TRPG General Chat

3:27 AM

Ron: "Can I cast that Leviosa spell on the troll's club?" DM: "That's not how the spell works, it says here you can't tarhet object being carr-" Ron: "Alright, then, I guess me and Harry will just die now. In our first year of school. Are we starting a new campaign next week or-" DM: "ALRIGHT fine.. the club floats up from the troll's grasp."

Ron: "cool, do I have to roll to knock him out in the head?" DM: "No... I can't imagine what would happen if you failed. The troll plops to the ground in a lazy thud. 100 points to gryffindor..."

Shalvenay

lulz

hey there @daze413

daze413

@Shalvenay heyo! High five on their rp games being stalled indefinitely! At least I have GOG later this week, so I got that going for me, which is nice

Shalvenay

:P how've thins been otherwise?

daze413

RL's been tiring. My boss is on personal vacation leave and I've been appointed OIC. The amount of papers that require his signature for some reason I don't understand is over 9000!

What about you? Anything else exciting going on?

Shalvenay

well, indulging my transportation geekery :D

daze413

3:41 AM

Whats the study of traffic called? (Traffic as in flow of cars in streets?)

Shalvenay

@daze413 traffic engineering

daze413

Huh. Do you also go into historical transportation? I.e. caravans, wagons, carriages or other ancient modes of transpo? Or only the new stuff?

Shalvenay

@daze413 I have a bit of interest in wagons/carriages (still trying to connect the dots from "chariot" to "stagecoach" over here xD) but that's about it -- I'm not an equestrian/pack-animal type

daze413

@Shalvenay whoa. I've been meaning "stagecoach" when I keep saying "carriage" all my life.

Shalvenay

@daze413 not too much difference AIUI :P

BESW

8:49 AM

uhm uh it's my boy PO as an rpg character, he's a healer but he casts spells constantly out of excitement, he is do… https://twitter.com/i/web/status/886477435381858304

Tweeted by mackadoodledoo on July 16, 2017 at 6:47 AM

trogdor

lol

doggy healers

reminds me of Wiz 8

ACuriousMind

9:10 AM

@trogdor Why not Wiz 6 or 7? ;P

trogdor

well because 8 is the only one I played XD

BESW

Because Wiz8 is what we've played.

ACuriousMind

One day I'll manage to play that trilogy in one go without going "Ooooh, shiny" for another game and forgetting about it

nwp

1:51 PM

Made a character using the form-fill character sheet. The medicine skill bubble is bugged and trying to open the sheet again just reloaded the empty sheet making me lose all progress.

Way to kill a game before it starts.

Trish

6:29 PM

/me has the feeling people don't know how to read...

I mean, I specifically asked "I need loaded dice, how to do it?" People answer "you don't load dice" or "use hidden modifiers" or "you play the wrong game". I meant what I wrote.

Zachiel

6:48 PM

Well, @Trish, I guess the "why are you loading dice, you cheat" mentality (which I share, by the way) is strong.
Maybe it's not as bad as "teach me how to kill people" (ok, ok, without the maybe) or "tell me how to decieve speed measurements on the highway" but... well, there's two schools of thought at conflict here: yours says that it's OK to cheat in order to provide a satisfying story and mine says that if you want a satisfying story you should use a system that doesn't need you to lie (otherwise you can accept that the story might not be that good, but if that's what the players want, …

(Incidentally, I came to the chat just in hope I could tell this to you without having to post it as a frame-challenge answer.)

Trish

frame challenge answer is not apprechiated, just made the "How to fudge with the results" thing for that.

godskook

@Trish, if you explicitly want loaded dice, you're making people read the wrong question for that answer.

Trish

Just came here to vent "people,. please READ what is asked for, not question the question."

Zachiel

The worst part I see about that question is that, without those frame challenge answers, people could stumble upon it and think fudging dice is a good and accepted practice and... well, this might be a pet peeve of mine, but I don't think it is. It might have been when I didn't knew the DM was doing it but now I'd rather have my character die than someone saving me jumping over the ruleset.

godskook

@Trish, ok....but if you don't respond more directly to what I just said, I'm just going to post it as a comment on your question.

Trish

6:54 PM

@godskook I just don't see what you mean...

godskook

@Trish, you're asking a broader question then "how do I load my dice", and then trying to reel the question back into that scope towards the end. It READS like a question that should be frame-challenged and problem-solved against an X-Y-problem situation.

If you already know you want loaded dice

You should make a pretty extensive edit to the question.

Trish

The question was, from inception, "how to load dice"

@Zachiel it is a situational question, that asks specifically for loaded dice because people a tthe table know the system so well, they can read the dice at a glance. Modifiers are out because of the system. So the only way is loaded dice.

godskook

@Trish I'm not contesting that. I'm saying that the words you wrote failed to achieve that goal.

Trish

@Zachiel I know some players don't apprechiate the GM 'cheating' so the players have a chance to win.

@godskook Hey I Can Chan did that.

godskook

@Trish On my screen, there's no edits, but as I recently learned, fast edits get washed away.

Trish

6:59 PM

in worst case, I will have to get pig middlehand bones to make Worfels.

@godskook ctrl+F5

godskook

@Trish Huh?

Trish

Reload the page to see the latest edit ;)

godskook

Still no edits.

Tried ctrl+F5, tried a new browser

No edits on my end.

Zachiel

Ok, ok, I see your point, and I can perfectly imagine players not wanting to change system (and you probably don't want to tell them "hey, I don't want to do this 'rolls in the open' thing, it pevents me from saving your ***es without you noticing" - If I didn't knew that in advance I'd be really pissed off).
I just don't think your idea of cheating (in a positive way, but I lack a better word for this) is fair to the players who think they're the authors of their fortunes.

godskook

What was your original question?

Trish

7:02 PM

@godskook rpg.stackexchange.com/posts/103613/revisions

There is the original question

godskook

Oh I see

There's two questions on this

I was reading the new one.

Trish

Yes, I seperated the fudging one out, as people claimed "fudge with the numbers, not the dice" as the answer to "how to load dice"

Zachiel

And, while I absolutely don't want you to retract your perfectly legit question, I'd like to be able to do something to kill the "illusionism is good GM practice" thing for good.

Trish

@Zachiel in any GM guide I read till now, there is a section "if you don't like the outcome of your rolls, cheat a little to make the story better."

Zachiel

Let me guess, are those all "traditional" games (D&D, GURPS, White Wolf games and other games with a "mother may I?" kind of gameplay? (I know, the 'mother may I?' reference is hard on those games, but the similarities are strong enough to make that a distinctive element of what I call "traditional")

The idea is that those games need that text because their rules are not good enough to prevent unwanted events from happening (e.g. random character death caused by rolls)

Trish

7:07 PM

It's also in SR, I saw a section on it in FATE, Powered by the apocalypse has it...

@Zachiel while using dice that favor the bad side (for PC/for NPC) can be considered cheating if done intentionally, it is less of an intrusion than outright telling a different story than the dice do. It is statistics that make up some story parts (hitting and missing for example), and in my opinion, using bad dice with intention is much less intrusive than "oh, Monster XY has a -2 on damage rolls" that was just made up.

Zachiel

I didn't think it was in Fate (as an aside, it's not capitalized anymore) and I'd be very shocked if it was in AP, and I'd facepalm if any other PbtA brought it back... the main point of AW is that the MC needs to follow all the rules. (Also, he's free to make hard moves that have a very wide range of lethality, so I don't see why he would need to ignore dice results - also, he never rolls any dice and dice is rolled in the open. That's why I'm confused)

ACuriousMind

@Trish I'm 99% certain that PbtA does not advocate fudging the results of rolls. The whole concept is that the rolls drive the story forward, regardless of the result. The GM follows their principles, and you don't have any chance to fudge the dice because the GM never rolls any dice (hidden or not) in the first place.

godskook

@Trish, reading your initial question, without any edits, I personally think the frame challenge is appropriate. You're breaking what you know to be an explicit social contract.

My best advice for you is to talk to the other DM or the Group, and be up-front about your opinions about dice rolls, rather than lie by omission with loaded dice.

Zachiel

@ACuriousMind While that's true of any PbtA I know of, let's not forget that PbtA is not a System, it's more a family of games and I can see someone introducing such a rule because they don't know any better.

Trish

@godskook actually no: the contract is "roll open". I know all the previous GMs had intentional bad die bags.

Zachiel

7:14 PM

@godskook My advice is not to do that until/unless one is ready to recieve the "You cheated us! How ould you!" cry.

I once told a player I let him play a race with natural invisibility just because there were lot of enemies with see invisibility in the next dungeon. He stopped playing.

Trish

I'll look up the thing in Masks again... it was pretty much a call to the GM to cheat for the story, when the players are at the brink of getting wiped.

Zachiel

Masks, admittedly, is not one of the PbtAs I've been experienceing. (I've tried DW, Grim World, Fellowship, read the AW manual and friends of mine talked me about Tremulus and The Company).

Trish

It is in "NPCs Conditions" - it actually breaks its own rules there: "So don’t worry about tracking conditions for anyone except the villains—everybody else simply reacts according to the fiction."

Or, in other words: If it is not a villain, cheat to match the story.

ACuriousMind

@Trish I think you are misreading that part: It's saying that you shouldn't bother tracking conditions for NPCs that are not villains (=main antagonists), not that you shouldn't bother tracking conditions of players. In any case, I don't see how that's supposed to be the same as fudging a dice roll.

@Trish Is it known to the rest of the players that all the previous GMs had such bags? Also, were these just "bad dice" in a superstitious sense or were they actually unfair dice?

Zachiel

7:30 PM

Anyway, the rule about having people react according to the fiction is a wonderful example of the system managing to be realistic without complicated cause-effect, D&D-like "if I push this button, this happens" reactions. You know how sometimes D&D makes no sense (e.g. trying to backstab a sleeping goblin and still failing to kill it)? Well, "do what would happen in reality" works here (but it is a double edged sword.)

Transcript for