"Announcing Once More into the Void" press release. ONCE MORE INTO THE VOID is inspired by the TV show Star Trek: Picard, and the video game Mass Effect 2. One of the players is a Captain who must make amends, face the consequences of the past, and try to bring back together their old crew. Reminisce about the past, fall in love, get in messy entanglements, see if you can survive the final mission!
sententiae antiquae wrote a twitter thread of "a list of reasons why Campbell's monomyth is problematic."
May The 4th Sale: Space Between Stars by Viditya Voleti is 40% off until Friday. Space Between Stars is a collaborative storytelling roleplaying game about characters who are the crew of a spaceship exploring an unstable universe, dealing with their own internal issues and growing together through shared experiences, one job at a time.
May The 4th Sale: galactic 2e by riley rethal is 20% off until tomorrow. a game of rebellion, relationships, and war among the stars.
Shenanigans by Gabriel Caetano. A minimalist system for resolving challenges in any setting. Made for Tech Jam.
Kickstarter: A Howl by Native Realities. A Comics Collection of Wolves, Werewolves, and Rougarou. (not a TRPG thing but includes Indigenous TRPG creators)
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Caution: there's a "cinematic game system" on Kickstarter which proudly admits to dramatically underpaying its writers and making it a stretch goal to approach a reasonable baseline pay rate.
Re: underpaying TRPG writers: I just put this together: The Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America counts TRPG writing when considering an author's membership... if the writing earned at least 8 cents per word. So that's an absolute minimum baseline for a professional pay grade if you're looking for one, and paying less than that is actively hurting the industry's health by barring writers from one of the most influential professional writers' groups in the world.
Some magical items, such as spell scrolls, work only if a given spell is on the caster's spell list. For example, the description of a spell scroll states:
A spell scroll bears the words of a single spell, written in a mystical cipher. If the spell is on your class’s spell list, you can read the...
I think I shared a picture of my latest cross-stitch in here at one point. A bunny pillow. I like the repetitiveness and how if I work hard it comes out pretty.
Snagit's image editor. Snagit itself is supposed to be for taking screenshots, and it's good at that, but its image editor for those screenshots is magnificent.
I actually only tried out layers for the first time a few years ago when I switched to Linux which came with GIMP. Before that I just had Paint and an old free edition of Paint Shop Pro, which didn't have them.
I still don't actually use them all that much but when there's something they're useful for, they ARE useful.
Actually colouring something in transparently, for one thing.
And I think the way I'd do it, is to basically go "when magic is around, the genre rules change." So instead of taking away things that tech can do in an average Star Trek episode, I'd add, say, things that you can do in Star Wars.
Or the things that Star Trek only allows by going "handwave nanotech mumblejumbo holodeck technojargon" and then never do it again after that episode.
But since Star Trek is... well, it doesn't have rules about what can't be done, it justifies whatever the episode needs and then forgets it later...
I'd probably instead go with "magic lets you replace the cost with risk of discovery." Because usually there's a cost.
Geordi's visor can do anything but it'll give him a migraine or he won't be able to also see; the Voyager can get home but it will take decades; Discovery can go anywhere instantly but it's killing the galaxy; etc.
Often on a per-episode basis the cost is either "time" or "limited resource," which magic would let you replace with the cost "risking someone noticing that you're magical."
(Retcon: Scotty was a magic-user, which is why he could always cut the cost of repairs so drastically.)
Yeah, that's a good down-to-earth handwave, but still doesn't exactly explain things like the time in Star Trek III that he automated the Enterprise so only the main characters were needed to fly her and she could even do rudimentary battle maneuvers.
@BESW As a whole, I think it’s interesting and a good perspective of the role of magic in the story, not just the world; although I’m still not sure what I want to do (blame the utter lack of free time between the end of April and the first week of June), I’m leaning more and more towards either “magic changes the rules of how X works” or “no magic at all”
It would explain a lot if the bio-neural part of those things was based on an attempt by Starfleet to use a biological construct to harness magical power. At the very least it would explain the ship's infinite supply of shuttles.
(Basically Starfleet went "magic is controlled by brains, can we make something that's enough like a brain that it controls magic?")
Bonus points for the potential of the ship developing sapience and becoming a character.
@BESW Hmmm.... pros: I get to deal with identity issues (for mages and sentient ships), politics in science, and I get to draw sapient ships! Cons: none. I think I might go with that idea!!
(There are honestly prob cons, I just can’t think of many)
Now I'm imagining that magicians assigned to the ship get a big shock because the ship is all "You're magic? I'm magic! Samesies!" and then helps them use their magic to help out without getting caught.
Any ideas on how to make this question stackable? rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/184738/… I'm at the point where I feel that it is so stackable that I don't see the issues raised - to me, they, unfortunately, sound like misunderstanding the question.
@Akixkisu Regarding the question, I think it's what the people in the comments said - it is too vague. I don't have a clue how to answer it myself. All I can really make of it is "We left a thing accessible that shouldn't be. What's a convincing way to take the thing out of play - knowing nothing about what the thing is, whether people, money, goodwill or rocks, nor whether it's indoors or outdoors, nor whether the island is in the Stone Age or on an alien planet in the year 4000?"
But no, there is no need for a "convincig way to take things out of play" it is not what I'm looking for. It is very specific about how to fix broken gating under set circumstances.
@A.B. that could be an answer if the concept works.
Well, if you want specific details, I don't know either, because I can't tell you what would successfully get in the way not knowing whether your party are wizards or what.
Literally all I know is "arctic island".
Also, > But no, there is no need for a "convincig way to take things out of play" it is not what I'm looking for. It is very specific about how to fix broken gating under set circumstances. In the question: > we thought about introducing an event that seals off the resources that we shouldn't have been able to access in the first place.
The question appears to be asking exactly that. If you meant something else the question needs to be reworded.
Well, "add a thing that gets in the way" is my answer, then, at the same level of specific-ness as your question. What kind of thing, I could not say, without knowing anything about the circumstances.
I'm trying but this is a bit impossible. You know the facts about all this, the people trying to answer don't. I can see why it would be good to make it as broad as possible, that way the answers will be useful to more people, but I think this is too broad to work.
@BESW Neither do I.
At any rate, I think you should also take out the "feeling cheap" part, as it seems to be causing confusion. You've already got the much more specific "without breaking immersion or having to backtrack, handwave it, or redo any sessions", it looks like you'll do better to leave it at just that.
"Nuclear-powered superlizard gets in the way" is a concept, while "Godzilla takes a nap in your resource spot" is a concrete solution. But I think you're using "conceptual level" to mean a table-level mechanical structure that you can add to your game's toolkit for solving this and future similar problems. So "use the Atomic Robo 'brainstorm' mechanic" is a concept, but... so is "nuclear-powered superlizard gets in the way" if you take it as a recurring game design principle.
Do you want a table of obstacles that would be plausible to add to any scenario? Is that a "conceptual level solution"?
You're using a compound phrase to mean a very specific thing that I'm guessing comes from some field of expertise you're familiar with (a google search suggests it's common in data abstraction).
Good guess BESW, it didn't even occur to me that the words "concept level" referred to game mechanics, although that could just be ignorance of RPG detail.
It's an especially difficult term to decode because you're saying you don't want to break immersion, but you're asking for table-level mechanics rather than narrative-level story elements.
So you're asking for mechanics that don't break immersion? Which is a tall order at the best of times but you also don't tell us what qualifies as immersion-breaking for your table.
eg, I think the 'brainstorming' mechanic is great and qualifies as not immersion-breaking because it's asking players to use their character's stats and abilities to create new truths about the world.
But I've talked with people who think it's inherently immersion-destroying because it's asking players, not GMs, to create new truths about the world.
[grin] I love it as a GM when I can throw some weird problem or situation onto the table and then turn to the players and go "explain that, because I can't."
Atomic Robo is built around exactly that kind of story, and its mechanics do a good job encouraging and supporting those narrative beats.
@Akixkisu I think you're the first person who's said "can't break immersion" to me and then thought those mechanics were a good fit for their game.
Atomic Robo is a long-running comic series about a sapient robot and his friends and co-workers, who use combinations of science, combat, and intrigue to keep the world safe from Weird Science Stuff.
Atomic Robo: The Roleplaying Game by Evil Hat is the franchise-licensed TRPG based on the comics. It uses an expanded and complexified variation of Fate Core.
Brainstorming is one of the sub-mechanics added to Fate Core for ARRPG, and Mission Briefing is a sub-mechanic added in the expansion book Atomic Robo RPG: Majestic 12.
For example, I presented the party with a problem: an extrasolar object the size of the moon was hurtling toward Earth, emitting strange signals. They decided that the best thing to do was go into space and land on the moon and see what's up with it. But they didn't have a spaceship which could reach it safely and in time.
So the first part of the campaign was a series of adventures, each dedicated to getting something they needed for the spaceship: super-powerful heat shield material from a hell dimension, so they could fly closer to the sun; a nuclear goldfish to power their engines; the preserved brain of Charles Babbage to serve as the ship's computer; and so on.
Each adventure was built around meeting one of the "costs" of the invention (spaceship), and it had many costs because it had to be so awesome.
And one of the costs was unwanted attention from various other groups. A tech mogul who wanted to suppress the things we'd find on the rogue moon; a cult that believed the moon was a herald of apocalypse.
So that's where our antagonists came in; the thing we were doing defined the "enemies" that we'd have to get around in order to succeed.
Yeah, in the end one of the downfalls of the campaign was its open-endedness. We didn't calibrate regularly enough and each person's sense of what the world was like drifted away from each others' until it started to stretch too thin.
Aye, that seems to be a very common problem, especially in games that are GMless or have rotating GMs or otherwise distribute worldbuilding to the entire group.
I was the lead GM of that campaign, which meant that I introduced the initial problem and facilitated setting up the making-a-ship invention and its requirements and costs. Then I could hand off GMing to whichever player had a cool idea for how to address a requirement or cost that week and wanted to run it.
It is so easy to think about something in your framework and have it make sense when you misunderstand where someone is going with it in their framework.
I got this particular template from an artist on Deviantart who used it to collect their thoughts and ideas for a project, or to reflect on their artistic style as a whole.
I should probably make some influence maps for some of my nascent game systems, to try and nail 'em down a bit more.
It probably has to do something with that I use several organising tools for work, and my brain then ties them to work, which doesn't look appetising when I want to be in my free time headspace.
> Yeah, in the end one of the downfalls of the campaign was its open-endedness. We didn't calibrate regularly enough and each person's sense of what the world was like drifted away from each others' until it started to stretch too thin.
Could you tell me anything at all about how you went about "calibrating", as you put it (if I'm not interrupting)?
I often feel in role-playing games as if I've lost track of what the GM and the other players think the world is supposed to be like, so some tips might be useful.
...OK, I looked at the "influence map", but I'm none the wiser :-D Maybe I should try writing down all the various groups and adversaries that are going on in the Vampire: the Masquerade game I'm currently in, and see if that helps.
I didn't realise at first that the things you'd posted after that did relate to that. Reading in a hurry.
@A.B. VtM comes somewhat pre-calibrated thanks to having lore pre-written. There is still some uncertainty due to some authors not checking with each other and producing contradictory descriptions. And because some important questions are undefined. But at least it offers some kind of unified baseline in the lore sections of the books. The core and the Guides are probably the best places to start, as everything else will be much more situational.
Except that it's never that simple, is it? At least, it never has been any time I've tried the "new in town" idea in any game. I've got to make the circumstances of how I got there fit the context of a lot of things I don't know.
For a typical Camarilla game, I'd expect entering a new PC into a living world to involve: - Agreeing with the GM on some sort of off-screen NPC contact vouching for the PC; - PC coming to the Elysium to introduce itself to the Prince (if there is one); - Start finding people to talk to and asking how's life, what are the news &c.
That makes good sense. I kind of already know all that, but it sounds much more viable when you write it out like that. (It's Anarch, but not in a way that seems to make a lot of difference).
@BESW I'm probably being ignorant, and I fully agree that monomyth is not a complete view on stories, but it always seems to me that it's the use of the monomyth that is problematic. Like saying that the problem with carpenters hammering in screws, is with the hammer. Yes, there's too many hammers and it's too easy to pick one up. In that sense it's missing it's robot head,
but otherwise I'm not seeing the core issue with the monomyth
@A.B. You're always welcome, and I appreciate your candour.
I made the mistake of making him a newly turned vampire and he doesn't know what happened to his sire. I'd seen somebody else do it and I thought it was clever at the time.
Malkavian (the variant kind). Dominate, Auspex and Obfuscate.
I am playing V20, but I skipped the Archetypes because they were doing my head in and nobody said anything.
So sireless. Which probably is a non-issue in Anarch space.
Figuring out what's up in the town, and finding whom to ally with (or whose protection to seek) for pragmatic reasons seem like . . . well, maybe not good, but certainly playable and scene-generating, ways to start out.
I don't know about V20 but in old VtM and VtR the books I've seen it recommends the story teller introduce you to the world by roleplaying how you became a vampire
Hah, I do keep reminding myself of that. Either as an excuse for his sire doing something that didn't make sense, or even for what he said was the backstory not actually being true.
@A.B. (I was in that game) The influence maps were something we made right at the start, during our sessions where we were just talking about and building out what our world was going to be. We were noticing we had some diverging ideas about what it could be like. Creating influence maps helped us identify our influences in what we were thinking to basically show "it's like this stuff". Influence maps have you sort things into major/minor influences by how much space they take up.
@AncientSwordRage we didn't have a specific tool. we used photoshop, mspaint, google docs, whatever. BESW did all that fancy cropping and stuff on his one himself, the rest of ours were less impressive. :D
One problem we bumped into was some of us didn't have the means to really create those
@AncientSwordRage I offered to make them for anybody, if they gave me the pictures.
I had this idea, which never quite materialized, that we'd look at all our images and make one collaboratively that would represent our shared overlapping vision.
@AncientSwordRage I used Photoshop, mostly, for mine. These days I'd try to make a template which everybody could use, in something like Google Docs.
@AncientSwordRage That's point 2a in the thread, but also even as an analytic tool rather than a creative recipe it makes the destructive choice of being a monomyth. That is, the very notion of a universal structure to storytelling is, itself, a tool for flattening and de-nuancing whatever story it's applied to (and by the people the story is about and the culture that story exists in), whether forwards (as a writing tool) or backwards (as an analysis tool).
We dismiss the patterns unique to a culture as trivial deviations from a universal truth rather than as important qualities of that culture's sense of story.
I wanted to look at review queue voting patterns (close-, and reopen review queues) of select users, and I'm sure that there is a query that shows reviewers by total votes and split by action, but I can't find it - does anybody have that one handy?
So, all those things in the twitter thread? Like how the monomyth is heteronormative, relegates entire swathes of society to the role of tools for the growth of the narrowly-defined hero class, doesn't teach us how to die or be parents, all those things?
Aye. The monomyth would be much less of a problem if it were simply a way of describing a kind of story, rather than a mould by which all stories are to be defined by their deviation from its form.
It might be a bit better if it was like "hey, all these stories share this in common, crazy right?" without going "and i theorise every story fits these, uhh, ignore that this one reverses these steps, and ignore that this one skips several steps to go do something else, and ignore that these don't fit at all"
@AncientSwordRage the influence maps are individual, they're a way of getting what's going on in your head and putting it out on paper as a communication tool. BESW's idea to make a collaborative one was pretty great.
Someone I know recently expressed interest in playing D&D. This came at the perfect time because I and some other friends were about to start a D&D 5e game.
The problem is, I don't know how to teach this person the game. Usually, my advice is, just read the PHB, but the person in question isn't m...
@Akixkisu There are some (vague, contradictory) legal precedents about converting scattered but publicly available information into consolidated databases of information, that so dramatically changing its accessibility can be transformative enough to cross the public/private barrier.
For a rough comparison, somebody leaving their kitchen window open is not permission to print a photo of their kitchen on the front page of the newspaper.
That is: There are levels of public access and it can be invasive to change someone else's choice of what level they're operating at.
I have no particular rigorous opinion on the immediate situation, but I think it's important to be sure we don't go "public is public and all kinds of public are the same," and instead make choices about it thoughtfully.
if someone went and compiled my review queue history and compared it with that of other specific individuals without our consent, I'd be asking "what are you doing? please stop?"
aggregating various peoples' data including me without identifying them would be something different and much more OK
i am fine with those lists existing, they serve important purposes for auditing what's just happened. what I'm saying here relates to what BESW just said.
You understand there's a difference in both scale and aggression, between my comparing your review history with Greener's in the privacy of my own brain, and my publishing that comparison on meta to make a point?
I would probably not bring it up at all, even if something unsavoury was going on (unless it was so severe that I felt dutybound to do so - which seems implausible).
But that is also not what interests me, so I don't think I would even notice anything.
@NautArch My question resolved, but if you think there is a particular use in reviving it (other people gaining insight?), then I'm curious about your framing. So if there is anything else, please do prioritise that.
@BESW It must be popular, it comes up 4th (or 3rd, depending on how you look at it) in a google search, just after an entry for All the Crossroads and two entries for a novel of the same name
The reception is so wild to me. Like, yeah, I put a LOT of effort into polishing it up, but the idea and core text was more like a thing that happened to me than something I made, and it was sparked by a really lame bit of wordplay.
But it's soft and silly and that can be radical, and that's a good thing to get reminded of.
@Akixkisu those, conceptual, are tough questions to frame on this stack; @vicky_molokh-unsilenceMonica has had some success with them after a lot of trial and error. Maybe ask them for an edit to help?
@BESW I've recently had similar experiences, can relate. It's funny how sometimes it's the things done half in jest that stick well :) Congratulations!
@AncientSwordRage that's how my English professor suggested we write. Unload it all and then come back later to organize it, cull it, amplify it, etc. Granted, that advice is over 40 years old, but it's a way to do it
@RevanantBacon It's been a bit of a challenge to get the asker to clarify what's going on, see the chat / comment stream that Someone_Evil moved to it's own chat room
@ThomasMarkov Just gonna say that our five level 11 characters wiped the floor with 7 hill giants in our first encounter in Against the Giants (hmm, 2016 ish) - spells like animate object, hill giant low armor class, and a few good tactical moves like our monk using stun to good effect broke up their group and we defeated them ... though I think my Champion was a 19 HP when the fight was over.
@Someone_Evil In my experience, PCs progress faster in strength than the xp thresholds suggest.
I also often feel like there is little difference in CR 20-25.
At that point, party composition and caster spell selection is a much better indicator of performance than level and CR.
5 level 15 PCs vs. a CR 23 boss. How do they do? No idea until you tell me who they are and who theyre fighting, it can range from TPK to Medium encounter depending on the builds and the enemy.
@Someone_Evil Yes, the number of variables involved as more magical spells come on line and action economy gets wrinkled makes Tier 3 and above play hard to estimate using that table. (Thank goodness for legendary actions). My brother is grappling with this as we hit level 8 in our group; and it's been hit and miss for him ..
@ThomasMarkov not to mention a few magic items. My warlocks single {treasured} magic item (Wand of web, uncommon item) was a huge tactical benefit to our party from levels 5-8. Punched above its weight, it did. She's about to hit level 9 and still has it attuned.
@ThomasMarkov I was tempted to take it, but my bard is so full of concentration spells that I didn't. But I did take Wall of Force and Bigby's Hand at level 10. Dominate Person and Greater restoration at 9 and 10 for bard spells.
@ThomasMarkov unless the dice hate the monk and the enemy keeps making con saves
@ThomasMarkov yeah, the group I DM for (brother's world) has a monk who has on numerous occasions made encounters easier with a few stuns. When he remembers to do it ...
@Someone_Evil He better hope he's immune to fire :p
@ThomasMarkov Yeah, OP spells are OP
On a related note (and I'm pretty sure there was a question on this) if someone has one of those artifacts that allow them to downgrade immunity to a particular type of damage to only resistance, does that combine with Elemental Adept to allow ignoring it completely?
