• 0 Posts
  • 242 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: July 3rd, 2023
  • jjjalljs@ttrpg.networktoRPGMemes @ttrpg.network•Combat vs RP
    3·
    5 hours ago

    This is the best approach I’ve found.

    Player says, “I make a sales pitch playing on Priscilla’s hatred of our common foe, and that’s why she should sell us these explosives for cheap” and doesn’t have to actually do a sales call. Roll the dice and decide if that means she buys in, makes a counter offer, or what.

  • jjjalljs@ttrpg.networktoRPGMemes @ttrpg.network•Combat vs RP
    3·
    5 hours ago

    Personally I find adding a lot of flavor that has no mechanical impact kind of distracting and tiresome in a different way. Like, sure, it sounds cool you slashed their ankles or whatever, but if it doesn’t do anything I need to discard that. I can’t, in most systems, then be like “ok he just got stabbed in the leg he’s off balance. I can take advantage of that!”. It’s just noise.

    Some people have been like “You just don’t have any imagination!” but it’s not that. It’s that the flavor stuff is often actively not true, and it’s tiresome to hold two separate world states in mind at the same time. One where the fighter just stabbed the guy in the hand and threw sand in his eyes, and the other where he hit for 5 damage and his hand + eyes are fine.

    (Contrast Fate, which explicitly encourages you to be creative about the scene, and lets you mechanically benefit as well.)

  • jjjalljs@ttrpg.networktoRPGMemes @ttrpg.network•Combat vs RP
    17·
    12 hours ago

    I think the “I move and attack” stuff can get boring, especially if it’s slow. Like, if the players are speedy about it then you’re basically playing a board game, and that’s fine. I start to lose patience when you get the “can i move here? oh i can only move 30 feet. what about here? oh that will provoke. maybe if i cast misty step? oh i can’t cast two leveled spells in a round. Can I hide first? Oh that takes my action? Sorry I usually play rogue. Uhhh I guess I just shoot them.” mode.

    I also kind of really want to spend more time in systems where the talky parts have rules, too. D&D tends to be just "wing it’ and “DM decides”. If you’re at the noble’s ball and try to make a big speech to convince the duke to flee before your army attacks, there’s not really a lot of structure there. It can be fine to just “talk it out, man”, but that runs into the problem where my character on paper has CHA 20 but me in real life rocks a solid 10 CHA. Or the other case, where the fighter with 8 CHA has a salesguy for a player, and he punches well above his on-paper skills using his real life personality, where I’m sidelined.

    Honestly, just removing all the social skills from D&D would normalize the system.

    But there’s also games like Fate, that handle social conflict and sword conflict with the same rules. Stab someone? Roll fight vs whatever they defend with. Stab someone with your words? Roll Cruelty vs their Composure. In either case, if your dice come out on top enough then they don’t get to go on.

    I think some peopel who want more RP would hate this, since it gamifies it. But I’d rather have it than the aforementioned “real life sales guy hogs the spotlight” problem.

  • jjjalljs@ttrpg.networktoRPGMemes @ttrpg.network•Guilty As Charged
    1·
    10 days ago

    i am inclined to agree. the final fantasy 7 remake was surprisingly gentle about not having stupid missables. You could miss stuff, but it was recoverable without starting the whole thing over.

    i had a whole argument with someone on here a while ago where they insisted i just had “fomo” because i didn’t like this sort of surprise consequences. Foreshadowing is cool. Unpredictable is, to me, unsatisfying.

  • jjjalljs@ttrpg.networktoRPGMemes @ttrpg.network•Guilty As Charged
    78·
    11 days ago

    Sometimes it’s funny when tabletop RPG players expect the game to behave like a video game.

    GM: “The nearby town sent a message that a swarm of zombies is coming down the haunted mountain for them! They need help!”

    PCs: “Cool. But let’s finish that mushroom side quest first, and then we gotta help our wizard buddy get his new broom tuned up.”

    GM: “…okay.”

    <two in-game days later>

    PCs: “Ok, what do we see when we get to that town?”

    GM: “Seems like everyone’s dead. Looks a swarm of zombies or something came down from the mountain and ate everyone alive or something, maybe a day or two ago.”

    PCs: <confused, shocked>

  • jjjalljs@ttrpg.networktorpg@ttrpg.network•You Don't Need a Game System Before You Play
    1·
    16 days ago

    …yeah so if you’re the kind of player who argues and fights at the table. Maybe stick to structured games with clearly defined rules.

    You ignored the “or play a game I don’t like” part. That is what this process is extremely likely to create. Go look at the blog post again. Go look at those rules.

    Furthermore, the process described in the blog post is

    When a rule is needed, everyone at the table quickly discusses what the gameplay should feel like and what rule(s) would support that. If a majority of players agree on the rule (voting is necessary only if there is dissent)

    Arguing is built right into the process! Someone proposes a rule, and you talk about it. And you know what I don’t want to do? Discuss the merits of rules mid-session. Especially large systems like “how does magic work?” or “can you change someone’s mind?”. That sounds awful. It’s one thing to do a quick “Do you think Alex can climb a ladder with this ‘Broken Arm’ consequence?” discussion in Fate. It’s a whole other thing to invent aspects whole cloth, and then try to integrate them with whatever else people came up with this week.

    Or, if I pass on discussing why (for example) dropping your sword on a low roll is going to have weird effects, then I end up playing a game with rules I don’t like. Why would I want that? What don’t you get about this? Do I need to make you a flow chart?

    System doesnt know how to handle something
|
|-- Propose a new rule
    |- is the rule good?  --> yes --> oh that is surprising. carry on
         | no
         |
      discuss  <-- the void of wasted time
         |
         | - were they convinced? --> yes --> go back to 'propose a new rule'
                      |
                      |-- no --> keep discussing? -- yes --> well this sucks
                                             |-- no --> give up --------^

    Ironically, the game I mentioned as an example of what I do like (Fate) is very light weight. But not so light weight that it doesn’t exist, and I have to deal with Brian trying to introduce hit locations mid session, again.

    You seem to be imagining this like perfectly spherical frictionless group of players that are all super chill, on the same page about everything, and happy to just do whatever. I’m imagining what has been more typical in my experience, which is not that.

    Again…this isn’t your scenario. I don’t know what to tell you. You’re conflating taking game systems and adding other mechanics to it and just goofing around and making it up as you go.

    The blog post is about building a game system! Look at all the weird rules they made up! This whole blog post is about taking game systems (ie: rules people know from other games) and smushing them together! Anyone doing this process is going to start with some baseline system(s) in their head. Even if it’s just “let’s rock paper scissors for it” or “flip a coin”. It is in fact taking game game systems and adding other mechanics to it.

    They certainly had fun, but as I said that sounds like my personal hell.

    It’s okay to say “I need a game with explicit structure and rules”. That’s fine too, but maybe don’t argue with your players though.

    Arguing is built into the process described into the blog post. Unless you’re splitting hairs and saying “argue” isn’t the same as “discuss”.

  • jjjalljs@ttrpg.networktorpg@ttrpg.network•You Don't Need a Game System Before You Play
    1·
    18 days ago

    This has nothing to do with builds. Fate, the game I said I’d play, doesn’t really have builds.

    This is all about not wanting to have to spend a lot of time arguing with people, or playing a game I don’t like. Those are the two most likely outcomes. People will propose bad rules, and we either argue or I suck it up. There are so many common ideas in RPGs that I really don’t enjoy, but are popular nonetheless. I don’t want to stop the game and argue that “save or die” kind of sucks, and if we kill Alex’s character now like that a. they’re probably going to be unhappy just look at their face and b. what are they going to do the rest of the night?

    (Or I’ll propose rules that won’t achieve the desired goals very well, because I’m also not such a good designer I can nail things on the first try)

    Maybe with some hypothetical spherical frictionless group of players that are all on the same page about rules and design it would be fun. But that doesn’t seem to exist in the real world. We live in a world where people go “Let’s use D&D for a game of political intrigue! Wait, why does the fighter barely have anything to do and gets bad results on every check he does make? Why weren’t they scared when the antagonist pulled a knife on them??”

  • jjjalljs@ttrpg.networktorpg@ttrpg.network•Your Ideal RPG Series or Campaign
    4·
    19 days ago

    System: Fate

    Concept: “What if we fix the world with violence?”. Sort of the non-sephiroth parts of FF7. Near future cyberpunk ecoterrorism. The villains have money and the power that brings, but they’re still mortal. Find when their board meeting is happening, set off a bomb in the office. Find where the CEO gets lunch, shoot him in the back of the head. Senator voting to defund public education? Wow what are the odds he’d drown in his bathtub?

    I did sort of get a game of this going for a while, but the players ended up being a little weaker than I wanted, and the “make allies with other people who hate your enemies” was slow to catch on.

    I also probably let too many tangents sprawl out.

    One of them also rolled well below average, based on analysis one of the players did of the dice bot.

  • jjjalljs@ttrpg.networktorpg@ttrpg.network•You Don't Need a Game System Before You Play
    21·
    22 days ago

    As I said, it sounds like my personal hell. I do not believe the average person is good at making up rules, and thus many bad outcomes are more likely.

    If the other people are proposing bad rules, it’s probably some combination of

    • Play with the bad rule and am annoyed
    • Try to convince them to change the rule, and that’s not fun
    • Don’t realize it’s a bad rule until it has unwanted consequences

    I really don’t want the game to grind to a halt because we realized mid session that the interaction of rules is making Bob super effective, and now we need to untangle this in a way that Bob won’t feel attacked and Alice won’t feel useless.

    If I just wanted to fool around with some friends, and we wanted to do an RPG, Fate is right there. It even encourages you to build on top of it.

  • jjjalljs@ttrpg.networktorpg@ttrpg.network•You Don't Need a Game System Before You Play
    4·
    26 days ago

    A couple years ago at a bar I was talking to a guy, and he mentioned he’d started playing DND. I went, “oh cool. Which edition?”

    He said, “what?”. He didn’t know there were other editions. He didn’t know there were other RPGs. I think about this a lot and try to remember a lot of people aren’t really deep in the hobby. They show up once a week to play a game with their friends, and that’s about where it stops. Which is fine. Totally valid way to spend your leisure time. But very different than where I went.