TRPG General Chat

AncientSwordRage

00:16

@Trish oooh shiny

Trish

@AncientSwordRage need to age them still. Worked a little with green on it, next is some inks...

AncientSwordRage

00:45

@Trish don't go too far and end up with purest green

Trish

@AncientSwordRage nah, I want to go for patina, I know what I'm doing^^

AncientSwordRage

BESW

01:06

@NautArch I'm not gonna weigh in on the specific mainsite Q, it's working in a playspace I won't pretend to really understand anymore. But the conversation has me thinking about the concept of consequences, risks, and un-take-back-able choices, and why and how we value them.

In particular, something I run into a lot that I'm trying to unlearn for myself, is that consequences don't have to be negative, or even risky, to feel good. At its core a consequence in a game is about making a choice feel significant, acknowledging "you did a thing" and saying it matters.

A consequence can be a lateral change, like swapping out one stunt for another; or a flat-out benefit, like an extra social contact that gives you expanded narrative options.

One way to make a choice feel significant is to make it irreversible, and that's especially tempting in D&D-like games where unchanging builds are the default. For myself, I found that forcing players to eat their metagame mistakes isn't very satisfying. It makes people more timid and conservative in their game choices, less likely to swing for the big exciting choices.

Alan

06:20

@Trish My tables used half+1 HP for 3.0/3.5 just to avoid the crazy swings, especially at lower levels

@BESW Yeah, in my tables it was "If you're an optimizer trying who would just have found a better way to optimize or want to do something now at this level because you coldn''t before", nah, but if it was "Your character you made isn't effective at all, we can fix it", then definitely. Of course, part of that was because 3 of the players were hardcore PF1 optimizers, 1 wasn't but took some advice from one of them, and 1 was an idiot :)

And while I love PF1, the delta between a fully optimized character and a randomly built one is...yeah. The sad thing is, if people who didn't know what they were doing just stuck in a single base class and took some of the base good options, that was a perfectly viable (If not optimized) build, it was people who used all the custom nifty tools in bad ways that ended up unplayable

BESW

06:59

Yeah, that's something I appreciated about 4e; they labelled the "for experts only" track very clearly and outside of that the difference between floor and ceiling was pretty minimal unless you went way out of your way (except for Seeker, that was just a mistake).

And then we moved into games like Fate where that entire way of thinking about character design just didn't apply at all, and it was such a relief.

Alan

I've never played Fate, but I have the Dresden files RPG books and I really want to play it :)

I never played 4E, but the little I saw of it made me think it looked like a fine miniatures tactical wargame, back from my old wargaming days :)

BESW

Because I have no problem with people optimising for goals --my group's optimisers were mostly quite good about recognizing that individual hyperagency was only "necessary" if you didn't trust your group and GM, so they built for other kinds of goals-- but I've never had a group where everybody at the table was equally invested in the out-of-play minigame that is D&D-style character building.

DFRPG was my group's introduction to Fate, and it was a good gateway because all of the subsystems and a-la-carte options make it feel more familiar, but it's a lot crunchier and fiddlier than I'm interested in now. We mostly used it because at the time a lot of the group was reading the Dresden Files books and that helped with the buy-in to overcome the inertia of switching systems for the first time.

Alan

Yeah, its a a specific gaming style that isn't to everyone's taste. I was optimized for crazy stupid knowledge stuff as a lore oracle, was making dc 50+s at level 10 or so

nod I love Dresden Files so much.

BESW

(It's actually not a very good setting for Fate, once you lift above the street level of setting. And I became disillusioned with the storytelling style after a while.)

Alan

nod

Though at least the books are hilarious, the way they are written in character

BESW

07:08

The thing about Fate is, it's designed around the idea that PCs' choices can have major world-shaking impacts. The status quo is not sacrosanct; Fate PCs are proactive, competent, and dramatic people who tend to break stuff in big ways.

Alan

Interesting.

I haven't played anything in so long. I miss all the different random stuff we'd do. Mechwarrior, Rifts, Paranoia, GURPS....

BESW

And once you get very far into the DF lore, you realize that's a terrifying disconnect with the way the stories are structured. Dresden looks like a move-fast-and-break-stuff character, but it only works because the author is constantly pulling punches on how far Dresden's choices send ripples through the status quo.

The whole setting is balanced on a knife's edge that would be less interesting if it tipped irretrievably either way, but Fate's built on the assumption that breaking status quos is more interesting.

Alan

Oh yeah, Dresden definitely only inches along until the last couple books

it feels like everything up until Peace talks was the extended prequel to the main story

BESW

There's other Fate games that are a better fit for the kind of story told in the early DF books. Your "Local Werewolf Nerds" kind of thing, or something more like InCryptid or PC Grant. My group's big long campaign used Atomic Robo as our baseline and brought in a lot of other influences to make a sort of Weird Stuff urban science fantasy mashup.

Alan

Wait, is there an RPG for McGuire's InCryptid, or is that something else?

BESW

07:22

There's not an RPG specifically for it, but Fate would be high on my list of systems to use (there's a few other options like Monster of the Week, too, but a lot of them use PbtA I don't vibe with PbtA very much). Fate's got a lot of similar material ready to implement and a good engine for just making the rest work without a lot of backend effort.

I listed InCryptid and PC Grant as examples of the sort of stories that are in the same realm as Dresden Files but more aligned with Fate-like play values.

Alan

Ahh. nod Got it. Yeah, InCryptid is very "Status what now?"

BESW

Honestly for InCryptid I'd probably use a really stripped-down version of Fate, maybe even something skill-less like Three Rocketeers or Fate of the TMNT. Character proficiency and agency in InCryptid doesn't really map to action-specific skills or stunts so much as background/relationship qualities.

Alan

nods and yawns Okay, bedtime for me,, lot of papers to finish tomorrow

BESW

In skill-less Fate your character has character aspects like normal, but no skills or approaches. Instead you modify rolls based on how many of your character aspects make sense to be helpful for the situation.

ttfn

I go back and forth on whether PC Grant would be a good Fate game. I think it'd have to do something innovative with magic. But it would probably also be really good at, instead of "changing the status quo," capturing the PC Grant feeling of "constantly learning the status quo was never what we assumed it to be."

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KorvinStarmast

16:15

I have read a couple. *Death Masks* and *Dead Beat* I read a lot of "hard boiled" detective novels as I was growing up, so the tone is a nice bit of nostalgia.
Some day I'll read the first few books.

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16:48

The Soloist: Getting started with solo RPGs

posted on February 15, 2023

Also 7 new Zine Month projects, journaling game immersion, and more

NautArch

17:48

@BESW Also why I didn't answer the mainsite question. But yes - consequences are not inherently negative, they are just the result of a decision. It's the decision itself, the game, the world, the environment, and the table that helps guide what the consequence will be in any given situation.

Oblivious Sage

20:29

@NautArch Some things to keep in mind: 1) If you flag a comment, our choices are (edit the comment)/(delete the comment)/(decline the flag)/(decline the flag but also delete the comment). None of those come with the "enter a custom message to the flagger" capability that we have for flags on questions/answers. 2) Commenting on an answer to expand on an aspect of it is not the same as answering in comments.

NautArch

20:45

@ObliviousSage I explained in my flag comment exactly what it made it answer - which is what made the other answer an answer.

It is literally exactly the same thing.

As I said in my comment: "It highlights an aspect of the spell that OP missed (like the duration...which is an answer) and then summarizes with their thesis for an answer: use the right tool in the right situation (lightning vs radiant.) This should be removed."

That's an answer, not a comment or a clarification.

If someone had put the top answer in as a comment, i'd have flagged that, too. And I'd hope that you'd have removed that, too. It's a good answer!

As is the comment under debate.

Also, the flag isn't a comment on answer, it's a comment on a question.

I agree, a comment expanding on an answer isn't answering comments - but that's not what's going on here, so i'm confused as to why you bring that up.

Oblivious Sage

The flag that I declined twice was on a comment on this answer. It expands on the answer's point about the differences between the two spells.

NautArch

I am an absolute idiot.

mea culpa

Oblivious Sage

Pretty much that exact text, if it were a comment on the question itself, would absolutely be an answer in a comment.

No worries, I have also occasionally scrolled through the question/answer transition without realizing it.

Usually resulting in my being very confused about what the question is.

NautArch

21:09

And thank you for leaving comments on the correctly marked answers in comments :)

Adeptus

23:39

Speaking of urban fantasy/supernatural... has anyone watched Lockwood & Co? I really enjoyed it, some interesting worldbuilding. A friend has read some of the books & said the TV show changes some things but makes it better.

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