Oh boy. I'm the... uh, "chief of culture and leisure" of our student org. The IRC lit up like a bonfire after I mentioned we should have an intro-level RPG club.
The only problem is the lack of masters. We have a fairly quiet RPG scene and most of the smaller player communities don't talk about their games much to outsiders.
I'm trying to establish contacts and getting new people to play.
@kviiri While "masters" can provide more confidence at the table, they can also (unless they're really great and not just good) cause some problems re: tone, elitism, etc. I think that new and newish GMs working with new and newish players can be just fine, and help develop the club's own play environment rather than importing one.
@BESW We have lack of any people capable of being GMs. So far, we've got myself and one another - which isn't enough by my estimate of willing players.
As someone who started his experience with RPGs GMing a new-ish group of players with only the three core D&D 3.5 manuals to guide him... don't underestimate the power of a willing noob.
@kviiri GM-less RPGS are sometimes called GM-full RPGs. Usually, each scene has someone doing the GM or a bunch of players collaboratively GM the others.
One of the better RPGs I've ever played is a GMless called Fiasco.
For example, in Pilgrims of the Flying Temple each action your character takes is expressed as a written sentence about them helping someone or getting in trouble. Which they do is determined by your interaction with a bag of coloured tokens you draw from. If your character is helping someone, you write that sentence. If they're getting in trouble, everyone else at the table collaborates to write that sentence.
@kviiri Mh, what are you calling storyteller games now? Being RPGs a quite wide and ill-defined category, there's games someone does put under the ddefinition and someone else doesn't, in this case maybe I'm not giving you a thing you'd call RPG
@Zachiel I define RPG's rather broadly myself. In this case I meant games like Storium, where you tell a story by describing your characters' actions turn by turn, usually using some kind of constraint.
@JoshuaAslanSmith Prepping for a storm; dejected by GMNoob's unsurprising suspension; working on new household routines for the family; reading an insightful but elitist book about horror RPing...
@JoshuaAslanSmith It says "Lee Pace," so I'm sold.
@kviiri I'm not familiar with Storium, but I know about Fiasco, Montsegur 1244, Dō: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple, Blood Red Sands (competitive, one player versus 4 GMs with rotating players and elimination rounds, more a boardgame than a RPG by author's own word), Annalise (not for beginners IMHO, too complicated), Polaris and The Drifter's Escape.
(Drifter's Escape is an awesome idea but looks like it's been poorly executed in the Forge tradition of relying too heavily on players rather than system to create the desired environment. Not sure I even want to try it.)
@JoshuaAslanSmith See also Wonderfalls and Pushing Daisies.
We could just do plain d6 roll to dodge in a ring. On your turn, describe what you're doing and roll d6. The next player, taking the roll into account, narrates the consequences and reacts as their own character.
@JoshuaAslanSmith Funnily enough, I suddenly remembered that show yesterday as well. It's about a guy who's touch raises the dead, and another touch kills them again (forever). If he keeps a dead person alive more than sixty seconds, someone else dies nearby instead.
It was some sort of a love story between the protagonist and his girlfriend whom he resurrected like that, but never got to touch.
@BESW that's very on the line, like Kingdom and maybe even Chronicles of Skin. But I forgot A Penny for my Thougths and, of course, Archipelago.
@BESW Tried it. Sure the mechanic works fine for letting the Drifter feel miserable
you need people who know the american culture quite well. My game featured people working at a wal-mart docks, hobo help centers, latino gangs and corrupted policemen
@kviiri :'(
@kviiri I'm not a skilled DM and Fiasco worked fine for me (I just had to explain the rules and it worked)
Calling a club was somewhat misleading of me... we don't have any organization or anything. I'm just trying to get the sleepers of the RPG scene at our campus to teach willing newbies to play, and give the new guys a chance to try the games out.
Conversly our roleplaying club is kinda of big and significant. (I like to think I have contributed significantly to it.) I think we have well over 100 members (not all active), and probable almost a dozen games being run. Last few years have had 50 new members sign up and be brought into our fresher games. Though we have not retained all of them. (we used to retain like 5 per year, i think now more like 10-20) Our Uni is not small and the student guild (which gives us money and a room and stuff) has multimillion budget.
Well actually, as the culture and leisure manager or the association I already have a snack budget. I'm just expected to spend it on events that have a wide appeal (which is one of the reasons why I'd like RPGs to get more popular here!)
@Oxinabox We have an actual RPG organization at the university, but it's harder to connect oneself with. First of all, it's reputed to be fairly cold towards new people (everyone has their established clique already). Second, our university is split between several campuses around the town and most people have an easier time associating with the people of their own campus.
I have worked hard to break our club out of that mold.
WRT money: We were just given $800 for first semester. We'll probably get something like that again at the end of the year. Plus making ~$50 per week on selling snacks, for 26 weeks of the year. +$500 of membership dues.
While I have nothing against the University-wide RPG club, I believe it'll be easier for the CS students to get into the hobby among their fellow computer scientists, informally.
Conversly I have considered working hard to destroy the roleplaying with-in the CS club here. (Considered doing it, but didn't).
They are a enemy of our sibling club, the Computer club (Seperate from the CS student club). By destroying I mean trying to convert to joining us and using our resources.
It happens here as well - the CS students have a lot of money because they get far better sponsors than most. Most student associations have to bond together to get stuff done, but CS has enough resources to do cool stuff on its own.
Fiasco basically: players cooperatively choose a setting. Settings are printed in booklets. They roll a bunch of dice, then proceed to pick pairs of dice from the rolled pool to draft elements from the booklet's lists. They need to pick a relationship per player pair (only players sitting next to each other are considered pairs), starting from the guy who lives in the less populated city and assigning it to the pair of their choice. Let's say I want to pick *Father and Son*, which is relationship 6 from list 2, I'd pick a 2 and a 6 from the pool and assign it to any pair of players I want (…
The CS club here is comparitively poor cos they get no sponsorship and are not guild affilated as are a faculty society. The do get some money from the faculty. Where as the Engineers club is fantasically wealthy because they get bulk mining sponsorships. (and Mining in Australia has more money than god)
StackExchange's format is alien to most, making bad questions for the format is easy, especially (but not exclusively) at the beginning
So don't be embarassed. By the way, I'm glad you came to chat, where discussion is doable, because it looks like your curiosity is solvable by talking about it and I feel there's enough people competent on that matter to actually make it clearer for you. Most people just see their question closed and never show up. :(
It might as well have been that but I try to only look at the facts.
So, there's someone who says that a solo RPG can't exist. If you show them one they could tell you "that's not an RPG", or they could believe. The important thing is to estabilish what is a RPG to them and to explain them what it is to you.
If to them an RPG is something you play with other people, we have a tautology.
maybe unconsciously it was? i'm glad i got a bit of the reasoning behind the opinion. there are actually some cogent arguments behind it which are different from 'rpg'ing is social because rpg'ing needs 2+ people' which sounds is a tautology
exactly!!
i now have to mull over the reasoning behind it. some compelling arguments actually.
not incontrovertible evidence, sure, but the explanations of why 'they' decide to hold this opinion are well thought out. IMO, of course!
For people who don't know what it's about, I usually characterize them as a mix of acting, playing and gaming (this is easier in Finnish because we have two different words for "playing" as in playing with toys and "playing" games)
One can certainly play on their own, there are single-player games and quite often this involves imagining certain characters in the mix. Hence, I wouldn't consider RPG's an inherently multiplayer activity.
Yes. I think that's how Paradox monetizes, anyway.
They make a game to last years. People play it, make funny and cool things happen, share the stories, and by doing that encourage their friends to play as well.
speaking of computer games like that, how would 'toys' like The Sims, Dwarf Fortress, etc, classify for you? it's very fascinating for me to see people tell stories using them.
I only realized the true potential of The Sims ages after I had stopped playing, when a few friends made this simulator of their own household and instead of minmaxing the family (like I always did) they concentrated on doing wacky stuff and taking funny screenshots.
@user15299 Zwergenspiel?
Seriously, Dwarf Fortress is awesome. As in "awe-inspiring", "magnificent" - but I'm not too fond of it as a game.
Actually it's not ASCII, it's CP437! </computer_scientist_speaking>
But I agree, I'm used to it personally (having always played roguelikes) but it's not very useful for visualizing a 3D landscape.
I dislike several things in DF: the micromanagement is excessive for some tasks that should be simple (eg. building a square tower), the user interface is inconsistent, the fortification mechanics are too unrealistic to please the historical combat fan inside me... and most of all the economic system of the entire game is heavily geared towards "specialist economy" where you get the best results by having 1-3 super specialists for each task.
But then you get migrants and migrants and MORE migrants (and you need them to "progress" to Barony and beyond), who are basically useless unless they fill a niche you want an additional specialist in.
Yes, Yes every one even stupid voyager, yes both original and reboot, yes even stupid universe, yes though not all of it because farscape is too wacky for me, and now im just laughing at andromeda being considered a great sci-fi show. Its good for the budget its at considering sorbo is in it.
I'm creating an adventure for my game world and would like help coming up with specific details. Answers would necessarily be rather specific to the scenario (although system-agnostic and probably genre-flexible).
Is that on-topic in rpg.se? What sort of questions along this line are too broad ...
Humans "take:" land, traditions, crafts, gods, rituals, histories, D&D humans don't have much that's their own.
Humans are expansionistic and acquisitive, but unlike most real-world expansionist cultures they don't have much culture of their own to impose on those they expand into and over.
I can only think of one human-specific god in 3.5. He's a Lawful Evil deity introduced in an expansion book which dedicates 1/3 of its content to humans.
I'm creating an adventure for my game world and would like help coming up with specific details. Answers would necessarily be rather specific to the scenario (although system-agnostic and probably genre-flexible).
Is that on-topic in rpg.se? What sort of questions along this line are too broad ...
