Despite "EDIT:" syntax, the edit makes this question a lot closer to useful, IMO. I threw OP an upvote to try and get them over the chat-hurdle. Only one to go.
@Anaphory yeah Harn is super detailed. I have the Harnworld map - it comes with a book detailing not just the kingdoms & civilisations, but also weather patterns, ocean currents, etc
@nitsua60 I'm pretty sure I saw a similar question. It had answers that linked to the Same Page Tool and expectations of the game and the kind of game youre playing/running and the GM being allowed to have fun (despite players).
flex fingers and starts searching*
Similar experience: First ever game I ran (Lost Mines of Phandelver for my friends), they were ambushed by goblins and player Bob says: "I jump on the wagon and start playing my bagpipes." DM: "are you casting a spell?" Bob: "Nope." DM: "Are you giving inspiration?" Bob: "Dude, I just wanna play my bagpipes" DM: "The four goblins pepper you with arrows first and you topple to the ground unconscious."
I get that player, he just wants to see the world react. Even now, almost 2 years later, he jumps on the back of the warlock and rodeos him because the warlock has a ring of water walking and the water beneath them is icky. Surprise! A shambling mound appears as you both topple to the floor.
I use the word topple a lot in my games, now that I think about it.
@Shalvenay nothing much. Chinese New Year coming up and it looks like we have no work this saturday. Was hoping we could play but family matters came up, it was a stretch to play twice a week anyway so I wasn't very hopeful
@trogdor yeah, aside from the abuse, I don't want to have to put up with that sort of thing every time battle starts. Does he just ALWAYS play his bagpipes? You know, there are spells you can cast while playing the bagpipes.
@daze413 ah. adapting to a very adversarial DM in my in-person AD&D game. also, trying to work out scheduling difficulties with the online 5e game I'm in
@Shalvenay hm. I don't get to play as often but the last time I did, I also had an adversarial DM. It left a sour taste in my mouth as I left the game. Still haunts me since. How bad/good is it?
(i.e. you can't tell the ranger you run into in the woods about the cave you're going religious-artifact-hunting in because they might run off and organize a party to jump the PCs)
Successful games in the adversarial style tend to pivot around mutually accepted rules--often the system itself, but also around "gentleman's agreements" about what is and isn't good form for the various parties to do.
@trogdor because you wouldn't do the stupid thing in the first place, I totally get it. haha or did I miss it entirely? I mean, it's all in the intent of the action.
I think the best examination/deconstruction of adversarial style is Old Man Henderson, where the GM's failure to adhere to the players' expectations of good form led one player to exploit the GM's assumed gentleman's agreements.
@daze413 well, either I would not do that thing in the first place, or I would have only done it if there was already a tacit understanding of what the consequence would be
I have, for example, played a Cuthulu dark game where my character went progressively insane in a way that he didn't have to that got him killed
but I went the whole way doing things I didn't need to do, knowing full well the final action would cause the character to die
also, my first Great Ork Gods game had my first ork die after the first thing he tried to do
not quite the same thing because I had no way to know that just trying to walk would kill the ork, but at the same time similar enough because I mostly understood that any action could have caused the ork's death
@trogdor well, you don't have to investigate the cthulhu idol in the first place. And Cthulhu games have different expectations. It's fun to play madness and phobias and manias :D
@daze413 Well, not literally any action, but Orks tend to put themselves in dangerous situations and the GM can call for a roll vs death at any time it's justified.
A lot of that justification is failing other kinds of rolls.
When you take an action, you roll against the god who oversees that kind of action. And the gods hate Orks.
@daze413 I may have exagerated that slightly, but the point is that in said game any roll you end up failing could end up also triggering a roll against dying
So when Trogdor's Ork charged down a hill, he rolled against the god Flailing of Limbs and failed.
...meaning he tripped in a gopher hole and rolled the rest of the way down the hill. That seemed dangerous, so I called for a roll against the god of death, That Which Guards the Gate.
the point of that being, I had bought into playing a game where I could concievably die on my first action, that happened and all I had to really say, more or less, was "ok guess I expected that,... at least a little, on some level" XD
@nitsua60 hm. Went to the question. It's deleted. Did the OP get closure?
So, the orks, what were they trying to do aside from not dying? is there a goal in mind? Who comes up with the gofer hole, does the game have like, random tables?
Orks have one primary goal: to be as Orky as possible. Usually a game starts with the GM offering an activity like "Make the gnomes stop singing" or "Burn the elf village."
But it quickly devolves into counting coup by doing the most impressive, daring, "hold-my-beer" stunts possible.
...and trying to backstab Orks with more "oog" (Orkliness) than you have, because that's a great way to advance in the social pecking order.
We once attacked the North Pole because Santa was anti-naughty.
@daze413 It got put on hold, then a few comments, then self deletion. (Despite the four upvotes, one of which was explicitly commented as purposed to allow OP into chat to workshop the Q.)
@daze413 more that I've been told by a fellow player that this DM is a schemer (also, in later conversations, I referred to Tucker's Kobolds, and that brought up the topic of a kobold army with spears of disintegration)
User retention is best accomplished by interacting with the user. Positive or negative interaction matters much less than just whether or not we ignored 'em.
@Miniman It's interesting--a lot of the comments have been along the lines of "does X better than Y". Comparisons, rather than absolutes. Which (a) I tend to agree with and (b) are really tough to imagine highlighting.
@Shalvenay So 1e, certainly 1e + UA, was getting rather clunky. Lots of lookups, diverse mechanics, not a lot of system-level streamlining. I mean, each individual piece you'd look at and think "yeah, I can see what they were trying to do with this," but taken all together it was sometimes an unplayable mess. (Anyone else remember looking up weapon modifiers vs. armor types--not classes--and ranges?)
One stark highlight you can measure is its ease in character creation. It takes a lot less time to make a character in 5e. Maybe you can design a oneshot that is super deadly to highlight the ease in making characters (kidding!)
So 2e comes along with the explicit goal (read the 2e phb foreward) of basically making 1e playable, while keeping as much of the fiddly-bits as possible.
More subtly, 2e also takes a bit of a tack away from the Gary-centric "mother, may I?" style toward "let the players play some, too." Nonweapon proficiencies, for instance, were a way to let the players have some more control over character competencies and do some more-interesting signaling to the GM "here's some of the game I'd like to play."
But it was still a little too fiddly--who loves THAC0 =) --and, given its close-compatability with 1e/UA and the proliferation of splat, it ended up being twice the system at half the complexity, for no net gain.
(That's just my experience of it, at least. Wold be very interested in other experiences.)
In any case, if you check out the 2e foreword by Zeb Cook, it's almost like Mearls et al read that and thought, "yeah! It would be cool if someone did all that!"
@nitsua60 yeah, and 1e/2e had multiple ways to do the same thing which sometimes caused mass confusion (wait until you have a character that's built half using standard class-based construction and half using Skills and Powers at your table :P)
From the 2ePHB foreward: "the goals: to make it easier to find things, to make the rules easier to understand, to fix the things that did not work, to add the best new ideas from the expansions and other sources, and, most important of all, to make sure the game was still the one you knew and enjoyed."
Good answers will support their solution somehow, and often the best ones use personal experience or the experience of others learned through blogs, podcasts, etc.
But don't limit your potential solutions by making assumptions about what is and isn't going to be useful. Trust the answerers to be experts.
Well, my problem is that I want to run a solo Fate game and I don't know if having less skills/aspects/stunts than usual from the start (to leave more room for character progression) would be fine.
Yeah, I think it's gonna be hard for an answer to that question to not draw on experience, and if folks give bad answers we'll downvote 'em.
But I'd be loathe to discount possibilities just because I haven't thought of them--that's why I'd be asking the question, right? Because I want things I haven't thought of.
I am planning to run a solo Fate game inspired by videogames (Legend of Zelda in particular, since I've been playing that a lot) and their long progression from a no-name hero to a world saviour. It is intended to run for a long while, and as such I'd like to leave a lot of room for character pro...
I can't answer this question officially because I haven't tried it in a twosie, but personally I tend to throw out incremental Fate milestones entirely.
Start the game at the level you want, and keep it there. Use smaller milestones to change the character laterally rather than vertically.
Swap skill ratings around, change aspects as the story requires, but don't just pile more and more and more complexity onto the character for its own sake: instead grant and take away stunts and extras as the story demands.
Considering the fact I'm inspired by LoZ, actually, most of the stuff will be contained within items. I like Fate's so-called fractal approach in that regard.
No, because I'd want to challenge the frame of the question and since I can't speak from experience with twosies I'm not sure it'd be really righteous to challenge the frame.
@UristMcDorf Just bear in mind that quantity of stunts is directly proportionate to one's ability to accrue and spend fate points, which then goes on to have a significantly proportionate effect on one's power in the game. If I had two different characters I'd keep them within one aspect's difference of each other (or at an equal number of aspects), I'd just have the newbie non-hero say less heroic things about themselves.
An increase in power, status, etc can then be expressed as changes into progressively more heroic aspects which reflect the story so far, rather than as a strict addition of aspect slots.
Are you interested in Fate system specific answers, or would a more system-agnostic one be helpful? — Sardathrion8 mins ago
@Sardathrion Naturally an answer to handling this situation in Fate Core would require some Fate Core-specific experience and guidance in order to be a useful Good Subjective answer or a useful objective fact-based answer. That would mean there wouldn't really be system-agnostic answers. — doppelgreener2 mins ago
that's the first time i've been able to decently articulate that set of thoughts, hooray ^
For tonight's dinner we have a special guest: fresh tuna! Marinated in soy sauce, apple cider vinegar, garlic, ginger, and red pepper. Fried in olive oil with some black pepper. Served on sautéed onion, green beans, and carrots, with toast and slices of cucumber.
@BESW they did such a good job of making that site mobile-friendly, too
and the developer's been super appreciative every time i've reported an issue (which was only 3 times i think), and took my advice the one time i had a suggestion to make, which was pretty great. :)
I have a few friends that want to test a RPG game for an evening.
We are using the German game system TDE (The dark eye, or "Das Schwarze Auge"). (1) Since there are no introductory scenarios (only campaigns that last quite long) provided for an aspiring GM, I decided to create something myself.
...
I had posted an answer to this question: Can a druid get out of wild shape to avoid an opportunity attack?
Which I think was rightly refuted.
After some consideration, I considered my answer to be completely wrong and deleted it. Is it preferred to leave the answer, edit it, or delete it?
Leave the duck at home, put on a phone headset and talk to the duck's voicemail.
Fellow software engineers will understand what you're doing, sales or HR people will think you're on the phone (which you will truly be) and won't be weirded out.
Fairgrounds Trumpeter:
At the beginning of each end step, if a +1/+1 counter was placed on a permanent under your control this turn, put a +1/+1 counter on Fairgrounds Trumpeter.
Walking Ballista:
Walking Ballista enters the battlefield with X +1/+1 counters on it.
If I bring in a new...
Don't forget, classic Doctor Who taught us vampires got large enough that one could drain an entire planet.
(Though, as with everything in classic Doctor Who, it was probably Rassilon's fault they exist and they may have been a peaceful race he spread propaganda about in order to justify their extermination.)
@Ahriman "Impaled," maybe, but I'm not sure "rammed" is quite the right word for crashing a spaceship nose-first and straight down onto a vampire clambering out of its enormous grave.
There's definitely some luck in there, but really Henderson's player was capitalising on the imbalance of the implied social contract.
The GM didn't understand or value what the players wanted out of the game. Henderson's player DID understand what the GM valued, but the player didn't value those things himself--at least, not enough to prevent him from exploiting the GM's values to get revenge for having had his own rejected.
So the player put the GM into positions where the dice didn't really matter, because the GM has obligated to "let" things happen according to his own idea of how the game should be.
I had posted an answer to this question: Can a druid get out of wild shape to avoid an opportunity attack?
Which I think was rightly refuted.
After some consideration, I considered my answer to be completely wrong and deleted it. Is it preferred to leave the answer, edit it, or delete it?
Leave the duck at home, put on a phone headset and talk to the duck's voicemail.
Fellow software engineers will understand what you're doing, sales or HR people will think you're on the phone (which you will truly be) and won't be weirded out.
