@Ryan wait, am I misremembering? Wasn't 1e the one where you had to roll through the spell list against your % to learn until you hit the number of spells known? I.e. no choice in spells, just the luck of the draw?
@kviiri I dislike it. I like identify and read magic being part of the equation =)
@Miniman I dunno... it was the deal. It simulated the whole "you start out knowing whatever spells your hedge-wizard mentor taught you, or whatever dregs you were able to find in the back libaray." I, personally, dislike that the minigame of wizards assembling a spell list is basically gone.
@Miniman You mean you haven't seen it used in 5e?
@Shalvenay Okay. Had to miss AL tonight for a work-meeting that was inexplicably moved from its usual night to tonight =(
I dunno. If you have a wizard, it's basically no-cost as a ritual. But if you don't because of random party makeup, you have to go find someone to do it? Wizards lose a bit of schtick, but it seems a minor problem.
@NautArch I'm not fussed about stepping on the wizard's toes - I wouldn't mind if everyone could do it. But in an edition where they're trying to bring back the mystique and prestige of magical items, making identifying them totally free really doesn't make any sense.
@doppelgreener I suppose much of that depends on how the game is DM'd. My players were generally reckless enough that I didn't call for Gates without some kind of reasonable trigger, and that player is just the most timid/reasonable of the group.
@NautArch You could always grab the Ritual Caster feat.
Our Paladin and lawful good Fighter ran into a church we were sent to to bury a body in the graveyard, ignored me saying lets go do that thing we were sent here to do, and instead went into the basement and murdered the Priest's son... while the priest watched :(
I charmed the priest and led him away for a while but eventually his sons yells were too much and he broke the charm to go try and save him
ooh its been too long since ive used an actual DVD in VLC and don't have a drive to even test it right now. If I remember I can give it a shot at work tomorrow for you and see if I can get it
If I hit "play" it'll subtitle the three languages that aren't the one I chose. If I hit CC, it'll subtitle all of them.
When I look at the VLC subtitle menu while it's playing, then things get funky: it uses EN (2) if I go English > Play but it uses FR (2) if I go English > CC.
...But if I go French > Play it'll use FR (1) and won't caption the French dialog.
ugh, part two. So, I'm asked to roll up some spare lvl 1s. I'm told "no humans, no half-elfs because you already have PCs like that; no warriors because you already have a fighter, and a paladin". No half-elf because I've already rolled up an extra PC, who is a half-elf mage/cleric. And "seriously, roll up the extra two because you won't be allowed to play the mage/cleric tonite" -- (the raw 1st lvl m/c I just rolled up)
wtf? I get the premise (don't play all the same type/race/class). But tell me to roll up 3 characters and then exclude one as a means of getting the other two rolled up?
Mostly monster of the week with a loose collection of players. Any given night there might be 4-8 players, out of a pool of about 10. We all have some low level PCs (1st-3rd) and some "high" level (6th-8th). So, certainly a need for at least two PCs each.
The best campaign I played had a group of all-rogues, all-dwarves. No clerics. No mages. The DM rolled with it and it went in a horror/diplomacy direction after some capers & cons.
The worst campaign was when the DM said "I want to recreate [some 80s schlock movie] and so you'll play PCs modelled after the characters therein."
Hey, if the DM said "I have this idea, here are a bunch of pre-rolled PCs designed for the adventure" then that'll be great. Ask me to do the heavy lifting and ask me to get invested in my creation but take away all my agency? No.
Interesting. Doesn't sound like the restrictions are actually serving any purpose.
I mean, as a DM, I totally understand not wanting everyone playing the same type of character. I've DMed for a full group of squishy mages, and it presents some serious challenges.
But there's a big difference between that and arbitrary rules, especially when you're making 3 characters at a time.
Especially if those squishy mages are used to being protected by other PCs like fighters etc. If the group is all mages because each player made a selfish choice and assumptions that other players went otherwise .. yeah, rarely turns out well.
So .. I'm thinking "Gogmagog is a charming roguish fellow, full of bluster and slightly over friendly and a bit of a dimwit. He's actually a bit smart, and loves to play the long con. He's also afraid of the dark."
.... dwarf rogue, 13 DEX 14 INT 18 CHA. Afraid of the dark.
Oh ... an 18 CHA has particular bonuses ... but this DM house ruled that he doesn't use the reaction tables, just plays it by ear.
"A charming roguish fellow, full of bluster and slightly over friendly and a bit of a dimwit. He's actually a bit smart, and loves to play the long con. He's also afraid of the dark. .... Rogue, 13 DEX 14 INT 18 CHA. Dwarf, afraid of the dark."
Ooh .. house rule "ignore racial class restrictions" (wtf?) ... I wanted a Bard but was thinking I couldn't because the DM said "no humans". Now I can do a Dwarven Bard. That fits even better.
Heh, just realised .. a dwarven bard who is afraid of the dark. A bard, afraid of the dark.
Brand clutches his bongo drums in nervous fingers, and starts to tap out a brave ditty to embolden and inspire his party .. "Brave Brave S-S-Sir Robin, s-s-striding forward in the dark; Brave Brave Sir R-Robin, facing down the evils in the sh-sh-shadows, ... the awful awful evils in the shadows, the sneaky and slippery evils that will eat your soul, the ... uh guys, can we go now?"
@MikeQ Like one of my friends put it: "DnD 5e has done a pretty good job at becoming just 'DnD'" :)
@Erics I think it's somewhat strange how this is perfectly normal but a GM who'd say "oh, I don't use the combat system, I just improvise what your attacks do" would get funny looks.
I personally try to adhere to three standards with my social rolls: 1) no roll unless there's a chance for a relevant success, 2) player knows the possible outcomes before making the roll, and 3) player knows the roll's target number.
I try to do that for all non-combat rolls, actually
Oh boy, tomorrow's finally going to be a game day, with hopefully just one player absence! (although another one could pull his timeless classic and show up hung over)
@nitsua60 I have no strong feelings one way or the other, but I dislike the utility of those spells (among many others) being heavily tied to nuances of the rules the GM is enforcing.
Let's say he rolls 15 and you tell him "it's too complex for you", it results than he still don't know what the item is, but he knows that the item is more complex than this other one that only required a 10 to be identified.
But if you tell him directly "you need to roll a 19 to identify this", then the player already have an idea of the level of complexity of the item, without examination
I find them more interesting than the standard "now you have to roll this value to pass this thing" as they give you the opportunities to do things even with a bad roll, but that's taste differences, I guess.
Hmmm, I just browed a few questions and wondered: WOuld a question like "Is there a clear line between good and bad GM Fiat" independant of game and specific problem be on topic and not too bróad? Like a "Go To" question for a lot of questions regarding "when to use GM Fiat" or something??
@AnneAunyme That's why I sometimes ask "Roll XY, tell me what you have." I don't give them the difficulty all the time. Spot checks and similar are notoriously for that... and at times I call for these rolls when nothing is to be seen.
Yes, telling them "You failed because of complexity" might give him some insight, but you don't have to say that. you might say "You understand that this item might have been a weapon." But it doesn't give them an idea how to use it. That is, you might allow 'partial' successes.
@AnneAunyme interesting... I think I saw some with specific problems or games in mind.
When it comes to rolls, I know two general types of rolls: Boolean ones (Fail/success is all that is possible) and gradual ones. (Sliding scale of results)
Boolean ones are very easy to determine: You hit or you miss. They are most appropriate when it comes to hit and miss close together: attacking, breaking down a door etc. Gradual ones are what I prefer for any task that coul have varying results, depending on how good you do it. Let's talk some examples and how graduality has an effect on them: Lockpicking. Of course the main result is Boolean (in it is open or not), BUT lockpicking is a time intensive thing. If you beat the DC just slightly, you take X ammount of time. If you beat it by 5, you take less time. If you fail the DC by enough, …
@AnneAunyme Overall, the "say what honesty demands" idea has grown on me and hence I find it hard to require players to pull off knowledge checks just to confirm stuff they already know. So I go the other way round and give information generously, and let the players play stupid if they like :)
Yes, the bear lore example is over the top, but sometimes a gradual check that gives more information the better you are until you get the full info you search for can be more intriguing. Like... LEt's assume there is a "Sword of blazing blade" that can sheath itself in flames. To identify it fully you need a DC 25 because of some reason. The player rolls. A 10 and they learn "It's a magic weapon.". 15 "Its enchantment carries the signature of Gorolian of Harastur." (They could make a Knowledge history roll to learn he mass produced fire blades for an army some 100 years back in the neighbo…
I almost would call not informing the player of the DC allows them to paint their own picture in the "Negative Space" you leave with the info. Just telling them "this is a magic weapon" can make them imagint this to be the dragonslayer blade they want. Or just another +1 Blade. They could go a bit wild with their fantasies at that point. It gets a bit more specific the more they get to the top of the success table, and crafty players might find non identify ways to find the required information, like searching the library or something - and suddenly not giving the DC has become a tiny ploth…
@kviiri I am not talking about general knowledge, more about information on a specific individual thing (item, person...)
Absurd example: "I want to check if this weird guy is not the villain in disguise" "ok, if you roll 17 or more you will find that it is indeed the villain"
@AnneAunyme Well, in practice it would be "roll at least 17 to find out if he's being honest with you", but that's one of those things I don't do in the first place.
The "traditional" alternative would be just rolling and either receiving the response "He doesn't seem to be lying or hiding anything" or "He looks shifty, he's probably hiding something" without knowing whether the roll was successful or not.
And then Anne Aunyme made some good points in where hidden DCs might be useful, but those tend to be the rolls I try to not use anyway.
@Trish I don't think it's unavoidable in spot checks. "You're walking into an ambush/trap/whatever: make a perception check, with 15 or more you notice them just in time and they won't get a surprise round on you."
Spotting treasure is easy too. "Roll perception to search the room. X or more to find anything hidden here, which might be nothing. The search takes about ten minutes" (and I use a time tracking mechanic in the side to make the time cost concrete)
@Trish That simply changes the nature of the metagame. Now your players are trying to guess what's going in your head. It may not be visible to you, but they are still metagaming.
I have them roll spot and perception rolls for noticing sideline details regularily. it does help that the two elves have like... rediculous chances to spot.
They pretty much like to spot some of the details like the overgrown statue of a human, the face eroded from the ages and someone smacking off the nose. Or the small squirrels peeking out from their hiding.
As for sensing motives, it has too enormous campaign derailment potential for larger cases (eg. the good ol' villain questmaster). And when players buy into "I can use X to gain information through my character", they will use X to gain information all the time. The problem being, when they gain information through their character they feel obliged to act on it.
Being suspicious of everyone and everything is all fine and dandy for the player, but why would the character do it? So I usually give my players a ton of free information their characters lack, and they decide whether they want their characters to know this too. Usually they don't.
@AnneAunyme Disallow sensing motive if I really want to keep a NPC's motives secret (because of the massive derailment potential), but far more often I'm just open about what the NPCs are trying. No lies nor gotchas.
It's easier in some other systems than DnD, though.
But anyway, if you're interested in reducing metagame, I've had very good successes with this and can recommend it to the others. When the players don't have to fear being cheated, they spend more time thinking about what would be fun than trying to guess what I'm hiding from them.
There certainly are games where secrets from PCs are better kept as secrets from players too, but I'm a bit concerned about it being the default mode simply to avoid metagaming.
Yeah. I've tried it both ways, and it depends on playstyle but for the folks I've played with it's generally better to go with treating the players as a Hitchcockian audience.
My games are much more fun, more dramatic, and more narratively satisfying, if I share everything with my players that I can't think of a really good reason not to share.
Some people get pleasure from playing "guess what the GM wants you to do so the story can move forward," but I've never played with any of them.
We're mostly just frustrated by stumbling around in the dark hoping to bump into the plot without getting killed by it.
Plus, like Hitchcock's audience, we all get to enjoy the deliciousness of knowing something the characters don't and watching them waltz into a tense situation.
In the last game I ran, a Cthulhu Confidential adventure, it was very good that the game explicitly says "if you have the ability and you roleplay using it, you get the clue you need."
Because I didn't play an NPC clearly enough and Doppelgreener thought he was lying about something that was actually the truth--and I was able to just drop the characterization and say "No, actually, [thing] and [thing] are true but you can tell he's lying about [thing]."
@kviiri It's kind of astonishing how obvious it seems once it's said out loud, but how long it took RPGs as a medium to say it.
@BESW I don't play with those people but I do play with a lot of people who are pretty bad at separating player and character knowledge, i.e. they have a hard time letting their character waltz into a tense situation if the player knows how that could have been avoided, so keeping information from them is the most viable way to get those tense situations. Also they enjoy being surprised as a player, I guess.
And we're still surprised by our games--if anything, we're more surprised than ever because our stories are the result of everybody throwing in their improvisation to the setting and plot, rather than just one GM making all those decisions.
The GM gets to be surprised along with everyone else.
@BESW Didn't work for us very well - they just refused to take the points for the bad choices. They're not metagaming to "win" the game, but because they're very attached to their characters.
So I could give a player a fate point for letting his PC be mind controlled, and he kept right on running her: I'd tell him what his controller wanted her to do and he'd figure out how she'd do it.
@BESW They're not afraid of death, they just don't want their characters to do "stupid" things. I've had one of these players walk into certain death willingly to save the rest, and that was okay with everyone.
And everybody knew, and loved coming up with reasons for their characters to not figure it out until it was most dramatic.
@ACuriousMind And that's why you have juicy character aspects to compel.
It's not "do a stupid thing for a fate point." It's "act in line with the way you described your character, even though it's not the best choice for her from an aerial perspective, and get a fate point into the bargain."
Leela had A sharp but uncivilized mind, and she was Not a tesh-nician, so it made sense that she'd accidentally turn on the complicated mind control device.
@BESW Which they will refuse (or not make a character with nice aspects to compel in the first place). Fate only works well if everyone is interested in playing the sort of characters Fate wants to portray. I'm not saying Fate is a bad system to encourage such play, I'm saying that there's a kind of player who doesn't want to play that sort of game, and it's not because they enjoy "guess what the GM wants you to do"
(And when the Nestene Consciousness ordered her to kill the Doctor, she was a Superstitious tribal warrior who hoped he'd Enjoy your death as I enjoyed killing you!)
@BESW Maybe I described them a bit uncharitably: They do have character flaws and will do non-optimal things, but "My character will do this thing they wouldn't do if they knew what I, the player, know" is not an enjoyable mode of play for them. I think they just like to identify with their characters and this sort of dissonance dissolves their immersion.
I understand that "immersion" is not universally what people value in role-playing (and I frequently enjoy playing characters I don't want to identify with or immerse in), but well, the fact is that there are people who come to the table for that.
@ACuriousMind I think it's more of a matter of what helps and what hinders immersion.
I find rules and openness helping me immerse in my characters because I have to devote less brain-power to thinking about what the GM intends us to do.
Sure, it's a wonderfully vague concept into which you can project everything you value in role-playing and outside of which everything you don't like lives ;)
True immersion is, practically speaking, impossible--even in a LARP there is always a distance between player and character. So "immersion" become a game of drawing lines in the sand and arguing over which side is better.
As a practical playstyle goal I have nothing wrong with most of the concepts people mean by "immersion"--though it's not a goal I usually share.
But it's a term which has become effectively meaningless because it's forced to encompass so many different meanings.
There's a lot of people for whom immersion means "forget I am a person at a table and be a character instead", and for whom "only ever do in-game stuff, never talk about the game on a meta level" is how to get it. For me, immersion means being able to buy into the story and feel out my character and portray them effectively as an exercise of self-expression, and I am most happy and most able to do that in games like Fate which require stepping out of character constantly.
Given how overloaded "immersion" is, I don't try to use that term to describe that experience though.
You don't have to deal with translating character action into table-level mechanics, or confusing player and character knowledge, in APFMT. Your character doesn't know anything about themselves and you don't know anything about your character, and the rulebook is the guidelines for the collaborative therapy session the character is using to try to remember important things about themselves--which the players will be discovering at the same time their characters do.
If there's anything like "pure immersion," APFMT is probably one of the games best capable of approximating it.
Now that I think of it, the appeals to immersion I've seen have been rather strangely focused on defending a very particular playstyle of DnD.
(I don't mean in this chat, but the elusive meatsphere)
Eg. people say knowing how much damage standing in a campfire does (before trying) breaks immersion, but at the same time they're fine knowing how much damage a fireball does or a battleaxe does.
I've seen immersion goals bleed into, say, White Wolf and CoC. But yeah, in my experience it's been a pretty niche thing with some weirdly drawn edges.
(I maintain that Old Man Henderson is an excellent case study of conflicting immersion goals and how the basic premise of immersion being at odds with talking about the group experience causes problems in the group.)
I was unlucky enough to experience a very unique snowflake PC in my first campaign ever, along with a GM (and other players) who weren't experienced enough to know how to handle the situation.
Or maybe lucky - it's a good thing to learn eventually that you can't simply focus on wish-fulfillment for your own character and expect it to work well in a group game.
Yeah, playing a character who prioritizes wish fulfillment at the expense of other concerns can be fine in the right group. But playing for the player's wish fulfillment at the expense of other concerns...
Basically, the player who introduced the character is a hobbyist novelist, and imported his favorite character from one of his stories without anyone lifting any eyebrows. The character was an elf who despised violence, had a sentient pet owl and regularly talked to their god. I bear no ill will against the player, because literally no one of us knew better, but the character was extremely annoying until we started dissecting the problems she caused.
So, basically the same stuff as Henderson, except toned down to non-satire levels.
@AnneAunyme Yeah. It was painful on so many levels. But none of us figured out the right thing to do was to talk about it, which seems stupidly simple now :)
The player of the character was, is and always will be my friend, and he has taught me many important lessons. One of the lessons is this: always discuss character expectations before starting a table!
@kviiri part of the problem is that the vast majority of new players are ill-equipped to even *have* these discussions. They really don't know what they expect from the game yet.
Another problem is, for want of a better word, genre. Some archetypes that work *WELL* in other media don't work at all in most tabletops. Dexter was a cool show, but the strong silent type who is hiding an inner mental introspection fighting with his own subconscious makes for a really poor tabletop character.
@godskook Yep - only one of us had any substantial DnD experience (our GM) and even his idea of how to run the game was more based on funny DnD memes and stories. So the game had this kind of "you can do whatever you like if it's in character, but rocks might fall..." vibe.
Those are long arcs, but actually only one PC would be a "bad one" in a standard setting and the GM started with him (I suspect that it was on purpose)
I've also been thinking about games where one or two PCs are dedicated protagonists and the others are plot-wise lesser characters, to see how it would work.
@doppelgreener Yeah, immersion seems to be different things to different people ... Sort of like pornography, I suppose, to the tune of "I know it when I see it." :p
@Ryan I'd suggest letting this sit for a bit in case someone else wants to answer. Would you be content with that answer if the first paragraph was inside the spoiler tag? I don't want to mess with Derek's answer, it seems pretty clean.
@kviiri This is my experience as well. It gets brought up reliably in connection to ideas around the role of the GM as universal arbiter, nobody being allowed to metagame, in-game solutions to out-of-game social problems, etc.
@KorvinStarmast Not even that specific since I'm pretty sure people talking about immersion are often talking about different things which have a common compatible label.
I won't know it when I see it! I'll know what it is for me when I'm experiencing it though. To me it's a point where expression and common understanding and a smooth social flow is achieved. It's a zone of shared understanding and self-expression.
Is there a tag for asking which rpg system has a particular general mechanic? Not the [product-identification] tag though - that tag sounds more like 'there is a real, specific, unique thing that definitely exists, but i've temporarily forgotten its name'
Or would a question along the lines of "are there rpg systems that have really well thought out mechanics for X" be too much of a shopping-list style of question?
@Erics You got the purpose of product ID just fine. But, yeah, we don't handle "what games have this mechanic?" questions any longer. Even when game recs were permitted we considered those questions to be endless lists & too broad; there couldn't possibly be a best/correct answer.
The issue being mainly that there's no complete answer to "which games have X"... It'd just be terribly long lists with little actual substance to evaluate.
OK. The general mechanic is with feeding background info, clues, distractions to the players before a game session. Pretty much take all of the long winded speech from the uninterruptable "mysterious stranger in the tavern", break it down into components, and split it up into bits of gossip, idle observations while at the market, etc.
But do this for about 4-5 different adventure hooks. Including a few adventure hooks that are not even fully baked yet.
"While at the market, waiting for that damn rogue (another PC) to arrive, you pass the time by idly counting the number of stone gargoyles mounted on the town hall. There are fourteen, all with a silly grin."
Another player might get fed: "OK, you went to the blacksmith to repair your armour. While there you overheard the blacksmith explaining to his apprentice to not stray off to the hills to see his new sweetheart because he heard from the baker's cousin's stepmother that there are kobolds about"
Meanwhile, the cleric of the party gets slipped "While waiting patiently for your turn to see the Bishop, you get your ear bent by some local shopkeeper about how the town council is a bunch of idiots, and how they simply wasted all that money on getting 13 gargoyle statues erected .. 13! that's an unlucky number!"
And maybe someone else has their purse filched by a street urchin, who escapes down an alley. The urchin escapes, but in the alley you found a homeless bum. Clearly dead. Looks like he fell from a great height.
Yeh, not a mechanic in the sense of "roll a d20 and get equal or under your dex score", but rather some amount of thought-through writing in the DM rulebook/resource that does more than simply hand waves it with "feed some tidbits to your players".
I'm thinking 3-5 tidbits for each player, such that with a decent sized session it's clear the intention is not to fully share and read thru the lot at the start of the session.
PbtA ?
Yes, a detective style game sounds likely
A fifth player might get handed "Cave bears live in caves." ;-)
The point is .. i'm interested in such a mechanic, and i'd rather not re-invent the entire thing when there might be other games out there that have thunk it through more than I have so far.
This isn't so much a mechanic as an antipattern that leads to people wasting their time. Players already force a lot of improvisation from GMs even in games where the GMs are trying their best to lead players down a certain path -- because players will latch onto things the GM didn't expect, or follow paths the GM didn't expect, or try to solve problems in the way the GM didn't expect.
@BESW and I played a twosie game recently called Cthulhu Confidential, and it's all about playing a detective. It was a practice game to give BESW some experience before he ran it for someone else. The module we played through had a bunch of red herrings and dead-ends, most of which I managed to avoid -- and BESW's conclusion was he needed to keep the number of red herrings low, because I could've strayed off into some ridiculous time-consuming paths which weren't going to help solve the mystery
@kviiri All players do it all the time without even knowing, because they do not know what the GM has planned. They don't know which parts of the dialog are the most important, but they do know that everything the GM mentions is important -- because otherwise the GM wouldn't mention it.
Ideally it wouldn't be the only mechanic to get them off on an adventure. It's more background info, and needs to be pitched such that it feels like fluff.
Narration operates on a Chekhov's Gun principle: if you mention it, it's important. So mention the important things, and avoid mentioning unimportant things because they will be expected to be important. The players will treat them as important and try to interact with them as if they're important. If they are not worth the player's attention, they are not worth mentioning at all, because doing so just causes trouble & wastes time and energy on unimportant things.
It's one of those things where I think the outsider perspective on RPGs suck. People who have never played RPGs only know certain memes from the hobby, and one of the common ones is that "railroading is bad". So we have new players who insist on pressing against anything they see as rails...
I don't want to blame non-players of course - it's just a weird quirk of culture that only certain bits make it to the externally visible surface.
Good advice on red-herrings. The main idea is to nudge the players in the direction of 2 or 3 possible adventures, and let them decide which one they'll pursue in this session. The other bits don't get wasted though - they remain in play, and maybe they stumble across more tidbits that form up into a solid hook
I don't have much interaction with new players nowadays except through this site. And way back when, it was always me who was the new player. :P
(I didn't push against rails, or even know what railroading was. I just joined up a university D&D 3.5e game and did cool stuff with my cool barbarian, with his giant axe, later a +1 giant axe, and dreamt of him getting extra arms via magic so that he could eventually hold two giant axes.)
@Erics So the difference from more traditional plot hooks is that each character only gets a bit of it, and they have to pool their knowledge to get concrete hooks?
To train the players that not all snippets are Chekovian, I imagine giving them 5 bits at once, mostly unrelated, and saying they can seek more information on just one snippet (e.g. "I press the barkeep for more on these 'pirates'. The barkeep explains it's just a euphemism for the wagoneers guild and their extortionate ways.")
@kviiri Yes. Some snippets should appear to be utterly trivial and irrelevant and not worth the time discussing ... until some hours later when they are knee-deep in kobold gore and the realise kobolds banner has the same sigil as on that bottle of wild rum they found on the dead bum in the alley.
Give the players the "ohhhh ... wait wait guys, I just realised something" experience. A canny DM might feed such tidbits to the more usually reserved/shy/quiet player.
(The seeking 'more info' mechanic I mention above would be pre-session, e.g. email)
Because I am pretty sure if I give you five snippets as a player, you will spend time trying to figure out which ones are important, and which ones are not, and spend half your time on the unimportant ones. Consider then what that would do for you as a GM, who has nothing prepared for this unimportant stuff. (Unless it's Dungeon World or Apocalypse World, in which case anything the players choose to follow up on is important.)
It will, in that sandbox is a mode where you just describe whatever's around the players and let them choose what to do arbitrarily, and nothing is a correct or incorrect path.
PbtA (Dungeon World and Apocalypse World) is, from a certain perspective, sandbox play mechanised. It's much more than that, but that's part of it.
And it is, for the most part, an antipattern. Describing bunches of unimportant irrelevant information nobody's supposed to care about or do anything with will do bad things for your game, cause problems, and be unfun and make people unhappy. As in, the opposite of everything you want to be doing. It is not a good idea to fill narration with important-sounding red herrings unless you want to stress people out.
Important to note that pretty much all the parts given are important. Just that not all puzzles are complete at that time. And that the players understand that they will have multiple puzzles of various degrees of completeness to choose from.
@doppelgreener Yeah, and given how lightweight the system is, coming up with new threats on the fly if the players do something unexpected is easy as long as one has a quick imagination.
Even in a Gumshoe story -- in a game where you're a detective and you're meant to experience red herrings and figure out what's going on as a player -- more than a handful of red herrings becomes a problem.
@kviiri Yeah, easy peasy. Players having lots of freedom correspondingly needs a lightweight easy-to-use framework for improvisation. Games like D&D which lean heavily on preparation and don't make improvisation easy don't lend themselves well to sandbox play, nor games where players are presented with lots of options and expected to pursue whatever however.
The other side of that coin is the puzzle room thing where you are given a white mouse, a ball of twine, a ring of keys, and a scroll of Messenger. And even if you achieve the objective (free your comrades), you don't score max points unless you use every damn thing handed to you.
@doppelgreener When I started GM'ing Apocalypse World we didn't use fronts and threats at all. Later on I really grew fond of them... just in time for Apocalypse World 2e to replace the system with an updated version :)
I have 6 adventures already prepped, enough for a bunch of sessions. I don't want to force them to play whichever one I have line up for the session, nor do I want 6 "mysterious strangers" bore them with long speeches and say "so guys, which one do you want to play tonite"
@Erics If that's an issue picking which one, I'd just summarise the kind of adventure each one is -- outside of the game entirely, not in-game -- and ask the players (not the characters) which they'd like to pursue that night.
Oh, so, now I see. I had to re-read the stuff from earlier. You're looking to drop quest threads into a story without devoting, say, explicit description of each quest from a dedicated NPC?
This isn't really a DnD 5e specific idea, but one thing I did (and had great fun with!) was publishing a newsletter of the fictional worlds' happenings between sessions. It takes a bit of writing (and styling, if you want an actual newspaper look - even more if you care about it looking medieval) but my party has really liked it as a source of entertainment and exposition.
@Erics I suggest you pick where to apply your tools carefully. "Heightening immersion" isn't always achieved merely by staying in character (in fact we had a conversation about that earlier here) and the quests here aren't necessarily background knowledge nor do you need to solve them by integrating them with such.
Seriously, asking your friends what kind of thing they want to do tonight adventure-wise -- like asking them which game they want to play or which movie to watch, and summarising the options -- can be a really effective way to do exactly this with minimal time wasting or faffing about or confusion or stress on everyone's part.
I do like the idea though, in that you expect even a mocked up newspaper to have lots of irrelevant fluff, like a "lost cat" ad or a "yard sale" ad or an ad for "Mr Gogs Wonder Soap. Totally not made from Demon Oil!"
Well, the campaign is heading down the path of the PCs being residents of the community, and not simply murder-hobos passing through.
@Erics I don't really have lots of it in mine, but some, yes. Each number of the magazine has some stories on the developing crises of the land, a biographic bit on a local hero, and some miscellaneous stories :)
But there have been some minor stuff as well: jokes written by kids, advertisements, announcements, guest writers...
I'm already feeding them rumours and gossip about what is happening in the kingdom next door. Mostly along the lines of "dont go there, you will get dragooned into the militia, and all your magic items taken away and given to the elite kings commandos"
@Erics I'm not sure if that was a direct response to me or not, but that's not mutually exclusive from what I'm describing. (I don't even play murderhobo games. I don't even play D&D nowadays, I play games which let me focus more on story sans fighting.)
I just snorted ginger beer up my nose when reviewing my old writings for it. There's one with a "Missing: pair of binoculars. Can't work without. Finder's fee promised --Karl Vimpel" (Karl Vimpel is the rough German translation of my name, and "losing the binoculars" is a Finnish metaphor for having no motivation. I must've had a rough day at work that day :D)
docs.google.com/document/d/… here's an example of what it looks like. Just copy it to a new doc and replace the Finnish with your own stuff if you like it :)
Murder-hobos that want to make an impact inside the game world and be part of the story ... yes. Murder-hobos because they just really don't care if they play DnD tonite, or Canasta, or that game with Penguins and Farms ... yeh, not interested.
Like, the technique I just described is not in any way, shape, or form, connected to murder-hobo gameplay. Or D&D. Or any specific type of game. It's just a "what do you want to do today/tonight?" discussion. That's all it is, and it can short-circuit half an hour of in-game time of wandering aimlessly trying to figure out what's going on and pursuing several different threads at once unawares, which can be really frustrating.
Swedish is a nice language, I use it a lot in my games.
Everyone here understands the basics of it around here, and it easily conveys a feeling of times past to use it since it really used to be the official language and lots of old places have Swedish names.
