It is sadly rare. I've only had one character express interest and that was to build, essentially, a brewpub. So we statted it up, determined how long it would take, and had some events happen along the way (supply line defense, etc).
yeah -- I haven't had a PC really settle down in that way either (at least in my campaign-focused experience. persistent worlds are a bit of a different animal xD)
mm, I suspect it's largely a D&D playstyle issue. D&D isn't about staying in one place.
The whole model of game it's inspired is about constant movement. When I play games that are about one particular place, then PCs tend to settle and establish connections.
We can say "A sandbox means you can settle down if you want" and that's ostensibly true, but disregards the entire mechanical subtext of the system and the narrative associated with it.
@Shalvenay Doing well. Girlfriend's almost in the third trimester, so we're starting to get the nursery together and furniture purchased. Felt my daughter move for the first time the other day. It's getting real.
Tonight might be the night that my barbarian pushes his luck too far. Or the night that the paladin tries to convince him that his civilization is worth saving for its own sake.
> Horrible grey-pink thunderclouds sweep over the plain, drenching the dry dust with red and yellow ichor and illuminating the sky with flashes of lightning. When the storm has passed and people step gingerly from their homes into the sticky mud to breathe the ozone-smelling air, they are shocked to see a grim castle looming above their small town where nothing stood before.
@Ash if we do a 1-on-1 in April btw -- 1) what system would you want to try, or did you want to leave that up to me? and 2) are you an arachnophobe? (got a dungeon in mind -- it's just something that I know for sure would not be arachnophobe-friendly)
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@Shalvenay I'm up for anything, I've only played some very loose with the rules 3.5 so as long as you're patient with me I'm cool with stuff. Arachnids are not a problem for me :)
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@BESW My copy of Digger shipped, should be here in a couple weeks. I am absurdly excited for it even if it is going to be giant and likely take me forever to read :)
**[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!"); [UScons](http://casualgamerevolution.com/blog/2016/01/2016-tabletop-gaming-conventions-a-comprehensive-list "List of RPG conventions in the US."); [UKcons](http://www.philmasters.org.uk/RPGs/conventions.htm "List of RPG conventions in the UK.").
Satanic Panic looks amusing, I just wish there was more about the system.
You play government agents in the 1970s who are part of a special task force dedicated to responding to the demonic and monstrous threats caused by the supernatural game known as "Tabletop."
Basically it's an alternate reality where all the ridiculous rumours about the seductive demonic evils of D&D are actually true, and there's a government agency for trying to stop it.
@JuneShores [wave] As you can see above, I try to curate a sidebar pin with links to current, time-sensitive RPG-related events. If you ever have a public playtest, for example, we can pin it to the chat for everyone to see.
So if you ever run across anything you think the chat would be interested in, please share it! We're always looking for non-Kickstarter things to put on the pin.
@Shalvenay I think that nap I had earlier has me free associating still. ”Too Long; Dungeon World: mass spectrometer teardown -- everything from molecular turbopumps to what's likely a Tesla coil”… befriends the party, and asks for help to defeat the evil micro black hole lurking in it mountaintop particle accelerator lair.
I've been mentally branching out in terms of what genre I associate with adventure fantasy, too, so that's probably part of it. I really like traditional “D&D genre fantasy” and how well DW lets me play it without the mechanical baggage of D&D, but I've lately realised it's extremely niche, possibly generationally-specific.
@Miniman I suspect so. That thing about science-fictiona and fantasy mixed together, that gets called “weird fantasy” today sometimes, used to be the default. Today, dungeonpunk is the (one?) default. The player that inspired this change had absorbed “what is fantasy?” from playing video games, particularly the Final Fantasy series, and when she joined this group was quite confused about this alien idea of “fantasy” D&D turned out to be.
This also explains the phenomenon where D&D's definition of fantasy begins eating its own tail, defining itself by previous editions of D&D rather than D&D's original sources, and “distilling” down to what now can be called “D&D genre fantasy”, distinct from what it came from.
@JuneShores Very weird, yes. So that conversation was an eye-opener for me. I'm running a JRPG-influence game now just to do something different and give her more of what she was hoping for when she joined, years ago.
@trogdor Yeah, I'm running with that in this game. Largely starting with the idea that mana can power technology, but we'll see how it develops as we explore that part of the world building more.
@Miniman The different classes help a lot in redefining what the genre is like. I find that I'm still fighting my own genre habits though, and that the “voice” that DW is written in carries enough of that D&D-genre fantasy that the reminder interferes a bit.
@SevenSidedDie Ooh, I saw this doc before. I've been wondering, when you say the Princess is being modified, what sort of modifications are you using? Just curious.
Actually, one thing that's always interested me about JRPGs (and a lot of animes) is the mix of technologies. Leaving magic out of it, they often have this weird mix of medieval society with sporadic bits of sci-fi, futuristic stuff.
@JuneShores Oh, I hacked the PDF just slightly. There were a few moves whose wording I disagreed with (like dictating what happens on a 6-). I'd have to compare the two PDFs to remember exactly what though.
The most significant hacking was to the Gunslinger. I changed the PDF to use Drives and Background instead of Alignment and Race, and I added a vow to never take a life. Because we watched Trigun together recently, and the Gunslinger is so Vash. :) (Of course, nobody picked the Gunslinger. ;.; )
@Miniman Yeah, I'm looking forward to exploring that mix of tech. Swords, guns, steam machines, crystal-powered airships, magitech hovercraft… We just need to get out of this starter dungeon. I always underestimate how long it takes to get through material!
@SevenSidedDie well, I think I know honestly, I have only very specific things prepped because I try to balance between prep and flexibility of choice for the PC's
@SevenSidedDie Interesting. I associate JRPGs with a long, narrow, focused story (which I tend to like in video games, as attempts at breadth over depth in video game stories fall flat to me), usually with elements of being saviors on a large-if-not-global scale. From that perspective, I actually think most of my DMs do D&D in that style (and I've longed for them to do it in a more dungeoncrawly, smaller scale style).
@CTWind In terms of story structure, yeah, it's (become?) common in D&D. But the elements that make the story fit a “fantasy” genre seem to be quite different.
@JuneShores Ah, only very minor things: removed the bold in Natural Grace (because bold is to highlight move triggers, and that isn't a triggered move); changed Pure Hearted Intention to “When you Discern Realities, add these to the list of questions”; made the “Requires” parentheticals a smaller font; changed all “carry one forward” to “take +1 forward”.
@SevenSidedDie @CTWind Yeah. JRPG fantasy and D&D fantasy are similar on the surface, but the thematic undercurrents of the genres are different. The structures of the classes, the ways the game mechanics have been played with over time, the ways the video game medium has been leveraged for different kinds of gameplay, or mini-games.
@trogdor Yeah, in a paper RPG you can't guarantee being able to avoid explaining how they interact. I'm going to heavily lean on Dungeon World improv stuff to figure that out, if we have to, because I have no answers to that!
@JuneShores I went on a spree hacking the PDFs I was going to use to fix what I saw as development errors or oversights in a few of the 3rd-party classes I was using, so I must have done the Princess's minor changes just because I was on a roll. It definitely doesn't need it.
@trogdor That's one thing I'm still not sure how to translate into a tabletop RPG, now you mention it. So much atmosphere and setting in a J-CRPG is conveyed by the art, and I don't have that to lean on, so I have to take apart my impressions and figure out how to convey them as known or implied facts when narrating. That's surprisingly difficult.
(All in all this is so far a great exercise in stretching my GMing skills.)
we actually sorta tried in our ARRPG campaign to mix magic and tech together in the same world
I don't think it was the only reason it fell through for the foreseeable future, but I think it was a contributor in that we were just mashing stuff into our setting with no guidelines
It's sticky. The bandwidth of the conversation is so narrow, you can't convey all that you can in images and animation. And that's not even taking into account narrative editing.
So a lot of what you do has to be either very well conveyed through still images, or prose, or be an engaging enough interaction to be emotionally resonant.
Yeah, I'm still not sure what to do about that sort of bloating other than to retcon it. Though retcons are a completely valid option that RPGs are suited to.
My largest genera challenge exists more in player style. I have to enforcing a physical separation between the "pink mohawk" players and "black trench-coat" players. This is true no matter if the game is themed fantasy, sci-fi, or a mix. If I don't actively manage style, everyone ends up playing to the most disruptive players needs and nothing in the referee toolkit can raise the joy bar.
@JuneShores I've found that step zero, before figuring out the conveyance technique even, is to make sure we're all familiar enough with the genre conventions that those methods can find mutually-compatible fertile ground in every player's imagination. (I learned that was necessary the hard way.)
@Wermske Exactly, yes. Player expectations have to be at least in the right neighbourhood of the game to be run, and mutually compatible.
@SevenSidedDie Yeah, I did too, just recently. It's never a fun moment when you realize that some players aren't even reading the same book, let alone are on the same page.
@JuneShores Yeah. With an actual book at least it's only one person not meshing with it, and they can just put it down. With a collaboratively-created improv experience like an RPG session, it's a real clash of gears when one or more people don't have the same genre awareness. Worse is when it's a player who doesn't do anything overt that reveals the mismatch; worse yet is when I the GM takes the genre conventions for granted and isn't even aware that they can be not shared.
@JuneShores I may yet have the chance to make it up to them, fortunately. They're a close friend of a close friend and current player. Maybe some day they'll be interested in a game that starts with acknowledging that the bad experience was my fault, and it doesn't have to be that way. :)
@Miniman I suspect they're a different-enough kind of entertainment. I think the individual in question plays CRPGs, actually. Come to think, the genre mismatch stuff I've been pondering might have played a part in that misfired experience.
@Miniman Now that you mention it, I'd probably play way more open-world video games and character-playing video games too. The appeal those have for me is definitely rooted in the same stuff that makes tabletop RPGs appeal to me. (I just got introduced to the Sims 4. I'm loving the roleplaying potential.)
@SevenSidedDie Ooh, interesting. I was introduced to D&D slightly after I was introduced to JRPGs and have described my various "generic fantasy" dials as "D&D-esque fantasy," "JRPG-esque fantasy," or a blend of both. I don't think I've ever really sat down and determined what is what, though.
@Pixie To set up this game I actually tried to find a deconstruction of the JRPG genre to find out what elements were essential, but couldn't find anything. I ended up having to brainstorm it based on my limited experience and a conversation with the player that inspired the game.
@SevenSidedDie Hmm, yeah, I've never come across an analysis like that.
FF and BoF are good places to look, pretty definitive franchises. Dragon Quest, also.
I haven't actually played Dragon Quest myself except for a few of the Dragon Quest Monsters games, but it's so widespread that I still generally recognize when it's being parodied in other media.
@Pixie It sorta seems like it! But there are also grand themes that seem common, that I ended up analysing as dichotomies. Things like tradition vs. progress, pastoral vs. technological, magic vs. machines. Then there's the lack of gods, or “god” means something else than in D&D-style fantasy.
@Pixie I've played a bit of the original Dragon Quest, a bit of Final Fantasies, all of Secret of Mana. Those are my touchstones. I've never played a Breath of Fire, but it keeps getting mentioned in my researches, so now it's on my to-do list.
@Pixie Some other touchstones are the more fantasy/science Miyazaki films (especially Nausicaä), Trigun (because it's a shared reference for me and this player), and (of all things) Sailor Moon.
I have to say that consciously considering and picking a campaign's influences is an interesting experience. It's shown me how much I've generally relied on staying within comfortable, known tropes and genres in past GMing.
@BESW I can easily see that happening. I'm still not sure if/whether/how I'm avoiding that this game, despite all the ingredients and having to incorporate player additions that aren't “vetted” for the genre I'm going for. It seems to be holding together, but I'll have to see in a few months when we have more sessions behind us. :)
I think one thing working in my favour is that I'm leaning heavily on the one touchstone I know best (Secret of Mana) and filtering everything else through that. So there's a master touchstone for the coherence of vision, maybe? And the rest gets adjusted to fit?
Hmm, touchstones. That's probably an issue for us too.
The underlying system was originally designed for Atomic Robo, which is.... I dunno, I feel like they didn't really address one of the comic's major design goals and we sidestepped the whole issue by subverting it.
@trogdor I once did too, when I lived in D&D Only Land, and I seem to have lost any kind of focus since delving into other games. Now I collect games far faster than I can ever play them, and I want to try all kinds of scenarios and genres. I have the opposite problem now! I'm trying to swing my pendulum back towards a more playable place.
@BESW Which design goal? (I've read a bunch of Atomic Robo, though I haven't kept up since the kaiju plotline ended.)
One of Clevinger's oft-stated goals is to keep the science rooted in reality. It may be a silly explanation, but it's never just technobabble: he always starts with something real and extrapolates from it.
@SevenSidedDie Miyazaki sounds like a great influence for some of the conflicts you've mentioned, for sure. Something else that comes to mind is Slayers, which is a comedic anime take on D&D-type fantasy. I haven't seen a lot of it, and it is (as far as I've seen) not very serious, but it might be worth a look. Freely available on Hulu/Yahoo View, IIRC.
(This is why Doctor Dinosaur is so hilarious: he's spouting technobabble in a world that laughs at technobabble, so we don't just accept that he's right when he says insane junk even though it keeps getting--on the surface--supported.)
@Miniman For me, it's that the bigger and more open of a world someone tries to create for a video game, the more shallow each part of it is; video games can't improv like people (short of procedural generation, which has its own problems with generating depth), so you have to divide effort across the entire world in advance. It's... well, like trying to pre-plan an entire world that a tabletop player can adventure in, except not having a live GM at the helm when he actually does so.
The Atomic Robo RPG instead gives us Brainstorming, a mechanic by which people invent random junk and then explain why it's all related to explain a thing.
@SevenSidedDie hehe, I truly recommend at least 3 for this, the first two, I have heard, are good games, but the 3rd is the only one I have personal experience with
@CTWind This is my perpetual disappointment with open-world CRPGs too. I keep looking for my unicorn though. Meanwhile sandbox games like Minecraft sometimes scratch the open-world RPG experience, but not for long.
@BESW Yeah, that seems contrary to what the comic does.
@SevenSidedDie Yeah, I get that for CRPGs too. Though I'd like to try one of a system I actually play so that I can 'explore' the mechanics rather than the world, at least.
@BESW Ever since Savage Worlds sold me on cards not being merely gimmicky in an RPG, I've been wishing there were more card-based RPGs. I'm looking forward to the eventual release of Project Dark.
@trogdor Mystic Empyrean has an interesting resolution mechanic. A 7 element-based deck is assembled based on the strength of elements in the plane/world you're visiting. Drawing cards that match the way you're trying to solve a problem (fire = force, water = change, etc) and match your character's aptitudes determines success/complication/failure.
@trogdor It's a very interesting, but very specific RPG experience. I wouldn't consider it a generic system at all, though from a design perspective I think it's worth studying regardless.
Something (like Dark and Ki Khanga) that uses a standard playing deck has a lot of appeal. There's so much meaning already embedded in that deck, when you look past its familiarity.
not all of the random elements of course, just the ones I don't like as much, like not drawing mana in magic, or the exact right activater cards that you need to use other cards in just a lot of games
@trogdor In theory I like how Project Dark does it, in that hand management is often more important than luck of the draw. But I've yet to properly play it to see if it goes as well as I hope.
I am fine with the fact that card games typically involve a little luck in exactly what you draw, but I hate that games ,like Magic for example, decide they need to add extra "you need to luckily draw these specific types of cards to even do anything" elements in
I liked all those games that did that stuff, but definitely not for those reasons
drawing little or no mana and all your absolutely highest mana cost cards,.... that was not a fun element
@trogdor Have you ever played Tower MtG? It has everyone drawing from the same deck of spells, so there's more randomness than a normal built deck game, but the mana is a separate deck. Choosing which to draw from becomes a strategic consideration, but eliminates mana flood and lack.
@trogdor Yeah, Tower Magic kinda eliminates deck building. You do build one tower, but due to the size and everyone drawing from it, it's entirely different building a tower than a normal deck.
@BESW It seems like schoolkids keep it alive here too. We had an interesting experience in that regard: our daughter came in from playing with the neighbourhood kids and asked us, “Have you heard of Magic?!? It's even better than Pokémon!”, and our response was, “Oh dear sweet child, let us show you our card collections.”
Yeah, I have the issue of not really knowing IRL to play card games with. Games that are on Steam or, in the case of Duel Links, a phone app are all I can manage.
@SevenSidedDie Haha, yeah. My mom's cousin gave me his cards when I was in high school, and he asked me to pass them on to another cousin when he got to high school and was playing it if I wasn't using them anymore. By the time I remembered to bring them to a family gathering, though, he had stopped playing and didn't want them. :P
@Pixie I made the mistake of giving away the cards I had in high school. I still kick myself to think of some of the rare cards that you can't get anymore.
@trogdor Hearthstone does seem to have hit a sweet spot for a lot of players that Magic is aimed at.
@SevenSidedDie Aww. I'm kinda glad I still have them, but I didn't play much then and haven't in many years (nor have I bought anything new), so I would have to learn from scratch if I were ever going to.
@Pixie My reintroduction to Magic was when I met my future wife, who had a pile of cards. We played a lot of kitchen Magic when we first got together! The trick then, if my experience is anything to go by, is to find someone who remembers Magic fondly and spend a lot of time with them. ;)
@SevenSidedDie it definitely hits the spot for me, though it would be even better if it had more cards in it,.... and if it didn't rely a little more on cards that have randomly targeted effects than I would like
@SevenSidedDie it is nice that they know what they are doing yeah
Along those lines, I'm actually planning to buy a fresh starter set (they come in deckbuilder starter sets now), so that I have a more level playing field to play with my daughter and a friend of mine this summer. Building decks from my huge collection to play against their tiny collections proved to be both overwhelming for me and unfair to them, so this should be less bad for all of us.
@Pixie I think I remember you saying that it might be hard to get into it now that it has been out for a while and has a bunch of cards in it you don't have
That is why I am playing Duel Links. It came out, and suddenly all my friends and acquaintances who remembered playing Yu-Gi-Oh fondly had it, so I got it and stumbled through... :P And the nice thing is I haven't had to spend real money on it yet.
@trogdor I was thinking it might be something along those lines.
@trogdor Hearthstone has always sounded great. The thing that keeps me away is that I'm really attached to owning cardboard and just can't get into a digital collectible game. Something about the tangible object, and something about playing with friends, makes a big difference to me, evidently.
@Pixie I can see that too. I've given up trying to stay up to date with MtG. I think MtG still works for me only because I tend to play with people I know rather than competitively, so I can avoid staying up to date mostly.
the standard rotation vs wild means that standard will be a little more freindly to people who don't have all the cards, but some power creep has been happening too
@SevenSidedDie yeah, owning a thing isn't as important to me as being able to use it, though I do still hoard stuff I own XD
I played Smash Up for the first time recently and fell in love with the concept of having everything you need in the box (plus, of course, expansions here and there, but it's not like "buy a bunch of these booster packs and hope").
I'm also pretty stubborn in that I like to figure things out entirely on my own, which begins to get difficult when more and more new gimmicks arise and the metagame transforms itself. It feels like, even if I get the cards, my brain isn't gonna keep up. I wanna try some more close-ended deckbuilding games sometime.
@BESW A few of my decks are older than my daughter. I like that in casual MtG I can keep playing them. It's a large part of what keeps me away from format-based events.
@BESW That seems to be the case for the kids I've seen my daughter play with. I get the impression it's partly because the last two years' cards are simply what they have access to, but I can't tell how much is also an ideological subscription to format-legality as the valid way to play.
I really enjoyed it when it first came out, but, much like MMORPGs, it's designed to be a time sink, and the amount of enjoyment I get out of it is just not worth the amount of time it wants from me.
(One of my favourite decks to play became only legal in Vintage and Legacy when certain cards were added to the Modern banned list, but it's not as strong as “oh, this is only Vintage legal” would normally suggest, yet that still makes it seem unfair for a casual deck. :/ )
It's devoted entirely to damage-prevention and a handful of gimmick clerics to destroy combos, revive dead clerics, etc. And once I can passively soak ridiculous amounts of damage, I turn all my lands to swamps and spam Pestilence to trash everyone and everything. It's designed for group play where there's always a more pressing threat than the purely defensive deck which can help other folks survive whatever's most threatening.
@BESW Nice. I love a deck that does something unusual like that. I have a deck (admittedly not my design) that uses Sulfuric Vortex and other similar “hurt everyone” enchantments, along with circles of protection red and similar cards to avoid taking any of its own damage. It has no creatures.
I think my favourite deck I ever saw was based on the idea that for every common deck gimmick, there's a single creature which can counter it. And the deck had all those creatures, and could pull them out at will.
It was a five-color deck with green base, for land searching capacity. Early game was pulling out one land of each color.
It had a lot of creature-searching and a little of "play a creature without paying for it normally" power, but it was mostly about getting creatures into your hand and being able to cast them normally.
Anyway, it started with just the goal of being able to play any of the three-color dragons. Then it expanded into a broader goal of being able to pull out the creature that broke whatever deck it was facing.
I can't remember all the creatures in it. Vesuvan Doppelganger was there for dealing with Weird Unpredictable Stuff.
It wasn't unbeatable, but it was a worthy challenger. Global Ruin dropped most decks to a crawl so it'd have time to build power.
