TRPG General Chat

One of my goals with Walkies With Grim was to use a supernatural lens to bring the wonder of one's existing reality into focus.

The idea is that when the supernatural pretending stops, the wonder stays.

But Traveling Librarians goes a step further, and eschews the need for a extraordinary lens at all.

Planning a campaign and I ended up with too many villains and main characters in Act 3.

There won't be enough sessions to meet each of these characters, or fight through all these villain sub-arcs.

What act is the game currently in?

I'm doing pre-game prep just to have things available in each act so I can grab-back as appropriate.

I think my main problem is that it's a time-travel story, so I have to introduce new characters and the old characters again.

Because they're different this time.

I have an overall story that I haven't started running any part of, but I'm planning a 1-20.

Planning the story and sessions like that generally isn't advised, since players may deviate from the script or have unavailable schedules. Has that strategy worked for you with previous campaigns?

12:18 AM

In my most successful massive-length campaigns where I was the sole GM, my pre-game prep was creating places and people with motives and plans. The first half-dozen levels were just wandering around seeing the world and meeting people--and then whatever the players latched onto and imbued meaning into, I focused on and amplified their motives and plans based on how the PCs had interacted with them; whatever the players didn't get attached to, I let fade into the background.

One easy way to give players that agency, was (in a traditional "adventurers looking for jobs" campaign) to make them members of an adventurer's guild so that every town had a guildhall with an "adventurers wanted" notice board. The players could pick what to do from the board.

Upper_Case

My players know by now that NPC organizations (especially antagonists) are always doing their own thing, whether they're on camera or not. If the players decide not to deal with the Evil Club in the current arc, the Evil Club will either be eliminated by another NPC faction (which gets some bad-dudes credibility for it), or the Evil Club accomplishes that phase of their plan and is more dangerous later

@BESW @MikeQ What I'm essentially just doing is filling the world with key people of interest and conflicts that surround them so that I can talk about things in that won't happen for a while, but sort of seed the world. Players would meet an Act 4 villain in Act 1 and if their trajectories collide, they're not meeting a new face, but reassessing an old first impression.

Upper_Case

My NPC groups are organized into what is essentially a narrative tournament bracket, with by-rounds as necessary

The problem, is I've noticed the basic conflicts I've got as my current seeds are too interconnected.

Too many chefs in the kitchen when all we're making is cereal.

@Axoren So, what I do with that is to wait until after Act 1, and then choose the Act 4 villains by drawing from the pool of characters the players have met.

Upper_Case

12:23 AM

@BESW That's what I like about this approach-- the players choose which foes to tackle and when. It makes their choices seem much more consequential

Work forward, not backwards. TRPGs aren't novels or films, they aren't written ahead of time and edited to be tight and coherent. They're made in the act of play, without space for revision after something's hit the table, and that means "editing" and "planning" happens by building on what's already happened rather than building toward something that hasn't happened yet.

Foreshadowing in TRPGs doesn't happen in the planning stage, we create the illusion of foreshadowing by making something inconsequential become important.

Ok I've made this mistake before. Planning issues aside, you don't need to overpopulate (saturate?) the NPC cast to make the world seem big. If that makes sense. They become difficult to manage. Start small, then gradually add as needed.

@Axoren I've done that too, and what I learned is that the players are the best connective tissue.

Well, I misspoke when I said it was just time-travel. I have it broken up into the following: Act 1: Present, Act 2: Alternate Present, Act 3: The Choice (players make some very heavy setting decisions, as well as character decisions), Act 4: The Finale (The Past)

Small things will balloon out of scale when exposed to PCs, and the PCs make two things connected simply by virtue of being the main characters while interacting with both things.

@Axoren hmm. Sounds kinda like Fate of Cthulhu stuff.

12:29 AM

So instead of introducing a meaningless character in Act 1 so that they can be the Act 4 villain, there are better options. Maybe you introduce them later, and connect them to something that already exists. Maybe you wait until Act 4 and have an existing character become the villain.

Act 4 breaches the topics of the true cosmology and creation of the setting, which is a good place to end on so that I can follow-up with another campaign in the same setting.

Hrm. It sounds kinda like you have a story to tell and the players are the vehicles for telling it.

That's not bad --I knew a group in college who really enjoyed it-- but it makes my experience and learning much less applicable.

In a sense, yes. But it's a lot more flexible than it sounds.

These are just templates for the kinds of challenges they will be facing, in the same way that a module would function.

Like, there are hooks that will bring them across each Act, but within each act, there's any number of possible ways they could drive the adventure.

Each act begins with a node of divergent choices which re-converge at the next act's node?

The Acts are also a means of partitioning the campaign to allow people a break and an opportunity to cleanly switch in new characters. There is an event that would happen that doesn't nullify all the choices made beforehand. Like, a meteor landing, or a natural disaster. They could have decided to go to the north and dismantle a dangerous circle of Mages or resolve political disputes in the south between the Kingdom and an Ex-Duke that is building his own opposing country...

But at the end of the day, that Meteor was always coming towards the planet, and it will have to be dealt with.

12:39 AM

Ok, using the prewritten modules as an example, I see where you're going with this. You predefine the starting & ending conditions for each Act, but don't plan them session-by-session. Makes sense. Can involve a bit of railroading though. Still, there's a precedent.

The challenge I ran into with "the world keeps going, even the parts you ignore" is that it very often turns into "your choices are overwhelmingly small compared to the turning of the world" because the players feel like nothing they do is enough.

The specific events I've chosen for transitions are:
Somehow, a trip to the Alternate. Somehow, a choice between worlds (where would you like to go? Are their loose ends in the Original you want to tie up? or are there pressing matters here you'd like to continue?). And then finally, regardless of which world they choose (or if they choose, or if they even fight for a way to go between at will), they learn the very nature of the story: how the player characters came to be who the players chose them to be, how the world came to be, and their role and the roles of various critical NPC charact…

For the NPC "seed" problem, try minimizing that set of "seeds" as much as possible. Like instead of introducing a cast of names to remember, you establish a small handful of factions or other world elements, and then focus on those most relevant to the ongoing act.

And that's, you know. fine if you're going for an existential dread kind of game, because giving the players more disasters than they can manage will always make them feel less competent and heroic.

If I understand correctly, the next disaster shouldn't escalate until the players have resolved the prior disaster, so it should produce a story where the players are making meaningful differences.

12:45 AM

@MikeQ I am definitely doing that for much of the Kingdom. I'm using things like Loyalists (two different variants on this, Loyalty to the Line and Loyalty to the Crown because they will be at odds), Federalists, and such.

@BESW I'm actually going for an uplifting surreal experience with it. I think I may have set the wrong impression here with using a Meteor as an example.

A meteor can be fine, it's this bit that gives me alarm bells:
"They could have decided to go to the north and dismantle a dangerous circle of Mages or resolve political disputes in the south between the Kingdom and an Ex-Duke that is building his own opposing country"

There are a number of events that aren't necessarily happening unless the players trip the breakers to get involved with those things.

Because while on its face that's good agency-building, in the context of a complicated time-travel plot in a persistent world, that looks like a Hobson's choice.

The Duke and his machinations only really get escalated and interesting if the players engage with it, otherwise it's a relatively annoying quagmire that doesn't evolve on any scale

I'm going to look that up, never heard the term.

Basically "looks like a choice but isn't."

12:49 AM

If at the end of the day, the players really divert from the Transition Points, it'll just be a different game.

Persistent "if you ignore a problem then it gets worse" worldbuilding gives the impression of being less "which bad thing do you stop from happening" and more "which bad thing do you let happen."

In the same vein as if I started running Dragon Heist and everyone decided they weren't going to rob a villain, it would just be a game in Waterdeep.

Oh, no. This isn't a "the problem gets worse" situation. Each transition point is an template for an event that bridges the acts.

It's not like there's some timer that says "At 0:00, you get shot with time juice"

Gotcha.

On some level, the world is going to be waiting for the party, and they aren't the only ones that can solve the problems of the world.

Villains that aren't dealt with by the party, might be brought up as "Oh, Joe the Barbarian and his Beer Carriers thwarted a Lich to the East, there's safer travel in that direction now and it's beautiful this time of year."

Whereas the party could have been the ones getting the glory.

I'm not going to take the fun stuff off the table if I see that they want more Dungeon Crawls? I keep the Vaults, Tombs, and Prisons on the table.

If I see they want more intrigue? I leave pull out some mysteries I've planned out for one-shots and associate them with the characters.

But I definitely have some prepped setting specific stuff.

Not strictly RPG related, but I found this interesting

7 Underrated Books by Asian Authors

1:01 AM

Ooh, if we're doing that...

"Adult Fantasy Books Written by AAPI Authors" from Copper Dog Books.

Paperblots wrote a twitter thread "on some (of my highly anticipated) 2021 ya/mg releases by asian authors."

1:17 AM

@BESW AAPI?

Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders

Gotcha, thanks

It's a somewhat controversial bucket term that centers continental American categorization over the identities of the people it's describing, but it's been used a lot recently, especially in the context of recent pandemic-inflamed hate crimes because the perpetrators don't distinguish between all those communities.

Transplanar RPG tweeted a thread of the panels for their upcoming event "ROLL FOR SOLIDARITY: Uplifting Asian and Black Creatives in #TTRPG for #StopAAPIHate and #BlackLivesMatter!", an ALL-POC charity stream from 4pm-8:30pm CST on May 19 + May 20 on twitch.tv/transplanarrpg

goldenlassogirl asks on twitter "Should game designers be writing their games with bad faith players in mind?" The quote retweets have a lot of great discussion.

bobble

1:44 AM

@AncientSwordRage I've never read the others but can vouch for Want.

On the other hand, I like nearly every book I read so take my recommendations with a grain of salt.

Discussion point for game designers: if a system forces you to use basic powers to unlock your more exciting/customised powers (on a per conflict basis) does that build anticipation or make action use feel like a slog.

@AncientSwordRage What do you mean by "use basic powers to unlock"? Prerequisites?

"You must know Fire Bolt to learn Fire Blast"?

Or "You must use Fire Bolt 10 times to learn Fire Blast"?

If the latter, the problem comes down to imposing an incentivizing metagame where they may be using their powers in inappropriate situations just to bolster their necessary casts of Fire Bolt.

Morrowind, one of my favorite RPGs of all time, had this problem.

@Axoren (this analogy only works if you break how D&D actions work) more like you must have cast firebolt this turn to cast fire ball later in the same turn

@AncientSwordRage Then you're talking about Builder-Consumer type combat. One of our guys is working on that kind of combat.

This was a feature of Guild Wars 1 Assassin

@Axoren I've come across those turns in programming separately, but never together like that?

1:56 AM

They had a Main Attack -> Off-Hand -> Dual Attack cycle, and each attack move put themselves somewhere in this cycle.

@AncientSwordRage I was always a little disappointed that 4e's power system diverged so dramatically from its late-3.5-era prototypes, the classes in the Tome of Battle and Tome of Magic.

In the Secret World, various classes built up points with their Builder skills and their stronger Consumer skills ate X points from their point total.

They had a lot of very cool (but early-days clunky) variations on what you're talking about, where a class's powers were gated behind usage of other powers.

And many classes in FFXIV have a Meter which works the same way

@Axoren (un?)coincidentally I'm looking for a alternative term for Limit Break

1:59 AM

4e designers have said clearly that Tome of Battle was their first experiments with what would become the 4e power system, but it was a lot more strategically complicated.

@AncientSwordRage Unleash.

@Axoren that's interesting

I'm trying to find the term used in The Secret World because I believe it was the more industry-used term.

"[Skill] builds N X resources."
"[Skill] consumes M Y resources."
Where N and M are counts, and X and Y are types of resources.

> Boiling Blood
> Builds 1 resource for each equipped weapon.
> A single target attack that deals 111* magical damage.
> Requires a Blood Focus.

In The Secret World, you had two simultaneous kits, and they were intended to synergize with each other depending on which two you had.

So what sparked this idea was Tabatkins talking about how in d&d you can nova early in a combat and obliterate the BBEG without feeling like you really fought them

@AncientSwordRage To avoid this, we considered Builder-Consumer to be the wrong approach for that and instead considered a staggered cooldown system.

2:05 AM

@Axoren go on?

@AncientSwordRage There's always the Fate attitude of spending early turns to build up bonuses

@AncientSwordRage If you're not careful, every turn is Firebolt -> Fireball

@BESW those book sounds familiar btw

As for the cooldown system, you simply make it so that on each turn, more of the player's kit opens up, with the coolest stuff coming out later.

Two options being added to the pool each turn seems to work really well in practical testing.

Yet, we still have some work with Builder-Consumer, but it's a delicate balance.

I don't remember the Tome of Battle classes very well, but one of them was something like "you have five powers but you start combat with only two available to use; using a power replaces it with a power that was previously unavailable."

2:07 AM

@Axoren Sounds really interesting

So you can't just throw down all your powers at once, you have to use what you've got on deck in order to get to the next ones.

You need to make gaining points a trade-off instead of a freebie. They must be giving up an opportunity to earn the points needed to cast something like Fireball.

@BESW interesting

There's a 13th Age expansion class that uses its main-turn action to meditate and gain points which it can spend on out-of-turn reactions triggered by other characters' actions.

@Axoren my initial thought was that low rolls on the basic powers is what fuels the non-basic powers

2:09 AM

Biggest thing that goes into builder-consumer is that consumer scaling cannot be as powerful as high-level spells in 5e. Fireball shouldn't be able to hit an infinite amount of things if you can fit them in a 20-radius ball. That scales so well, the best strategy is to unlock Fireball and put everyone in a ball.

if you don't use up all your points by the time your next turn comes around, you blow them on a weak-but-better-than-nothing direct damage power.

@AncientSwordRage ...have you considered Roll For Shoes as a model for a power-up system?

@BESW that feels extremely my sort of thing, even outside of this discussion

@BESW having played it is probably a distant inspiration that I should approach again

@AncientSwordRage Sort of like an entropy-correcting mechanic? For something like this, I would look to how Evasion procs work in Path of Exile. It's a system that by design gives you the average number of Evasions more often than not. As to whether or not gating the right to cast Fireball or stuff like it behind this mechanic is another matter.

@Axoren I'll have to think about that

I really want to proc how in some media the hero is losing until suddenly they aren't anymore

Then you want narrative surprise, which is what you'll get out of an entropy-correcting system.

2:13 AM

RFS is definitely a good model for a simple entropy-correcting mechanic.

It stops being "I need one more low roll to cast Fireball." and starts being "If I get a REALLY bad roll, I might need a Deus Ex Machina at this point."

@AncientSwordRage Isn't that something that Fate tries to do? You gain Fate points by letting the GM throw more obstacles at you, then spend points to overcome obstacles later?

@BESW RFS?

Thanks all, this has been a really interesting discussion, going to have to bow out now to get some sleep, bit will check back in the morning

@Axoren roll for shoes

@AncientSwordRage I'll have to check that one out

2:16 AM

The original blog post with the rules for Roll To See If I Have Shoes On is down, but it's archived and also you can find the rules in the roll-for-shoes tag wiki.

3:15 AM

Brandon Leon-Gambetta wrote a twitter thread about "my favorite GM Principle in Pasión de las Pasiones."

creator day bundle! by riley rethal and 7 others. creator day bundle!: 8 items for $30.00 with content from Chloe Montgomery, gamesfromthewildwood, Geostatonary, Jay Dragon @ Possum Creek Games, riley rethal, Riverhouse Games, Tomas Herbertson

Tempered Legacy on Technical Grimoire. Tempered Legacy is a magic item supplement for fantasy RPGs. The powers of these items are locked behind the regrets of previous owners.

Heirs of Glass and Silver by Zoey Whiting. A couple rituals about reflections and their many sides.

Nevyn Holmes shared on twitter photos of the new GUN&SLINGER physical prints.

"Birthday dice bag - free pattern" by BardicWizard (yes, that BardicWizard).

Ben

@AncientSwordRage skill burst?

3:32 AM

Devlog: "GUBAT BANWA 0.8 -「We Are Lightning」" by makapatag. The newest of Gubat Banwa's #TTRPG update brings with it huge overhauls, game design realignments, and a more confident stride into the territory of stylish tactical combat.

4:21 AM