We have a new player, who seems to be obsessed with optimization. They're playing a warlock, and is constantly discussing tactics for choosing spells, even though at the moment, he can't do much about it until he levels up
The only problem is that I feel the player might be trying to "optimise" the character, and seems to be playing it like a LoL or Dota character... they're trying to choose their spells based on buffing, debuffing, or "multi-casting"
@Shalvenay Alright... just got off explicit duty for the night, hoping I don't get an emergency call. (580 teenagers cooped up... what could possibly happen?)
A while back, my group decided to see if we could come up with a way to get an Exalted Character, with unlimited XP and Personal Artifacts (those that can be worn for example), to run across creation in less than 10 minutes.
What we came up with was the following: An Infernal of the Fiend Caste ...
Like when @trogdor's character was replaced by a shape-shifting witch, he got to play the witch. Or when one of my old players got to play his character and his character's mirror duplicate.
Yeah, in 4e I modified all mind-control type debuffs to instead give the character an extra action that I got to choose instead of the player choosing it.
this is why the DM for the campaign I'm on - even if it's a homebrewed campaign - stopped "mind control" as a thing of absolute control - it's more like "extreme suggestion" that requires a roll now heh.
(after my PC kinda destroyed the entire party while mindcontrolled... heh)
"The mind flayer lets out a devastating psionic shriek, rattling your character's mind. Roderik the Brave finds himself casting a "u up?" sending to his ex
@SPavel it's a skillmonkey dungeon -- the monsters are half comic relief (and neither flooding nor smoking them out would be a particularly wise idea) anyway
Hey guys, any really good examples of a story with a trial about reflecting on oneself
for a party
Im entering the rotation as DM for a campaign and want characters to analyze their characters. I guess I've generally been the only non-murder hobo so I want to make the characters disproportionately experience this inflicted on themselves
Its a bit of an experimental game for me I guess, and I may even make it a dreamplane of sorts
I'd advise caution. People don't react well to being forced into a didactic criticism of their actions, and "murder hobo" play is usually predicated on the assumption that they're playing a game which isn't about serious repercussions of their actions.
So that kind of session would probably be a massively unwelcome tone shift.
awkward scene -- having your partymate shackle your arm to hers while you're still holding a sword in that hand so that she can teleport you and her at once
Something that I've found really helps with reflecting on characters is just asking questions. "How does Mike the Flamboyant feel about the events of this session, I ask as I gesture wildly toward the bloody swathe left in his wake? What about you, personally?" is a choice. Also, asking a question in the beginning of the session about their upbringing or where they got a particular value helps too.
Prompts and nudges work better than giving people their own medicine.
I came upon the tactic as trial and error. I was trying to do some heavy stuff with my Werewolf in Monsterhearts and I started talking to the MC about what I was going for and how to achieve it. I think that was about five sessions out of seven, and by the end we knew each other really well.
We played a session of it for the... fourth or fifth time, last night, and every time I remember all over again what a joy it is.
Players roll good-sized fistfuls of dice that they feel like they've earned, mechanical advancement is incremental and fueled by dramatic characterisation choices, the setting is strongly evocative but full of gaps for the players to define, GMing is mostly playing the world, asking "what happens next?" and calling for dice rolls.
My group only exists because I've spent a few years finding the best way to take advantage of (rather than just tolerate) everyone except myself and Troggy being almost completely unpredictable about attendance.
I've never run into any other group which is willing/able to do that.
Yeah, part of my success involved seeking out systems that were less stressful for me, and then accompanying other people to become more comfortable with the idea of GMing too.
I've had similar challenges, both with getting group buy-in to try new systems and with getting people to feel comfortable GMing anything at all.
My solution was a long-game process of changing the "landscape" of how people at the table viewed their role in the game. I didn't set out to delibera...
I'm hoping to take some of BESW's GM burden; the only thing I'm concerned about is clarity over our Skype calls. BESW's side has gotten pretty good though — in the begining there were sometimes raucous conversations I couldn't be heard over, but the group makes plenty of room for me as I'm skyping in nowadays.
@doppelgreener It's great! In all the years we've been gaming together, none of us have ever actually completed an adventure.
I'd been running the game for 6 months, now my buddy is going to step in and DM Storm King's Thunder and I'm excited for that because I finally get to play 5e as a PC.
He is really itching to run a game, so he was adamant about finishing Strahd. I honestly didn't expect them to be able to bumble their way straight to his location so easily, but it worked out really well.
And I do mean bumble; they had no idea where they were going and kind of just... ended up there.
since the game is decades old, I don't mind spoilers
in the opening scenes, you RPG yourself around town, helping rescue kittens, grabbing random items, etc. Then, for Reasons, you're put on trial. Character witnesses show up and tell the court about the good/bad things you did.
in this context, you could do something similar, wherein NPCs behave better/worse toward the PCs as they do good/bad things
The party I am GM'ing a game of DW for spent about 20-30 minutes deliberating on what to do with a stray goblin child that was practically screaming "I'm a spy" to them, on the basis that it was too cute to harm. They pointed out that this is one of the consequences of having the group of players be entirely female. Play to see what happens, for sure.
@Skyler Well, they have a magical nearly-sentient rope they named "Ropert" that they instructed to tie it up so that only one hand and eyes were free so it could direct them around danger without escaping.
we sort of are doing a bit of a clean slate currently but I can set the stage for them to reflect on their actions, the previous DM did also promote murderhoboism a lot
we kidnapped a marquis kid to try to get him to execute this evil mogul (both were bitter rivals and prominent members in competing cults)
but the person who was originally DM in rotation and precipitated this whole setting decides the kid is a liability as all hell breaks loose, so he shoots her while being carried about by one of the players
Na, but there is this tempest running around purifying alters for his god of lightning/thunder (lots of effort goes into these) . I thought it might make his character a bit more fun if like a couple of level 1 or 2 lightning spells could be rewards.
They already get to add extra damage on all of their lightning or thunder damage spells, and should have access to extra spells from their domain list.
@Skyler Have you considered a one-use (or N-use) item instead of straight up spell slots?
that also gives you the option for a higher-level spell than he can cast, because <plot>, but it's limited enough that it shouldn't permanently break anything
not really. 5e only answers to its strengths genre-wise, and it also does expect at least some use of the combat mechanics IMO
compare to Fate, which can handle about 90% of the genres out there (the other 10% relying on incompetent/non-proactive characters) and also deals well with a variety of problem-solving paradigms
I'd say that vanilla Fate does plenty of genres poorly. You gotta hack it to do anything specific. There's joy in that toolkit nature, but it can be troublesome if you want to play in a genre that turns on different paradigms.
Magical girls sentai, for example, doesn't fit into the skills/approaches framework of Fate Core. Everything is about affairs of the heart, not any character's particular competency -- unless that competency or lack thereof highlights or justifies their emotional struggles.
@JuneShores yeah, it seems to be the fate of just about every game I get involved in -- the schedule stops working and the game dissolves or I lose track of it and drift away as a result
It's been a background project for several years. Your TV system might be helpful, actually.
It's based on the idea that ponies are so small and simple that they can't really hold more than one emotion inside them at a time, or they crack under the pressure. Luckily they're pretty easy to fix, too--if they get support.
I want to make it a game that appeals to the show's actual target demographic, and doesn't require any extra materials beyond what a family with a kid that age probably already has lying around.
For those unfamiliar, I'm a Pretty Princess is an RPG where part of your character generation is picking a colouring-book picture of a princess, which you colour in as you play.
It was one of the inspirations for my game Surgadores.
The colouring-book picture serves as your character sheet, and colouring in parts of it represents both developing your character and using up limited resources.
@Skyler Ah, yeah, we were talking about games with a social focus. Then I started getting ideas about a game I've been low-key designing for a few years, which is inspired by the TV cartoon show "My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic."
The extent of my familiarity with DBZ is the time in college a friend took me to a fancy restaurant specifically for the purpose of spending the entire evening explaining it to me.
The DBZ centaur fight is that super destructive magical battle in that one season finale where Twilight absorbed the other princesses' magic. It was past the point where point where I dropped the show, but I still tuned in, and hoo-boy! Was that ever dissonant.
Well, like I said, I want it to be aimed at the show's actual target audience of young girls, not its unintended spillover into the young-adult demographic. I've got nothing against that demo, being among it myself, just--I think that the show is at its best when it's not winking too heavily at the older audience, and the game should reflect that.
The power of the brony concept is that it's a show for kids which appeals to other demographics because it doesn't condescend to kids and so it can talk about important concepts everybody deals with.
And also like I said, I'd like the game to be runnable with household stuff. If it needs dice, they should be what you can scrounge from a couple of board games.
Conflict resolution needs to avoid the winner/loser dichotomy; there has to be a way (even if it's hard) for everybody to come out ahead. Not just all the PCs, either.
I like the idea of using a Pilgrims-like mechanic so that each session concludes with an actual Dear Celestia.
I haven't analysed the structure of such shows the way you have for your system design, but I've been focusing mostly on the internal-struggle episodes for modelling the game: a pony gets stuck on something and fails forward spectacularly until her friends can help her straighten things out.
I was considering using a mechanic to reflect my theory that ponies are just too tiny to contain conflicting emotions.
That heart-on-the-sleeve quality is one of the show's great strengths. It's not unlike the Prydain Chronicles: everybody has real emotions that can't be dismissed easily, but they also talk about their emotions much more than "adult" shows would find "realistic."
In Prydain it's sustainable because of Alexander's great writing.
In MLP, we're okay with it because they're candy-colored ponies rather than people.
