yeah Id imagine online is perfect especially given the sort of cyberpunk meets fallout aesthetic of the game.
oh yeah totally but writing and passing notes takes a long time and I see the GM always being the bottle neck because they have to communicate with X number of people which is always greater than 1 whereas the player is mostly communicating with 1 person
like I said, I haven't done it IRL yet. I've been on the lookout for a reasonably priced sourcebook for a while, and it's been OOP for a few years unfortunately
yeah I also think its like, they dont wanna pay someone to go over it format it for printing again or as a digital pDF
but I agree with you totally
A misunderstanding high up about how RPGs with very different feels and editions apply generally to different people
Im either going to want the old and the new if I like the old or just the old theres too much competition for me to be forced into something I dont want at this stage, yey capitalism
luminaries like LordDuskBlade and others really cut to the bone when it came to analyzing things and it was a great resource for campaign discussions and GM issues.
because Im always thinking about running a 4e campaign (but then I get weary about it) and because there are still 4e questions coming in about items and powers and its a great way to answer those
yeah, I technically still have an ongoing 4e campaign though we haven't met in months. And yeah, answering 4e questions is still a thing and I'm not going to dig through books
@doppelgreener good to know. Hopefully they get it resolved soon
Part of "these are your friends, don't be a jerk" is talking with your friends as friends instead of seeking rules-based solutions to social-rooted problems.
e.g. "another player is being a jerk and trying to kill everyone, what can I do about it ingame?" has been a recurring theme in a lot of questions, and answers often provide ingame solutions where it's appropriate, but also say "hey, y'know, it's another human being in punchspace at the table, you should talk to them about why they're doing this and ask them to stop"
I was thinking of adding this to that Messiah complex answer. Is it complete enough for an answer or should I put it in a comment. @JoshuaAslanSmith already gave a good answer I just wanted to add this suggestion.
Use his savior complex to create some awesome Roleplaying. If it will not discourage him try putting in choices or situations where he can't save everyone or, he has to choose between two things both seem to be the good thing to do but in reality one would cause more harm than good.
It's a really bad idea to use players' real-life values and goals as setups for orchestrated Bad Choices in the game, unless they're totally on board with it from the start.
@aaron I almost put something like that myself, that you can use his natural impetus as a plot point, that the person he thought he redeemed was only faking etc. but I feel like that takes player buy in to not be a "gotcha" and that the tone from ard Catlanthe is pretty dismissive toward the player so I dont think he'd handle that with the finesse required
Yeeah. It's really hard to keep it from turning into Duelling Ideologies at the table, not just in the game, unless the group has a much healthier dynamic than I think that one does. Like, a dynamic my groups--awesome as they are--rarely achieve.
(And if it does work out, it's going to probably sideline everyone else in the party!)
I am veerrrrry leery of using real life at the gaming table. It can easily turn the table toxic
A big BIG mistake I have not run into personally, thankfully, is a GM using a real life trauma as a motivation in a game. I have heard of GMs (mostly unknowingly, sometimes knowingly, the scum) use the rape of a female pc (played by a female player) as a motivation. These cases, many times... the player had that particular tragedy. This makes my stomach turn, so i just try to avoid real life at the table
Yeah, bees aren't exactly a common trigger and they're easily enough excised from most adventures. But rape? That shouldn't ever be something you throw at a PC without making sure everyone's cool with it first regardless of gender or history.
That's symptomatic of far deeper problems in that sort of group.
Yes, but this isn't that. DF isn't a happy 'verse, but many PCs start out play happy before the supernatural world runs them through a salt-laced barbed wire fence.
I've read authors who get told by other authors that if their solo-adventuring heroine doesn't get sexually assaulted at least once, they're irresponsible authors.
I feel its to the point right now where even if you have a legitimate and well thought out story that involves any character being raped (which is probably .01% of any and all possible permutations) it should just be not written because the wider context has made it inviolable and distracting
Im not sure where Weber's Honor fits in all this either (the only recurring female character Ive read consistently) or how I feel about it
That's a bit extreme--it's a topic that shouldn't be ignored in media either--but yes, it's really hard to get one presentation of a topic read coherently in a culture that tends to present the topic in a very different way.
her backstory does include a rape attempt (this was written 85 when the trope was used but not over used at that point possibly) but its an attempted rape that ends with her beating her attack senseless
@besw if you are writing a story that directly deals with rape than yes obviously rape, but I mean if its just a throwaway character detail or not part of the main plot in anyway its worthless
Suicide is a major issue among teens on Guam; it's almost unheard-of for someone to manage to graduate high school without at least one friend or family member killing themselves.
So when my mother tried to teach them Richard Corey --which uses the suicide of an apparently-content wealthy man, and the ensuing confusion by the poor in his town, as a means to comment on various class issues-- it was almost impossible for the students to see past the fact of the poem's suicide to analyse the narrative purpose that suicide was intended to convey.
Instead, they focused on analysing the suicide itself.
@JoshuaAslanSmith Aye. It's a big combination of factors, with drug abuse (by the teens and by their families, leading to a big family violence problem too) as a major factor.
"Dungeon magazine #19 (October 1989) includes the adventure scenario "The Vanishing Village", by Marcus Rowland, which features the house hunters; these creatures are described in the adventure synopsis as "gigantic relatives of mimics, able to imitate cottages and other buildings up to the size of a small inn or temple." Unlike mimics, the slow-moving house hunters work in a pack and cooperate to catch prey, usually disguising themselves as a small village."
Either my sleep-deprived brain is malfunctioning, or that's the best thing to have come out of old-school D&D.
@BESW Well, yes. It's a community of giant shapeshifting amoebae, that have decided they will reproduce human houses in intricate detail, and migrate over the landscape slowly.
Which part of this plan doesn't seem reasonable to you??
> House hiders are an unusual strain of domesticated mimic, bred for their size and docility by a particularly secretive gnome tribe. Capable of taking on the form of whatever building the tribe needs, house hiders allow their masters to maintain an itinerant and secretive lifestyle in luxury. For table scraps and massages, the enormous mimics provide shelter and comfort when the tribe is at rest, and let the gnomes travel in style when it's time to move. When camping in a hostile area the house hiders often take the form of a grove of trees, hollow and cushioned inside for their masters to…
I did look at the wiki in search of mimic lifecycle information. Unless they spawn wholesale (and they could, A Wizard Did Them), they'd probably need to do the cuckoo thing and infiltrate a merchant's backroom, pretending to be ever-larger boxes of supplies.
Because a herd of that size and speed kinda has to be either herbivores or carrion eaters, and D&D has a proud history of saying "A wizard did it!" which we might as well leverage to our advantage in order to gloss over evolution.
@Magician Same smell, though: tiny isolated pockets of society struggling against the encroaching darkness and savagery, huddled in the ruins of the dead civilisation which spawned them.
@Magician Actually, they kinda can. Nerath was razed by an endless army of gnolls led by a demon-touched emissary of Yeenoghu on a campaign of worldwide destruction.
@JoshuaAslanSmith I just tried to open the wiki for my setting, and it's not having a good day. Apparently, something broke in the couple of years since I've last touched it.
Nerath was the Second Human Empire (the first was human in propaganda only, as it was ruled by a tiefling upper class). It was the only major civilisation after Bael Turath (the first "human" empire) and the united dragonborn nations of Arkhosia destroyed each other at least a thousand years before.
And Nerath was the last Primal Plane civilisation of any note up to the "modern day" time period for PoL, which is somewhere between 30 and 200 years after Nerath's fall.
And those three nations are pretty much the only Primal-Plane-focused civilisations run by mortal humanoids to ever exist as major powers controlling significant portions of the Primal Plane.
ttfn
(I ran a year-and-a-half campaign set during the war between Bael Turath and Arkhosia. The Points of Light setting's decision to deliberately contradict itself on most details about its history means that in order to learn all I could about that time period, I had to know about the stuff around it too.)
NO! NONONONONO.... episode of a show, shot in Vancouver, is set in my home town. EVERYONE so far is using a new york city or new jersey accent. We dont talk like that here in buffalo >.<
I can let the fourteenth precinct go (there is no fourteenth police precinct)
The question made me a little uncomfortable considering the author of the book in question has said as much as... "we couldn't ignore it in oblivion, but i really dont expect it to be used in actual games"
I know that Charnel Houses of Europe is technicality a wraith supplement but the idea of "Holocaust Survivor Geist" is too interesting to pass up. So what parts of this book could be used to fill out the backstory of a geist that made the bargain in period of the nazi occupation?
I just don't have the time or money to look into other systems much.
I am looking into a couple other systems like Exalted for the next game I run but not sure I want to dive into a new system by GMing a game. Seems like it would drastically slow down gameplay when I have to look up rules all the time
Put him outside of his comfort zone
Disclaimer: I don't know your friend at all, so take what I am writing here as a simple idea. I know it worked on myself and on friends of mine, but take a moment first and try to imagine how your friend might take this. It might be fun and challenging for him...
@Tritium21 That user has asked a bunch of questions, and they all seem to display this concept of 'my plot is an inexorable force which players cannot alter in any way'
So, @mcahogarth made a super-short honey badger game. >_> https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/15841671/honeybadgergame.html HONEY BADGERS UNITE TO BITE THINGS \o/
Here’s my suggestion for rewriting the end of Zibbobz’s question based on the feedback I’ve seen so far. My hope is that this both represents Zibbobz’s needs well and is sufficiently specific to request game recommendations.
That’s what I’m looking for. I’m looking for an RPG in a fantasy medi...
Feedback welcome, either workshopping here or comments on the meta post.
@Tritium21 I agree, although that particular answer approaches it from an interesting angle. It would be a great exercise if you first talked to the player about the clash.
Here’s my suggestion for rewriting the end of Zibbobz’s question based on the feedback I’ve seen so far. My hope is that this both represents Zibbobz’s needs well and is sufficiently specific to request game recommendations.
That’s what I’m looking for. I’m looking for an RPG in a fantasy medi...
