@trogdor Well, there is a fair bit haha. I decided that instead of letting the wind completely destroy my umbrella, I'd just walk to the coffee shop without it
Yeah... I'm almost proud of NQ because the damage was minimal, considered the scale of the storm, and only one person died... while no less tragic... it was his own fault.
He brought the generator into his house and suffocated on the lack of oxygen.
Either way, the rain we're getting now is welcome - we've been on water restrictions for near 10 years, be cause they decided to rebuild the dam, and as soon as they broke down the wall, we got hit with torrential rain, then went on a 10- year "drought" haha
@KorvinStarmast over here....mostly keeping one eye out for DW vets among the chatizens here while avoiding the cold. (also hoping to catch up to nits in the near future, but he seems to be freaky-busy atm)
The only reason I can come up with to worry when a character has this odd hobby is chekhov's gun.
My bad. Fifth spell level not fifth character level.
So he's one or two levels from being able to do so.
@Shalvenay: One of my friends is gathering up the pieces for one of my stupidly overpowered devices and the DM doesn't suspect a thing yet. I think he's two or three character levels away right now.
Ah. Yeah, it's not like truesight is particularly OP if you're spending a high-level slot to do it (and a costly component worth 25 gp that's consumed per each casting)
No game is completely coherent from a RAW perspective; RAW is a literalist lens that doesn't accommodate the fact that all rules are leaky abstractions and that the unpredictability of play means the leaks can't all be anticipated beforehand.
But also, specifically for World of Darkness, I don't know about more recent iterations but that system was notoriously incoherent from its inception; the designers were literally on drugs and just writing whatever seemed cool to them.
Long-time WoD players will be familiar with an approach to the system of never expecting the rules to fit together well. In order to play the game, each table of players had to fill in the gaps themselves. RAW is not a useful lens for that paradigm.
@KieranMullen I think it's useful to remember that the RAW lens was not developed as a play aid. It was developed as a talking-about-games aid. It defines the common ground shared by disparate groups of people who aren't playing together but want to talk about their games to each other.
(This is an opinion question so I thought it inappropriate for the SE itself).
I am trying to put together a Demon The Descent game and while I am struggling to absorb all the rules, I thought that knowing them was at least worthwhile....
I don't know. I have very little direct personal experience with any White Wolf products; I'm just conveying the general impressions I've gotten from experts, and my own limited exposure to Mage and Vampire (not sure which versions).
Sure! knowing the rules can be very helpful.
But the question you're referring to isn't "what are the rules?"
It's easier to make text-analysis questions and answers that fit the broader Stack Exchange structure, so they tend to be more common and more visible.
But the best answers are "I did this and it had this effect and here's why I think that's useful to your situation."
I think it's also useful, when studying rules texts, to remember that game designers --specially for big franchises-- aren't usually spending a lot of time picking the exact right words and phrasings to accommodate edge cases, or looking up all the previous existing material and checking how their new material interacts with it.
A lot of them are copy writers who get paid by the word to write material for a system they didn't create.
I come from a more mathematical background so I tend to think in terms of rules and consistency. CoD is interesting to me in that it tries to reward interesting narrative choices rather than tactical (killing and looting).
White Wolf never really caught my attention in part because I feel like it relies TOO much on trusting the Storyteller to "make" the game work.
ttfn
@KieranMullen You might be interested in games where rules and narrative are more evenly married, compared to games which seem to sacrifice one for the other.
I like it how many games match their RAW with generous exposition of the designer intent, it allows one to interpret and tweak rules much better than simply facing the huge monolith of rules alone.
@kviiri Yup, I still can't recommend Nightmares of Mine highly enough for anybody interested in... ANY kind of genre-specific story curation, but of course especially for horror.
(My copy is the re-published version in GURPS Horror Third Edition that I got used from Powell's, because the original is insanely expensive when you can find it at all.)
"You can't get blood from a stone," the mage said.
"Can too," the barbarian thought.
It just depended on how hard he hit someone with it.
(I have a lot of trouble with stories that don't somehow show an understanding of how landscape and architecture interact with how people behave and the stories they tell.)
The sense of environment's influence on story and motive and character is one of the things I really like about Manly Wade Wellman and Ben Aaronovitch.
Fortifications, too, require some attention to get right. I've played both games where fortifications were centuries ahead of the threats they were facing (Star forts versus catapults) and vice versa (everyone has straight walls to defend against cannon!)
@BESW By the short sample I've read of his works, he does have a knack for vivid description
If you've read any of Aaronovitch's "Peter Grant" novels, or Allingham's "Albert Campion" novels, you'll be struck by how they introduce a new setting by explaining how the environment --landscape, architecture, history-- informs who the people are and what they value.
Or AJ Hall's opening passage from Lust Over Pendle:
> Outside the rain beat in horizontal brush strokes across the shrubbery. The wind, getting in on the act, wuthered enthusiastically away in the chimneybreast. The square-built house of smoke-blackened stone on the edge of Roughlee-in-Pendle glared across the valley at the Hill, barely visible today beneath its shrouding of low cloud. It was a staring match that had been going on for a hundred and fifty years. So far, it was still a no-score draw. The house had been built by a race that had prized above all else the ability to stand upright and glare back at whatever opposed you for however…
I've got a Bubblegumshoe game that deals with some pretty significant issues of prejudice and bigotry, and I deliberately set it in a town that's humid, flat, and swampy, in a particularly hot summer, with older high-economy architecture and newer low-economy architecture mashed up together.
It's a place where poor people who grow up there don't stay if they have a way to leave, but rich older people come there to retire.
The environment is oppressive and impossible to ignore. It's buggy and moist. The landscape offers no high ground. The water table is so high that any hole you dig will flood immediately.
This offers interesting metaphors for elements of social inequality, but it also informs how people think and behave. Physical labor is even more burdensome and so even less desirable for anyone who can afford to hire someone else to perform it. People come because it's a warm escape; people leave because it's an obnoxious morass. There's no hiding behind a hill or in a basement, everything is out in the open for all to see.
For an RPG, I find that microsocieties are more useful to focus on.
Unless your campaign lasts for at least a year, grand sprawling nationstate worldbuilding is usually going to be indistinguishable from a bunch of okapi butts, and putting so much energy into the big picture usually leaves the local details --which are what the players will be directly interacting with!-- sparse and generic.
It's worth mentioning, though, that my Bubblegumshoe campaign is set in the contemporary United States in a lightly fictionalized version of a real town.
So the broader worldbuilding work was already done by reality.
We literally opened a private Google Maps document and wrote our fictionalizing changes over the top of an actual satellite map of the real town.
And the landscape/environment influences on the local people is an exaggeration of observed traits during the four years I lived there.
@kviiri it's a principle I've started applying to my specfic RPG worldbuilding too: never change something from reality unless the worldbuilding change creates a specific desired change in the gameplay experience.
The more world alterations I ask the players to keep in their heads, the harder it is for them to focus on whatever we're doing IN the world, so the stories get simpler as the worlds get more complex.
@kviiri Absolutely. It's one reason I go for simpler systems too.
The more the system is designed to remind us what we're there to do, the more we can focus on just doing it instead of turning the game into a negotiation with the rules.
(That's why I can't GM for PbtA games; all the GM mechanics are reminding me to do what I'd do anyway so they just make it take longer and occupy brainspace without benefit.)
@JohnP Not hard to run in 5e. I've been running the DL campaign in 5e locally and do all my conversion on the fly. The overwhelming amount of magic itemry given away in that era's modules is the only thing that needs too much thought, IME.
Basically I just run it as written. When I hit a statblock I take the 1e AC subtracted from 20 to be the 5e AC.
I read HD as CR and eyeball hit bonuses from there. (Jotting it down in the module.)
And then I give out waaaay less treasure than indicated.
HPs are often rather low so those I either take a quick peek at the MM or just eyeball an adjustment based on (a) what level of challenge I believe it was written for the original party and (b) how much damage the 5e party's generally putting out.
```FYI, the question was put on hold because you didn't cite which game you were playing. Add it to the tags, and we should be able to re-open it for more input``` What is this, another war on the agnostics?
This question results from a small debate I had last weekand with our gamemaster during a session on cthulhu.
A player wanted to check if an npc is alive or not. The players character had but zero points in medicine. Players argued, that they would not check anything complicated, just check his ...
I find it so ironic that I'm usually the one accused of being a slavish rollplayer, but end up defending roleplaying and otherwise non-mechanics-centric questions on a roleplaying stack.
And irrelevant when discussing whether a ssystem is necessary. Many systems mechanize roleplay to the point that there is no difference. The fact is, the person is clearly playing a particular game, knowing what that game is will only help to give context to how to answer their question.
I'm honestly unclear where this idea that keeping the game you are playing secret somehow helps the question at all comes from.
@Rubiksmoose Could make sense if an issue happens in a specific game, but the asker wants to know how to address similar issues for future games in other systems
It's not that keeping it secret per se helps. But some people seem to miss the forest behind the tree, focusing on the game mechanics when the solution lies in the meta/roleplaying/player-social plane, for example.
Dungeon World's mechanics exist to create a bombastic narrative of powerful, capable heroes. Fate's mechanics exist to create dramatic stories about proactive, competent characters. Golden Sky Stories exists to create stories about cute animals helping each other wholesomely. Katanas & Trenchcoats exists to create a 90s schlock action film parody setting where absolutely everyone is an edgy badass with a tragic backstory and ancient weapon.
@Rubiksmoose Gotcha. (Though I suppose it ended up being a predicate adjective missing, not a verb. I was imagining gerunds, like "I'm honestly wondering...")
All of these are completely different stories, and not by coincidence—the game is deliberately aiming to make those kinds of stories naturally unfold as part of simply playing the game.
Paranoia, Gumshoe and Bubblegumshoe, D&D, also create narratives entirely unlike these.
GURPS doesn't consciously try to create any specific narrative... but it's still creating certain kinds of narratives, and not others, because of its mechanics. You can't do Katanas & Trenchcoats stories in GURPS, and if you did, they would feel completely different to those told by using K&T.
Our system gives us a narrative bedrock. It also gives us, as players and GMs, expectations about what the narrative is like, what can/should be possible or difficult, what kind of stories and content and scenes we should be looking forward to, what kinds of things are/aren't conflict and what is/isn't a valid resolution to those conflicts.
It also tells us what the mechanics expect of us, where the system will help us or resist us or break down completely. Golden Sky Stories breaks down if you want to start a sword fight because it is simply not about that. Katanas & Trenchcoats breaks down if you simply want to open a bakery and help people by baking cakes because it is not about that.
@vicky_molokh So there is no "war on the agnostics", there is just us requiring information to answer the question. When someone's asking about a narrative experience, we need to know: "what game's narrative experience?". We know the question's not asking about how the mechanics work. But there is no universal narrative that exists in a void.
@nitsua60 I haven't had the pleasure of seeing that yet.
@adonies NP. Hope it helps--I'm generally pingable if you want to chat more about it.
@doppelgreener I'd say anyone who already really likes the Highlander films should give it a try. In a vacuum, though, not that good. There's too much good TV out there for me to recommend it standing on its own, that is.
("The Average Role-Playing Game Story" is of course unavailable for our examination because it is kept locked up in a hermetically sealed vault in Geneva, along with its participants The Average GM and The Average Playing Group.)
@vicky_molokh fwiw I didn't take you to be going dramatic :) Your good! We have discussions of varying levels of intensity here all the time. As long as everyone keeps a coolish head and a civil tongue and is reasonable we all stay friendly.
Second, I'm just getting an impression from time to time, a question gets under fire because it dares to ask about the 'roleplaying' side and not the 'game' side, or describes a problem occurring across multiple systems but gets closed with 'no, pick a system first' comments.
I find it extra bizarre that a question can be understood, answered, get a lot of support for being a good one, and then the question gets closed as 'not being phrased in a way that is answerable'. That seems contradictory to me.
@vicky_molokh I definitely understand where that sentiment is coming from, but I think there's a base assumption taking place by you (and a lot of people, honestly) that Roleplaying and Narrative and Storytelling exist as some kind of platonic ideal separate from the games we choose to play. And there's a degree of truth to that sentiment, but not enough that we think questions about them can be complete if they're system-agnostic.
@vicky_molokh This is not the impression that I get. And, as someone frequently on the side of demanding a system, I can tell you that is not my motivation.
Remember that we know the Stack does better when people are asking about problems they actually have. So if you're having a system-agnostic problem about player-character skill mismatches (not that I can wrap my head around what that'd look like) you describe the problem and ask the question. But the question in... question clearly doesn't stem from a system-agnostic place. They were playing *a* game and had a problem, (we can tell the game has a Medicine skill and 100-pt scales). Answers can only be improved if the question's transparent about what game.
A spectrum doesn't need to be binary to be discussable separately. The spectrum from red to blue is gradual, yet we can talk about blue paints and red paints.
I may have been hasty with assuming system-agnostic (the tag), but the way the question was phrased, it seemed like any system mentions were purely for an example.
@vicky_molokh There is no meaningful difference between a mechanical and a roleplaying question as far as the needs of the Stack system are concerned. A system's mechanics are inherently tied to assumptions and a narrative the system drives and they do so through mechanics and other systems. Narrative gameplay emerges based off of the environment created by a game.
Otherwise, if the question is intended as system-agnostic, and contains justification for that tag (e.g. it's an issue that has occurred across multiple systems) then it can be well-received
@vicky_molokh Perhaps an overlooked consideration: it does seem like the question is asking about some kind of Cthulhu game; is there enough context that we can correctly deduce which one it is? Both Call of Cthulhu and Trail of Cthulhu are games I know of, are they mechanically distinct enough that we can't pin it down?
Just to clarify, is the player threatening out of game to kill all the PC's? Or the players themselves? There is a large and disturbing difference there. — JohnP14 secs ago
@vicky_molokh I can give you a very specific example for this particular question. There is a system called End of the World in which you play yourself in an apocalyspe situation. In this system your character is assumed to have all of your knowledge and skills. Does your answer apply to that system the same that it does to D&D or Pathfinder or GURPS?
The mistake here is in assuming "narrative" and "mechanics" exist separately, and therefore "roleplaying" or "narrative" exist separately from needing to specify a system.
I will say, at least for this question, "System Agnostic" would be inappropriate: I already know for a fact that games Powered By the Apocalypse would handle this question very differently than D&D would, and I think any of the Cthulhu games handle this question a third way.
"How do I conduct a fun stealth infiltration story for my group?" has a different answer depending on whether you're playing Honey Heist, Fiasco, Fate, D&D, etc -- because we need to tell you how to use the game to do that. "But I'm only asking about narrative" doesn't make that any less true.
@MikeQ It's funny, though... I look at most of those top-voted questions now and think "this would still allow for the great answers we see and might get system-specific answers if it mentioned the system being played." Because spot-checking a lot of those seem like they really did stem from a particular game (or collection of games) being played.
In D&D, for example, you'd simply make a medicine check, and the modifiers applied to the roll would affect the narrative. You wouldn't block someone from trying to check for a pulse just because they have a -2 modifier; you'd let them make the roll, and if they rolled badly, you'd describe the consequences.
There'd be little question about whether they're allowed to "check for a pulse" or not. There would only be the question of whether they deduce the correct information from doing so.
"How can I handle an intimidating character?" has a different answer whether you're in D&D (where it causes a lot of trouble which should be avoided) or in Fate (where it causes a lot of trouble which is delicious) or in Golden Sky Stories (where you are playing the game wrong) or in K&T (where we rub our hands and tell you to strap yourself in for how to live out this badass role)
@Xirema Step 1 in my adjudication-resolution flowchart is determining whether the proposed action is (a) trivial requiring no roll or (b) impossible allowing no roll.
Some tables will ask why the character does so (if the character is not learned in medicine; especially in a medieval-stylr setting where that knowledge is not commonplace)
All of those are roleplaying/narrative answers to a roleplaying/narrative question. Note all of them depend on the system, because the system matters in handling the roleplaying and the narrative because of the narrative constraints the system creates.
Consider: if all systems produced identical stories such that system never mattered for the story, why the heck does anyone bother to create systems for specialised kinds of narratives?
3
If every system could tell the same story the same way, why would I ever need Gumshoe? Surely Werewolf: the Foresaken could handle a hard-boiled detective story exactly the same way. Why would I play Honey Heist? Surely Cthulhu Dark is equally good for telling the same story about a bunch of dumb bears breaking into HoneyCon to steal honey. (It's even about as lightweight!)
If someone with a -2 Medicine score asked to perform a tracheotomy on a character, I'd probably inform them that no possible roll would be good enough to succeed.
Why would I bother picking up Lasers & Feelings or Shadowrun for a sci-fi game? Surely Great Ork Gods is equally good for telling sci-fi stories about high-flying insterstellar adventurers and low-down hackers.
@Xirema Incredibly sad. I actually mailed him a long time ago and got his autograph. I really need to find where I put it. Got a couple of the other MASH folks as well.
I probably won't be able to participate in the discussion at full speed, but I suppose a major difference in views on the division depends on whether one sees rules as supposed to be subservient to logic ('If someone with a -2 Medicine score asked to perform a tracheotomy on a character, I'd probably inform them that no possible roll would be good enough to succeed.'), or to overrule logic ('drowning someone brings HP to zero; use it for resurrection!').
The question about intimidation was asked with the expectation that logic should trump the letter of the rules.
Well, if you're playing Gumshoe for a start, that tells us you're not in a story where there's resurrection available. When people die, they're just gone, therefore we expect people -- especially the main characters -- not to die, and for dying to be an enormous thing and not a mere inconvenience.
@vicky_molokh I definitely have opinions about how I'd rule on those kinds of questions, but I also know that different games have different rules about how much logic should trump rules.
Settings also don't get run independently of games. There was a D20 Stargate game. It sucked at telling Stargate stories, because it focused on systemic murder as a resolution to all problems, which is not how Stargate works. Fate rules at telling Stargate stories because it lets us solve problems by smack-talking the evil magic pharaoh and by kicking his gadget.
If we're going to tell you how to navigate a Stargate situation concretely, it matters whether you're using the d20 Stargate system or the Fate system, because what can possibly happen and what is/isn't effective as choices is completely different between them. Smack-talking the Space Pharaoh does not work in d20 Stargate.
My favorite example: You're riding in a taxi, the driver suddenly takes you down a dead-end alley, and a black van pulls out and boxes you in. Some armed goons get out of the van. What happens next?
Well, if this is a John Woo movie, you fight the goons and escape. If it's The Godfather, you're pretty much just dead.
And if it's a Saturday morning cartoon, the armed goons fire for about 3 minutes. You get out, chug a nearby bottle, and water sprays from the various holes in your body.
If it's a spy flick you expect to be taken to the evil overlord's HQ and be given food, water, a comfortable bed, a length villain monologue, and ample time and resources with which to escape and stop their plan.
Seems to be a conflation of genre, system, and relative power levels.
And an assumption that the system is being used in a way that does or doesn't clash with the genre, instead of being adjusted by optional and houserules to fit.
But GMs can flip the game's switches and toggles to get the result that is appropriate. You can have GURPS Horror, you can have FATE Horror, you can have GURPS Espionage, you can have FATE Espionage etc.
Relative power levels are also genre convention. Again, The Godfather. You're not getting ambushed and shot 50 times because you have fewer hit points than the goons. You're getting killed because someone got the upper hand over you politically.
@MarkWells I beg to differ: see Begotten (WARNING: The film is immenseley graphic and even reading the plot synopsis may be troubling to some). The characters are literally gods and forces of nature.
@MarkWells Classic horror, yes, because it typically dealt with mundane/natural vs supernatural. Although AFAIK horror can be generalized such that the threat/problem is more powerful than the protagonist(s).
@vicky_molokh That's true, I think. Often I'll have logic overrule the dice (no attempt at tracheotomy would work) and other times dice'll overrule my pre-logic (oh, you succeeded at a tracheotomy. They must be easier than I thought for some reason, and let's think about the consequences of that.) I can't claim to be rationally systematic about when I apply either approach.
Except maybe as arises from some sense I have from reading the table as to whether the tracheotomy minigame is something that'll be a fun three minutes or not.
@MikeQ If only time was not such a tight resource, I might even volunteer!
I find Mouse Guard more awesome than Torchbearer, probably because I have enough other games scratching my fantasy-itches.
Also, I think Mouse Guard is able to shine in a one-shot. Torchbearer can show some things in a one-of, but the interplay between adventure, camp, and town needs more than one session, I found out.
