Kichae

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.

empathicvagrant@lemmy.world Backstory is probably the wrong concept for a low-level character. They, instead, have a background. Backstories are prequel fodder, while backgrounds are used to figure out character motivation, and how a character reacts to future events.

Generally speaking, you don’t want to fill in blanks you don’t need filled i, because it’s creatively limiting your future self. If the events that got you to Session 1 are too interesting, you’ve probably written too much.

ensignwashout@startrek.website I don’t know, zero-to-hero is one of the best story tropes out there. Totally nullifying it seems kind of wild to me. But you have to know who you’re playing, and if you’re playing a highly skilled veteran with a rich history of great deeds, you need to understand that that is not a Level 1 character.

I’ve become increasingly convinced that people don’t want to play low level characters. Level 1 characters are neophyte adventurers. Their backstory shouldn’t include significant a mounts of adventure, combat, or heroics, because it introduces a significant amount of ludo-narrative dissonance into the campaign.

Unless there’s a reason they’ve been de-leveled.

This is functionally what Fellmarrow is doing in Narrative Declaration’s Kingmaker 2e actual play.

Heating on reentry is actually due to compressing the air in front of you, not friction. Falling from orbitall height will absolutely cause you to heat up the air in front of you, even as the air paassing you by is doing you no harm.

Though, if you smash into the atmosphere at orbital speeds, it’s probably going to do you some harm as it tries to force you back down to TV.

TTRPGs are games where you create stories, and sometimes those stories are “we did something we shouldn’ta, and someone got ganked”. What you’re describing is someone reading you a story book.

Well, not every game has Heroic Inspiration, but it still has people that gripe about secret rolls. And of those games that have metacurrencies for rerolls and the like, they’re not intended to be used in those situations.

So many people hate secret rolls. So many people feel like they remove agency from them.

But that’s what the dice do. They’re agency-revoking machines.

One of my favourite parts about Pathfinder 2e is that items – magic or otherwise – are leveled. I can hand out Level 6 weapons to Level 2 characters, and they will feel absolutely legendary.

Until about Level 5, where they start to feel really good.

Until Level 8, where they just feel OK.

This means, yes, I can take the effort to rebalance fights to account for the party’s toys, or I can just let them feel like fucking bosses for a few levels, and the challenges they take on catch up to them.

A significant part of the culture that has formed around 5e is about “having it all”. And usually by ignoring the (admittedly weak) rules that do exist, rather than exploiting actual gaps. So, you can frankenstein together a caster that has martial proficiency in armour (or even melee weapons), with the only compromise being your capstone abilities (which often are very expendable). And then you can metagame away your shitty social abilities by “roleplaying”.

I’m not going to defend 5e – I genuinely think it’s a poorly made game, and place the blame for that entirely on the execuitives – but the reason why so many people refuse to try something else is because they like the exploits that they believe exist, even though they are totally socially constructed.