@Yuuki Some systems also come with excellent advice on how to run them.

@BESW Ooo, that looks helpful.

and even though System Matters, quite a bit of that is generic skills that transfer well to other games – within reason –, so just pick up one of those books and browse, if you want to build your own scenarios.

And yes, picking a system can be really helpful.

I do know some that I love for their GM advice, and I'm far too willing to preach them to anyone willing to hear. I'm pretty sure the same applies to many people here.

I occasionally re-read the playstyle sections of Call of Cthulhu. Don't think I'll ever run a game in that system, but the book's discussion of participants' roles and expectations is masterful.

Also there are a lot of great blog entries about GMing.

Some of them aren't even about GMing.

@BESW I don't think I could do that, just sorta leave a scrap of background information. I feel like I would have to flesh it out even if nobody will ever see it.

That's an equally valid, but much more exhausting, GMing style.

I was an exhaustive worldbuilder for many years.

It contributed to my eventual burnout.

(Right up until then I had a lot of fun though.)

The best generalised GM advice I can give, though, is simply: ask your players questions and listen thoughtfully to their responses.

This is a thing I have done GMing myself

I have made the whole ocapi when I just needed the butt, I mean

And it turned out my session would have gone better with just the juicy bit

@trogdor Or the juicy butt. ಠ_ಠ

Yeah XD

Hmm... does Rule #1 mean "real-world" harm or "in-game" harm?

Real-world harm, whether physical or (more commonly) emotional. Harm to fictional people generally falls under the Third Law.

I made a volcanoes lair and stocked it with a villain and all his stuff

AKA, make people safe, make people happy, and play the game sincerely.

It ended up grinding to a halt in the first room and then de railing the next session or two

@BESW Maybe I should have a look at that.

@BESW Do you have a source for that?

I had over saturated that room when what I really would have liked was for the PCs to meet the villain,... Which didn't happen

@Anaphory It's something I learned from summer camp supervisors: are they safe? are they happy? are they doing the activity? in that order.

@BESW I do see the logic. But phrasing it in Three Laws also speaks to my Geek side.

I normally do very low prep GMing, but I found it very interesting (even if time-consuming) to prep a “whole” (11-Room) Torchbearer dungeon, even though the party saw less then half of it…

I guess I like worldbuilding enough for it to be a fun activity in itself, and I intend to use it at least twice more, so that benefit comes on top.

@Anaphory Ah. Yeah, that was me spur-of-the-moment.

I don't by any means mind that the de rail even happened. I jus wish I had known then what I do now because then I would have skipped to the room of the main event

Excellent. I'll cite you for it.

It's a little saddening that people need to be reminded it's more important that folks be safe and happy than that folks play a game, but I've seen a lot of cases where it's thought that the game is either more important, or that the act of playing it will make people happy regardless.

I think I have never been in a situation where that reminder was urgently necessary, but I'm fervently in favour of getting that into people's minds fast.

I actually took that quote into my growing document for an RPG “course” I'm kind of giving in a few weeks, because it's a nice phrasing of that reminder.

Oh, cool.

You might find some of the links in my profile interesting/useful.

For a while I had all my players read Making the Tough Decisions when they joined my group.

I have a feeling some of them are in there already, let me check…

Yep, I haven't stumbled on your profile or some of these things for the first time.

If there's any particular subject you're feeling a gap in, let me know and I might be able to help track something down.

BESW is the first and most major influence on my RPG thought process

I got set up on those things by Vincent Baker's writing.

Well tabletop ones anyway

I had stumbled upon the old GNS thing before, but it was really Apocalypse World that got me thinking about those things more deeply.

Baker was definitely an early influence in my RPG thinking, but I'm so far away from his paradigm now that even some of his basic principles aren't helpful anymore.

Starting with “I don't actually like post-apocalyptic stuff, why do I so desparately want to play this game?”

@BESW Can you be more verbose about that?

@Anaphory Baker's steeped in D&D principles. Balance, level-based progression, the GM/player divide, player agency overlapping almost entirely with PC agency--these are things that the games I play now either don't care about at all, or have radically different thoughts about.

Huh? Player agency overlapping with PC agency is a thing I see, but it looks like a deliberate choice to me in what he does. The other things I'm not fully sure about.

Well, yeah, it's deliberate choices. I'm not saying he's unable to think outside that box or anything.

But because he's chosen to work inside the D&D paradigm, and I'm playing outside of it, a lot of Baker's work stops being helpful to me.

One of my main foods for thought out of his stuff is thinking about objects of a game, and how they align or don't align between players, characters and – if present – GMs, and how the reflect in the game rules

That's a very crucial thing.

Call of Cthulhu's playstyle sections deal with it explicitly.

Fate Core's setting prep mechanises it.

Anyway, must dash. ttfn

bye

@Anaphory A lot of Baker's work on that topic is about recognising and negotiating the implicit assumptions made by D&D which the systems I use turn into explicit discussions.

Especially for 3.5, there's a lot of playstyle implications and assumptions that need to get unpacked for a healthy group to discuss their objectives rationally and productively.

Baker's very good at deconstructing and facilitating that... but it's not something my systems need deconstructed or facilitated in those ways, if at all.

EG, "Making the Tough Decisions" is about challenging binary characterisation and decision-making constructs which systems like Fate don't even allow to enter the discussion in the first place.

The very very basic "Don't succumb to My Guy Syndrome" idea in that essay is pretty much universal, but everything he says about it is predicated on challenging constructs like "play to maximise mechanical advantage" and "ultimatums are good play" which systems like Call of Cthulhu inherently dismiss.

@BESW Read through the most recent Call of Cthulhu ruleset. How is it as a system?

Was thinking of giving the sample adventure a run

I haven't actually played any CoC, it's not a system that attracts me. I prefer my systems smaller and more story-first, like Cthulhu Dark and Achtung! Cthulhu.

And if I wanted to go for a more rules-heavy Mythos system, I'd probably use Trail of Cthulhu.

So... what are you looking for in a system?

Just experimenting!

You know, done D&D, and a couple games of FAE (haven't been able to give full FATE a run yet...), and I've heard CoC is great for setting up that horror atmosphere

Just something different

eg, do you prefer systems with lots of little fiddly bits to move and adjust, or systems with a small set of broadly-applicable mechanics?

Are you interested in story-first games that enforce narrative pacing (like how FAE uses Fate points to create a crisis/victory cycle)?

Honestly, I don't think my group really has decided what they even like. Thus the experimenting

Or do you prefer systems that serve more as randomisation engines for resolving actions regardless of their position in the narrative?

I would prefer narrative styles

My wife however loves to tinker with things

Then try Trail of Cthulhu, maybe Achtung! Cthulhu.

CoC tends more toward the "arbitrary action resolution" end of things. Which works in the sense that it makes your actions equally meaningful regardless of the context; if that's the kind of horror you want, then it's pretty good.

But, for example, Trail of Cthulhu makes it almost impossible to miss a clue that's vitally necessary for the plot to continue, while CoC will happily let the story die in its tracks if you miss a roll unless the GM takes pity on you.

And Achtung! Cthulhu has a Fate Core version of WWII Mythos play.

Trail has more fiddly bits than Achtung!, so your wife would probably prefer it.

Also: what kind of horror are you looking for?

No idea actually. We've never done anything horror based. Everything has traditionally been hack and slash type games

But I was hoping to change it up a bit, branch out and experiment

Broadly, Mythos horror can be divided into "punching Cthulhu" (AKA "pulp horror") and "surviving Cthulhu" (AKA "psychological horror").

I was thinking more along the lines of psychological horror, I think.

Also, horror in general can be categorised as Dread (the thing you know is coming), Terror (the thing you see is coming), and Gore (the thing you can't stop looking at). Good horror games have all three, but you can define them by which they spend more time on.

Interesting...

Dread is tension, it puts you on the edge of your seat; Terror is the jump scare, triggering the flight response; and Gore is the repugnant, unnatural things you're forced to think about.

Psychological horror often spends most of its time in Dread and Gore.

Trail of Cthulhu is good for that, it's an investigative game that can underplay the effectiveness of PCs using violence so that they have to run and think instead of fight.

I think it would be awesome to make my players scared shitless, more or less. Either because a situation is that intense, or because their own imagination runs away with the scenario

(It's got hacks for more "pulp" play, but it sounds like you're trying to get away from that paradigm.)

You might also look at Cthulhu Dark. It's a very small, free game. Very few moving parts, but very elegant. It's designed for one-session play and the scenario structure advice leads to really strong Dread.

Cthulhu Dark is distinguished by two primary innovations: first, if you fight a monster you die. Second, PCs almost always succeed at anything they do that's not fighting a monster.

Because of the way it's structured, guaranteed success increases tension rather than decreases it: you succeed at whatever you try, but it just doesn't help much because of the nastiness of the problems you face.

I actually have Cthulhu Dark bookmarked now that you mention it

Something that simple might be interesting to run for the 12 year old nephews

You might also try games like The Princes' Kingdom.

It's not horror, but it's about making important, difficult choices with far-reaching implications and consequences, and violence is played as a last desperate resort.

So low-violence, high-psychology.

Also interesting

Bookmarked!

(I'm not thrilled with it myself, but it's got interesting ideas.)

(Specifically the setting and mechanics have some... unfortunate implications that I'd want to hack out before I played it again. Like avoiding child-PC fatalities.)

Reading a review of it makes it seem FAE-like

quality == aspect, more or less

I like the idea of the setting though

Kids being put in positions of power and traveling around to solve problems

It's a re-hash of the game Dogs in the Vineyard, which had even more unfortunate implications.

@KyleS. Hmm. Then, also look into Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple.

@KyleS. The big thematic difference between Fate and PK is that in PK, "consequences" are much much less voluntary.

Do also looks awesome for kids

Basically, you get to choose how much power you bring to bear in order to get your way in a conflict... but the more power you bring, the more severe the fallout will be, and you don't get to choose who the fallout hits, that's pretty random.

So the whole system revolves around the question "How much are you willing to sacrifice to get your way? Do you really think you're right, and how much is it worth risking?"

Do is very fun. Much less... weighty... than PK.

The kids I've ran games for before are very silly by nature, so that's right up their alley

@nitsua60 okay now that i understand this was about bad handwriting this is hilarious

@nitsua60 hey there

@doppelgreener [poke] When are you and Dan available today?

@BESW soon, we're probably good for the 4pm thing

Line that must appear in our campaign sometime:

> "You science bastards! What did you do to him?" (source)

lol

I get the impression Dr Light would then have to come in and say "um, excuse me,......"

"I believe they did exactly this thing"

yes. doctor light responds by explaining what they did to him while the greater part of the question flies right over his head.

if we're lucky, it turns out to be something that was pretty awesome.

Trailer for X-MEN: How Professor X Lost His Hair.

@BESW He trained so hard his hair fell out. Now he is strong.

@doppelgreener =P

@Shalvenay hey

@BESW I didn't feel like he stops at deconstructing D&D play style, so I feel the need to discuss this some more at some point.

In Baker's stuff, I also read a lot on “How does something become reality in the game fiction”, “How does the rules text relate to the actual game, the conversation that happens” and “How do we make better games (and what does ‘better’ mean anyway)”. To me, this does not look like being limited to “deconstructing D&D play styles”.

Fair enough. We may likely have read different sections of his work.

...And it's been many years since I read much of anything by him.

@TheOracle WoD: A gift that keeps on giving. Giving meta questions about tagging, that is.

@BESW That would explain it. He may have caught up with you.

More like evolving parallel, but yes.

Indeed.

Tonight's game was pretty amazing, but it was also rather confusing. I'll try to describe it in the morning when my brain's more online, unless Troggy or Greener beat me to it.

By the end of the session we'd done things like climb up through a service hatch in the sky, carefully mark the location of a stick disguised as a powerful magic item disguised as a stick, and after defeating a guard patrol hypnotise the surviving guard into thinking he'd won so he'll take us to his master as prisoners.

Also one of the players is playing a villain disguised as a party member disguised as an enemy soldier.

Sounds excellent!

You seem to like the double bluffs.

Anyway, ttfn.

Oh, this is almost all my group's doing. I just sat back and offered Fate points.

I would jump in and explain it but I need sleep too XD

We're on an artificial world drifting through space that's at least a few thousand years old and has become a place of laser fantasy (think He-Man and Thundercats) and the creators were the Ancients. We've just learned that the entire world falls under the ultimate power of whoever is master of the legendary Bridge of Kon-Toro (which is probably an AI), and that a particular very capable villain might be planning to do that - so we need to get to it first.

There's lots of magic and good old black-and-white good people & evil villains.

To reach the Bridge, we think we first need to control a Major Node of the world, and all known ones are controlled by Masters, all of whom are evil and perpetually at odds with all the other Masters. The inhabitants call this world Umdaar. This is an adoption of the Fate Worlds Masters of Umdaar.

Tonight we had Agent Baker and the Knightly Telekinetic, Edgar T. Vogue. We also had Doctor Light, or rather, one of our nemeses, Vulturra, disguised as Doctor Light and trying to stay in character so she can learn about us and manipulate us, now that we wiped out her army. Stellata's re-emerged for the first time since being taken by a living Nightmare monster and being made to re-live all her traumatic childhood memories in which she was being used as a test subject by Doctor Light.

(She was created from an Oak sapling a decade or two ago to see if plant/human hybrids could work, so that Doctor Light, then a human, could make himself into one. She was put through a lot of tests to see whether she was "viable" as a lifeform. It was not a fun time, but she hadn't remembered or realised how unpleasant it was until being made to relive it. Now she remembers and has some daddy issues going on which we planned to exploit for fun and drama.)

We had some greetings, had a strategy meeting to decide how to take over a Major Node, and decided we'd go take the closest one - belonging to Queen Appa-Tax of the Dinosauroids. We got there by climbing through a surface hatch in the "sky" which was at the top of a mountain and into a new layer of the planet's inside. (Apparently the sky lets off sparks if you throw a rock at it. It might be a big LED display.)

The new place was a windswept swamp experiencing a thunderstorm. Doctor Light/Vulturra said something that struck a nerve with Stellata, they got into a fight, she tried to take the powerful Staff of Seven Calamities off Light/Vulturra, and created so much noise and magical explosions that Appa-tax's gecko guard patrols found and attacked us.

(Vulturra's trying to be in-character as Doctor Light and thinks that means being fatherly to Stellata, when Doctor Light is the least fatherly and most socially awkward person around. She nails the socially awkward bit perfectly trying to be him. The fatherly bit is a problem right now and all of us are enjoying that I think. Probably especially me, being Stellata's player.)

Doctor Light, being really a tyrannical sorceress in disguise, went on a fairly violent killing rampage with the gecko guards, while Edgar and Baker tried to subdue them more peacefully. We kept one alive at least who Baker just choked out.

After Light's... horrifying display... Stellata cried out "you're terrible, you're not my real dad at all!" which is exactly the kind of thing a person who is literally not actually her real dad at all doesn't want to hear, and thought she might be breaking character. So Vulturra/Light created an illusion of transforming the Staff of Seven Calamities into a tree branch and dropping it into the swamp full of tree branches, and melodramatically asking for forgiveness.

So now we have an actual tree branch we believe is an extremely powerful staff merely disguised as a tree branch, and Vulturra/Light still has the actual one.

Our original plan was to ingratiate ourselves to Appa-Tax and offer our services as mercenaries to eventually pull a fast one on her and take over her Node... and maybe that plan's totally busted now that we've violently murdered some of her guard (or at least Light did). So we've decided to be prisoners instead.

Vulturra/Light transformed her/himself into one of the dead gecko guards. She still has the real staff which she'd made invisible during her sleight of hand, and now it's cloaked as being a stolen gecko guard's surprisingly large sword. And Vulturra/Light offered to transform himself into a gecko guard. Apparently Doctor Light can do that now? (Really it's just Vulturra that can do that.) Weird stuff's been happening though so we're not questioning it.

Baker used his psychic powers to alter the memories of the one gecko guard who survived, making him forget the horrifying fight and instead think he and the gecko guard Light's disguised as actually subdued all of us, and blew up the plant monster that was Doctor Light.

So, now Stellata and Edgar and Baker have physically gotten themselves all tied up and bound in rope and stuff, Vulturra is pretending to be Light pretending to be a Gecko Guard of Queen Appa-Tax, the actual Gecko Guard will wake up and take us in as prisoners, Vulturra/Light will free us from the prison later but we don't know it's actually our nemesis who is the last person we can trust, Stellata's issues with Light are very fun, and the plan's falling apart but we'll work something out.

Also, the branch we think is the Staff of Seven Calamities disguised as a staff is now somewhere in a bog, Stellata and Baker have made sure its location's marked so we can find it and secure it later, and the real staff is still cloaked and carried by Vulturra/Light.

Almost all of the above drama and chaos and nonsense was completely our doing as players and was hilarious fun and having one of our own players being our archnemesis in disguise is fantastic.

> "I'm a dude playing a dude disguised as another dude!"

@Yuuki Vulture-lady sorceress disguised as a hulking plant monster swamp thing scientist genius, in turn disguised as a gecko guard who's likely to get a promotion and all sorts of unwanted attention.

it's so good.

theonyxpath.com/announcing-chronicles-of-darkness

> Onyx Path Publishing and White Wolf Publishing are proud to announce that Chronicles of Darkness is now the overall brand name for the series of game lines previously called the New World of Darkness.

</spam>

It's a pretty nice name & cool looking logo.

@AncientSwordRage There's a question on meta about what to do with tagging this, which you might be interested in weighing in on.

@doppelgreener But yes it's it's pretty and I'll weigh in later on

Whoops, I was missing the http.

@doppelgreener good spot

It's an interesting choice

I wish more people who liked WoD/cWoD/nWoD/CoD were in chat...

I don't know anyone else who is, and I struggle with forums (like the official OP one) since buying into the SE model

Yeah, I'd like that too. I'd like to hear people's game stories, them geeking out over world of darkness setting details and stories, learning about the world of darkness paradigm strengths and complications and points of strife, etc

The settings seem cool, Mage has interesting sounding conceits, the whole god-machine thing has me very intrigued, and I would likely geek out about their vampire interpretations if only I knew more about them.

I have a friend who is so into the Malkavians and the world of darkness video games.

Plus every new RPG I've learned things about has helped me learn to play the games I love better and have more fun with my pals.

It's all really well done in my opinion, the writing never pins anything down to well

The one thing I never got though was going back anger don't the 20th anniversary editions

Feels like going backwards

That's probably me being backwards though

@doppelgreener what do you normally play?

@AncientSwordRage Fan here as well

hey there @nitsua60 -- I'll be AFK for a few hours here, hopefully I'll be back before my Saturday night 2e game starts :)

@Ahriman which granted do you play?

mostly oWod: vampire, hunter, wraith

did some experimenting with Horror in nWoD & Highlander

@Ahriman cool

The horror one was a supposed filming for a tv show: stay a night in a haunted house & win 10000$

They get in & lo, it's an old creepy enhanced house

Stuff starts happening (bleeding walls, bugs out of nowhere, furniture moves, ...)

Then the shadows start moving

Much screaming, blood and fainting later the majority of the players escaped. One was the sacrifice to enable the others to escape

@Ahriman sounds like it went down well

@AncientSwordRage The players had several guesses of what was going on (being long time vampire players), but the characters were clueless. Gave the session some tension.

@Ahriman sounds epic

I have a story I'm planning on using but it's a long time in the making

Hard to get sessions planned?

@Ahriman I want even at that stage. I was world building so the characters could go off and explore

hehe

I was going to base it runs a real world ghost town, before it was abandoned, and have the PCs start as children

Add they grew they'd get all tricks from mirrors, and depending on their 'life choices' they'd end up in a different Splat

ooh

noice

but requires quite the lifting to set it up

@Ahriman yeah

I wanted to make a web app to help me map the connections

But I've not had the time

@Emrakul awesome, do tell

@Emrakul Manhattan space

@Emrakul is that DnD or just math

@Ahriman what's the difference? :-P

math is more fun?

@Emrakul ah yeah

@Emrakul 4E does that to be nice to people

@Emrakul I think the standard term is "chessboard distance".

Or Chebyshev metric if you want to sound fancy.

Or "maximum metric", because that's effectively what it boils down to: distance = max(x_distance, y_distance).

@Shalvenay I'll be home and online for the night about 9EDT

Rubbish

@Poutrathor You're talking about D&D 3.5, right?

Assuming you are, the advantage of bard/crusader is the Song of the White Raven feat, which allows your Crusader levels to stack with your Bard levels for the purposes of your Inspire Courage feature.

So if you want to be a tanky melee fighter, but still be giving your allies a huge boost to attack and damage, you take some number of Bard levels, then be a Crusader for the rest of your life.

Alternatively, if you want to be a Bard, but just want to add some melee options, you dip Crusader at certain key levels to pick up maneuvers and stances you want.

You might want to look at this, this, or this.

Thanks ! 3.5 indeed

Based on the first link, (KRyan is orders of magnitude more knowledgable about this than me), it sounds like you want to take your first 4 levels outside Crusader, then enter Crusader when you level to 5.

Oops, I meant the second link.

Still reading

OK. So I go cleric 3 bard 1 then crusader ?

Or 4 bard ?

If you're looking to be a tanky melee fighter, harmonious knight variant paladin is awesome - Dvine Grace is just amazing for 2 levels.

Good question. Isn't a rule against more than 2 classes for xp ?

Technically, it's against more than 1.

Not many DMs use that rule, but the wway to get around it is to have your racial favoured class be the one that's significantly different to the others.

So if you're taking 1 level of Cleric, 2 levels of Paladin, and lots of Crusader levels, if you can get Crusader as a favoured class (hint: be human), you won't have any exp penalty.

(Further hint: Be silverblood human so you can get Dragonfire Inspiration.)

Thinking about it, I'd strongly recommend at least 2 levels of harmonious knight variant paladin - the fact that it gives Divine Grace and Inspire Courage makes it really great.

If you're looking to make full attacks, Lion Totem Barbarian 1 for Pounce is hard to go past.

You never get this sort of discussion with WoD

It's a bit complicated for me (

Basically

I am afraid heavy armor will prevent my bard to successfully cast

And I am afraid my party need a tank

@Poutrathor world of darkness? It is quite different

So I am torn

Oh

@Poutrathor Ah, ok. All of the advice I've given has assumed you didn't care about spellcasting.

Oh ?

You can disregard the bard spell ?

@Poutrathor Well, you said Bard/Crusader at the start, and since Crusader doesn't progress Bard spellcasting, I guess I just assumed.

You know what ? I go bard it's fun

Then I ll go full battle leader crusader

Fun and two experiences

I trust your knowledge

@Poutrathor Well, if you're wanting to wear heavy armor to be slightly tankier, you may want to look at this.

I will very solid at level 5

@Poutrathor It's not mine, I'm just passing it along :)

Anyways, I gotta go, ttfn.

@Miniman ttfn