Today my younger-than-me uncle asked me if I played D&D as I as leaving a family function. When I said yes, he told me he needed help DMing. We shall see if I'm up to the task, heh. Really depends on what his problem is.
Well that was an interesting weekend. Went to the local Steampunk Festival (at the railway museum). Wife did her book launch. We sold 25+ copies of the book, despite the fact that we didn't actually have copies with us (damn couriers, damn US public holidays). She wasn't expecting to sell that many - the 2nd day's orders will have to come out of the next shipment. People ordering didn't mind the 3-4 week delivery time!
I have noticed something which may have been noticed already: take a match, and light it, then hold it so that the flame is directly above your hand. The flame will eventually go out. My guess as to why this happens is that the convection causing the flame to go upward eventually starves the flam...
I'm beginning to think a [edition-comparison] tag would come in handy so that I can search through all our existing questions of the form "What's the diff between Game 1st edition and Game 2nd edition?"
@BESW the "but" instead of an "and" makes all the difference there.
Going through the spells, I see the phrase "Willing creature" used to determine who you can cast some spells on. I don't ever see a proper definition of what a willing creature is, but I would assume that it would go something like if you asked them "Can I perform this spell on you" they would an...
I know! It's an actual potentially useful-in-a-game point of mechanics that I both don't trivially know the answer to and would be interested to learn it.
Idea for a game, requiring a rather unscrupulous party. Eclipse Phase or Shadowrun or the like. Dead Man's Switch is a common trope: someone has compromising documents on someone else, and sets up a system/friend to release them if an unexpected misfortune were to befall them. So should a party want to bring someone down but lack the compromising documents, all they have to do is find out who does and off them. Repeat as needed, until you find the person with an actual DMS.
For a reversal, have party's minor enemies start disappearing. A cause for celebration quickly turning to concern. Save your enemies!
Wait, as in, the party knows A is being blackmailed by B, but they don't know the identity of B. They expect that B has set up a mechanism to release the documents in case of B's death. So they start killing random (well, presumably there are selection criteria) people in the hope they happen to hit B?
Pretty much. Well, ideally they know the identity of B and it's a more-or-less straightforward deal. But just offing all the people who ever crossed A is more amusing.
Doesn't your "reversal" rely on the party being blackmailed by a nemesis in the first place? In which case, they would be hunting the friends of the nemesis.
Relationship graph of NPCs: who is blackmailing whom. Knock out the weakest link and watch the dominoes topple.
I think it's usually not a blackmail so much as "leave me alone". As in, a reporter knows the party has done something dodgy, but won't actually publish it for fear of retaliation. It's a stand-off.
Well, I mean, you know how these unscrupulous cyberpunk corporate blackmailers are... I mean, it's never just the one guy who has a dirty secret that someone else is holding over his head. Chances are, B's being blackmailed by D, and D set up a mechanism (held by E), and D's being blackmailed by F, and so on and so on until the party's best bet is to kill random janitors until they hit the one at the bottom of the tower.
Although, that kind of reporter/blackmailer/whatever would probably have dirt on lots of people... they die in suspicious circumstances, and everyone's going to be outed
It's particularly amusing if you assume the graph contains (several?) loops: everyone knows that if anyone starts the DMS war, they know it'll come back to bite them in a few connections' time. Mutually assured destruction.
It's like the Cold War with janitor murder instead of nuclear missiles.
@Althis Wikipedia: "The premise is that, long ago, the Earth and the world of the Forgotten Realms were more closely connected. As time passed, the inhabitants of planet Earth have mostly forgotten about the existence of that other world—hence the term Forgotten Realms."
Here's an example of how you'd actually use this. Let's say you want to find an Item Level 3 item (something worth almost 800gp). That's a DC 16 complex Gather Information check (assuming there are no factors which increase the DC). Assuming there are also no other factors that influence the # of required successes or allowed failures and you have a +3 modifier, there is a 11.36% chance of success normally, or 21.32% if you press your luck.
Don't you guys think it is really unfair that despite being an incredible proficient character in a certain skill, you might still do REALLY REALLY well due to the roll of a dice?
@Magician I was about to say that, it has a lot to do with goblin dice doesn't it? I refrained from saying it because I was afraid it's not exactly that
It may help to borrow a page from Fate (and other games, I'm sure) and not always blame failure on the character, but rather on external circumstance. Were you making a suit of armor and rolled a natural one, ruining half of your materials? Maybe there was a fire in the forge, or an apprentice stole it.
@Althis Then either the system takes that into account and master lockpick's skill bonus will be high enough to always beat the DC, or it doesn't and the GM can simply allow the picking of simple locks without a roll.
I was decently into the "GM doesn't tell you" thing before I played Fate, but I actually like the Fate approach (no pun intended) a bit more... you know exactly what you're up against and it creates a sort of.. narrative bargaining to get what you want
But that is working around the system. The truth is, if you use the system as it is designed, there is the possibility for rolls where it shouldn't. And D&D isn't like Fate where the rule book says to ignore the rules when seen more narratively appropriate.
Players should be players and characters should be characters. We care about what the characters do, why would it matter if the players are aware of some numbers or not? I find that it doesn't improve immersion in any way... if you have to rely on the players not knowing things to immerse them, you might want to work on other things or even switch systems
I do think a good GM thinks in terms of game design as well, I think something's missing if a GM doesn't give that some thought
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Players calculating probabilities and dissecting a game system is unimmersive and we call it "metagaming", but a GM doing that is.. an essential part of being a GM... I think.. I'd go as far as saying the GM should do that so the players don't have to
Well. I've read lots of books on game design. Theory of Fun. The Art of Game Design. Game Design Workshop. The Design of Everyday Things. And so on. NONE of the other GMs I know have. But they have been GMing for a lot longer than me, some up to 20 years.
So I do not thing an academic knowledge of game design is necessary to be a good GM.
For example, let's say they have a 25% chance of guessing a password. I can use this toy to answer the question "how many times should I let them get it wrong before there are dire consequences?"
Not academic, but basic knowledge of game design elements and its interactions with psychology should be there... I've played a lot of video games before, ever since I was 4 I've played games, and it comes naturally to me now to estimate if some element of design is fun or not.. and to what kind of player
It's not necessary for a GM to know game design, I think. But it helps to consider it, as it may reveal the reasons behind some game trends or behaviors, which is what I often do in my blog. I don't have proper academic background in game design either.
If I want the group to actually have a better-than-50% chance of success, I can say "for 1 success required and a 25% chance of success per trial, I would have to let them fail at least 3 times at maximum (which would produce an overall chance of success of 57.81%)
More importantly, I don't TPK unless the players are intentionally stupid. Case-in-point, if everyone gets KO'd, they have reserve points to bring them back to above 0.
(assuming that what KO'd them didn't then kill them explicitly)
I think Fate inherently solves combat inconsequentialism, much like it solves any failure... make something different, but still interesting happen
"That’s not the way a straightforward game like D&D would handle it. In it, you fail – you do nothing. Maybe you get to try again, maybe something occurs to prevent you – but not because you made the roll. " - Magician
Exactly, this is the reason I quit D&D.. that, and the dreadful balance on early levels and menu-picking
it's not enough, so the GM says you can treat it as a success at a cost, such as messing up your lockpicks forever or someone overhearing you and coming to see what's happening
OR, if you still have Fate Points, which you mainly get by making your own life difficult narratively
you can spend one on something relevant, let's say you have an aspect called "Master Burglar". You spend the point giving you a +2, bringing you up to 4, which is enough
Fate points are powerful, but they come and go as the story unfolds
The same "Master Burglar" aspect could be compelled by yourself or the GM when it'd make your life worse, let's say when someone recognises you as being one or something. You gain a Fate Point then
I'm doing a bad job selling the system, it's really a gorgeous one
I was going to talk about this in relation to this question where basically every comment in sight has been rapidly deleted but after reading this and this I think I'll just stop bothering to answer questions at all.
Metagaming as it's typically used means "using out-of-game knowledge, such as rules knowledge, to make decisions in-game".
So one could accuse a player who sees a garden of realistic stone statues and stocks up on stone-to-flesh spell scrolls because they expect they'll be facing a medusa of meta-gaming if there's no way for their characters to have ever heard of a medusa before.
Another example might be if the PC group is split and has no way of knowing what eachother is doing. If one group acts on information gained by the other group when they can't communicate because of things they heard me tell the other group, that would be meta-gaming too
Hm, okay, but Fate Points are an inherent part of the game, to me they seem to be that kind of build-up of juice a character goes through when their life gets so messy that they get more and more motivated to get through the next obstacle
a sort of "I've been through far too much [snip] to give up now, I WILL succeed on this" translating to a player's "Yeah, I have 5 fate points, watch me"
Meta-gaming, like most gaming behaviours, is only bad when the group dislikes it.
Thing is, a lot of RPGs assume metagaming as a default stance--but some of the more "traditional" playstyles dislike it, and their inertia lends the concept an erroneously universal poor reputation.
(Ludonarrative was earlier referred to as a universal "bad thing" also. Metagaming --and its associated awareness of the ludonarrative-- are hazardous to "immersive" gaming styles where the player's agency and the character's agency --and their shared experiences-- are expected to overlap as much as possible.)
(In any game where the player and the player's character have different values of agency or their experience of the narrative is expected to differ, metagaming and ludonarrative incrementally cease to be bugbears threatening to ruin the experience.)
Hm.. okay, but I feel (and I emphasise, this is just how I feel) that the extra effort needed to keep things hidden and unify the player and character are not just unrealistic, but manage to create very unimmersive mechanics, like a lot of number-crunching and foggy data, which in themselves are clearly not something a swordsman or a mage does, all of this just to make the player just as able to act as the character
Oh, I agree. But it's a subjective experience, so I can't generalise my opinion that such mechanics cast a veil between myself and the narrative experience into a statement that it's inherently a poor game style.
When I finally internalised my intellectual understanding that all abstractions leak, I was able to make better-informed decisions about abstractions in my games.
Anything which intends to represent something it isn't in a simpler way than the thing it's representing.
An easy, commonly-discussed example is D&D hit points.
> The basic idea is that abstractions hide details, but sometimes those details are important, so pretty much every abstraction will require us to "break it down" and look deeper sometimes. (source)
Barring a bunch of rocks and a better understanding of the world than humanity currently possesses, no RPG can accurately and losslessly simulate a real event.
At best we can approximate realism or hope to be realistic--and the 'ism' and 'istic' bits are the important parts of those words, not the 'real.'
I was going to talk about this in relation to this question where basically every comment in sight has been rapidly deleted but after reading this and this I think I'll just stop bothering to answer questions at all.
