TRPG General Chat

1:20 AM

5

Q: How can, by Raw, Animal Handling be used with a mount?

My question is: How can you use the animal handling skill in a mount? does it help to controll it, to make it not be afraid of something, etc or is just DM-dependent?

2

Q: Ways to mantain a mount

Mounted combat is really cool part of D&D, but sustaining a mount seems like it would be difficult and costly. What are the rules governing the sustainment of a mount and are there ways for low level/poorer characters to do so? Also, are there alternatives to owning and maintaining a steed that w...

dnd-5e mount

A. B.

1:32 AM

@BESW was talking the other day about community and how the coronavirus had pointed up how people needed to band together and help each other in a crisis. It reminded me of discussions people had in this chat room a while ago about whether that kind of thing, as opposed to the very individualistic stories of one hero or band of heroes conquering their enemies with little input from anyone else, got its fair share of air-time in TTRPGs.

TTRPG adventures are often based on the party going on a journey, out into the mountains or down a dungeon, somewhere far away where they don't know anybody and won't be staying long enough to get to know anybody, which doesn't leave much scope for that. That's the best-known model, anyway.

I was wondering, quite apart from indie systems that are designed around that kind of thing, how often have you seen campaigns/adventures for more major systems that take place in one building or one town, especially the party's home or home town?

BESW

Aye. And it automatically taps into frequently toxic real-world tropes like terra nullius.

A. B.

Hah, I never thought of that, but you're right. There's always a plentiful supply of adventuring land that conveniently isn't anybody's in these things. Which is fun, but you have to remember that there isn't a whole lot of that in the real modern-day world.

BESW

I'm not sure what a "major system" is anymore, but here's two system-agnostic setting guides that make the space you explore more home-like:

Dec 13 '19 at 23:06, by BESW

"space is a sea and you are its sailors." by Tenmi is a system-agnostic setting about Southeast Asian wayfinding translated into the setting of outer space.

Aug 7 '19 at 23:50, by BESW

DREAMSCAPES vol. zero: The Thousand Cousins, a system-agnostic setting about DIASPORA ELVES and reclaiming a home and a heritage that has fallen to environmental disaster. By Carly M. Ho.

Hrmm. That first link is dead. [rummages]

Oooh right. Lampara Games had... stuff happen. [sigh]

Anyway, the basic behind "space is a sea and you are its sailors" was that there is no untouched territory: every island/planet you visit is home to people who already have a connection to you, be it family or friends or trading partners or rivals.

A. B.

Oh, I remember you mentioning "space is a sea". I never did get around to reading it. (Yes, just tracked down the new link, it just needed a search for the title. lampara.itch.io/space-is-a-sea )

That's not a bad idea. The usual habit is to have the adventurers arriving at places that are completely new to them, whether or not they're new to other people, but you can still have exciting things happen in places that are somewhat known. More, in some respects, in fact, because you know the people and know where to look.

You get a very rootless sort of story if it always has to be about the adventurers meeting complete strangers.

I like the sound of the elves thing. Sucker for eco-warrior themes, sucker for elves.

BESW

1:48 AM

The Thousand Cousins does a similar thing: everyone you meet is a relative, however distantly. You may like or hate each other but you can't just pretend they aren't tied to you.

A. B.

Nice. So there's always history of a kind, both yours and theirs and theirs is connected to yours if you dig deep enough.

I enjoy history, both real and fictional (I read all the appendixes to The Lord of the Rings and enjoyed them). I suppose it tends to get left out of RPGs because that's normally something the GM has to make up details of from scratch each time, beyond the fairly vague flavour text in the handbooks, and there's a limit to how much they can be bothered to.

BESW

Yeah. It puts a lot of load on the GM.

But if you've got a world that's built on the idea that the PCs have connections wherever they go and whoever they meet, then the players can take up a lot of that creative burden. The result of that kind of collaborative worldbuilding tends to be much more complex and surprising than anything one person would come up with.

A. B.

It's probably also more interesting if you as players have some input into it yourselves, rather than it just being something the GM made up that is behind glass.

Haha, crossed in the post.

BESW

ARRPG has a character feature you can take which lets you announce a local you have a connection to in every new town you arrive at.

(Anyone can do it, but the feature gives bonus mechanical permission and reward for doing it.)

A. B.

Players contributing to the lore looks like something that takes a bit of know-how to do successfully. We've had questions about that on the site, I think, that have come up with some fairly well-tested approaches.

ARRPG?

BESW

1:55 AM

The Atomic Robo Roleplaying Game.

Oh! You might like to look at Bubblegumshoe. In it, you play teenage sleuths solving mysteries in their town, and worldbuilding is basically making a relationship web. Let me see if I can find one of ours...

Apr 8 '19 at 5:39, by BESW

(Blue is teens, red is adults, dark blue is PCs. Orange is hate, green is like, purple is love. Squares are rich, ovals are poor.)

For the physical locations of the town, you're mostly defining where major NPCs are most likely to be found.

A. B.

Ooh, very nice. is having a Buffy the Vampire Slayer phase at the moment.

BESW

And during play a major resource is the points you've invested in relationships, which you spend to get access to places and skills and information your teen wouldn't normally have access to... and you restore points by roleplaying scenes that reinforce your relationship with the person.

Spend a point to have your elder brother drive you someone, get it back by shooting hoops with him.

Bubblegumshoe and ARRPG are the closest to "major systems" of what I've mentioned; BGS is a drift of Gumshoe (Cthulhu Confidential's engine) and ARRPG is a high-crunch version of Fate Core.

@A.B. BGS doesn't have specifically Buffy options, but the back of the book has several variations inspired by media from Scooby-Doo to Veronica Mars.

There's a couple of different magic-heavy variants.

A. B.

Haha, yes. I wasn't really meaning playing it itself in that system, just that it reminds me of that. Trying to solve mysteries and survive adventures amid a mess of A-might-be-in-love-with-B-but-they're-only-interested-in-C-who-is-D's-deadly-rival-on-the-cheerleading-team.

BESW

@BESW I should've said Trail of Cthulhu instead of Cthulhu Confidential. Technically both are true but Trail is the original and the one people know.

There's a couple of other locality-based games in Evil Hat's "Fate Adventures" series of free setting drifts.

They're as varied as Good Neighbors (humans establishing relations with the fairies in the woods), Ngen Mapu (Indigenous supernatural beings in a modern city), and Morts (keeping your city safe in the aftermath of the zombie apocalypse).

And of course there's Balikbayan.

Dec 22 '20 at 2:10, by BESW

Balikbayan: Returning Home by Jamila R. Nedjadi. In this Cyberpunk-Supernatural game, you are Elementals on the run from the CORP. You have returned home to a city that's fallen apart: can you bring about the rebirth of Machine-Magic before your masters catch up with you? In this daring game that based on the innovative Belonging Outside Belonging system, create an amazing story based on Filipino folklore, myth, and legend.

It's a reverse-diaspora setting, returning to a place you were forced to leave a long time ago, and trying to make it yours again.

A. B.

2:14 AM

I kind of like things where there's somewhat a system about the interpersonal relationships as part of the mechanics, like what you described with Bubblegumshoe and spending points. It makes it a bit easier to get your head round than just "make up whatever looks right freehand, but make sure you get it right". And it also means there's a bit more point to it within the game, rather than just "people may role-play accordingly if they are sufficiently impressed and can be bothered".

BESW

Belonging Outside Belonging isn't a really big game engine yet, but it's kinda like a diceless/GMless version of PbtA so it's familiar to people who've played PbtA games.

A. B.

Oh, I didn't know that. That gives it a bit of a chance - to set against its name.

I mean, that name would sound promising to the already converted, but to anyone else - :-)

BESW

@A.B. Very much so! I'm a big fan of systems that offer structure and form to help us learn how to tell a particular kind of story, and keep us on track with our chosen story form.

@A.B. Yeah. And Balikbayan is actually GM-optional rather than strictly GMless. A lot of BOB games have more overlap with No Dice No Masters.

@A.B. Bubblegumshoe in particular helped me learn how to stay focused on relationship-based conflict resolution. In the past I'd tried to do that with systems like Fate but Fate doesn't give any systemic encouragement to NOT turn the conflict into a fight; it gives us the OPTION not to, but when we were so used to fighting being the default conflict resolution option...

....Golden Sky Stories probably helped, too.

A. B.

("Indigenous" with a capital I always sounds weird to me, used to describe a whole bunch of unrelated groups - as if it was trying to say that "Indigenous" is one ethnic group by itself. But if that's what they're going with.)

BESW

It's used to help force a cognitive distinction that Indigenous people are not the same category as indigenous plants and animals. (cf terra nullius)

A. B.

2:24 AM

That's a fair point, I suppose, if you're using the word "indigenous" in the first place then it's useful to show that the two senses of the word aren't quite the same.

BESW

Here's a discussion by one group about their choice to use that style and this is the book they're using as a reference.

A. B.

I like the basic idea of Fate, you get a certain amount of leeway to muck the story about so long as you pay for it by having it go against you as often as for you. But it's not about conflict or not conflict, obviously.

BESW

It is, of course, not a universally settled matter. But most of the people I interact with prefer it.

A. B.

The Bubblegumshoe system kind of sounds similar only for making allies.

Maybe not. I dunno.

Maybe, now I think about it, actually the only thing they have in common is being points you can gain or spend :-D

BESW

@A.B. I'm a big fan of Fate. It's a great system for forcing a particular kind of narrative pacing, the cycles of crisis (running out of fate points, taking compels) and victory (spending fate points, making declarations).

But Fate doesn't give much thematic or tonal structure, it's entirely reliant on the group to self-calibrate all of that stuff. It falls apart quite quickly if the group doesn't have a good shared sense of the kind of game they're playing.

A. B.

2:28 AM

Either way, sounds a good plan. If you have a system where there are obvious rewards for not fighting, or costs for fighting, that's obviously going to lead to a different kind of story and action.

BESW

And yeah, BGS has a similar kind of rise-and-fall pacing but they're more narrowly focused: you can have crisis in one place while having victory in another.

A. B.

Yes, Fate is in itself from what I've heard a pretty neutral system and leaves the themes for the GM and the adventure to put in.

GURPS similar, D&D actively leaning towards fighting everything unless the GM hauls it back by the scruff of its neck.

BESW

The one thematic thing Fate usually enforces, is that PCs tend to be competent. They succeed more than they fail, and they fail for reasons other than random metanarrative (the roll of the dice).

Bubblegumshoe does an interesting thing with that concept: Gumshoe has automatic success on finding the minimum necessary clues to keep the story moving, and you roll for extra stuff that will make things easier for you.

A. B.

Interesting. That's the kind of detail that's not always obvious unless you've seen the system in action.

Oh, I do remember seeing that mentioned about Gumshoe.

BESW

But BGS adds a conflict system that can escalate to being pretty brutal, especially if it gets physical. Fights that rise above a scuffle are Serious Business, and even losing a verbal fight can result in major embarrassment that's very important to a teenager--you might even lose the ability to walk into the place you got humiliated without spending significant Cool points.

Mini-zine Template Pack by Speak the Sky. Affinity Publisher templates for mini-zines!

Owlbear Rodeo is an attempt to make a web app to run tabletop encounters without the complicated setup process needed for other VTTs.

A. B.

2:42 AM

(Oh, good idea, it's always tricky working out which pages should be printed where to make it all line up right in booklets like that.)

BESW

Speak the Sky also did this:

Feb 23 at 0:40, by BESW

Typeface: Dicier by Speak the Sky. an advanced and accessible analog games typeface

22 hours ago, by BESW

Update: https://speakthesky.itch.io/trifold-template-pack by Speak the Sky. A pack of trifold pamphlet templates for Affinity Publisher, plus supporting files like fonts!

Jan 10 at 1:17, by BESW

One-Page Zine Template by Matthew Gravelyn. Templates for creating one-page zines.

@A.B. I can do it, it's my job to be able to do that sort of thing, but am I gonna look a gift "somebody else did it for me" in the mouth? No I am not.

Shalvenay

3:32 AM

@A.B. I've seen sort of "hub" like structures sort-of-develop in tabletop campaigns before, but where that sort of thing I think gets more interesting is when you start to tilt more towards a Persistent World type of RP environs. sadly, that's a playspace that's been...somewhat abandoned? over the years, which means that nobody's really taken a fresh look at it with what we know now about TTRPGs

A. B.

@Shalvenay I've seen quite a lot of "living world" games online, often as Discord servers. Hunt around on Roll20 and you'll find some, especially under Text Only.

They often tend to veer towards becoming freeform RPs with no rule system at all, but not always.

If that's the same thing you had in mind.

Thinking about more well-known systems, I suppose Vampire: the Masquerade probably tends towards campaigns that stay at home rather than going off on quests as it's more about politics than adventuring. But they're supposed to be more about one-upping each other than any kind of community.

At least, that's the idea in most of the published materials, though the one VtM game (actually a living world server, not a scheduled game) I sat in on for a while was rather the other way.

Hot RPG Questions

4:10 AM

4

Q: Does wearing magic items with armor affect AC negatively?

If I’m wearing a set of full plate armor and I replace the gauntlets with gauntlets of ogre strength do I lose the AC provided by the full plate as I’m no longer wearing a full set of full plate armor?

dnd-5e magic-items armor armor-class

Shalvenay

4:37 AM

@A.B. ah, I hadn't heard much from that sort of space -- my experience with PWs has been in environments that are a "RP in a CRPG" sort of experience instead

@A.B. and yes, there is a lot of drift towards freeform. you need a ton of mechanics support from the PW if you want to countermand that trend

Adeptus

5:25 AM

@BESW How does Affinity compare to InDesign? We were getting amazing educational pricing on Adobe, but that's been scaled back from amazing to a bit better than retail... so we're looking for other options

A. B.

@Shalvenay With regard to "RP in a CRPG", historical footnote, Underlight's still going strong.

BESW

5:53 AM

@Adeptus Aside from some accessibility features for PDF exporting, there’s nothing I’ve ever done with InDesign that I can’t do in Affinity Publisher/Designer/Photo. There are some things which make workflow faster, like stacking master pages; and some that are slower, like an absence of GREP.

It’s generally made me very happy. It’s cheap, it’s fast, it’s powerful. I strongly recommend getting all three programs because they complement each other really well. You can actually use almost all the Designer and Photo tools INSIDE Publisher, without switch programs, provided you’ve got them installed on the system together. It’s magical.

And they keep adding new features; just last month they added things like pass-through PDF embedding, package exporting, and data merges!

Oh, and all three programs are on sale right now.

Adeptus

I think I saw that they can open InDesign & Photoshop files?

BESW

Yes, though it’s not perfect because Adobe’s stingy about its proprietary formats.

But a couple months ago I was hired to make web-friendly PDFs of magazines I’d made in InDesign years ago, and I did it in Affinity Publisher with minimal headache. I probably would’ve had at least as much trouble using InDesign because the files were ten years out of date.

And where I didn’t have the original InDesign files, I imported the print-ready PDFs and Affinity was very good about turning them into editable Publisher documents.

(Until very recently, Serif hadn’t cracked the indesign file type and so the workaround was to export an InDesign-editable PDF of the file and import that into Publisher.)

So long as you’ve got the linked fonts and images available, importing an Adobe file will get you something that LOOKS right but its internal structure (text variables, automatically generated page numbers and TOC, etc) may need to be rebuilt with Affinity tools.

Serif also has a two-week money-back guarantee so you can buy it, try it, and then get your money back if it’s not working out.

There’s also some very good documentation, both text and video. And if they shipped their beautiful hardcover guides to Guam I would be ALL OVER those things.

The biggest problem I’ve found so far is that some clients expect Adobe files and Affinity can’t export as Adobe files. But most of my clients are okay with PDFs, and if they insist on InDesign then I get to charge ‘em stress pay.

I also miss InDesign’s book feature? But that’s kinda niche and I feel like Publisher has features that compensate which I just don’t fully understand yet.

Adeptus

6:19 AM

@BESW Book feature?

BESW

With InDesign, I could have each section of a larger work (each chapter of a novel, each article spread in a magazine) be its own document, and use the book feature to create a meta-document which stitched them together and treated them as a single item with continuous page numbers, etc.

Hot RPG Questions

8:37 AM

1

Q: How do Shadowdancer's Hide in Plain Sight, Hellcat Stealth, and enemies' darkvision interact?

I recently had a game where there was some uncertainty, so I'm here to ask you how this interaction works. I have a character, a Shadowdancer. This character has also got the Hellcat Stealth feat. The character sneaks in pure darkness, no light at all, on an enemy with Darkvision. There is no cov...

pathfinder-1e feats class-feature vision-and-light stealth

AncientSwordRage

9:56 AM

@BESW have you ever seen Red Dwarf? I was trying to think of what system would play like the TV show, but the only one that feels appropriate is Fate

trogdor

he's definitely watched at least a little of it

AncientSwordRage

I'm thinking of the vindaloo monster being weak to lager, or the potato virus eating their clothes

AncientSwordRage

10:11 AM

makes me think of things working in a much more narrative sense than a logical sense

trogdor

seems fair

they definitely make up a lot on the fly to fit the narrative

XD

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