TRPG General Chat

SirTechSpec

01:59

Eh? To me rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/83573/… is no more opinionated than any other question of GM techniques. Am I missing something?

doppelgreener

@SirTechSpec FYI that thing could've received as few as 2 close votes for primarily opinion based.

It does seem close-worthy though. Most GM techniques questions we have, have some strong specific sensible ways to handle the situation sensitively. That question's just sweepingly referring to "PCs don't give a cow", also with no setting specifics at all, other than "there's guards" "it's D&D 3.5e", whatever that means. There's going to be dozens of suggestions, none of them "correct" for the scenario (because there is no one scenario).

I'm going to leave a comment.

Joel Harmon

@SirTechSpec seems to be somewhat related to the "how do I prevent them from being murderhobos", or perhaps the orbital medieval ion cannon one

perhaps it could be rephrases a bit, but I'm pretty ok with it as is

doppelgreener

This almost certainly needs to be more specific about the situation you're encountering. We can't address the sweeping situation "PCs are troublemakers" with no specifics at all on what they're doing or their setting or any information at all about your gaming group. Everyone is going to have a dozen unique, not necessarily even useful solutions, and many of them are going to be more or less effective in different circumstances. Could you tell us what is actually happening, and some information about your setting and gaming group, such that we can provide a somewhat specific solution? — doppelgreener 59 secs ago

Adeptus

02:28

2

Shalvenay

@Adeptus LOL

doppelgreener

@Adeptus when my group of friends started getting interested in TTRPGs, my friend offered to run one of the standard modules which involved diving into a cave of kobolds and skeletons and stuff. He started us off in the village bar, and said there was a guy in the corner looking shifty. We decided to keep tabs on him, then spoke to just about every other NPC in the city, and considered how we'd murder at least a couple of them.

(The blacksmith had a sword mounted on the wall behind him. We discussed briefly whether dropping a sword on someone point-downwards using Mage Hand was a legitimate use of the spell, since it wasn't meant to do damage.)

Shalvenay

@doppelgreener :P

@doppelgreener I believe I have a kobold blacksmith in one of the towns I wrote up for the 5e campaign I tried DMing for my parents...

doppelgreener

Suspiciously every single NPC pointed us toward the caves outside of town where the guards had headed... took us a while to get the hint. Apparently he expected we'd talk to that one shifty guy, then move on from there to the caves directly - while we everything but. We never did wind up talking to him.

Shalvenay

@doppelgreener wow, haha. must have been a real shifty lookin' bloke

doppelgreener

02:40

all we knew about him was how dodgy and shifty and suspicious he was behaving.

we figured if we tailed him, he'd lead us somewhere interesting that would progress the plot.

trogdor

02:59

@doppelgreener at that point he should have had that guy go into the cave XD

20/20 hindsight though

doppelgreener

@trogdor i agree! :D

shifty guy passing through some hostile skeletons without them hastling him. sudden change of plans, this guy's one of the antagonists.

trogdor

I mean, don't get me wrong, I have made similar mistakes

but at this point, if I planned an NPC to be a quest giver but the PC's have already attached to one of his eccentric personality quirks and decided he is a villain, it's probably better to roll with that to some degree

that doesn't even mean you have to make him a villian if you get creative, but if they are literally tailing him around instead of talking to him like you wanted them to, that specific scenario does call for him leading them to the place you want them to go instead of telling them to go there

flexibility is one of the things I dearly wish to learn how to have while DMing

heck, if you roll with the first assumption the PC's make, you can often lead most groups by the nose for the rest of the session without them even knowing it if that is what you want to do

it does require ditching the first idea you presented to them but that isn't an especially heavy price if everyone (including all of them AND you) is having fun

my main problem as a DM/GM has been being unprepared and or unwilling to ditch that first idea, or making the mistake of making it a lynchpin of the rest of the session

Shalvenay

@trogdor yeah, I'm either super-railroady or super-bendy, nowhere inbetween

trogdor

same here

I want to be able to do something in the middle, where I have structure that the group can follow, but enough flexibility that they can introduce things for themselves

Shalvenay

@trogdor yeah -- I can pretty much set up a sandbox and let folks pull levers to their heart's content, or railroad folks around, but nowhere between

trogdor

03:14

because railroading too hard isn't fun, but just going in with no prep (or more accurately, almost immediately discarded prep XD) has always left the session I did that for being too all over the place

Shalvenay

@trogdor I don't have that problem so much at least in the smaller-scale stuff I've done in that vein

trogdor

my most recently run set of sessions was supposed to be about one of the PC's personal anagonist setting up shop in a volcanoe base, and them going through said base and meeting him

but I had put so much stuff in the lab they found that they poked around there till we ran out of real world time to continue

the next session basically devolved into them looking through other parts of the volcanoe because I had decided to leave them a couple of options, and they went down a side path, did a bunch of relatively random things and never met the guy they were supposed to run into

at least half of that second session was stuff I was making up on the fly because I hadn't anticipated everything the PC's would want to do

and it just ended up meaning next to nothing for the overall plot of the game

I think they still had fun, and I did too, but I feel like it could have gone a lot better

doppelgreener

hmMMmMMMMmmm

mostly I approach this stuff by having a plan of what the key players are like - I know the antagonist(s), the henchmen, and I know their natures well enough to improvise with them. I have a fuzzy idea of what the players could do and what could happen along the way. Almost none of it will happen, but it's there and available for me to draw on if I want to.

trogdor

@doppelgreener well that is kinda what I had tried to do

doppelgreener

If the players have multiple paths available, but I have only a couple of exciting things to offer them, I'll make sure at least one of those things is along that path. Is there a villain? Don't provide a fork in the road with interesting things in the other direction from the villain's direction. If I do, and the players decide they want to take that fork, well that's the fork the villain's in now. Nobody knows! :D

trogdor

03:28

@doppelgreener yeah I get this,.... it's just that me doing something like that at that time would have basically just been an "illusion of choice"

doppelgreener

@trogdor Correct

trogdor

it would have actually ended up just being me railroading completely

doppelgreener

No, not necessarily.

trogdor

@doppelgreener well now it wouldn't, but at the time if I had done something like that it WOULD have only been railroading

doppelgreener

No, it wouldn't have been.

Presenting the players with meaningful choices and things to do is important. Presenting them with choices and ensuring those always move forward toward something exciting happening makes for a fun session. Railroading means "you don't get to make meaningful choices except the choices I have already chosen for you, and you don't get to change the story except in ways I've already decided you will."

We could've gone into that room full of devices, and you decide to have Adrian walk in from an abbey, teleport into the middle of the ring, suddenly speak up over loudspeakers installed in the cave (gasp!) addressing us directly in ominous tones, etc. Now we've made choices and exciting things are happening.

As proactive competent heroes, though, if Adrian appears we're entitled to basically rope him up, knock him senseless and drag him back to Amaterasu HQ - if we're good enough to subdue him. It would be railroading to prohibit that completely without justification other than "that's not the story I'm telling here, so no you can't do that."

Or, while we're busy tinkering around with equipment, you compel someone to push a button and a door opens to a room full of big robot spiders. etc.

Illusion of choice is a tool used in railroading, but using that tool does not mean you are railroading. You can just use it to create cool exciting stories.

You were there for the session where we broke into the BRAC base and rescued Charles Babbage, right?

trogdor

03:39

yeah

Joel Harmon

one possibility about the illusion of choice is if they stumble on the bad guy, they should be able to back out of the room quietly and explore the rest of the place before engaging him

doppelgreener

I didn't have any kind of floor plan worked out for that BRAC base. I had narrative plans worked out: I wanted to let y'all explore, see if you'd get into trouble with guards or cause general mayhem. I had lots of themes and scenery and possibilities thought out, including a passageway where gravity turned upside down as you ran along it (so the walkway would also twist). Didn't use half of it.

What I did have planned was that at some point when things got relatively serious or intrigue-ey, where you headed would be toward the supercomputer at the center of the base. Y'all chose to break into a service passageway as the physical entrance, but what mattered more was "it's sleuthing time", and I made sure that lead to the the thing you were there sleuthing for.

It could've been running away from guards, ducking into a side-passage, diving into a ventilation shaft, escaping a trash compactor, etc. How you got there wasn't all that important, but it mattered that you eventually found the supercomputer, and any path can feasibly lead to it.

trogdor

I get that,... I think one of my other problems is wanting to define what is behind each side passage and ventilation shaft though

I understand that that isn't necessarily ideal, but part of what I was saying before was that I not only had that problem at the time, but also couldn't put my finger on it

so the way you described how you did that session? I most likely wouldn't have been able to pull mine off that way

just to be clear here, I am not saying that was the wrong way to handle a session like that, I am saying that at that particular time in the past I wouldn't have been able to do that

doppelgreener

my half-baked articulation is that while the intrepid heroes move through physical space, the story - their story - moves through narrative space. They don't find the clues and crack the conspiracy just because they moved through the right physical spaces - they might've been doing that having a proper loud fist fight. They find those things because they engage in the right narrative paths.

trogdor

and maybe I could now, maybe I couldn't, but the point is that back at THAT time I definitely was not in the right mindset

doppelgreener

03:52

gotcha

Shalvenay

@doppelgreener yeah, whereas what happens with me is that I find narrative space trying to influence ingame-world-space as problematic because narrative space lives beyond the fourth wall for me

doppelgreener

yep, narrative space is definitely beyond the fourth wall.

Magician

So are the players, though.

doppelgreener

@Magician Yeah, GM included.

Magician

To the characters, we are otherworldly beings, inhabiting them but never fully comprehending them. Manipulating them through unknowable, undoubtedly eldritch systems.

It is a great honor, to be chosen as a character. A great horror.

nitsua60

04:00

in Not a bar, but plays one on TV, Jun 17 at 1:14, by nitsua60

I have a friend who has--for years--been trying to write up his idea of a "spark" in D&D.

in Not a bar, but plays one on TV, Jun 17 at 1:15, by nitsua60

a near-omnipotent (or at least transcendent and very differently-powered and wholly alien in thought process) being has taken an interest in the PC.

in Not a bar, but plays one on TV, Jun 17 at 1:15, by nitsua60

And now the Universe tends to bend in small ways around them. Especially if they group up.

Shalvenay

yeah -- still working on that one @nitsua60 xD

nitsua60

=)

BESW

05:09

@nitsua60 Now I'm thinking about what Astro City is doing lately.

Magician

06:08

Fate SRD has been updated with all the new content from @EvilHatOfficial’s Fate More KS! http://fate-srd.com/

Tweeted by Fate_SRD on July 4, 2016 at 6:54 PM

Anaphory

10:56

@Adeptus Yes! I used to have a time when I absolutely loved that style of game, and i have one Kingdom module for Hârn (Kaldôr) somewhere, and frankly it's ridiculous that every noble house has their family tree in there and so on, but I still quite like the vibe from looking at a village/manor/location description on Lythia.com, and using it as a starting point to dream up something.

Oxinabox

11:34

So, I ran a giant game of Amber Diceless (at least 14 players, ran on and off during a larger event) with players doing a lot of things without me being required, and me being dragged in when they attempted to kill each other, or interact with the setting wanted to know ho many people they could recruit into there armies.
Was using it to roleplay 40K space marine primarchs.

It was pretty great, This is the second giant game of primarchs using Amber, out club has done. I swapped in as GM from my friend who ran the last one, and ran over the years a bunch of much smaller games of playing primarchs.

Amber doesn't have social mechanics -- you need to use your real social skills. I think that is because of the time it was made.
One thing this mean is that what is a giant clusterf*ck of a meeting in game, is also a giant clusterf*ck of a meeting IRL.

The players organised to have a Counsil on Nicaea,
Where they passed what came to be known in game as the Nicaea Acords.
It took 2.5 hours of IRL arguing

lisardggY

Well, that's a stylistic choice. I've known games, especially LARPs, to be totally oriented towards hours of in-character arguing.

Well, as long as it doesn't really devolve to players shouting at each other.

Nex Terren

19:24

So random question I don't think is worthy of actually posting a question: Any rule systems that use the Lawful/Chaotic and Good/Evil scheme... well "chaotic" tends to have negative connotations as a term. Does any other system use a more neutral term for the same idea?

Francisco

19:51

@NexTerren Not quite an answer to your question. But I love this site easydamus.com/alignment.html, really gave me a better idea of the breadth of possibilities each of the 9 alignments have.

BESW

The problem with the alignment system is that it's so poorly defined you can justify nearly any behaviour or philosophy as fitting nearly any spot on the alignment diagram.

So, what do you mean by the idea of "chaotic"?

Nex Terren

Basically I'm helping a friend create a setting and we're lightly adopting the alignment system to describe the gods/paint a clear picture of their distinction and separation, and to play into the notion of balance. One 'good,' one 'lawful,' one 'chaotic,' one 'evil,' and one 'true neutral' (better phrased as 'of balance,' or 'pro balance,'),

but "chaotic"--while well accepted in the tabletop world--just smacks of this negative connotation, and it feels like I wouldn't be the first to come across this dislike of its flavor, and somebody else already explored this topic. I was just curious if somebody else had tackled attempting to re-term it.

BESW

Most of the games I'm interested in don't consider the alignment system useful enough to try to salvage. [thinks]

Alignments don't map to real-world attitudes in any consistent or useful way, so it takes a lot of unpacking assumptions and picking one particular interpretation before they can be codified.

Perhaps the best expression of pure chaos I've seen is in the Chalion series; it's definitively "Not technically malevolent but don't get any on you."

Oct 2 '15 at 6:31, by BESW

There's a book series (Chalion, by Lois McMaster Bujold) where demons are fragments of pure chaos, escaped from the plane of chaos, which must possess physical bodies in order to survive in the physical world. They acquire traits from the creatures they possess, and slowly develop sentience and then sapience by leeching it from their hosts. In this way, a demonic bear is just a very confused and remarkably powerful bear, while a demonic person is probably a very cunning and ruthless sorceress.

Nex Terren

20:07

I mean I agree in general I'm not a fan of the alignment system. Just mostly curious if I was alone in thinking that, when used, a better term than 'chaotic' should be used. It's purely curiosity for curiosity sake, so thus why I didn't think I should ask it on rpg.stackexcahnge.com

BESW

For some versions of "chaos," "anarchy" would be more appropriate.

Nex Terren

Hmm, okay.

BESW

For others, rules and acts, whether that be rule/act utilitarianism or salvation through acts vs salvation through faith, or some other similar dichotomy.

Some would simply call it "spontaneity" or "freedom."

Nex Terren

Well thank you for your help, @BESW!

BESW

Good luck!

eimyr

20:20

@nitsua60 Hey, a friend of a friend wrote some RPG draft for 4-7 yeard olds to play and is looking for playtesters. Anyone would like to help? drive.google.com/file/d/0By3enwcFNlhKa0lpbXNjTFpWZkU/…

Nex Terren

20:41

One minor point, @eimyr, under the section “What are they good at?” and the example question “What do superheroes do?” you might get answers like "shoot beams out of their eyes and fly and punch!" Might ask your friend if this would be an acceptable response, since children to be concrete-focused instead of abstract focused like "being brave." If this is acceptable, no issue, but if it's not perhaps he needs to tweak something there?

eimyr

@NexTerren Thegame is not mine and I have barely read it. It's good feedback though and perhapsifyou have a number of questions Ican pass them on if you were to write them up all together

Nex Terren

@eimyr That's honestly the only one. I'm afraid I can't playtest it for you!

@eimyr I have a particular shortage of people within that age range.

BESW

20:59

@eimyr If there's a Facebook-shareable link I can broadcast it to the RPG Families I know.

eimyr

21:17

@BESW I picked this one off friends FB page.

I'm sure it's fine to broadcast but if you want I can ask permission

I asked, awaiting response

nitsua60

22:46

Mar 2 at 19:49, by AncientSwordRage

Shalvenay

hey there @nitsua60

nitsua60

23:01

hmm... @BESW: do you mind moving the last three ^^ to the NAB? I'll not overwhelm general....

BESW

→ 4 messages moved to Not a bar, but plays one on TV

nitsua60

@Shalvenay hiya

@BESW thanks

Shalvenay

23:29

@nitsua60 how're things going?

Miniman

23:47

That awkward moment when an answer has a bunch of good advice...and places focus on the single piece of abysmally bad advice it offers.

SirTechSpec

@Miniman ?

Miniman

@SirTechSpec Here. I never know how to react to this sort of thing, I'm hoping someone will post a competing answer with just the good bits.

SirTechSpec

@Miniman Hmm, I see what you mean.

Besides the awkwardness of letting one player sabotage every bit of dialogue like that... I'm surprised no one has said "you talked to him, but what did you say?" Because a lot of times people will say "hey can u not" "sure" and they go right back to doing it, whereas an explanation of why the behavior is a problem would stick better.

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