@BESW I personally think that there are problems that are often paired with strong preference of making your character strong. But the problem is not in trying to make your character strong, but rather in something else. Whatever is considred good RP, I have seen wargamers who can't RP but can charrop, and even if you disallow them to charrop, their RP won't change just because of that.
Conversely, if you are generally good at RP, again, whatever should it mean -- your group likes your RP -- strong character will not hinder your performance, nor will some attention spent on making wise character development decisions.
...and? I'm not the person you're trying to convince.
I generally agree with your statements on this subject, I just see some problems in expressing them.
Specifically your question is written as if all powergaming and all objections to powergaming are single coherent notions rather than a wild concatenation of disparate and sometimes contradictory parts masquerading under misleadingly similar vocabulary.
There's no anti-power-gaming convention where people gather to agree on why powergaming is bad. There's mostly people who've had jerks at their table who used "powergaming" as an excuse for their behaviour.
An undue focus on system mechanics is often coupled with devaluing the social element of the game. Powergaming and optimisation are, inherently, mechanics-focused. So they're a common denominator with folks who don't value the social game.
Correlation doesn't imply causation but for many folks the phrase "I'm a power gamer" is a warning sign that the speaker won't care about the happiness of the other participants and will use the system as a justification for that attitude.
I suspect you're trying to find a rational argument you can attempt to disprove. You won't.
It's about individuals correlating their experiences and coming to conclusions.
For example, you've said that mechanical complexity doesn't impinge roleplaying quality, and I agree that it often does not. But sometimes it really really does.
neither, I don't know Kirk well enough to judge, both parties have become two faces of the Korporate Money Party, RAI is impossible to get rid of because human language is imperfect, no idea, just get rid of the fanatics and we'll all get along OK, and huh?
For me, I strongly feel that the system rules are part of the shared reality of the fiction we're creating, so flauting or disdaining those rules is the same as dumping on any fundamental conceit of the game.
@fectin I agree for the most part, although sometimes it's necessary to patch said shared reality because something broke xD (classic example: Truenamers)
eg, there's a very big difference between "I powergame" and "I'm a powergamer." The latter makes the stakes much more personal and defines our social status.
@Shalvenay Sure. But you fix that by changing the rules so they work or avoiding that part of them, not by having everything the Truenamer does arbitrarily succeed/fail.
If I powergame and a group asks me not to powergame, I can talk about that with them and make a decision. If I'm a powergamer and a group asks me not to powergame, they're kicking me out of the group unless I change my identity.
As a tangentially related but not identical topic: I would most like to be building infrastructure in most RPGs. Pretty much at any point, thi thing I want to do is I know that I tend to default to
...wow, poorly placed [enter] made a real hash of that
As a tangentially related but not identical topic: I would most like to be building infrastructure in most RPGs. Pretty much at any point, the thing I want to do is build a social, political, and economic powerbase in a city.
InSpectres is about working for a startup company. It's focused on Ghostbusters-like supernatural companies, but the core rules work for less supernatural themes easily enough.
Good Neighbours is about maintaining good relationships between the people in a town and the fairies in a nearby forest, in the face of urban expansion.
...which is also fine. But the roleplaying in the second game is mostly about being the best at stabbing monsters and stealing stuff. That's fun too! But it STRONGLY encourages me to optimize for something (spellcaster shenanigans. Epic bluff via telepathy. Etc.).
Since I know how I have fun (as non-disruptively as possible, btw), I always suspect that someone who complains about powergamers in their game may just not be engaging them.
I feel like I want to step outside the hack-and-slash world, but non-hack-and-slash game design has focused on social/emotional narrative building, which is something I lack understanding of to the point where I'm the proverbial bull-in-a-china-shop
If this is going to be another chapter in the multi-volume epic of Shalv's Adventures In the Lands of Narrative Conceit, it should probably move to the NAB.
For topics that tend to go very very long and drown out everything else, after it's happened a few times we start moving them pre-emptively to the Not A Bar.
Any system works; crunchier systems tend to be more fun.
It's more, Why go fight through another dungeon, when we have a perfectly good keep we just cleared out? We should set up shop here, and start improving local agriculture!
Though all three suggestions are getting bookmarked for later.
Once, my young daughter described the smell of a new natural food store in the area as "it smelled like hippies eating sushi in a barn." It was then I knew she would be an artist.
@BESW Thanks, yeah I figured it needed some more where-to-go-from-here (I mean, the question doesn't technically ask for that, it just says "why this question different, but it needed to).
**[Timely RPGery](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nKltjD1HJ954pS3QZZL-E_ckNaKEeedxMKn7XwdFiio/edit?usp=sharing "Click for full source doc; please suggest items to pin!"):** [Bundle of Holding](https://bundleofholding.com/ "Great bulk deals with bonus charitable donations!"); [Writing the Other](http://writingtheother.com/writing-inclusive-games/ "A workshop on writing inclusive games. Feb 11 - Mar 4"); [Star Trek](http://www.modiphius.com/star-trek.html "Star Trek Adventures RPG 'living playtest' signup");
Gotta say, I haven't seen that before: a game about playing the faculty of a magic school.
(Ping @nitsua60 for PbtA game about magic school faculty)
New site-motto contender: we can't argue with your DM for you (emphasis in original). Though perhaps it's a better site-subtitle than site-motto?
5
@BESW I'd imagine that being a magic-school faculty would be much like being the GM of a group with a visually-impaired player: 95% of the challenges are exactly the same as they'd have been without the unique ingredient =)
@RollingFeles alright here, just wrapped up a cookie baking session
@RollingFeles also, looks like I swung myself a seat at a regular table at the local FLGS, so we'll see how it goes. AD&D/Greyhawk/modules, with a DM who appreciates the wild and wooly variety of character just as much as I do :)
so, my concept is a Gnoll monk/cleric of St. Cuthbert
probably got kicked out/orphaned at a young age and adopted by some monks :)
@RollingFeles yeah, I think it'll turn out pretty nicely -- Cuthbertian discipline and practicality should be an interesting mix with a few feral-ish elements and a tooth-and-claw fighting style (probably along with whatever random cudgels the char can snag)
And I have rpg recovery myself. In August we paused our main campaign (5e) to try Phandelver. It went not so good, to be honest. And finally in December we've returned to our main campaign. On other hand mine own campaign stuck and now we decided to try something new. I will run my first DW game this friday for my two brave heroes.
@Shalvenay I'm not familliar with St. Cuthbert, but it all sounds pure awesome :)
I'm more glad that you found regular table. I'm hoping to gather my own in near future.
@RollingFeles ah, cool. what happened to LMoP btw? also, I managed to get one of the other online 5e games I was working on going at last, to the tune of "getting grab-arse with a paladiness in front of a half-orcess acolyte of Pelor is a bad plan"
and then our chars got kidnapped in their sleep, stuck in a box, managed to knock the box they were in off whatever it was on and into the water, got out of the box, swam to shore, found their stuff getting airdropped to them in a box, and are now dealing with silly goblins who don't understand that food grows on plants and trees
@Shalvenay we found that Phandelver was not so fun and different from our GM campaign. Our GM felt himself limited by a world he was not familliar with and some adventure design decisions dissappointed us. In the end we wandered off in different direction and although later games were fun, it felt like we were lost at bigger scale.
also, picked up a Volo's. review: interesting take on where half-orcs come from, don't like how they did gnolls (played up Yeegnohu too much) or lizardfolk (too much "not developed brain", not enough saurial/argonian influence), but loved their takes on kobolds (seriously -- someone needs to pull the Volo's kobolds into civilization properly) and hobgoblins (reminds me of some of the things I've been doing with that race)
@RollingFeles If you haven't played DW yourself, I recommend you read the DM section of the game, think about it, then read it again. As Seven is fond of pointing out, most of the rules are for the GM.
@JoelHarmon Thank you! I've read SSD's great answer about DW. I've read GM section. I've read Beginner's Must Read at r/DungeonWorld. And I'm certainly need to follow your advice about reading it again =) I feel that I understand how it should be played and I saw how Adam Koebel run the game, but it seems to me that some bits are missed anyway.
@AlexAgapov Hi! We keep a list of other RPG communities that might be helpful, and you'll notice this very room is on that list.
We may not be the right folks for your particular needs, and it'll kinda depend on who's around when you have time to chat, but there are plenty of people here who are happy to help with that sort of thing.
@BESW thank you for the list! my questions regarding the campaign are quite numerous (not to mention the lenghty introduction required to understand them), so I'm going to look for help in some of these communities. thanks again and happy gaming!
@AlexAgapov My pleasure. And feel free to impose on us in the future!
One of the values of this chat room is that it's got a much wider variety of experience than most forums--which tend to stick to a particular subset of systems and/or playstyles.
@BESW this is awesome! I'm currently posting my question to the Giant forum - I have seen it before and it seems like a great community for that sort of discussions
@SevenSidedDie thank you for your great answers and examples for DW. It helps a lot to understand many issues and aspects which is not obvious at first even after reading book and guide.
Look's like we have about two more weeks till our region will have epidemic wave. Based on last years reports it was from 3rd untill 7th week of the year.
@DForck42 that's surely not good, but at least it's far from bad. That's great that you're better :)
@RollingFeles You're welcome! I should go re-read some of them myself — I just kicked off a DW game last night and it was super fun but I felt rather rusty. ^_^
@DForck42 Yeah, that's the worst of this things. We have a lot of young floks at my office, who happen to come at work even with cold. My supervisor often send them back home :) When I have cold, I just work from home. Last two years I had cold few times and never took a sick leave.
@SevenSidedDie I'm pretty excited and can't wait for friday. Today I described to one of my players basic game flow (from this image: imgur.com/YXrw1Zq) and we had a little example where he described Defy Danger in a few ways, rolled a couple of times and I described what happened next. Even this little example was unexpectedly fun when I run it over and over with different GM moves and different results.
I love DnD, but I felt many times that I'm not satisfied with some things and I believe I will find this satisfaction with DW :)
@RollingFeles I find just running through the moves to be quite fun myself. When it's actually in the context of unfolding fiction, they can be delightful.
@DForck42 the lost connection between fiction and mechanics. My main character is fighter and I love that class. I love imagine and feel close combat, but I can't do many cool things because system doesn't support it. Yeah, GM try to help with this with occasional advantage or effect on the enemy, but it's already sometimes game bending. I can hit my enemy's knee with my giant maul, but RAW GM can't knock him down. Because there's no knee in system. There's his hp only.
I can knock him down with shove or tripping attack maneuver, but first one eats whole attack and second one is a special ability for my class which use resources.
And from tactial, turned-based kind of fun - it's still pretty fun! It's great!
But when I'm deep in my character, when I imagine my maul crashing his kneecap and he will just let cry of pain and keep standing and that's all. It's saddens me sometimes.
GM can do a lot of work in attempt to cover such things, but at some point it will become fight against system. And that won't bring any happines to the table.
I'm not looking for exactly realistic. Flexible? Not sure. But even with limited fighter's resources(comparing to other classes, specially spellcasters) it's still damn good and flexible.
It's just sometimes it's not emotionally satisfying because results of your actions resonates poorly between mechanical and fictional effects.
@RollingFeles in this particular case, I'd just increase the ac (by an arbitrary amount, say, 2) and have you knock him prone
@RollingFeles I think that's more to do with the gm, rather than the core mechanics of the game
imho the mechanics are there to get you MOST of the way there. if a player wants to do something a bit outside of the box, then setting an established rule on how it works isn't that hard
As I said GM can do a lot of these things, but at some point it will came to conflict with system. Maybe it won't be much of a deal.
As a player I almost always want to do things out of the box =)
Because that's fun and because that gives me more options. And GM will have to build exceptions. And for some cases he will have to cut reccuring usage of such cases and come up with explanation why then it was allowed and now it's not. I'm not an abuser, but it just an argument to show that system support is important.
DnD's combat system is tactical, positioning and resource management at multiple levels and it does awesome job for this task.
The answers so far tell you how to allow this but don't address the follow-on problem - that the player is looking for a way to disable an opponent without having to eliminate all of their hit points. The problem with allowing this is that you're over-powering the players relative to the NPCs.
...
And as I said I love it. But sometimes some things is not there and can't be put there. And even if they can, it put additional burden to GM to handle this things.
Yeah, one of the things that eventually comes up in any system that has canonical ways of accomplishing specific things is someone will want to do something for flavor that normally takes someone else resources/training/etc., which causes a hitch of "well, how can I let them do this without taking away from the person who specifically had to specialize for it/who has to spend resources for it?"
Yeah. Although, I'm not sure he cares about mathematics, but he is smart and cunning fellow.
@DForck42 and one of the things that saddens me in DnD it's time cost. This combats take a lot of time. Yeah, GM can do many things to make it faster, but it's once again, additional burden.
So, to sum it up. Two main points:
1) Fiction separation from mechanics that are sometimes can be mended with hacks.
2) Time spent to content covered ratio.
I love DnD and this things won't stop me from playing and enjoying it with my friends.
@JoshuaAslanSmith Speaking of Jedi pets... for Christmas my wife had a custom portrait of our dog made. The graphic artist drew her (our dog) in a Jedi robe and gave her a lightsaber, it's hilarious.
But I'm very excited for a DW game, because I believe that it would deal with first issue and as I heard second issue is also better.
Also I liked that DW's rules lead you to heating up action in game. As I saied earlier little play with one situation, but different GM moves revealed several fun outcomes.
@RollingFeles Combat is quick enough but less demanding and DW handles exploration/story/skill type interactions way better so it lends itself to more narrative gameplay
@JoshuaAslanSmith that's great! I wanted more saturated with content and action gameplay. I like them to be exhausted from action more, than from a time spent.
Also, I hope it would teach me to keep game more intense and player more enaged overall.
just follow "The GM" precepts when making your GM moves and it flows very naturally
especially if youve done solid prep with the threats and fronts
the crazy thing about DW is once you learn it you can import its ideas into other systems like D&D and run (In my opinion) much more enjoyable campaigns
Fronts should force players to be active and not passively react to what you are doing
so its much more likely in DW that the ORC horde is really going to destroy a country side without player intervention and if they ignore it or do not intervene there are real costs to the world, likewise even a traditional dungeon crawl for loot could end up awakening some ancient evil (a la balrog from LOTR) or something along those lines
I agree totally, fate/FAE also helped me really thinkg about when to have players roll and how those rolls should be handled
and increased player agency
like wise Ive really been enjoying Fantasy Flight's Star Wars Edge of the Empire's dice mechanics because being able to succeed hacking a door open but accidentally tripping a silent alarm or having your shot vs a storm trooper go wide and explode tie fighter fuel in the hanger damaging ships as you esape are both really intersting outcomes
Its the barrel-proof version of the mechanics used in DFRPG
its really punchy (in terms of its brevity) and you get into it
Dungeon world is amazing in terms of what you can do with it vs D&D but as a D&D veteran there IS A LOT you have to unlearn
also high player agency so shy first timers might struggle as much as RPG Veterans to adapt but if people are outgoing/have acting or improv experience its the perfect first rpg
man part of me wishes I was still playing 5e for the rep on answering questions
@LegendaryDude My current hypothesis is that GMing long DW sessions takes deliberate pacing, inserting occasional downtime (or travel) at moments where the GM moves make that make sense. De-escalating is hard in DW, but I think it's possible by escalating to a “oh nuts, that's something we can't hit with a spell/stick immediately, and need time to maneuver against” or something like. I guess I'll see!
EOTE is focused on something called Obligation that revolves around owing others money, favors, literal oaths sworn, or personal ethics that can compel the PC on tangents to resolve them and of course the classes and tones in the base book are very much that fringe focus
Force and destiny uses a distinct morality and light/dark side character system
theres plenty of combat in the system but characters arent balanced against combat in the way that a D&D 4e pc is
for example you could build a colonist thats a doctor in EOTE and they wont get any class benefits to using any combat skills really, but they will still be decent if they invest the XP in it they just wont get to be combat specialists like a bounty hunter, hired gun or assassin can be
but that colonist doctor could be amazing at medical checks and social skills
the opportunity cost of everything costing the same resource (there are no level ups) and the fact that if you are running diverse adventures combat monsters will be punished for causing the party to fail skill checks balances it out I feel
I mean lightsabers are kind of OP
thats the only reason jedi could be OP
but again Id either run an all force and destiny game
or Id run an EOTE/AOR mix with 1 PC going the hard route to become a jedi
the exile class in EOTE gets no benefits towards it (also lightsabers are rarity 10 and illegal) so its very hard to find one and just having one is reason enough to be attacked/arrested by any imperial forces, hell even non imperial forces like the hutts might attack you to trade you in to the empire
the actual jedi classes in F&D have fighting styles and use it as a trained skill and so are naturally better
but the lightsaber is a very easy to crit weapon that can literally ignore 1 point of starship armor
so lights sabers dont cut people up in terms of pure damage but by their ability to ignore any damage resistance and stacking critical hit that can lead to permanent injury and death pretty fast
hmmm interesting question but I feel the core issue is more of a player campaign mismatch than a mechanical balance issue
but its super easy to give a force user premonitions or the ability to influence conversations/sense things via the force but someone could also just be good at those things without the force, the force is just a layer over top to use if they want to
It sounds great, but I still don't want to decide between the three settings! I've got anxiety just thinking about it. I'd probably go with Force and Destiny just because Jedi and lightsabers but even that feels incomplete when I think about what Star Wars represents
i'm very interested in a ttrpg which could explore Star Wars lore possibilities far out of scope from the struggles between a family and an empire
(because there's a lot of possibilities; ep 4-6 laid some foundations but had its own story to pay attention to, ep 1-3 undermined and ignored them, ep 7 and rogue one are exploring them)
> Take it easy. May all your dice rolls be sixes, your opponents be cursed with the wrong colour mana, and your available resources exactly match your intentions!
there's nothing wrong in minmaxing. I'm just saying that if you minmax the wrong way (there's an art to minmaxing - some, like you, is trying to maximize starting points and some, like me, is just trying to spend them all in order to get the highest value in some aspect of the character no matter the cost) you can very easily end up with something ugly that then gets associated to the concept of minmaxing. People don't hate powergamers, they hate people who ruin their character and the general experience in order to powergame. People hate spotlight hoggers, and since powergaming is an easy …
@Zachiel "People don't hate powergamers, they hate people who ruin their character" your usage of "their" is ambiguous; which their are you referring to? I say that if power gamers choose to ruin their own characters, who is to say anything is ruined?
Unless you're saying that so-called powergamers ruin the characters belonging to the other their in that sentence
I personally ruined lots of characters. For example, I'm not sure I'm able to play a character who cares about others enough to be good, yet I need to be good. And I have a really hard time convincing myself that having 1 million gold pieces and not spending them for feeding and sheltering the poor is good enough to be good.
So expanded crit has a couple of implications: it's very situationally-dependent.
I mean, if you're overmatched and facing something where you need a crit to hit, you've just doubled your expected damage output by expanding the crit.
OTOH, if you're facing something where you're guaranteed to hit except on a crit-fail, you've increased your expected damage by ~5%. (Though even that number depends on how much of your damage comes from dice, how much from modifiers.)
Most of the time, of course, we live somewhere inbetween those extremes.
@DForck42 I do think that, for flavor, it should just be expanded crit against that enemy who hit you. I think that'd dial back the potential for abuse/brokenness.
Two things I'm not crazy about: (1) there's a lot of traits. The flavor of all of them's fine, and I don't generally think any are OP, but there's just a lot to keep track of. And bloat (a) tends to slow things down, (b) increases the tendency for crazy/broken combinations to arise. (You can imagine the land druid/ranger multiclass penguin who can somehow always manage to be in the right terrain to jack their base speed to 100'. But who'd have foreseen that combo?)
(2) I'm not crazy about the "bipolar" bit, because I've contact with that IRL. I get that it's a clever bit of wordplay, but I imagine that anyone with experience with bipolar disorder could be turned off.
Gotta run--papers won't grade themselves. Someone needs to roll the die!
@doppelgreener I don't know. I've met people who said that what I do is the opposite of optimization, and some who said "stop optimizing, play a Tier 4 or a Tier 5 and learn to have fun with it".
I see some concepts that I like and I'd like to be able to provide an equal degree of awesomeness to the others, but I end up rolling stiff characters that look unnatural to everyone else, taking weird choices just to be useful even refusing to engage in other, more powerful options. Apparently, nobody believes one would rather die than spend money in consumables, or rather than buying suboptimal items before understanding what's the most useful one.
I'm not having fun. I'm here thinking that my characters shouldn't act like that but apparently that's the wrong mindset for D&D (first, I'd like to play a guy that deserves to gain far less gold than this guy has, but avoiding to take the money that flows towards me daily feels very wrong because I also want to buy many magic items that let me do things I couldn't otherwise do; second, I hate the feeling of wasting money on things that don't last, but this way I end up being less powerful than anybody else and I don't like that either, and I am forced to play a few builds that have incoher…
