@Thatguy What does your group find fun? Trying stuff to see what happens? Inventory puzzles? Drawing diagrams and working out the math? Creative use of spells and such? (I assume, since you're looking for fun traps, that this group is not a "roll your Disarm Trap skill to disarm the trap" kind of place.)
Also: why traps? It's been my experience that setpieces don't solve the underlying "bored" problem, they just temporarily distract from it. If my goal is complex engagement with the world, I need something more long-term and embedded than a trap.
In D&D-like games I found traps were good tools for pacing and tone, but weren't a good substitute for choices that would impact things the players are invested in.
The best use of a trap I ever found was to make the players feel good about the choices they'd already made.
"I can solve this riddle because I roleplayed a conversation with a loremaster in the last town," or "I can bypass this trap because I selected this particular ability last time I leveled up."
Or sometimes a trap can be a reminder of an ability or truth they'll need in a higher-stakes situation soon.
they like puzzles. things that are logical. sometimes they like the drawn out ones. I've set 1 or 2 timer traps. They're in a trap ridden castle right now and at the end of it they have t fight the trap master
Okay, how about a dungeon where the doors are XNOR gates and their open/closed states map to 1 and 0, with the output of the gates controlling other states of the dungeon? Chain the doors together so their outputs cumulate and you have to do things like figure out how to get into a room with a door that will only unlock if the doors leading to it are locked.
I once worked on an adventure like that, where the center of the maze held a monster that only wanted the smartest adventurers, and the maze was designed so getting to the center meant setting up the doors so it was very slow and tedious to leave while the monster could take shortcuts.
@ThomasMarkov If everything written there fails to persuade you, I'm not sure what I (or anyone else in chat) could say off the cuff that would change your mind.
Kickstarter: Locus: A Mystery-Horror TTRPG by CobblePath Games. A game about flawed character, consequences and morality. "Locus deliberately does not draw from the works of Lovecraft and outright avoids using sanity as a resource or main theme."
Game Jam of the Infinite City Hosted by r. rook. #infinitecityjam is about the cities you love from history and fiction. Open to any genre or #ttrpg system (even your own).
What's So Cool About Lucha Libre? by Color Spray Games is a rules-lite RPG for 1 GM and 1 or more players. It's a Borderpunk game, which means it blends Mexican-American culture and media with themes of social justice and political activism. Don the mask of a superheroic wrestler and prepare to fight for justice and oppose evil wherever it arises.
Ajey Pandey wrote a #TableTopChopShop thread to workshop "a crunchy, tactical game that utilizes what No Dice, No Masters (NDNM) does best: Making players CHOOSE when they take disadvantages" for "a mech game about scrubs in rust-buckets battling between the bones of a more beautiful world."
Dropbear Games wrote a twitter thread about "how you can tinker the token economy in games of #BelongingOutsideBelonging and no dice no masters generally to foster different kinds of story arcs."
What's So Dangerous About the Canals? by Michael T Lombardi. In Pentola, the most striking and sought after people are the Gondolieri, the singers and slayers of demonic entities in the city, the people who carry cargo and passengers along the treacherous demon-fiilled canals, the paramours everyone wants to have pay them attention.
One of my players has come up with a really interesting backstory. Basically, he was brought up in a cult worshiping an evil god as a paladin of that god. Due to an event that happened, he realised that the path he had been led down from birth was the wrong one and decided to break his oath and...
If an enemy is put to sleep using the sleep spell and then attacked by a rogue does the rogue get the full attack bonus (auto crit, sneak attack etc) Even if other enemies are fully aware of the combat before the enemy wakes up? This seems a really powerful combination especially at lower levels?
A folding boat is a magic item that can transform from a small box into a small or large boat and back. If I transform it into a boat and then sail it through an antimagic field, what will happen?
@BESW I've seen a few games on itch.io about Pentola... also some described with other terms that seems to be indie jargon - eg "sword dream". What's it all mean? Is there some indie dictionary or something?
Movements like #SWORDDREAM (itchio jam link) came directly out of a movement among OSR content creators to actively reject the patterns of bigotry and abuse in OSR communities.
And Pentola is an anti-canon setting created by Michael Lombardi.
An indie dictionary would be self-defeating, "indie" isn't a coherent community or collection.
Anti-canon is a loose term used to indicate various kinds of approaches, unified by attempts to write game texts that explicitly give the people playing a game more authority over the world than the creator of the text.
Generally an anti-canon setting text has big unifying strokes shared by everyone who plays, but either presents no details, question prompts rather than established details, or conflicting details.
Dee Pennyway also talks about an anti-canon table philosophy where the setting defined by the table during the game is mutable according to the group's moment-to-moment .needs
(D&D 4e had a very mildly anti-canon attitude, which was basically just them leaning into knowing that their poor quality control meant various expansion materials would be inconsistent with each other, and making that a feature rather than a bug.)
I would like to design an anti-canon campaign structure some time, modeled after the way long-running TV shows drop points that were established early on and modify other things, sometimes dramatically changing tone and theme over time.
I have been a part of a Dungeons & Dragons campaign for almost a year now (I am not the DM) and we have a player who has, within the past few months, quickly become very difficult to deal with.
He is notoriously late, often an hour to an hour and a half regardless if we met online or in person. ...
@HotRPGQuestions lots of that stuff is pretty abusive :(
“He has even caused two members of our group to quit.” — There is something worth being aware of called the dead sea effect. It is so named because the dead sea's high salt levels cause water to evaporate faster, which causes it to be saltier, which causes the water to evaporate faster, etc—influx of fresh water can't keep up.
Specifically, if a space or community has toxic members in it, the individuals that can't tolerate them and can't avoid them will leave. You wind up with a community that is slightly more toxic than before, consisting of members more permissive of toxicity on average, so you get more toxicity, so more people leave who are no longer comfortable with where it's going. This can keep going indefinitely until the community's basically disintegrated.
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The only way to manage that is to identify the toxic individuals and get them to change their behaviour or make sure they are removed from the space or community.
So, moderation kicking out jerks, basically, in an environment like this one, but it looks different when you're in a space like a playgroup that doesn't have designated community moderators.
I think it's also harder to take that tack face to face even if it's just as warranted
like if someone who you see ever day, or every week, or every two weeks, or wtv does something you find unacceptable every once in a while it can be harder to just kick them out of your life than to ban someone who did something similar but who you've never met, I think
One of the challenges the Stack faces is that it's got no grace in its moderation tools; there's no training or support for moderators to tackle anything less than a full-scale inarguable "that's on fire" social problem.
Uhm... I haven't actually gotten around to taking it. It isn't the kind of thing I prefer to spend vacation time on, and then it kinda fell of the radar
Has there been a commensurate increase in employed support and management tools, or is this another case of soft policy solutions for hard system problems?
My room is smaller and not-as-well ventilated as my previous one was so turns out a full day of working on a hot day makes it kinda annoyingly warm inside
I moved in in May, and even though it's not a strict upgrade from my last flat (which was, to put mildly, awesome) I do love living in a detached house again
@kviiri I get that; we moved from a townhouse which had shared walls to an actual house last year, and it’s actually good to be able to shout across the house if there’s a need
I was on a cabin trip last weekend. Felt like hydrating while taking a break from the sauna and the only vessel at hand was that tiny pitcher. One of my friends says something like "you look like a renaissance painting when you drink like that" and snapped a photo
(with my permission, plus we actually took a second take because in the first one I had my hands the other way around, obscuring the pitcher that I wanted to have visible)
...I'm not sure if I can ever follow up on my plans to lose the hair. Even when it's wet and messy I like how it looks on me
@BESW Recently the Stack decided to put more resources into the CM team (here), but that's part of separate concurrent efforts to make the Stack enterprise realise "oh hey uh, having a functioning adequately staffed CM team is pretty important actually." Which was built on the back of the Stack finding out "oh hey uh, turns out paying attention to active users and moderation is pretty important actually."
The Stack describes itself as data-driven, but that means it's not allowed to make decisions that aren't backed up by data. Relatively recently I learned that a large game dev studio describes itself as data-informed — it relies a lot on data to understand the decisions it should make, but doesn't limit itself to the data or prioritise data over sound human judgement.
It sounds like at some point the Stack leant so hard into being data-driven to the exclusion of actual wisdom that it lost sight of the fact that being data-driven is about making good decisions, and it's not the be-all end-all of making those.
Anyone who's done mathematics has probably had a moment where they make a calculation, then notice the output they got doesn't seem right because it's wildly off base, and so conclude they must have made an error or missed something in their calculation, and taken a step back to revise their work so that it lines up with actual well-founded judgement.
The Stack seems to have lost track of that last step and decided the way data-driven-ness works is "yes! data did output! output good! human wisdom disagrees? human wisdom wrong!"
@doppelgreener This sounds like every conversation we have around my school where people are pushing to standardize to a percentage-based school-wide grading system. It's always the math/science people saying "you can still make the number come out any way, now you're just pretending it's more precise, which is a lie."
@AncientSwordRage is this while Hogwarts has a Book Protagonist attending as a student?
I am still amazed that the stack had to rediscover the concept of a core audience and discover that they matter, because they concluded "yes, but there's all these users who are here sometimes, so who cares about that tiny percentage of the userbase?"
Well, for one, how would the two magic systems interact? Beholders come from a system designed around Vancian spellcasting, they can do [these things] x [number of times] per day each, plus the eye rays. Meanwhile in potterverse, magic is unlimited and requires only a minimal amount of practice to perform and single spell.
On the other hand, the potterverse wizards have (aside from a handful of specific exceptions) not means of fighting without their magic, and the beholder does a 90° arc that extends out 120 feet, making it quite difficult for anyone to atack it
@RevenantBacon So... those are the named spells. We've seen Voldemort and Dumbledore (any aurors and death eaters, among others) doing plenty that seems to be "off-book." Who knows what the actual, powerful Pottermagics are?
@nitsua60 I'm sure J.K. Rowling would be delighted to write you several twitter posts about it if she can find time away from her other favourite hobby
@nitsua60 Look at it this way: what % of math up through highschool was new, and what % was going over stuff you had learned the previous year/years and then forgotten?
Not to mention that it's been established in-universe that you generally don't acutally need to say a spell aloud to cast it.
@Carcer I've always understood D&D-style illusion magic to work this way. This is why you can't use an illusion of a lamp to see in the dark. There's no light source, but you think there is, so you think you can see and your mind fills in what you expect to see.
@RevenantBacon as a person currently involved in math at that level: first semester is 80-90% review for most, just at a higher level. Second semester is less than 20% review usually. Depends on the school and the teacher, but that’s what it’s like for me
@BardicWizard Well, that's kinda my point, 25-30% of any particular class is going back over what you learned last year, and I would expect a wizarding school to operate similarly.
modern geometry: now we're just going to switch to the plane-dual of this system and prove the theorem there, because it's easier in a different space. Method of Froboenius, there's another spell. "Just assume you know the answer, then figure out what assumption you just made."
My Computational Methods for Matrix Operations class was definitely Dark Arts. Not Defense Against the Dark Arts, they were the Dark Arts.
@RevenantBacon I'm pretty sure that site's rehosting copyrighted content (even if a lot of it is really old), so I'm going to remove that message. Sorry.
@doppelgreener Is that a grass sword, or a grass word?
The Ultraviolet Grasslands and the Black City by WTF Studio is a tabletop role-playing game book, half setting, half adventure, and half epic trip; inspired by psychedelic heavy metal, the Dying Earth genre, and classic Oregon Trail games. It leads a group of ‘heroes’ into the depths of a vast and mythic steppe filled with the detritus of time and space and fuzzy riffs.
One of my players has come up with a really interesting backstory. Basically, he was brought up in a cult worshiping an evil god as a paladin of that god. Due to an event that happened, he realised that the path he had been led down from birth was the wrong one and decided to break his oath and...
A folding boat is a magic item that can transform from a small box into a small or large boat and back. If I transform it into a boat and then sail it through an antimagic field, what will happen?
