Data scientist, video game analyst, astronomer, and Pathfinder 2e player/GM from Halifax, Nova Scotia.
buffman@lemmy.world Nor any other game series, really. It would be understandable if D&D’s playerbaase wasn’t concentrated in the two most recent editions, given how the brand dominates the scene, but it is…
It would also be understandable if Pathfinder 2 was a minor evolution of PFRPG, but it’s not…
dunstabzugshaubitze@feddit.org Oh, no, I mean they literally told me “I thought this was going to be like being characters in a book, where there’s a clear plot we’re following. Can you make it more like that?” And so I did.
Then they found The Thing during one of the sessions I was running while trying to actually structure things in the background. It was something I didn’t think was significant, but I probably should have seen it coming.
It… was not part of the restructuring work I was doing. It was part of the holding pattern “random bullshit” I was throwing at them for a few weeks.
Anyway, the campaign is about that now.
dunstabzugshaubitze@feddit.org This is why I did not plan long term plots for my family game, and then the chaos monkeys decided they wanted one.
So I put one together.
They ignored it.
theminions@lemmy.world The prone stuff also just seems unbelievable. Jabbing someone with your off-hand isn’t going to knock anyone over. It’s not a running body check against someone who isn’t bracing.
I see this all of the time in the PF2r subreddit. Everyone wants to know why it’s so hard to push enemies around or knock them over, as if they’re pro-wrestlers desperate to oversell for you for a paycheque, and not creatures who are opposing your attempts to do those things.
flavonol@lemmy.world Many, I imagine.
I spend… too much time on the Pathfinder 2e subreddit, and it is so painfully clear from how quietly obsessed that space is with class build optimization, that the idea of fighting for anything but a decisive, 100% kill outcome (on either side) is unimaginable to most people there. I think the most recent thing I saw could be summed up as “what’s the point of Hexploration if the outcome is just moderate difficulty fights?”
Even the idea of non-combat encounters or worldbuilding encounters are becoming alien to modern TTRPG fans, it seems.
heythisisnttheymca@lemmy.world The PR person he fired has charisma.
iamthetot > would you be okay with a player lying (fudging) a dice result to facilitate a result that they found more fun?
Thank you. No GM is going to accept their players declaring a bad roll to be a good one, instead. Cheating players is one of the more common GM complaints. I’m not sure why GMs seem to think that’s a one-way street.
> When I have DM’d there’s often a difference between the intended difficulty of an encounter I create versus how it actually works out in play.
Players are allowed to flee. Enemies are allowed to mock them and walk away.
I’m not sure why basically ever single discussion I ever see about GMing seems to live in this world where the only options in combat is “PCs die or NPCs die”, and the only workaround is to pick and choose when you’re playing a probability game.
mr_noxx@lemmy.ml Honestly, I agree with the others. I don’t know why we’re playing dice games if we don’t want to adhere to the dice. The dice create the uncertainty and variation that the play at the table responds to.
The more honest and transparent solution to players being at risk of dying is roleplay or narrative transition. Enemies don’t need to be doing coup de graces, and going down in combat can mean capture rather than death. But if it’s only fun for everyone if they’re winning, then why not play something else where losing is never an option?
themoken@startrek.website Some want to play XCOM without dice, and get really pissy when the dice say “no”.
iamthetot I’m in the middle of getting a forum going to keep track of my home PF2e game and organizey thoughts and ideas.
Maybe we should talk.
modernangel@sh.itjust.works They shape 100% of the storyline. The campaign is the story of their activities in the world.
They don’t shape the world, though, unless they do things to intervene in the current world lines of the people and institutions in it. At the start of the campaign, I scaffold the major political players in the world,and sketch out what their goals are, and how they’re trying to achieve them. I estimate how long it takes them to get to places of import for those goals, and track that in a calendar. I leave hooks for the players to pick up and engage with those things from time to time, but if they’re not interested, those entities just continue on unimpeded.
Meanwhile, everywhere they go, I dig into books of tables to come up with some NPCs with problems that need to be solved, side quests that can be activated, and locations that can be explored. They’re just names on a page until the players pick up the hook, but if they do, then the party does things to encounter and activate new political players who end up on the board. I then do the same thing after the fact, and add them to the calendar.
Their story is 100% theirs. The opportunities to shape the world’s story are there. There’s no “storyline” for me to bend around their gravity.
A lot of the people developing early fantasy RPGs were probably deeply influenced by the American western as a film and TV genre. It was really, really hard to avoid in the 50s and 60s, and it functionally provided the blueprints for other adventure-based genres. The western provided the setting of the frontier, and frontier towns were all too often depicted as being deeply isolated and under siege by the “savage wilderness”.
Because indigenous people were usually framed more like wild animals than people whose living room you just plopped yourself down and started squatting in.
So many of the adventure modules seemed to be built around this idea of the frontier, or the hinterland, or of being on the edge of civilization that they didn’t need to have a theory of settlement patterns. They were explicitly showing us what things looked like where the civilization networks wore thin and broke down.
But they also just sort of acted as one of the blueprints for later modules, and later settings. And when your setting is entirely made up of frontier modules, you end up with a setting where there’s no civilization.
> sorcerers have a superhero origin
This is Oracle erasure.
jjjalljs@ttrpg.network Yeah, the ideas that “I’m not interested in receiving a message, therefore the things I consume have no message” or “this product was inexpensive, therefore the creator has no message” are pretty wild.
Sometimes the politics being presented are invisible to the author, and sometimes they’re not. In either case, they’re communicating real messages about the world, what the creator believes is acceptable, and what they believe is not. Not seeing those messages really just means that you thoughtlessly agree with them.
Which says more about the consumer than it does the producer.
Presumably, they expected it to sell 0% more than their projections.
thegreatdarkness@ttrpg.network Sure. You should be able to use LotR to explain the rules of any fantasy RPG system, really.
LotR is running Pathfinder 2e under the hood, by the sounds of it, using Proficiency Without Level.
Ok, that’s brilliant and awesome. Brisome.
msbbritain@lemmy.world The issue us that it breaks with the established systems of “reality” without explanation or cause. It’s an arbitrary deviation from the established and shared understanding of how things work, with the only available explanatiin being “because I said so, so shut up and don’t question me”.
It’s one thing if there’s the equivalent of the Conceal Spell feat and actiin from Pathfinder being leveraged here,but tbat comes with both a build tax and an action tax. If there’s no price being paid, it’s a little bit of a “fuck you” to the players.