@BESW Sounds easy to say, but in execution ... heh. (Isn't roll for shoes within the 200 word limit?) PS, hope you can help the question on r20 macros; I fiddled a bit with his macro and I am not sure what the full question of "what is needed to fix the problem" is. (A friend has written some r20 scripts for 5e, I will ask if he'll chime in if we get no other assistance. )
But I'm not gonna spend my Roll20 learning time with 5e. I just got 4e under my belt and now I wanna get familiar with how to hack the template:default for Fate.
Automating as much as possible so he can put in the minimum info per NPC before the game and then just click a button during the session and it'll run all the math in the background.
@ACuriousMind I'd argue that one doesn't need to make much of an investment to start D&D. Find a group, have someone build you a character based off a five-minute convo, sit next to someone who owns the book. Read the (free) basic rules after your first session, with a highlighter in hand. If, after a month of that you like it then maybe you buy something. (cc: @heather)
Though what everyone else says contains plenty of truth: there are much simpler games out there, there are ones which are entirely free (that's not D&D's model!), there are ones much better suited to doing different things.
I have a really hard time putting myself in the mindset of someone who's never played an RPG, trying to answer (for myself) the question "what RPG should I start with?"
I tend to recommend Fate because it's low sunk costs, feeds into commonly shared media tropes about how stories work, puts a lot of emphasis on learning positive table habits, is super adaptable for whatever the group needs, and has a lot of free expansion material.
That makes it non-threatening as a starter, and easy to abandon if it doesn't work for the group, but it still gives a foundation that'll be useful whatever they wind up playing.
@BESW I feel like the spectrum of high-complexity to low-complexity systems correlates pretty strongly with the "puts lots of ideas/examples out there for you and puts guardrails around you" to "gives you a blank page to work with" spectrum. Fate, for me, is a little too far to the "blank page" end of things to recommend as a first game.
But I'm a person for whom a blank page is one of the scariest things....
@Magician From what I've seen in reported game experiences, traditional gamers are the ones with the most trouble going into Fate, while it works better for newer gamers.
@nitsua60 Aye, that's one reason I make sure to tell people about the Worlds of Adventure for Fate while recommending it.
@nitsua60 Evil Hat has a Patreon that funds a new setting book every few months. Each on is a pre-packaged setting with slightly customized rules and character creation guidance, and a one-session adventure to run, often with pre-gen characters.
They range from post-apocalypse zombie-hunters to He-Man homage to firefighters to deep-sea explorers to magic-using cats to psychic high schoolers to suburban fey folk to Three Musketeers with jetpacks to intergalactic cooking competition.
And because they're funded by Patreon, they're pay-what-you-want-including-free for everybody else.
@Magician It also coincides with my observed experience, but of course that always includes my own interference as a participant so the data's skewed.
But from what I've seen myself, D&D-style gamers tend to treat the rules as the primary touchstone while new gamers tend to treat the shared narrative as the primary touchstone, and Fate favors the latter while deforming a bit in the face of the former.
And I'm not just talking about observing Fate games; one of the reasons I moved to Fate games (and outward from there) was because of some very awkward experiences with new gamers in D&D and I realized I liked their perspective better than the one D&D had taught me.
There's another side to this. D&D has a well defined, refined over decades structure, a tale as old as time: PCs go into places and fight monsters there. All the mechanics center on that, and it's a narrative arc well understood by most as it's made its way into countless computer games since then. Whereas Fate gives you tools to make your own story, and stories are hard.
You don't have to strike out on your own; Fate just lets you tell whichever form of story your group is familiar with. And also I'm not really talking about narrative on that high of a level.
Like, I once spent a whole evening telling a new player "no" to cool ideas just because they were too high level for the group at the moment. They were immersed in the narrative and had a very good instinct for what would make a good character and a good story.
It just wasn't something that D&D was willing to let happen because coolness is gated.
That's what I mean; new players do tend to know how stories work. They've seen movies and TV shows, read books and comics, played video games and listened to concept albums. I've never met a new player who was at a loss for how to make their own story.
I've only met players who were at a loss for how to make a story that conformed to the game system they were playing.
That's too broad a statement. Not everyone is after the author stance, and some systems, including D&D, are perfectly happy to have players take ownership of only a small part of the game, their character.
(Authorship, in the broad sense, is still a useful lens to view the actor and director stances in the sense that you invoked it with game-as-storytelling above.)
Yes, I think you're offering counterpoints to points that I didn't intend to make.
...which is why my line of thinking is that newbs should get exposed to more than one point in the space of RPG systems, preferably points that are well separated
@Magician yeah, I happen to know a player myself who'd do very well in Fate but I'd really rather run a Fate game with some folks who have Fate experience so I can debug how I run the game before I inflict my miscues on someone who's rather new to RPGs in general
Also, consider canceling if you don't think you're up for it. It's disappointing, but not as disappointing as a subpar game - for you or the players. Self care and all that.
"What do you learn about the elf's motives?" "What do you think it'll take to break down that door?" "What did you trick him into revealing about the secret plan?"
Yeah, or you could ask someone else to run a game of Roll For Shoes for that night.
My thesis is essentially about studying a certain family of graph problems, ones whose solutions are essentially a matter of being "locally correct" for each node in the graph
Eg. graph coloring (for each node, choose a color out of a limited so that no neighboring node has a different color) is such a problem, because we can just check each node and see if it has a neighbor with a same color or not. We call these problems Locally Checkable Labelings
I study these problems in toroidic grids, which are basically n×n grids that loop from up to down and right to left.
I think I'd like to see the game end with each villain defeated, weakener greatly or reformed. (Fate can do social combat which I'd like to showcase a bit)
(Remember the grudge doesn't have to step on the PC's toes: it's something the villain blames the PC for but it could be totally spurious or misinterpreted.)
> Concept: Shape-shifting parasite Gimmick: Host-enhancing partnership Grudge: Spurned by my first partner
> Concept: Vengeful Goddess of Death Gimmick: Blade conjuration Grudge: Daddy loved me first
> Concept: Gutless criminal entrepreneur Gimmick: Trustworthy face and sincere patter Grudge: I had a good thing before you showed up
Concept is who the person is; if you had to describe them with a single short pithy phrase, what would you say?
Gimmick is how they do things: what's their go-to strategy or tool for accomplishing their goals?
Think about it this way:
When Batman shows up at a crime scene, he sees the gimmick used to commit the crime (birds, riddles, practical jokes) and knows who did it: Penguin, Riddler, Joker.
If someone at the crime scene doesn't know who that is, he'll tell explain it by saying the villain's concept.
"An exploding whoopie cushion! This attention-seeking terrorism must be the work of the Joker!" "Who's that, Batman?" "Joker? He's the clown prince of crime!"
Concept: Charismatic Revolutionary Gimmick: Populist speeches and hate-talk mob motivation Grudge: You are making people less angry, I can't control them if they are not angry
@Axoren Except in the novels the Pwents are described as headbutting, punching, biting, and even bear-hugging... I feel like it goes well with the concept expressed in the question, if not the text of the question.
My mistake. I could have sworn your avatar was less lumpy before, but I guess this might be the first time I've seen it on the top-right in a larger size
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@Axoren it also his this property "ou cannot be disarmed of a bladed gauntlet, but you cannot attack with it if you are holding anything in that hand."