kind of at a loss for campaign ideas other than what I already have, and both of those are stuck. then again, I'm still waiting for my two sort-of-regular groups to reform...
am wondering what sort of occasion or gathering would draw dragons to fly in from long distances though xD
the first book was full of player-oriented rules. The other two had DM material.
but in the box, players started as a dragon just out of the egg and evolved into wyrmhood. The island was governed by a council of dragons, each color that had a wyrm could get a vote on the council, with a caretaker voting when there were ties.
There they discussed all sort of topics, including what to do about those little monkeys that kept trying to invade their island to steal their treasures.
Just made chocolate (from scratch) for the first time. Lessons learned: (a) that's a hell of a lot of sugar in there! (b) my kitchen smells amazing! (c) See (a).
Later today: time to see if I can eat the entire batch in one sitting.
@nwp Well, that's close to being right. Best I can tell that's about 4300 calories, and 5K is the target I'm shooting for. (I'm training for a competition.)
Well, best we-all can tell we burn about 10K calories that day, so the 5K cal eat isn't *such* a gross... No, there's really no defending it. As you were.
It's a pentathlon: 1. 5K (meter) run (score is minutes) 2. 5K (lb) bench press (choose your weight, score is reps) 3. 5K (calorie) eat (10 pt. penalty for each 1K shortfall) 4. 1 round golf (~5K yards) (score is strokes) 5. Obstacle course (~5K ft.) (score is 1pt/5sec.)
So I'm working on "what can I eat 5000 calories of in an hour, and then play a round of golf and run an obstacle course?"
@GreySage In my experience (yes, sadly, I have experience with this) it's not the volume of food that's problematic: it's the desensitization to the notion that "that thing your stupid hand is moving toward your pie-hole" is food. I.e. the mouth-part of the digestive system starts to say "that's it--you're drunk, and I'm not hanging out with you anymore."
@nitsua60 I wonder if it makes sense to play 1 adventuring day per session. If the players leave the dungeon after the first encounter and take a long rest you say "Ok, see you next week". It literally ties game time to real time.
@Anaphory The original problem is that searching every inch of every room, retrying rolls and long resting after every encounter is a really good but boring strategy. This is one attempt to remedy that in a way that doesn't suck for GM or players.
@Shalvenay I'll go for an actual table and people I know first. I hope players not having any expectations will mask me GMing for the first time and not knowing what I'm doing.
@Shalvenay Of course. Free XP and loot. If they keep coming we farm them until we run out of resources and then leave the dungeon to rest outside or in town.
@nwp About nine years ago I placed one of those orders. It's finally coming to fruition, as he and two of his third-grade friends are now regularly playing with me =D
@Shalvenay I made up a start where the players wake up in a makeshift prison not knowing who they are. They then escape some cultists and encounter the basics, like traps, lock-picking, some simple-ish combat and so on. Beyond that I don't know yet. I will think about it if there are players left after the first session.
According to the original article throwing random encounters at players is insufficient to deal with the problem.
I also thought about having an evil death god with a temple and a cleric that help the party to defeat some vampires or other long-lived creatures and is generally good to various creatures. It will then be revealed that every death strengthens the god, but instead of killing everyone it thinks more long term and realizes that every creature born is a creature that will die. With notable exceptions that need to be dealt with.
I'm fairly sure the source story is obscure enough that nobody will figure out the rip-off.
@nwp I agree that random encounters are not the answer -- my thinking is more along the lines of a dungeon with integral time pressures
also, trying to rely on precise timekeeping can be a problem when real-time is incompatible with narrative demands -- long conversations are a problem here as they tend to take up indeterminate lengths of time, I find
1 session per adventuring day doesn't require very precise time keeping. I suppose if there is so much dialog, shopping and planning that the session is over before the adventuring day you would need to add more sessions per day.
@nwp I was thinking back to the Gygaxian view on timekeeping when I said that precise timekeeping is a problem when constant-time (I said "real-time" previously but "constant-time" is better) conflicts with narrative-time and its...stretchiness
I've played with first-time RPGers in Dungeon World, D&D 4e, D&D 3.5, Fate Accelerated, Fate Core, Cthulhu Dark, Roll For Shoes, and even once a rather dodgy Fate Accelerated playtest. Except for Roll For Shoes (and arguably 4e) the system had much less to do with the success of their first game than the group did.
@BESW I think I'd agree for the most part. did you use the interlocking-storybuilding chargen when you ran Fate Core? (that's the one pain point I can foresee for newcomers)
I mean, my first RPG experience was GMing a game system most of my players had never played either. I studied the books for a month and spent the next five years gradually finding out how almost everything I did in those first sessions was "wrong" in terms of the system. But we had a blast, it was very successful as a game.
@BESW Yeah, while people like to say "System Does Matter" in that it has some input on the resulting game, for some reason they take it farther than that and claim it's predominant - but while System Does Matter, I would say in the same sense that Characterization Does Matter, Pacing Does Matter, Social Contract Does Matter, about several dozen things all Matter and contribute to the resulting play experience.
I think if any element is predominant in the success of a group, it's the social dynamic. Not necessarily the social contract; that's a tool for talking about one facet of social cohesion.
Being comfortable with the people at the table will cover a multitude of sins.
When nobody knows what to do some game systems seem to help you out more than others. For example the DnD 5e PHB lists actions that a player can do and possible skills checks. Fate Core seems to be much more free style and choosing from a list of possible actions just isn't possible there.
@BESW It can, but that's also table dependent. To use a cooking metaphor, all those things that go into the game are ingredients. But different recipes try to "showcase" different ingredients. Some games/groups focus a lot more on certain aspects of a game, so for those who try to showcase the rules, the rules of the game will have a lot more effect on whether it's enjoyable.
Some groups are comfortable with putting social first and "doing what we always do" despite the game system (or adventure, or GM) at hand - which has its pros and cons too. I've been in groups where every campaign always turns out "the same" despite attempts at changing tone and system because the social is dialed up too high
@nwp I'd say that there are strategies one can use to deal with indecisive players in Fate -- its just they look different than what you'd do about such in 5e
@nwp So, again, that depends entirely on the group. In my experience, people who are new to RPGs are much more comfortable with improvising and get turned off when told "That's not on the list of things your character can do now."
It's folks who are used to lists of what they can do who freeze up without 'em.
@mxyzplk Please don't paint all gamers with that brush - I started my first table with a bunch of fellow gamers precisely because we found the freedom a PnP RPG provides over the constrained decisions of a video game alluring!
@BESW Yeah, lighter FATE is better. I still remember buying Spirit of the Century, the "Pulp pick-up roleplaying game" that's 411 pages long, i call shenanigans on that
I had a new player with amazing, dramatic, interesting ideas which would've made sense with the narrative and created excellent story--but would've trashed 4e's mechanical balance, so I spent the whole night telling her "no."
@ACuriousMind Not all, just saying button pushing syndrome is usually caused either by comp gamers or long term gamers who have had some RPG train them into that (usually D&D).
I'm glad Fate offers modular crunch, though, because I do have players who really like the between-session system mastery elements of character creation. They get to poke all the buttons without anyone else needing to do more than they want.
Some of the most fun sessions we've had involved characters at FAE complexity alongside characters at ARRPG complexity.
I'm now toying with throwing out skills/approaches entirely and using aspect-driven roll modifiers.
I appreciate games just about everywhere on the triangle, but Gamist/Narrativist games least of all; it just seems to be a compromise that doesn't get me anything
@BESW simplification? Well, the earlier GUMSHOEs weren't big - Fear Itself etc. But I have always had trouble with the strange "you can't do that any more since you're out of pool points" effect as a bad G/N corner. I played the Lorefinder Pathfinder/GUMSHOE mashup once, it was interesting if weird
@Shalvenay Oh, any mostly sim game that starts adding in player narration/control mechanics; "hero points" start you up that path and then you go from there inasmuch as a player gets any narrative control. Feng Shui is pretty close to the middle... Heck that's pretty much how I run most Pathfinder/D&D campaigns I have, as sim with some narrativist.
@nwp balance isn't necessarily all that it's chalked up to be
D&D uses "balance" to control passing the spotlight around
games that control the spotlight through some other means wind up with vastly different takes on balance because game balance is not overloaded to perform the spotlight control function any longer
I'm considering GMing Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space, but there's something I fundamentally don't understand: Why is The Doctor a player-character option? And why is it the default selection? Shouldn't the Doctor almost always be an NPC?
Player's Guide, P5: "If you like, you can pla...
@Shalvenay Yeah - "balance" is IMO not a real goal. "Everyone having fun" is a goal. Balance as a solution for that is not necessarily well conceived. Play Over the Edge with one character a demigod and another a hairdresser, it's all fine.
@mxyzplk Pretty much that. Each player is tracking potentially over 30 fluctuating point pools, and the GM is expected to keep tabs on all of them on the fly as well.
It's only in a very gamist mode of play where a) most of what everyone is doing is pushing game buttons and b) it's seen as somewhat competitive who gets the most DPS or whatnot that balance contributes to fun.
It leads to a lot of "pause, erase, re-write, confirm totals with the GM" moments in the middle of scenes that I think would be better without the momentum breaks.
I wonder what would happen if I pooled all the skill points together and only kept Cool and Relationship points tied to their specific origins.
You can use X mechanic for Y in Z situation but not in A situation, and only after you've used B mechanic--but in C situation you can use X mechanic for Y without using B mechanic first...
@EvilHatOfficial Congratulations to @EvilHatOfficial and the authors of Bubblegumshoe & Kaiju Inc Card Game on thei… https://twitter.com/i/web/status/882313618972319745
@nwp given the number of resources present, "check with the GM" is not a viable way to manage bubblegumshoe resources.
i need to evaluate all the resources i have left at a glance to determine what i'm doing, which would amount to asking the GM to list them. that's the opposite of the desired effect here.
I'm considering GMing Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space, but there's something I fundamentally don't understand: Why is The Doctor a player-character option? And why is it the default selection? Shouldn't the Doctor almost always be an NPC?
Player's Guide, P5: "If you like, you can pla...
