TRPG General Chat

Anaphory

12:01 AM

@Glazius Awesome! I should probably re-read Do and play it with my people here.

BESW

12:14 AM

@Anaphory Yeah, specifically, every turn results in a sentence being written down to further the written record of the session. The player whose turn it is uses the stones to determine if their character helps someone (player writes the sentence) or gets in trouble (everyone else collaborates to write the sentence). And as Glaze said, the sentence moves you toward the conclusion depending on whether you can put the letter's keywords into it.

BESW

4:00 AM

Drama & Disappointment: subgenre of epic fantasy novels where the author finally corrects the way his campaign SHOULD have gone if only Carla the GM wasn't such a tool.

Tweeted by KBSpangler on December 8, 2018 at 7:10 PM

SmokeDetector

4:49 AM

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Bad keyword in answer, bad keyword with email in answer, email in answer, messaging number in answer, pattern-matching email in answer (432): Can I cover a spellcaster's mouth as a grapple attack? by navian on rpg.SE

kviiri

3:16 PM

sup

Zachiel

5:18 PM

@BESW With replies from Ursula V and a story about how Deedlit really looted Parn's corpse early in the campaign that Records of Lodass War was based upon. O.o

nitsua60

dine

Zachiel

Is there any Pathfinder economy expert here? I have a question I've already made on the main site but I don't want to play moving goalposts with that.

Shalvenay

5:49 PM

hey there @Caitlynn, welcome to the RPG.SE lair :)

kviiri

6:57 PM

Wanna help a colleague of mine by proxy? He's looking for a Christmas gift for his niece, who wants a "RPG-like board game". I only know HeroQuest and I think that's discontinued

kviiri

7:09 PM

Any recommendations?

Niece's age is ten years old so I wouldn't recommend Mansions of Madness (also I don't think it's a very good game)

Shalvenay

@kviiri which RPG elements are you looking to capture with this recommendation?

kviiri

@Shalvenay Absolutely no idea

Carcer

7:27 PM

first thought was the pathfinder card game

have played a couple of times and was alright, would be okay for a ten year old playing with an adult or patient older children I think

there's also FFG's Descent, which I have not played but is supposed to be good

boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/104162/…

PACG has the advantage that it's entirely cooperative and nobody has to play the bad guy

kviiri

@Carcer Sounds quite excellent!

BESW

8:49 PM

@kviiri Tokaido, maybe?

nitsua60

Hrmm... if Cardhunter existed in physical form I'd recommend that. Ten years old... Descent is exactly the type of product, but might be a bit of overkill. I don't know the franchise well enough to know if any of the ten or so different games are more of an introductory complexity. Ditto Gloomhaven, only more so.
Geez... this seems like an underdeveloped niche!?

Heroquest is the game you want, but it's not worth the $150 on ebay or amazon resellers that it'd take to get it....

BESW

You're tourists in historical Japan, competing to have the best vacation by collecting art, eating awesome food, seeing the sights, and still having enough money for the next inn.

nitsua60

Yeah--is "fantasy-adventure RPG feel" a part of what's desired, or are all of us other than BESW just reading that onto it?

BESW

Unfortunately sufficiently foreign real-world fiction often feels fantastical (just ask Okorafor). But yeah, I was kinda deliberately challenging the unspoken "RPG = fantasy" assumption.

Carcer

9:16 PM

I'm just not familiar with a great many "RPG-like" boardgames

BESW

It is a sufficiently vague statement.

"RPG-like" can mean each player controls a character-specific avatar rather than an abstracted avatar token; or it can mean you get advancement choices over the course of the game; or that there's a treasure-hunting-adventure theme; or...

Carcer

yeah

BESW

@kviiri Speaking of which, Greedy Dragons is a card game but might qualify.

Carcer

"player controls a character with character progression as part of the gameplay" was I think where my head went

[long argument about whether RPGs inherently need character progression which BESW wins]

BESW

@kviiri Evil Hat has other games, too: Race to Adventure! might be the right sort of thing.

Glazius

9:25 PM

@kviiri One Deck Dungeon. Solitaire or multiplayer, and as a bonus all the characters are ladies.

BESW

[grin] I don't think a game needs any specific quality to be an RPG.

Carcer

let's not have the argument again

(but yes you're right)

BESW

Like most things with social definitions, there are few or no necessary qualities; RPG qualities are more like a tag cloud and the more tags your game hits the more RPG-like it is but there's no solid boundary between "is" and "isn't," and no tags that MUST be included.

Carcer

not even "you play a role"?

BESW

That's sufficiently broad that Monopoly counts.

Carcer

9:28 PM

I argue that an RPG must necessarily have that, not that having it makes something "An RPG"

BESW

You may be right, but that particular formulation isn't very helpful. You can play the "role" of goalie or shortstop or catcher.

Carcer

though the only games I can think of where that concept doesn't apply are just sports

unhelpful, definitely. There is no practical purpose to this pontification

BESW

...It might be a fun exercise to try writing a game that toes the line of multiple common definitions of RPG. Call it "RPG: The Argument-Sparker."

Anyway, yes, this makes it hard to recommend games for Kviiri's colleague.

If we knew what media the niece enjoys, we could infer with more accuracy what she means by "RPG-like."

(With just that to go on, she could mean the (apparently dead due to copyright issues) Final Fantasy Monopoly game.)

Shalvenay

10:48 PM

hey there @ACuriousMind

ACuriousMind

hey there @Shalvenay

Shalvenay

@ACuriousMind how're things going?

ACuriousMind

@Shalvenay Quite alright. Baking cookies, drinking mulled wine - it's Christmas time :)

Anaphory

11:05 PM

@BESW I am – remotely – reminded of Vincent Baker's answer to Epidiah Ravachol's game “What is a Roleplaying game?”. It does not break multiple common definitions, but gives an entirely different one from the original game.

I have played neither.

BESW

The Forge poked these ideas a lot too, but in its uniquely impenetrable jargon.

Anaphory

I'm very much not surprised.

trogdor

11:43 PM

@kviiri wait, has anyone mentioned Munchkin?

If not shame on all of you

Shame! Shame! Shame! Ring ring ring

Sorry I had to do that one XD

BESW

Well, it's not a board game?

trogdor

It kinda is though

It just doesn't focus that much on the board

But you still use the board to mark progress

ACuriousMind

...Munchkin has a board? :P

trogdor

It can at least

You don't absolutely need one to be fair, I suppose that could disqualify it

ACuriousMind

What would you use a board for? It's pretty firmly a card game.

BESW

11:48 PM

It's just a fancy level-tracking prop.

trogdor

But it's literally a game about RPGs that isn't itself technically an RPG

@ACuriousMind yeah it's only for tracking level

ACuriousMind

Ah, heheh, we usually track levels either with a d20 for each player showing the level or by just writing them down

trogdor

But I like that better than using dice or writing it down

nitsua60

@BESW starred mostly for the grin =)

BESW

trogdor

11:49 PM

Yeah it looks like that

BESW

@ACuriousMind Yeah, I always tracked level with d20s until some new players showed up with a fancy board.

trogdor

I like the board

ACuriousMind

I've never seen this board in my life

And I've played a lot of Munchkin :P

trogdor

But like, assuming we all classify it as a card game,.. should that disqualify it outright?

@ACuriousMind perfectly acceptable

XD

ACuriousMind

@trogdor Well...if card games can be "RPG-like board games", then why can't traditional RPGs?

trogdor

11:53 PM

I don't see the comparison there

ACuriousMind

Hm? The original question asked for a "RPG-like board game". If we're allowing non-board games as an answer, what disqualifies any game?

Glazius

It's down to the rules set, I think. If you play Munchkin or One-Deck Dungeon or Cutthroat Caverns nobody's got to come up with the game.

trogdor

I see a lot more similarities between a board game and a card game both either based on or riffing off of RPGs than I do between either of them and an actual rpg

Glazius

It's just you're trying to clear the dungeon/get to level 10 first/get the most money, every time.

The difference between board game and card game is an accident of components.

trogdor

@Glazius exactly the way I see it yeah

nitsua60

11:56 PM

This is exactly how I think of it. There's a vast, continuous, many-dimensional space around the qualities that an activity can have, and there's a small part of that space (say, *Creature*: the *Noun* games) that most of the people familiar with the things in that space say "yeah, that's an RPG" and there's lots of that space (say, the card game Bridge or a game of soccer) where most of the people familiar with the things in that space say "nah, that's not an RPG..."
But there are grey areas and where those are are different for each person, and exploring those areas with supportive-if-dis…

trogdor

They just have different props to support the game and the ruleset

BESW

@nitsua60 I think I first grabbed onto that "cloud of tags" concept when trying to describe Doctor Who and the regenerating character to someone, but it's been very useful in a lot of semantic contexts.

trogdor

I mean, I don't consider football or socceror baseball or hockey RPGs because you aren't roleplaying in those games

nitsua60

@BESW I recently wrote a distinctly un-fun RPG. I think. It's definitely un-fun. Whether it's a game or whether it's really role-playing... I'm not entirely sure on those fronts.

@trogdor Dennis Rodman was, by all reports =)

trogdor

Not to say you couldn't tweak them to do so but that just isn't how people typically play those games

@nitsua60 ok one famous guy was

nitsua60

11:59 PM

"The Worm" was a very different persona than him in real life.

BESW

@nitsua60 Sounds interesting. There are some very worthwhile non-fun RPGs which are definitely RPGs...

nitsua60

@trogdor Larry Bird

trogdor

I'll even assume you aren't just joking

Shalvenay

@nitsua60 how'd you end up with that?

trogdor

One guy :P

@nitsua60 your still under by a few thousand for a tie

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