead

Yes, @trogdor, I'm looking at you.

it sounds so silly, but I have seen that happen just about every time myself

@BESW I figured

mostly for 4E though

@zach Trogdor is the other member of my twosies.

though I did DM that a small amount

"other"

Ah, that makes since

or do you mean just the 2 of us,... nvm that makes sense

@BESW would it be fair to say that fate is a game that requires the group to work together to create a compelling adventure?

yeah

It's designed to work best that way, but it can just as easily support more traditional gm run scenarios.

Trogdor prefers it if I take over most of the world building, for example.

Ah, that would be the downside for my group. We enjoy exploring a world someone else has created. In many cases, our games tend to pit the GM against the players, in a manner of speaking.

He gives me general concepts like "magical ancient Egypt" and I spin a setting from that.

Ah, that would be a problem. Fate doesn't do GM vs players well.

Well... it's kind of an interesting balance. Our group almost treats the GM like a video game designer

Characters vs world, yes.

They are responsible for creating a world that we can play in, with challenging combats and unique plot concepts, but they are also responsible for not creating encounters that are just impossible for us to win

In Fate, losing encounters is expected. Losing doesn't mean death, just complication.

Well, for us, losing generally means death... mind, in general, that's been because one or two of the players always push it to that point

You lost what was at stake in the conflict, and now you have a new problem.

Yeah, PF is one of the "death s default" systems.

Well, it's not even that... in our group, either we could win the fight, and generally did, or we couldn't and the group treated it like something that was meant to be avoided

Fate prefers to make losing less final, and more part of the ongoing drama of the story being told. You know, the end of the second act in a film.

It's kind of aggravating to me, really... partly because I know that I was as much a part of the problem as was the rest of the group

We all have play histories that we look back on with chagrin, I think.

I'm awful about stealing the spotlight when I'm a player.

Always have been, still am.

Almost a self-creating issue, really. The group acted that way when it began, so when it first started and I was the DM that's how I had to make it work. The other players saw this, and expected it to work that way when they DMed, so they made games with that mind set, and in response I played to that game type

Honestly, the most fun I've ever had in that group was when the other rules-savy player I mentioned came up with what amounts to a survival-horror scenario, and actually pulled it off

Perhaps, but I've seen it in many, many groups over the years. (He said, as if he'd been playing for more than ten years.)

Survival horror in d20? I am very impressed. And curious!

Well, it started out with each of us having a level in an NPC class. At that point, the village we started in was attacked. The premise was basically "What if Resident Evil, but with magic?"

Cool.

Very

The interesting part was that the DM had expected us to strike out on our own, but we ended up recruiting the survivors of the village to go along with us

I've felt that d20 System is at a disadvantage in these kinds of games because it doesn't have incremental failure.

Like, HP loss doesn't impact your ability to act until it makes you utterly unable to act.

That's the most interesting part. Because we had a group to work with, we had incremental loss. If we failed to achieve a goal, there was a good chance that one of the weaker NPCs would die for it, negatively impacting the overall ability of the group

*one or more NPCs

So your choices the gm didn't anticipate actually helped enforce the atmosphere he was trying to create?

It did, to everyone's present surprise

*pleasant

Hmmm.

While the group proper was responsible for leading the larger group, and protecting them from major threats, we simply didn't have the necessary resources to successfully hold off the large hordes of undead the GM put us against.

Memo: in d20, "ablative NPCs" serve as incremental failure, with greater benefit to horror tone than isolation of PC-only group.

Hi !

Hey.

Originally, he has expected us to simply evade the hordes, and run from them. But with the larger group, we weren't able to do that, so we had to maintain the groups size in order to allow us to better protect it

That's good because d20 is all about combat as the primary mode of conflict.

A campaign that removes combat as the main mode of interacting with the world is missing a lot of what makes d20 successful.

ablative NPCs is quite like village-as-a-fractal HP. Very nice indeed.

One of the most interesting aspects was that many of the weaker NPCs were needed for non-combat issues. There were carpenters, smiths, and cooks among the villages, and because we were so low-level, we had to rely on their more min-maxed skills to do things like prepare the wagon the group used or to fix weapons damaged in combat, or even to just help the small amount of food we had last until we could find more

Yes, I'm making notes for Core games too.

*repair the wagon

However, not all of the NPCs were useless in combat. In fact, two of them were even better at it than us, being retired adventurers. We used them to help us take on even greater challenges, but their main loyalty was to the group, which meant we were forced to stay with the group if we wanted their help

That's a very interesting subversion of typical survival horror tropes.

Usually it's about isolation, or at the most small-group dynamics.

It was actually a lot of fun, and the way he used classic horror elements (ex, showing us that very large and very potent enemies are a potential threat, and that we could run into them at any time, in place of the unseen monster in most horror stories) meant that there were times I was legitimately afraid, both for my character and for the gorup

That shows some system savvy.

I admit readily, he is a much better DM than I.

D20 doesn't handle the unknown well.

However, it took him a month of planning with a highschooler's typical schedule, along with additional planning between sessions, to make that game work

Contrast Call of Cthulhu, where often stats are totally beside the point.

Heh. I know that gm workload well.

Yea, he subverted the fact that bigger monsters would very much likely kill us if we ever came across them by simply giving us incentive beyond our own survival

because, honestly, what adventurer worries about that?

The systems I'm using now are much less prep heavy.

*incentive to avoid fighting them

Honestly, I've thought about trying to create my own game using similar concepts, and try running it at a local game store, just to relive the experiance... then I remembered that I don't play at that store because I work the only night they meet, and I don't like DMing in the first place

Sometimes I think about going to my FLGS and seeing who I can meet...

I've tried that... I already know all of them there, and none of them are interested in trying a different group

But it sounds like they're all grumpy grognards.

Apparently one guy threw out his 4e books instead of returning them, to make a statement.

Another, when told Fate is a radically different system from 3.5, said "oh, like Pathfinder!"

I know a fellow who walked into the local store, grabbed someone else's books, and tried to leave with them on the premise that they were his because he contributed in part to their purchase (half of the price of two of the eight books)

The store owner hadn't even heard of Evil Hat or Fudge dice.

[twitch]

Well, in fairness, this is the first time I've heard of them... and my local game store owner wouldn't know what they are, either

That's just... Bad social contract comprehension.

Have you heard of White Wolf?

There's someone who works there that very likely has. You could almost call him the manager, with the other guy just being the owner

Can't say as I have

Fair enough.

My experience is mostly limited to d20 systems, and even among those mostly only ones that are related to D&D somehow

For the first seven or eight years of my gaming, I was similar.

I knew WW because a player had been gming that system, but other than that I knew 3.x, PF, star wars d20, sg-1 (spycraft), and then 4e.

I'm only now entering my 7th

I'm in my ninth, I think.

"FLGS" ?

Friendly local gaming store.

thanks

No problem. There's a lot of slang thrown around.

I started gaming fairly early, come to think of it... I started playing Pathfinder when it first came out, and at that point I'd only been playing a few months to a year

I wasn't even in highschool at the time

Which is to say, I started playing pathfinder in middle school

I started in college, just as 3.5 was hitting the streets.

I think one of the main factors that keeps me attacked to pathfinder is the sheer amount of content that exists for it now, both mechanically and from a story perspective

Games like Fate, for instance, where you almost seem to need to create an entire world, almost seem harder to run because you can't just say, "Well, this is the standard world, except for X,Y, and Z"

I had my first ever roleplaying game in AD&D1e. Then I went and badgered my parents to buy me the books, and then they bought me the 2e books, the week they came out.

I was devastated.

"What is this "rogue" nonsense? It should be "thief"! This edition is terrible!".

Luckily, I got over it in a week or two. :)

Heh.

I was always of the understanding that 2e was a vast improvement to the original

From the very beginning I made my own settings.

Or lifted them from novels.

It was, I think. But then, I grew up on 2e.

my first rpg experience was a narrative-only game with my older brother as a GM and a friend of mine, when I was, like, 14 or so. Then a DD3.0 one-shot at 16, and my first regular game was Exalted 1E, when I was 17 and entering college

I didn't use D&D official settings til 4e.

1e was basically taking all different rules from different D&D campaigns and editions and such and throwing them together.

2e was the first one to actually release a coherent single game.

3e was the first to actually make the rules streamlined.

and 4e made it into tabletop WoW... or so the legend goes

Thank you, @lisardggy, for making me feel less old.

Glad to be of service.

Oh, man, I believed that 4e-WoW equivalence junk for so long.

I actually had a about 8 years between when I stopped playing 2e (end of highschool) and when I came back to D&D again, to 3.5.

My first game was a 3.5e, where in I had to use 3.0 books because I didn't own any others

I had one 3.5 campaign, one BESM-d20, and two Pathfinder campaigns. A bit of d20 under my belt, but hardly the definitive system for me.

Ever tried Mutants and Masterminds?

Finally I gt so fed up with 3.5 I was willing to try 4e, and I'm glad I did.

I enjoyed the idea behind it (playing as super heroes) but the mechanics... Eww!!!

@BESW Is it true that they take power from the GM?

*they took

It was great, lots of fun, and it taught me that my problem with 3.5 was less that it was 3.5 and more that any flavour of DND wasn't going to work for me.

@Zach I considered the character creation and backed away

@Zach 4e? It mainly made the rules a lot more comprehensive, leaving a lot less for the DM to rule himself.

If anything 4e grants the GM unlimited cosmic power.

D&D does that with rule 0 being an official part of the book

But it makes the PCs a lot tougher and removes save or die.

So if a person gauges gm powr by how easily you can squash the PCs like bug without ignoring the rules, yes, it cripples the GM.

Instead the gm is given a massive set of open ended tools to challenge the PCs.

Yea, that explains a lot... like why it wasn't popular at my FLGS

They practically chant Rule 0 as a morning prayer...

Not so sure about the F meaning Friendly

I can think of several appropriate 'F' words to take its place

My autocorrect, it is giving me bad Russian accent. "You can squash PCs like bug."

That reminds me of a character I made once... everyone thought he was stupid because he had an accent, with his mother-tongue being giant

I love giving my NPCs bad accents.

It wasn't 'bad,' so much as he didn't use function words

He knew the language, he just chose to use bad grammar because his first language basically had none beyond the necessary for speech

One of my players played a raised by wolves ranger who knew a number of words equal t his Int score.

@BESW the average DnD char only need Fight and Loot.

what was his Int score, btw ?

Heh. This group was a lot more rpish than that.

Slightly higher than average.

In this game, each of them had a major flaw.

A single skill point could remedy that flaw, mechanically

Like thinking like a wolf and hardly being able to talk.

@BESW is this a mechanical thing in 4E ?

Which? Sorry, I'm on mobile and can't see what you're directing to.

woops, I realize I assumed 4E because "ranger" and "int score"

Ah, no, 3.5.

is there a flaw system in 4E, but it's irrelevant to what you're telling, actually

The bard had intelligent bagpipes that refused to play unless drunk.

Sopping wet bagpipes sound even worse.

drunk bagpips. I definitelly would have chosen a deaf flaw

Honestly, I've never figured out the 'flaws' thing... I hear it mentioned in RPG-based web comics, and when people talk about min-maxing characters to the extremes, but I've never found a standardized rule system for it, at least not for 3.5 or pathfinder, so it seems like something based heavily on DM discretion

3.5 has the flaws/trait mechanics in Unearthed Arcana.

@Zach Shadowrun, White Wolf games, they do this a lot

But this game ignored those and just rped them.

(well, white wolf flaws are mandatory, so they don't have anything to do with min-maxing)

That would explain it. I've never played either Shadow Run or White Wolf games, and I never got into 3.5 enough to use Unearthed Arcana

The wizard had always wanted to be an archer... So he developed a mental block.

He could only prepare spells by imbuing them into arrows, and their target was whatever the arrow hit.

To be honest, Pathfinder has enough min-maxing mechanics without introducing flaws... when you mix PF with 3.5 and 3.5 splat books, it breaks the game

This made buffing the party a hilariously perilous activity.

@Zach Most systems I play have them.

@BESW lucky he didn't choose to be a healing priest

Yes.

GURPS, Amber Diceless, Ars Magica. They're all based on the assumption that an interesting character is defined by his failings as much by his capabilities.

Fighter: "I need to be bigger!... Ah, my @$$!"

It gave fireball an awesome range, though.

Yep... buffing with arrows sounds like fun times

Flaws aren't necessarily a minmaxing tool. I would actually argue that it's a side effect of them.

Now I have a picture of a wizard singing "I wanna be... a lumberjack !" swinging his axe to cast Haste on his friend.

Heheheh.

They're meant as a tool to encourage better character creation, by giving players mechanic bonuses for creating more interesting characters.

@lisardggY Sure, I don't blame the system. But flaws do allow min-maxing when players are totally free

@lisardggY I don't disagree that flaws are needed for character development and the like, but I don't think making them a mechanic within the game is needed, or even smart. It's only one more layer for players to min-max, in system that already discourage playing to your character's mechanic restrictions as it is

Of course, minmaxers will find the flaws with least mechanical effect, like story-based or roleplaying-based flaws, and choose them.

I had a player which never miss an occasion of taking the asocial flaw in Shadowrun.

+20 BP and a justification to dump-stat charism ? hell yeah.

Unfortunately in the name of balance, 3.5 attached benefits to flaws in a rather haphazard way which made it possible to exploit... In a system that already encourages mechanical exploitation as a minigame.

Statistics, for example, are a built-in potential flaw... that most people ignore. "My charisma is 10, but I can still be the party leader and spokesperson without fail!"

Not that there's anyting wrong with that minigame.

But trying to ignore that it exists is a recurring flaw of the d20 ethos.

@Zach Mental attributes in general are often ignored. "I used Int as a dump stat, but as a player I like solving puzzles, so screw it".

Which I do find somewhat annoying... after all, if people are willing to ignore the most basic information about their characters for mechanical advantages, while ignoring their in-game consequences, how can you expect them to be held to more advanced levels of the same?

@lisardggY This is a real issue. That's why I never do puzzles.

@Zach You don't. Let them play the way they want.

@lisardggY See, I don't like that idea. If you have a mechanical flaw, I think you should be forced to accept it as a part of your character within the game

@Zach Of course you should. That's what mechanics are for. And players are, as always, encouraged to only use the part of the mechanics they like.

So ! I finally convinced some people to try FAE

@lisardggY That's where I disagree. I don't refuse to play with the Queen in chess because I don't like the piece. Why should other people get to do the same in other games?

the character creation was... disastrous. 2 hours of hesitation about the setting, before giving up completely.

If what some people find fun isn't fun for the rest of the group, something has to change. Either the group finds common ground so everyone has fun, or the group splits.

@Zach If you're playing chess with a friend who dislikes the rules for castling, for instance, then by all means agree on playing without castling.

@Zach A friend of mine didn't like the stack, in magic the gathering. He wrote entirely new rules, which I tried, and we ended up agreeing on never play mtg again

If you feel chess will be more interesting if there is no queen, try it out.

It's clear that not everyone in the group is on the same page about what the rules are and how they should be adhered to. That's the problem, and you don't automatically have the right answer just because the rules are on your side. The group's happiness --yours and everyone else's-- trumps the rules.

@BESW But what if the entire group wants to be the primary protagonist within a group of people that are supposed to be equally potent and important? Not everyone can be Goku, after all

Then I suggest they play Fate, or that wacky Ragnarok game where you roll fistfuls of d20s, or another game which supports that.

Most of the rpg insist on how the GM should allow every players to shine equally, even the shy ones.

If everyone wants the same thing, and they all agree on it, that's all well and good so long as they can find a way to make it work. But if what they want out of a game is unattainable by its nature, then the entire concept backfires

@Zach That's not a mechanical limitation, it's a social one. Either you come in to a game where you're a part of a group, or you want the center stage. There isn't really a solution to that.

If some players want to play space pirates while the others want to play fantasy adventurers, that's also a problem that the rules can't fix.

Unless you're playing RIFTS.

No mechanic can make people better friends, or more socially ept.

What about in standardized events?

Such as, for example, play-tests for new games and the like?

But there are tools and strategies for helping a group find common ground.

I like "ept".

inb4 same page tool

Standardized events are a totally different kettle of monkeys.

Either you go into them prepared to play on the event's terms, or you get asked to leave.

And people in my situation? Who either play with a group that isn't on the same page, or not play at all?

Then you can try to facilitate communication and improve the group's dynamic, or you can leave, o you can endure it until the ucler is more painful than not playing would be.

And then maybe check out online options.

Being the type of person to support Markism and the idea of the most good for the most people, I tend to support the notion that someone should just make a standard that you either have to play to or not play at all... then people who don't are asked to leave until they learn to play by the rules

*Marksism... I'm pretty sure that's still not right

Marxism.

That's the one

Marxism presupposes a set of finite resources that must be managed for a common good.

If they're your friends, approach them as friends, not as players. Friends compromise and work together for the sake of friendship, and too often people forget that when they hit the table.

This doesn't really apply to fun in a social setting.

If I play total munchkin hack'n'slash with no regard to characterization, mental abilities or logic, while metagaming the heck out of a dungeon, there is absolutely no fun taken away from anybody else.

It can be applied, if you try hard enough. "Fun" is a finite resource, as defined by the most of it that can be had by a group of people on a person-by-person basis. There's more 'fun' if more people are having fun. Ideally, you would do whatever makes the most people the most happy regardless of how miserable everyone else is because of it

I do not agree with that ideal.

Nor do I. That's an absolute extremist view

Minimizing misery is as important a concept as maximizing happiness.

And also, limiting your scope to a single group is an artificial limitation.

@lisardggY Unless someone in the party play a pathfinder who knows his way in dungeons, but the player isn't quite as genre-savvy as you are. He could feel useless and have hard time having fun.

Yeah. It's a game. People play games, they don't work games. When a game becomes a chore we leave.

@Trajan "I" in that example was a group who plays the way they want.

@BESW Tell that to WoW players...

@Trajan My basic assumption is that if members of the group disagree on what is fun, they should either find common ground or split.

I was a WoW player. I'm not any more.

I played, in 2005 or so. A dark time. A dark, dark time. :)

@lisardggY oh, right. We agree on that.

My point is, there are people that still are, even though for many of them it's basically a second job

Some people actually enjoy that kind of thing... the weirdos they are

But is it fun for them, or is it a grudging task?

If it's still fun to them, it's not a chore.

I know people who own horses because they enjoy horse riding

It's a chore to tend to them, but it allows them to enjoy a hobby

My point is, a hobby can be both

But you're arguing that they should tend the horse unpaid so someone else has fun riding it.

I'm focusing on the "stops having fun" bit.

Not at all. I'm arguing that you can apply Marxism to fun

I never said it was a good idea

Most fun things require effort. Filling the SCUBA tank, tending the horse, changing the oil.

It's a very contrived application of Marxist principal.

The way my group plays has absolutely no bearing on the fun to be had by a different group.

Then why is it relephant? I could argue that existentialism can be applied too, or the Mystery Science Theater theme song.

And in your own group, you cannot require people to make sacrifices so that the group has the most quantifiable fun, if it means that they suffer.

I shan't, because I have no interest in doing so, or advising anyone else to, so it would just begin and end with words.

Because the concept that some people must be poor so that the rest can enjoy material wealth isn't actually a Marxist concept. It's a very capitalist one, actually.

And I believe that any social contract, like the one for roleplaying groups, must emphasize a minimization of (individual) suffering over a maximization of (overall group) enjoyment.

@lisardggY I disagree. So long as everyone is still having Fun, you can minimize the amount some people have (ex disallowing people to min-max characters) in order to increase the amount had by the group

@Zach Unless they're explicitly not having fun, in which case your overall total, as it were, is irrelevant.

So long as the amount I enjoy the game is great enough to prompt me to continue to do so, then I'm still having fun, even if something about the game that I dislike makes it more fun for five other people

The minute even one player passes over the threshold into not having fun (as opposed to "not having as much fun as theoretically possible), your whole system becomes invalid.

(And now I'm imagining applying New Historicism to RPGs.)

In your proposed system, reducing the overall amount of fun for the sake of keeping that one player over the line isn't a good thing, since it reduces the total fun had.

My proposed system is an extremist view. Much the same way the basis for a market demands that some people starve because they can't afford food, because the price set by the market is determined by supply and demand not by what people can afford

But again (since we're not utilitarianists and this is a social setting), this would mean the group would be behaving like jerks towards a friend, and shutting him out because he's not fun enough.

Why are you proposing it to us if you don't think it should be implemented

I'm not a good pool player, but I occasionally play with some friends, some of which are much better than me.

?