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WELCOME BACK It is perfectly OK to post grog in this thread. Here are the rules. - Must post grog. This is the big one. Your post can certainly comment on some funny grog, but the last thread was overwhelmed with low effort slackers riding the jocks of the real grogposters. Don't post grog, something bad will happen to you. Commentary on previous posts is fine, or discussing grog, but you gotta bring a pie to the buffet if you do. - Gotta be TG grog. Chess grog, board games, RPGS, whatever. No outside grog. Video games related to TG need a waiver. - No fanfic, you disgusting fucks. - No personal info. I don't care how lovely the dude's opinions are, take it to G+ or twitter or some offsite where I don't have to give a poo poo about it. Ed Greenwood's sex life is out. Ryan Dancey's politics are out. Don't helldump anyone. If you have some question as to if you should post something or not, odds are good you shouldn't. - If this goes to 10,000 posts without a serious problem, I will write a song and sing and play the banjo in praise of grogs.txt. And so I am not breaking my own rule, I give you this gem from RPGNet. It is a margin call, but I got a waiver for it from the mod. Mod privilege, I will not check it: quote:Quite, this wasn't people not getting a joke. It was mods actively using Moderator privilege (red text, threat of sanctions) to obscure a joke, in a place where joking is frowned on. quote:I do not like it when people lie in my presence about things that matter to me. I do not like it when people who are known frauds attempt to bait me into a long exchange that's claimed to be an argument but actually is there for he and his pals to mock me at their leisure later. I remember such offenses, and I do not forgive them either. If they don't destroy themselves, then I'll put right the balance and ensure that justice is satisfied sooner or later. Winson_Paine fucked around with this message at 17:38 on Sep 3, 2013 |
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Apr 1, 2013 06:09
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Player Gimps Own Character 1st level party, 3 decently optimized characters - archer, fighter, paladin, and one guy playing a cleric. The cleric rolls stats and comes out ok. With race modifiers, he ends up with a 14 Int, 18 Wis, and 12 Con. Strength and dexterity are 10. Cha 7. He wants the high Int for RP. Buys light armor and no shield. No strike bonus. AC 13. So he gets hit constantly, never deals damage back, and watches as a CR 3 melee creature takes on him plus 2 of the warriors and beats the three of them senselessly. They barely got out. The cleric swings 4 time for a total of 3 damage. He picked this, knowingly. --- quote:You do understand that YOU gimped him, right? Those rolls come out to be a 13pt buy, assuming he’s human. With a 20pt buy he could be a well balanced 12,12,12,12,18,12. +1 to hit & dmg, more channels, +1 to AC, etc. I don't ever play 20 point buy. 13 points is just fine. And two of the characters he is traveling with are fighters - the lowest of the low on class tiers, so I don't feel bad for the guy with the strongest class having lower stats. The fact that he crammed his stats into INT for no good reason is his fault.
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Apr 1, 2013 06:20
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EDIT Sorry, posted in the wrong thread. --- So as not to make this a void: Grogs on rape in RPG's "" posted:09-14-2008, 03:36 PM "" posted:
"" posted:I had one of my characters almost get raped by another PC in a game a few months back. The other PC was completely insane but, due to the aid of my character, was recovering and able to function as a member of the group. As a result of this, he was developing an emotional attachment to my character (also male). When this aid was cut off suddenly, the other PC blamed my character. He claimed betrayal and declared his feelings for my character, who quickly dismissed this as the rantings of an insane man. The response from the other PC was essentially, "I'll show you I love you", and then he attacked mine. The other PC was a psion (the cause of his insanity), so it was partially a mental attack and the dice weren't on my side. For a minute there, it looked like my character was going to be turned into the unwilling, gibbering love slave of another PC, but he ended up getting away. Bob Quixote fucked around with this message at 06:59 on Apr 1, 2013 |
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Apr 1, 2013 06:42
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Bob Quixote posted:EDIT No that was exactly the right post, I tell you what.
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Apr 1, 2013 06:46
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Winson_Paine posted:No that was exactly the right post, I tell you what. Oh, wasn't sure if it counted since it wasn't technically gaming related but if you say its ok: Sunday, 24 March 2013 A Perplexing Lack of Scumbags: Mystery Solved. You know, Arrows of Indra has been out for about two weeks now (still in the top 10!), and its been received to enormous positive praise, to my pleasure and slight surprise. I mean, I knew Old Schoolers would like it. I really hoped some non-old-schoolers might like it too. I was more surprised when I had practicing Hindus like it. And even a few people who are not normally members of my fan club. So all in all, great! But it was really strange to me; because I was expecting a flood of vicious attacks, that I'd come to associate as inevitable, whenever I do anything these days. The Pundit-hater crowd; and yet, these were almost completely silent. They hadn't been, for Lords of Olympus; they'd gone on an all-out assault. They'd all but accused me of plagiarism, and worse, of robbing from widows, of betraying Erick Wujcik (rather than trying to save his legacy), not to mention the more mundane accusations that my game was somehow badly-written or a storygame, which were just nonsense. A few even tried to attack the really incredible Precis Intermedia artwork and layout. In short, there were weeks of a concerted effort and assault to try to undermine my project. And there was EVERY indication that it would go exactly the same way with AoI: when we did the previews, there were already strings of assault against the game, against the art, accusations of racism, claims that the game was not well researched, etc etc. I'd been forced to respond and fight back against some of these, so I was expecting the onslaught once the game was finally released. Only then, nothing. Silence. There was no attack; a few critical voices here and there, but nothing like the careful and organized preconceived plans of attack that seemed to follow a party-line of argument meant to slander, insult, and outright misrepresent me or my game. In the first few days, I found myself feeling increasingly paranoid, and confused: why hadn't that happened yet? At the time, "Something Awful", which had become the central gathering-place of these people, who planned and executed these vicious and often extremely personal attacks against not just me but anyone else in the hobby they didn't like, often resorting to the worst kind of lies and outright harassment, had been hidden behind its "Adwall", temporarily preventing non-members from seeing the Goon-HQ that was "grognards.txt". It was only after the Adwall lifted that the answer became clear, though still shocking: the grognards.txt megathread, where the goons of SA, the trolls, the haters, and the pseudoactivism-Swine would get together to co-ordinate, post things that they chose to be offended by or that they wished to mock, work out in-thread just how they planned to attack it, and then head out to every other gaming forum, blog, and group on the internet to engage in these attacks while looking for more target-posts and target-people with which to perpetuate the cycle; this central command for the worst Swine in the hobby (and I classify them as worse than even Storygames Swine, though they sometimes overlap with these; because at least the latter have some vision, twisted as it might be, of what they want to create, while the SA goons want to create nothing, they only want to tear down and destroy; the Forge Swine fought for something that was wrong, but the SA goons fight for nothing more than making others miserable), was no more. It seems that Something Awful (the larger website where the grog.txt group resided) finally realized how toxic these guys were to, well, everything, and how bad it was making the rest of their site look, apparently (I'm told, since non-members didn't get to see it happen) they decided things went too far when the SA goons started posting very intimate real-life information about one of their latest victims. Possibly fearing even legal consequences from the activities of these assholes, SA decided to expunge the thread altogether. But I think they could not have known, I don't think ANYONE could have known, just how much of a difference it makes. The situation after the disappearance of that poo poo-hole is like night and day; suddenly, there aren't neverending waves of toxic people coming to poo poo all over everything people do in their own backyards (that is, their own forums and websites; though apparently they were starting to move into real-life harassment too). For me, personally, the difference in the experience of the release of Arrows of Indra (without-grognards.txt) and Lords of Olympus (back when they were around) has been astounding. The latter, joyful as it was for me after finally fulfilling a dream that had taken more than two gruelingly long years to execute, and knowing that I was helping to preserve my mentor's legacy, had ended up being to some degree sadly tainted by the fact that when I should have been happy about my game being well-received I had to spend a great deal of time fighting back against concerted and preplanned attack strategies from people who seemed to want nothing less than to see me destroyed. This time? I've gotten to dedicate almost 100% of my energy into thanking those who are praising the game, answering productive and meaningful (rather than loaded or insulting) questions, talking about future plans, and generally feeling great for my biggest commercial success yet. So yeah, I knew that grognards.txt and the people in it were shitstains on our hobby that contributed nothing and actively harmed everything good about RPGs, but I had never guessed just to what extent, just how much of a difference it makes for them to be gone. I'm sure they'll be back, be it at SA or finding somewhere else to congregate, and in all likelihood this is, at best, a temporary respite from the sort of human garbage that can't actually stop themselves from obsessing about people who are actually having more fun than they are, much less those who are more accomplished than they are; its just not possible, I think, for most of them to stop; at least not the very worst ones (as another of theRPGsite mods pointed out, we've tracked that some of the bigwigs at grognards.txt, including now-rpgnet-moderator Ettin, spend more time on theRPGsite than any of its own mod staff do, and its not like we're very absentee). So they'll be back, but I have to hope that at least this has been an (unexpected) major blow against their ability to coordinate their assaults against other members of the hobby. I hope too that people start to think about what this unexpected springtime of pleasantness without the "grognards-goons" around has been like, and determine that maybe we should be more active in trying to prevent these sorts of toxic environments from being allowed to taint the hobby in the first place. RPGPundit Currently Smoking: Lorenzetti Solitario Oversize + H&H's Beverwyck
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Apr 1, 2013 06:49
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quote:Raziere wrote: Yeah, that Devilman comic is sure a howler. Totally hilarious! Jokes fit right in with its tone! And even moreso for Amon: Darkside of Devilman! The OVA based on the first comic is totally a light-hearted comedy and not a brutal horror escapade where a little girl gets eaten by Amon, Demon Lord of War, while he goes on a rampage!
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Apr 1, 2013 07:12
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Also from the Exalted forums: quote:Lord_Nabu wrote: quote:The Chills and One Last Joke wrote: quote:peterpan3764 wrote: quote:Chained Divinity wrote: Because 4e gutted both the system and the setting and remade it for WoW kiddies. quote:Exploding Frogs wrote: Here's the thing. Yes, we may have Pathfinder (which is never going to be the "fixed" 3.5e it tries so hard to be), but we will never again receive new official content for 3.5e. Ever. And fan content varies so wildly in quality and tone as to be completely unreliable and frankly worthless. So we have the options of either switching to the shitpile that is 4e or endlessly reheating old content. Or just giving up on D&D altogether and cussing out WotC for forcing us to do so.
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Apr 1, 2013 07:32
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Mind Control is a very common trope, used across multiple stories in literature, movie and comic. Most tabletop RPGs have it's adaptations. And mind control is great, I give it that. It works marvelously as a narrative. How better to make a villain apparent, if not by showing him forcefuly exert control over unwilling humans? The guy can force you to fight your comrades, your loved one, your family, so it's immediately obvious you have to treat him seriously. It's easy to base a moral conflict upon such power. "Perhaps they are not free, but given freedom they would only hurt themselves". "Your power serves you and yet you squander it. I shall make a better use for it by controling you". "If gods have the power to shape the universe, stop wars and famine and bring back the dead and I can control gods with my mind, then what does that makes me?". So yeah- mind control is great. It also doesn't work as it should. It works great as an element of the story that is told from a single perspective. It works when you're the puppeteer. It works when you are both the puppeteer and the puppet. It completely fails to do the trick if you're just the puppet. See, mind control is tricky, because it changes what a person is. As an ST who has a whole world at his disposal, it's a minor issue to adapt NPCs to players using mind control on them. You have uncounatble number of people in your world you have to play out, you're not really deeply connected to any of them. Or you are connected to all of them. But still, the story matters more then NPCs, so there is no problem for the ST to play out mind controlled NPCs. But as a player? Well, here's the place where things start to get complicated. In most games, mind control is binary- you get struck, you hand over your sheet to the ST, that's his job to use you now. You might not like it, but hey- that's part of the story. Maybe it will work out. Maybe you can fix things that are to follow. Hell- most of the times you won't remember what you've been doing. So basically- that meat puppet that stabs the kid? That's not you or your character. At this point it's just another NPC. Spell breaks, charm ends, concentration is lost and BAM! Back to your old self. White Wolf games went out of their ways to make it different. Look at Dominate Discipline in Vampire- it's the most cliche mind control trick ever. Or frenzy and fear mechanics. Bloodbond. Or Limit Brakes in Exalted and UMI. You are a subject of mind control, but now you have to play it out. The core concept doesn't change- what you're playing now is still not you, just a different person and yet- yes, you have to adapt. Why is that? This is based on a huge assumptions that all players are both very competent at playing different characters, switching at moment's notice and also that they are so disconnected from roleplaying their characters, that they see no problems in switching to play somebody else. And yes- it might be the case in Vampire. There you're screwed from the begining. You know that. You know that you're an insane, evil bloodsucker. If you gotta act a little more insane for a moment? Well, easy, you just do it. But this isn't the case in Exalted. Here players are really in touch with their characters. They don't want bad things happening to them. They don't want to play anything else- they want to be themeselves. They want to see that thy are the most important thing in the world, not the story that looms over their heads. They don't accept that it is beneficial for a story to play out differently for a moment. So they don't. And the entire mind control shtick fails. And it's a problem, because the mind control is balanced around the idea that you're gonna play it out. It's purposefuly powerful and hard to protect against, because the game assumes you're gonna cheat from the inside. But while doing so, it narratively pulls you out of your character and forces you to think as player. So exactly not how mind control should work. I know it is more realistic. I know that in theory, it has a huge potential. I also know, from a lot of expirience, that it doesn't work. So. How do I solve it? When struck with something like this you have to lean back and think about all the possilities you have now, exactly what can you do while being under the mind control spell. You gotta figure out how to act your character, while having an outside force telling you what to do. You have to cheat. While staying true to your character, you have to deal with being forced to play a narrative that is alien to you. It's vivd, it's fun, it's entertaining, it works. In Vampire. It doesn't work in Exalted, because for all the fun it might provide (and still- only for someone proficient in this type of fun, which my players aren't), it also brakes the immersion. The problem is not that mind control is there- it's great for narrative purpose. The problem is that it expects a lot of skills from the players and the ST- skills that are pretty rare. And it's build around that mechanically too, so it's hard to change it. WW games makes a lot of assumptions about the players. Those are all specific games that really can't be played by everyone. But unlike my Exalted characters, I have no UMI charms at my command, so I can't shape players to be better at what they do and apreciate stuff that I like. So I'm trying to work with what I have. The problem is not that there is mechanics that takes control away from players. There is something like that in every game and for good reasons. The problem is, that in WW, you have to play the puppet's part. The problem is that the game assumes that this is what players want to do when dealing with mind control. It assumes they are good at it. It assumes they value the story more then their chracters. All those assumptions are incorrect most of the time, especially so in Exalted. So I'm gonna say this again, because those are all mighty fine examples I really like: it works in theory. It works when your players are willing to cooperate. It works if they have fun while playing it out. But in practice- it failed me every time, because my players are not willing to see the potential and work with it. So what do you do, when you want to tell this sort of story and you can't quite count on your players to play it out right? Because in all other games I just take the reigns from them myself. The control either brakes at some point or not, but the narrative is my to command and if I want to tell this story, then I will. But WW games don't give me an answer to that question. They all just assume players will cooperate with me on that. Which they won't. So I'm left with magnificent tool to tell a stroy I really want to tell, but I can't do it, because I can't do it myself. Otherguy posted:I think you are over looking something. You see the story and are happy with it. The player sees the story and finds no fun in it. The issue lies exactly there. What you are seeing as fun is not fun to the player. It is not that they 'are not willing to see the potential', they have looked at what could be and found it distasteful, so they rebuke it. Not really much I can do to change this fact. And yes, it's something I admit is true. Still not seeing why it's bad though. Otherguy posted:I ask you, what happens if a player no longer likes the way the story if being told or that this chapter of the story even exists? Do you work out and find a chapter the player and you both can like or do you ignore the player's wishes and force them to do what you want if they wish to still be in the story? I don't make games for my players. They don't play my games for me. I'm just trying to create a story, if it turns out it's not a story they would like? I'm going to do it anyway. I'm sure as hell gonna tone it down and try to make it as much fun for them as possible. But some compromise has to be made. I'm not in entertainment business after all. Otherguy posted:What is the point of having a story that not everyone wants and will collectively work towards? Is a game that alienates some of its actors ever fun? Stories don't have to be "fun" to be good or bad. The point of a good story that is not fun is that it is good. The point of bad story that is fun is nothing- there is no point to such story. God created World War II- it was a magnificent story. Was it "fun" for anybody involved? Otherguy2 posted:RPGs are games, though. The primary purpose is fun for all involved. If only you would be having fun, why the gently caress should the other people stay playing instead of doing something they actually enjoy? ... Because... The story? ... I mean... For art? Suffering makes it... More worthwile... Does... Not... Compute... They don't see it as a blow to the integrity and value of the story, they see it as blow to their own integrity, the fun they have and happiness they derive from the game. They simply cannot look past themeselves, their egoistic desire for entertainment and when face with an option to have "a great story at a personal expanse" they chose "lame story at the price of no personal expense". They can't see the future, they don't know if the story will be good or bad. But they are going to brand it as bad and deny it's existance, because playing it out does not grant them "happiness". Otherguy3 posted:Wow, I am baffled and awed. You talk about "egoistic desire and entertainment" and you fail to see how this applies to you? It's not hypocrisy it is complete myopia. "They cannot look past themselves"? Really? I was worried you'd assume so. Can't blame you, it does sound that way. There is a difference in my desire to make a good story and in my group's desire to have fun. Egoism applies to me as much as it applies to anyone else. But the thing is- I frequently give my players story they want, most of the time in fact. And they're having fun and in turn I'm having fun because they're having fun and all that. And they all are happy because they achieved something and because the story we shared was something they liked. But I end up disappointed most of the time, because the story could have been so much better if only I could have been given more power. But the moment I try to do that, my players just refuse to cooperate. So yes- they can't look past themselves. I do, I do it all the time. The moment I try not to, the game ends. And it's frustrating. MiltonSlavemasta fucked around with this message at 09:33 on Apr 1, 2013 |
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Apr 1, 2013 09:18
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I am sorry that my perspective offends yours. I consider spending time purely for "fun" as petty yes, but that does not translate to others, so feel free to do so, knowing that I will not think lesser of you because of it. Neither should you think lesser of me for perceiving fun as a thing unworthy of my time. Of course, if fun is a byproduct of the story I invested in (which most of the time it is), then ever better, but it never was my purpose and the end means I want to achieve when playing RPG. Roleplaying games have wonderful potential. More so then fiction. It is pretty tragic, I think, to merely reserve yourself to use that potential for achieving fun. Otherguy posted:If your players do, however, then this is a disconnect you should not be perpetuating. Because I give a poo poo? I mean, if I do, why can't they? I perpetualy sacrifice my goal as a GM and my enjoyment so they may have their fun, while I'm left with scraps. Why can't they do that? Just once? Why can't they, just once, see things from my perspective and not think about their fun? Why am I forced to drop my goals and ideals, when they are not? Same aplies to you. You seem to think that seeking fun in gaming is justified in itself, so you should never be resigning from it. Why should you right? It's the "true way of gaming". I see past that poo poo. I play games frivolously all the time with my group, I'm having fun. I watch horror movies, good movies, bad movies, I'm having fun. I'm also left unsatisfied, because this isn't really what I wanted. The moment I try to do what I wanted everybody calls me a bad person for not seeking fun in games. OtherOtherGuy posted:Then Seriously, why are you GMing? Because there is a potential for great story. It's a matter of self realization. It's something that allows me to express myself. It's just the thing- they are not willing to brake out of roleplaying their characters in a specific way. They do not like to be told to do something differently then they would do. They refuse to act differently and there are some things they are simply incapable of doing. This is the reason mind control simply fails against them- they refuse to play it out. And the game makes an assumption that they are willing to do it, because they derive more fun from the story. But it's just not the case with my players. MiltonSlavemasta fucked around with this message at 09:45 on Apr 1, 2013 |
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Apr 1, 2013 09:37
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Charm Person makes people more friendly, but there is no telling what their friendship looks like, you can define it however you want. Some very barbaric tribes like to battle their friends to death, it's normal for them, so the scarry barbarian you just charmed might want to kill you even more now that he likes you. Suggestion spell is similar- a mental command you must obey. But that command is neutral, there is no moral value to it. It's a binary "do stuff" command that you still can work around if you're clever. Dominate and WW mind control in general is different. The most prominent example are spells that create or modify intimacies. Intimacies define what your character likes and what he hates. If the spell creates a positive intimacy you have to act as if you actually liked the stuff intimacy points to. And for some people it's just impossible. If I were to play an abstinent character in the game, for example, and some bad guy used UMI on me and said "go get drunk and pass out in the back alley, you have a positive intimacy towards alcohol now" I'd get frustrated. I would still play it out, but this is something that brakes my immersion as I can't picture my character doing something like that on his own free will. It's the same guy who wants his players to be cool with being mind controlled.
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Apr 1, 2013 09:47
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When it comes to games, passion is good. Really, really good. The best. In fact, I'd venture to say that if you're not really passionate about the game you're playing, no matter what game or what type of game it is, you'd be doing yourself, the game, and the world a favor by setting it aside the moment you realize this and heading off to find one that makes your blood boil and your heart sing. Passion makes the gaming world go round. At least that's how I used to feel. But if you believe some authorities, such as the venerable Steve Winter (and you should!) passion is the enemy. Enter the gaming boogeyman de jour, the Edition Warriors! This legion of soulless, twisted monstrosities has the nerve, the sheer gall, to believe that Dungeons & Dragons is one of the great games of all time. Not only that, but that the storied D&D name itself actually means something and has some sort of precious but somehow non-monetary value (an obvious contradiction in terms!) and that products bearing the name can betray, subvert, or otherwise fail to be worthy of it. But what's worst of all, what really keeps these guys up at night, is that these Edition Warriors are also known for their aberrant belief that they should be wholly unashamed to admit this in public. The most unholy among them even feel they have a very real personal obligation to do so! Clearly, Armageddon is at hand, for the Edition Warriors are not content with merely causing WotC's brilliant D&D 4E reinvention to fail through no fault of the company's own and despite being a peerless design copied directly from the pages of Leonardo da Vinci's fabled Lost Codex. Oh, no. They've already set their sights on WotC's next big project: "D&D Next." Yes, these heartless savages plan to nip this one in the bud, not caring one whit that the millions spent collaborating with Pepsi's ad agency on a name will then go completely to waste. For the love of God, you degenerate monsters: Can't you just stop saying how you feel for once!? Can't you see that you're ruining everything with your stupid caring and self-expression!? Just sit down, shut up, open your wallet to WizBro and keep it open and everything will be fine. Gaming without passion isn't so bad. You'll see. After all, many of the "pros" have apparently been doing it for years and they must know better than you. I mean, they're pros! Can't we all just
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Apr 1, 2013 13:57
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Benoist's amazing thoughts on Dungeon World posted:Well the whole concept of moves strikes me as Forgist, in the sense that it basically codifies into rules basic decisions and actions that should really be open-ended and up to the participants of the game (you know, what makes an actual role playing game what it is: the open-endedness of it all). It creates limits, instead of creating a normal collaboration and dialog between the players and GM. And if the creation of a specific rule for each "move" is not a self-imposed limit and hair-splitting of putting basic actions into their own little rules boxes with specific effects and the like, then what the gently caress is the point? Why make every action or decision or event a game unit, instead of just, you know, cut the middle man and get directly into the situation and describe what you do organically, without the need for rules clutches to tell you what to do or how to run the game? / 
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Apr 1, 2013 14:14
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quote:Rape is such an awful and personal violation ripvanwormer posted:The particular fallacy at work here is called a category error, which is to say you're comparing two things that are different enough that a comparison of relative value isn't meaningful, as if you had said "world peace is better than trees" or "I'd rather drive to work in a Buick than in a wet burrito." While it's quite likely better to be a rape survivor than a murder victim in real life, it doesn't follow that stories and role-playing scenarios about rape ought to be less offensive than (or even equally offensive as) stories and role-playing scenarios about murder. There's a reason Agatha Christie wrote murder mysteries rather than rape mysteries, and Angela Lansbury starred in Murder, She Wrote rather than Rape, She Wrote, and that reason isn't patriarchal bias or sexism. Death or the threat of death, in fiction, fills a number of useful purposes, including increasing dramatic tension by upping the stakes and increasing verisimilitude by upping the realism. An RPG scenario without the threat of death becomes a much tamer event; certainly, there are countless ways of threatening the PCs or NPCs that don't involve potentially killing them, but death is a particularly dramatic threat. Arguably, then, the threat of death is an important ingredient in telling a story. Rape or the threat of rape, on the other hand, adds not merely to the dramatic tension/realism but changes the entire tone of the story, adding flavors of violation/humiliation/trauma/prurient tones that death alone doesn't do. There are any number of dramatic and exciting stories you can tell without adding rape to the mix, whereas telling a story with no threat of death in it is a very different affair; the two story elements thus belong to entirely different categories. This is also, incidentally, why the syllogism "death is worse than torture, so if it's legal to kill enemy soldiers then it ought to be legal to torture them" is also a category error. A kill-or-be-killed situation on the battlefield is manifestly different from abusing a helpless prisoner. I point that out not to start a debate about the efficacy of torture, but just to further illustrate what I mean by category errors. The Corey Rayburn essay you linked is also relevant, noting that while death may be worse than torture, a court may be free to apply the death penalty while being prohibited from applying "cruel and unusual" punishments that fall short of death. This is a little different: the court was acknowledging that killing convicts is more extreme than, say, cutting off their hands, but still ruled that there should be legal limits to how living convicts could be treated.
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Apr 1, 2013 14:59
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Man, we're already off to quite a start. Benoist being Benoist, Tarnowski lying about people who disagree with him, and of course rapegrog. I made a text file to save relevant bits of grog for when the thread came back, but wound up with only the one piece to post, which is Zak S going in and zakking it up in a thread about problematic content in Tenra Bansho Zero.quote:
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Apr 1, 2013 15:32
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So as I mentioned in the TG Chat thread, a dude on a mailing list I'm on decided to post Powers & Perils conversions of the races from FATAL. I am not sure if this is ripped straight from FATAL or not, but lemme tell you ...quote:Ogre, Kinder-Fresser Heck of a PC race, gotta say.
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Apr 1, 2013 17:13
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Hiya. What HUGE mistake WotC is doing is that they are trying to basically create a 'new' system and trying to call it "D&D". This is simply *not* going to work. Period. Full stop. No Save. No Raise/Resurrection possible. I said it at the announcement of 5e, and I'll say it again. WotC needs to decide what the absolute *basics* of the D&D/AD&D system is. THAT needs to be the core, bedrock, base-line, starting point of 5e. And, IMHO, this should basically be a clone of BECMI, with edges rounded, shaped and smoothed to be able to use a BECMI character in a AD&D 1e campaign, playing in a 3e adventure module. For example, take AC. In BECMI, low AC = better. No armor = AC 9. In AD&D 1e/2e, low AC = better. No armor = AC 10. In 3e, high AC = better. No armor = AC 10. All are basically the same concept "armor improves you chance to not be damaged". WotC needs to smooth that out so it all fits as a coherent system; where a BECMI characters AC can be used 'as is' in a 1e/2e style campaign whilst fighting a 3e style monster. They can then use "dials" or "modes" or "options" or whatever they want to call it, to tweak the effectiveness of AC and/or the detail of it. However, WotC seems to be trying to say "The feeling of version X is Y; therefore, we need to make a new rule, called Z, that will give us X while still feeling like Y"...when they should just be saying "X feels like Y, so lets do that". It's like they are trying to re-invent the wheel for some reason, when they should be asking themselves "Why the hell are we trying to re-invent the wheel when a wheel does exactly what we need it to do?!?" ^_^
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Apr 1, 2013 17:35
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quote:I can get behind "If it were real, I could see this happening". That's good storytelling. In the words of Jean Paul Sartre: One of the complaints most frequently made about The Ways of Freedom can be summed up as follows: "After all, these people are so spineless, how are you going to make heroes out of them?" This objection almost makes me laugh, for it assumes that people are born heroes. That's what people really want to think. If you're born cowardly, you may set your mind perfectly at rest; there's nothing you can do about it; you'll be cowardly all your life, whatever you may do. If you're born a hero, you may set your mind just as much at rest; you'll be a hero all your life; you'll drink like a hero and eat like a hero. What the existentialist says is that the coward makes himself cowardly, that the hero makes himself heroic. There's always a possibility for the coward not to be cowardly any more and for the hero to stop being heroic. Player entitlement becomes a factor when the player believes that their PC has "PC" stamped on his forehead, that he is guaranteed to be a hero, that he cannot die an ignoble death so some goblins due to foolishness or poor fortune, because merely by virtue of existing he is intrinsically the hero and the world will warp itself to make sure his deeds are heroic and successful. But that's not how the world works. You are not born a hero, you become a hero - or perhaps you don't become a hero, or perhaps you do become a hero but later fall and become a coward, or perhaps one of a hundred other things happens. But the dice fall where they may, your owns skill will determine your fate, and you most certainly don't have plot armor to protect your heroic heroness. quote:WHAT KIND OF GM RUNS 1ST LEVEL CHARACTERS INTO A DRAGON's DEN? I would get up and leave as soon as the encounter happened because just the idea of it is so friggin asinine. The dragon's den exists in the world. It's not the DM's fault if the PCs stumble upon it, it's not the DM's responsibility to fiat away the dragon and replace it with a baby goblin, and it's certainly not the DM's fault if the 1st-level characters decide attacking the dragon head-on - instead of sneaking around, or running away, or poisoning it, or doing pretty much anything else - would be a wise course of action. Does your world just not have dragons until the PCs hit a certain level, at which point dragons suddenly spring to life fully-grown?
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Apr 1, 2013 17:41
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quote:What HUGE mistake WotC is doing is that they are trying to basically create a 'new' system and trying to call it "D&D". This is simply *not* going to work. Period. Full stop. No Save. No Raise/Resurrection possible.  (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Apr 1, 2013 18:15
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Guilty Spork posted:Yeah, WotC did make a huuuuge mistake back in 2001! First casualty of not reading the OP.
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Apr 1, 2013 18:20
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The D&D CCG debacle: Who's really at fault? On the surface, it's a straightforward combination of cynical marketing and absolute creative bankruptcy. But I'm not so sure. I was talking with a friend of mine recently who works in the videogame industry. He told me downright harrowing tales behind some of the worst games of all times. No kidding. Several of them actually received awards for it. These are projects that span the spectrum from "'gritty' reinvention of beloved cartoon mascot" to "is that even, technically, a game?" And one pattern emerged: A few people (sometimes only one) with way more money than sense and a whole lot of well-meaning, talented people who know it's a bad idea, say it's a bad idea, and still finish the project because they can't afford to quit their jobs instead of putting work unto a bad idea. There's also no small amount of throwing good money after bad ("We've already sunk millions into this turkey, we can't stop now!"). So that brings me to D&D. It's no secret that they're a subsidiary of Hasbro and that Hasbro wants the D&D "brand" to be making more than it is. It's not hard to imagine WotC's designers, who are, we can assume, RPG gamers with some respect for the form and reverence for a classic like D&D, being told by some executive at Hasbro who wouldn't know Dungeons & Dragons from death & dismemberment insurance: "What about that Magic thing? That makes money. Just make it more like the Magic!" Right before he adjusts his snappy Gordon Gekko suspenders and snorts a three-foot rail of coke off a naked $5000/night escort before bellowing his best Al Pacino "Hoo-ha!" So what's my point? I mean, for all I know, this might not be the case at all. Maybe so, but armed with these new insights into exactly how ugly game design in a corporate environment can get, I'm going to be hesitant to assign blame for this one. At least for the time being. Certainly somebody has masterminded a forehead-slapping affront to a great game, but we may never know exactly who or why. At least not until one of us buys the right ex-employee a beer in the years to come and gets the full story.
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Apr 1, 2013 18:23
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At one time one of the best thing in the RPG world was picking up a new game book in the hope that it will offer something cool mechanically. Not Setting and Fluff, those are are easy. I can make up my own without limit and end, and steal with wild abandon from the best fantasy/sci-fi creators the world has to offer (I just can't publish it, but that's not a big deal). Game Mechanics on the other hand have generally be produced by hacks since the end of the SPI era and the joy of seeing a new game has for the last 32 years turned to disappointment after opening the cover. I no longer expect to see anything cool behind the covers of a new book. It generally only takes a few minutes to determine if a system is worth while, all I need do is look for the any of the following Red Flags:
2. Does the game have dice pools, non-standard methods of reading die rolls, or doe sit swap out die types? Examples: All WoD 3. games, Shadowrun, All versions of Deadlands 4. Does the game fail Simulation of Process such as To-Hit rolls which don't actually hit things or damage rolls that don't really cause damage? Examples: All versions of D&D, Dark Heresy 5. Does the game use Fate Point, Hero Points, Bennys and the like to balance an otherwise unbalanced system? Examples: Shadowrun, Dark Heresy, Deadlands 6. Is it diceless? Examples: Amber, Theatrix 7. Does it include mechanics that control or limit role-playing choices? Examples: Call of Cthulhu, Pendragon 8. Does it fail to scale for the entire human (normal and heroic) range and at least near human superheroic? Examples: Call of Cthulhu, Dark Heresy 9. Does it include mechanics granting a player control over elements besides the decisions of his character? Examples: Hong Kong Action Theater 10. Does the game brag about 'getting out of the way' or being transparent? Examples: The Window, FUDGE 11. Does the system fail to support maps and minis? Example: HERO 6th Edition 12. Is the Pace of Decision too low? Examples: D&D, HERO using the published builds, Dark Heresy 13. Does the game rules reward non-genre behavior? Examples: D&D, Dark Heresy, Shadowrun... really nearly all of them. 14. Does the game focus on trivialities unimportant to the genre it's suppose to model. Examples: OSR Style D&D 15. Is the game system uninteresting to play outside the framing of a role-playing session? Examples: Just about everything That's just off the top of my head (examples too). I'm sure that I could add more to the list with time. Offer up your red flags, maybe you'll think of one that I'd agree with that I've blanked on for the moment. Some games can have one of the Red Flags and still turn out well, Force on Force for example fits #2 (changing die types) but the game itself actually works. Of course it's more wargame than RPG and that causes it to make up the error in other areas.
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Apr 1, 2013 19:31
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quote:
quote:I'm not saying that this wouldn't happen. wars have been started over petty things like that, a war was once even started over a pig. He's probably talking about the Pig War. While it can technically be said to have started over a pig, that was mostly just a sign of and excuse for mounting border tensions. You could say World War I was "over" just one murdered dude but obviously it was more complex than that. I wonder if WWI is sufficiently modern to be un-petty? quote:
And the crown jewel: quote:
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Apr 1, 2013 20:00
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I really like 3.5. 1st edition was great for it's time but looking poo poo up in tables became really tedious after awhile. 2nd edition is still pretty great and reasonably streamlined but 3.5 went even further. I did like 3.0 but the stuff they nerfed for 3.5 really should have been nerfed. Haste was loving crazy for example. 4 sucks balls. It's the Euro version of D&D where things are far too balanced. Some measures were taken in 3.5 and that was plenty. What I prefer about 3-3.5 is the feats and the overall ease of use. 1st and 2nd edition are a little trickier to play with no real gain in the role playing side of things. What I hate about 4th is that the classes don't have much personality anymore. Everyone is uber balanced and it makes the game much more boring to me. In all versions before there were some things you could count on. Mages would be weak until they got access to a 3rd level spell, thieves weren't always the most powerful but had uses that could be pretty cool, Clerics were over powered (especially in 3rd) as some kind of incentive to encourage you to be everyone's bitch.. in other words the classes felt really different from one another. 4th doesn't do that and the combat in 4th takes way too long. On top of this 3.5 should be easy to find and cheap. Pathfinder is the same basic thing but it's still more expensive right now.. most D&D fans call Pathfinder 3.75 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ How can a roleplaying game, where there are four classes, each with unique and critical skills, where cooperation is a key to success even have "Balance" as a measurable attribute? How can D&D be unbalanced? And by the way, what the hell is "the late game" in a D&D campaign? This truly is a Whiskey-Tango-Foxtrot moment for me. How the hell can anyone, where the heart of the game is narrative and the nature of the character progression allows you to adjust strength via level of experience even have "balance" as a consideration? Seriously, throw away all the new poo poo. Dump all of the profit-centered garbage. Get the original game and "play". It's not called Role-Competing for a reason. S. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ I've played the gently caress out of every edition of D&D and I've published over 280 reviews of D&D adventures. Most of the people responding to this thread know gently caress-all about D&D. The best version of D&D depends on how you want to play D&D. *) OD&D & BASIC or B/X D&D are essentially the same thing. These version emphasize the weird. You are only a little bit better than a normal human and you are entering alien environments where the normal rules of life don't apply. You don't know what the monsters can do to you or what hurts them. The magic items are non-standard. It's a constant struggle for survival against the forces of the unknown. GOLD=XP and the high mortality rate means that combat is usually the last resort. *) 1E keeps gold for XP but adds a lot more rules. A LOT more rules. The additional regimentation of the rules and world mean less mystery and less whimsy. *) 2E started the "Build" craze, which means Min/Maxing and CharOp. Not coincidentally there was a shift to plots, railroading, and away from GOLD=XP. If the game is now about combat then combat must be less fatal, and the game MUST now be about combat because of the GOLD!=XP and "roleplay" award stuff. *) 3E Added still more rules and more CharOp. It's now all about combat=xp. The game is now getting out of the DM's hands as players start to argue rules. Massive explosion in rulebook size as CharOp becomes the norm. *) 4E The game is now about combat. Mortality is reduced because of this. You are essentially playing Warhammer Quest with a few more rules for the stuff between combats. A few. *) 5E Who knows where this is going to end up. Early versions were simpler, but the focus is once again on combat but this time with high mortality. That's not gonna fly. If you just want to play D&D then go get B/X and be happy. The rulebooks are small and you can have fun forever with them. If you want to have the largest player pool then go get Pathfinder, a 3x clone. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Played them all and agree completely with Shellhead's assessment of the various permutations. I will add that as a miniature combat system, 4E is a ton a of fun. I prefer 3.5 Though I think there are better RPGs out there. None the less 3.5 does a good job of being a cohesive well thought out fantasy RPG.
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Apr 1, 2013 20:04
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Mors Rattus posted:
This is some bizarre grog, man. Also... quote:People don't ever seem to have this problem when they play Star Wars, and the Jedi code is even stricter than the paladin code I think.
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Apr 1, 2013 20:44
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quote:People don't ever seem to have this problem when they play Star Wars, and the Jedi code is even stricter than the paladin code I think. I totally remember in Star Wars where Anikan did something his DM said "his character wouldn't do" and he lost all his Jedi powers. I think it was after the DM set up some kind of ethical Kobayashi Maru just so he could gleefully "set up a Fall." quote:Throughout the years of 3.0-> 3.5 The CharOp Board, this board, and others have made posts and such detailing methods for strong builds, rapid accumulation of power, and often heavily breaking the assumptions of the designers of the game system.
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Apr 1, 2013 21:03
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You have rolled dice and scratched out the limitations of your character. You have made a decision about gender, you've followed the protocols of your game in order to determine what your character knows and what particular 'education' he or she has. You've poured over lists of equipment and plugged boots and clothes over your character's body, filled the back pack, strung belts and bands over the shoulders and hips of the character and stuffed or hung those with weapons. You've named your character. You've recorded all the things you're going to need to know about your character so that you can play the game. What you have here is 'life.' It is a gift. It is the sort of thing for which other people say "congratulations" and for which they throw showers and fill the space with presents. This character is alive. More to the point, this isn't 'a life' this is 'your life' ... which is to say, this is a life you did not formerly possess, but which is now ready for you to toss away or propel forward at your whim. It is a life you have never had. It is a life free of parental influences, free from guilt bestowed upon you by authority figures, free from fear of the law or fear of the unknown. It is free from these things because you are free from the restraining concerns having to do with pain, suffering, boredom or any other misery. This character, this life you have just recently come into, doesn't need to bother with all that. There are those players for whom the character will never be themselves. They deliberately keep the character separate. They do not invest. "This is my character, these are 'his' aspirations, these are the things that 'he' wants. I, personally, would never want these things, but this character is nothing like me, and therefore he has other wants and needs." There is something clinical in that approach, which says that as a player, I can conceive of the things someone else would want. I can process the methodology for obtaining those things, and I can take intellectual pleasure from the methodology succeeding ... but I would never, ever identify with the visceral pleasure in that success. It is apart from me. Naturally, we presume this means the methods and patterns of killing. This is, after all, D&D. Things are killed. There's blood. Mayhem ensues. At the end of many a hard fight, bodies are strewn across the field. That's something which, if it were to happen before us in the real world, would traumatize us. We could not manage it. We would turn and vomit and hope that we had to never see a sight like that again, and we would hope we could forget the one we'd seen. We would certainly not revel in the violence. We would not wash our hands in it. We would not be stripping the bodies in glee or arguing passionately with our mates about how many gold teeth, ripped from the jaws of the dead, we were willing to share out. These bloody fighters and thieves are NOT US. They are our characters. Displacement This is the shift, or move, which defends us from those things we do not wish to know about ourselves or the world around us. It is a strategy that ties up the world in a pretty box with a pretty bow, that allows us to believe that where it comes to the world, we are exactly what we want to perceive ourselves to be. This is an unconscious process. We do not do it from any sort of strategy that we intentionally employ. Long before we have come to the conclusion that we believe a thing, that belief has been installed - hard-wired, if you will - inside our minds by our need to have it so. No person who goes off to war, who leaves behind a wife or family, who has grown up on football games and chasing the opposite sex, believes they have it in them to be some sort of psychotic killer. Many may approach the matter from the standpoint that they are willing to kill ... but few imagine the full extent of what they may be prepared to do once the situation becomes hot and dangerous. That is why the way people are affected by war - where there is suddenly no law, no right, no wrong, just the raw force of weapons and absolute application of will - is such a shock. They didn't know they could do those things. They didn't know anyone could do those things. They'd heard of it, they'd had it explained to them, but all along the line there was that displacement that made it all seem far away and unreal ... until the full weight of reality came crashing down on their heads. Playing a character isn't reality. You're not really alive. It's just paper. And the brutality carried forth by your characters, that's unreal too. And thank heaven, too ... because otherwise you'd have to reconcile your imagination, the one that allows you to cheer and feel your heart rate increase at dice bouncing on a table with the actual, real act of bludgeoning someone to death with a mace. No one wants that. There's only a small percentage who could remotely begin to deal with that. So, yes, you've displaced your character from yourself. The character may kill for coin and experience, but that's not you. Except, of course, it is. The radical game design that is incorporated into the process of D&D is that your personal psychology is being called upon to conjure the necessary tactics and processes that it takes to kill things and take what they own. This isn't being done by a monopoly piece, with which you could hardly identify. This isn't being done by a character in a video game, that looks nothing like you anyway and - really - doesn't begin to fall into the uncanny valley of matching your everyday frustrations against working out those frustrations with a roleplayed axe. No, the character here is wholly imaginary. You may sketch out how you perceive your character to look; you may steal an image off the web; but you know, and I know, that the brain of that character, defined by those ticks and marks on your character sheet, is YOUR brain. You've got to figure out a way to get out of this goblin fortress, and there's no other entity you're leaning upon as a crutch to do that. If you sit down and think about it, playing a D&D character, taking the necessary mindset that displaces you from your character, is a mindfuck that doesn't occur in any game except this one. You are this character, this living breathing entity, and you're not. You've made the decision to swing and hit, and you haven't. It's just what you think your character ought to do in this situation, with your character's skills, if survival is the goal. Which is to say, on some neanderthal level, it is what YOU would do if YOU had these skills and YOU were there. So thankfully, you're not. Because that would be too freaky. It's a dance around the abyss, as it were. There's the great yawning black pool, where the worst things we can imagine slowly swirl in a terrifying void. While we don't want to fall in, we're going to just move to move as close to the edge as we can, and stand on our tip-toes, and look down for just a minute or so ... before falling back, getting up from the table and saying "whew!" ... glad its all just a game! Expression Let's lift all the battle mayhem and drop it on a shelf, and just explore the angle of being the character without the PTSD. I said you had a life to live, and a lot of players embrace that life. It is an opportunity to try things they can't otherwise try; to build up complex structures and networks, to explore unidentified worlds or meet imaginary beings. For some, this isn't their 'character' doing these things ... it is they, themselves. "I am the Grey Mouser," says the player. "I am touring the streets, examining each target, each simple minded fool who doesn't stand a chance against my worthy brilliance ...!" and so on. This is identification with the character, and it isn't as though it doesn't have considerable and enduring precedents that go back through the ages. This is, after all, acting. I have been given a part - say, a mass murderer of Auschwitz. It is my role in this play or film to represent the verisimilitude of that persona, to involve myself into the mindset of a person who is capable of doing that. I don't concern myself with the reality that it isn't something I would do ... because to achieve the respect the part demands, I have to become that frightening antagonist for the course of the performance - or else the audience won't believe. So, temporarily, I toss my proclivities aside, leaving them on the chair of my dressing room like a old cloak. I am "Klaus the butcher." I laugh at suffering. I take glee in the mass rape of the innocent girl that happens off stage. I order my men, bellowing at them, to enjoy themselves. This is the part. These are the words and the stage directions. What have I become? Surely, not Klaus. Klaus is killed at the end of every performance, his evil deeds wrapped in a cloak of ultimate justice (we hope) and the audience comes away feeling that we must be vigilant against the Klaus's of the future. So I've played my part. But what have I become? For the run of the play, I have chosen to express a part of my humanity that I understand to exist. The difference between me and Klaus is, as anyone can tell you, a matter of time and chance. If I, or you, gentle reader, had grown up in the proper families of Germany in the 1920s, joined the proper organizations in the 1930s and excelled at our positions, we could have found ourselves in the comparatively cushy and lucrative positions of executing Jews in the 1940s. If I research my part, and examine it closely, I must admit to myself how lucky I am not to have been brought up in the cultural frame that would have directed me to do those things. There are none of us who are so innocent that we could not have been seduced into that. So I have re-examined myself through the expression of acting the role. I have caused an audience to re-examine themselves. It is an opportunity. Granted, we're not talking about players being part of the Final Solution. Hopefully, we're asking ourselves to examine more wholesome lives we could never otherwise lead ... to be farmers and merchant bankers, buccaneers or landlords, kings or queens of land and empire. But along with those things, too, we must include pirates and vampires, mercenaries, master criminals, cult leaders and so on. Once again, we must recognize that the profound element of D&D is that everything is on the table. It isn't like a video game, where what you are is limited to the programmer's conception for that game. It isn't like a play, where the only part I can play is this, and the only lines I have are these. The field is wide open. There is no 'law' in the arena. The same character I run today as a missionary can turn sour and heretical tomorrow; he can plunder and pillage this month, and the next he can seek redemption and make amends today. My character is not limited to my being male, or my being human. So when we say, "express" yourself, it is the deliberate attempt to become this other being, this other sex, this other idealogy. Surely, the further I invest myself into the role, the more expressive the role becomes. I'm not saying that the character is a puppet that I move with strings, and the more adept I become the more lifelike it is ... I am saying that for a time, I forget that I cannot actually die as I sit at the table and run my character. I forget that I'm not actually falling through the air, watching the earth rise menacingly towards me, as I furtively roll dice hoping the right combination turns up before its too late. I'm there! I'm in the body of my character, and that's possible because when I close my real, human eyes, I see what I think is there, and I don't want to stop. If the reader dreams like I dream, the reader has been a scientist and a race car driver; the reader has been old or young, or the victim of a deranged killer or someone holding the stopwatch at a racetrack. When these things and more occurred in the reader's dream, the reader knew those things were true ... but in the dream, they were. It wasn't someone else falling out of an airplane. That was you. And as the ground approached, there was no displacement. You either relished in the conceived rush of air as it went past, knowing you were dreaming, or you awoke sweating as you realized that you were about to die. Whatever you may have been doing, or whatever you might have conceived of being (sometimes I am a zepplin in my dreams), you never thought upon waking, "that wasn't me." You knew it was you. You said to your partner, "I was a zepplin in my dream last night." You never said, "I dreamed I was running a zepplin character last night." Well, okay, maybe you have. I don't know you. You're a stranger. And if you think of your dreams that way, you're stranger than I am. Immersing yourself in the game means expressing yourself through your character ... and by means of that, you gain experiences as that character that you couldn't have otherwise. And that is a powerful drug. Winning Then what do we want to do with this opportunity? The answer seems obvious. We want to win the game. Or we would, if this was monopoly, and a 'win' was something as clearly designed as a goal post. It isn't in an rpg. Winning is this fairly amorphous quality that means different things to different people. For some, just gathering all the money they can in the shortest space of time defines a win. For others, having a good time is the measure. For still others, challenging themselves, either by overcoming the odds or 'solving the problem' is the ideal. I'm as much in the dark as anyone where it comes to defining a 'win' when there are no finish line involved. There's an entire self-help industry designed to aid you in deciding how, in real life, to win, and how to tell when you have won. The reason for that is that as people we've lost the clear definitions our culture once had; three or four generations back, the business of winning was obvious. Make money, use it to make more money, use the massive amounts of money you've gained to build a personal world of power and triumph, use that to beat back the other fellow and - if you're really successful - use it to tell the state and the other fellow what to do. You know you're winning when everyone around you is clearly on their knees. If you're still on your knees to someone ... you're not there yet. That doesn't allow for a win for very many people ... but in a strongly heirarchical society, everyone understood that humbling yourself before authority was expected and ultimately unavoidable. Unlike the present, when really we simply avoid authority or snub our noses at it. Faced with the expectation that we will never enjoy the appreciable qualities of massive amounts of power, we simply ignore the whole matter and find interesting ways to amuse ourselves. The roleplaying game has a lot more in common with the old heirarchical system than with our modern avoidist philosophy. You're not only awarded for increasing your abilities and influence ... you're positively punished for not taking the power-acquisition path. How? Well, the game is boring. There's nothing interesting about pretending to get a job in a roleplaying game. It's not like your steampunk character can sit down for the evening with the words, "I read all the plays of Shakespeare. How much experience do I get?" There's no percentage in it. If you're not fighting ... and thus increasing both the level of your danger and the potential reward from the risk you're taking, it's just a dull, dull game. Whatever your personal motivations - coin, fun, challenge - you must first and foremost recognize the social structure surrounding your eventual achievements: right now you are nothing. With time and effort and perseverence, you will be something. To be something requires acquisition - of power or wealth - and that acquisition will come, must come, from someone or something else. There's nothing to be done about it. You may be a nice person. You may have no personal desires for global domination. But someone has, and your meager acquisition of wealth and power (in the beginning) is, at the very least, an annoyance to someone. Eventually it will become an annoyance they can't ignore, and in the interest of keeping all the wealth and power they already possess, they will have to put a timely end to your existence. Well, usually in an rpg, they are trying to kill you. So where it comes to the subject of winning, we can at least acknowledge that you will have to be taking something from someone. Who you take it from is up to you. Your gamemaster is probably going to make this very convenient for you, nicely standing up strawmen you can beat into submission easily with your pain stick ... but if you have any influence on the decision-making process at all, you really ought to sit down and think. "What is it that someone has got that I would really like to have?" ... and ... "Who is it that has things that I think really ought to have nothing?" Those are two very simple questions, and they will greatly help you in establishing a purpose for your character. In the greater sense, they will build up those goal posts we were saying earlier didn't exist. The questions are open and non-moral in structure. The who and the what could be anything, after all. It does not matter if they're nice people or bad people ... the decision making process is not in how they behave towards their minions, it is in how YOU would behave towards their minions if they were nicely out of the way. Getting them out of the way is the win. One presumes that the thing you want would be the tool that would help with that. So first and foremost, go get the thing you want. Backdrop I want to avoid calling this part of your journey as a character the 'setting.' That's really something for the DM to worry about. For you, all that stuff that makes up the world is just a screen you stand in front of. You do not need to be involved in all that. You don't need to invest. Granted, if something comes screaming out of the backdrop at you, you will have to adapt and overcome ... but regarding the principle of all that environment, you're free and clear. Where are we? You've come to a reconciliation that you are the character. You recognize that being the character gives you the opportunity to do things you wouldn't normally be able to in life, and so its rational you're going to pick things that interest you. And towards that, you've made up your mind to rid some poor bastard of all their wealth and power, and along the way get some of the great materialistic things that bring happiness to your heart. What now? Well, now we assess that backdrop we're not invested in ... the main feature of which is that stoogy, largely untrustworthy creature whose imagination unfortunately thwarts most attempts at close dissection and examination. (You can dissect the DM physically, but it makes for poor gameplay the next gamenight). For you, the player, the DM is the backdrop. The DM is also the possessor of all the material you want and all the power you're bent on usurping. Fortunately for you, the DM is not personally involved in his or her wealth and power. He or she is only pretending, acting in a passionless manner on behalf of creatures and personalities that do not in fact exist. The DM is a little like a pro-bono lawyer designated to look after clients who are now dead, leaving the lawyer with obligations and no expectation of remuneration. In other words, the DM is a bit of a sap. Fundamentally, the DM wants you to win - that is, achieve your goals. That is your edge. From your perspective, success or failure matters. From the DM's perspective, success or failure is a matter of making all the right ticks on all the right boxes of documents that fill filing cabinets in an immense warehouse that won't yield up all its paperwork in the DM's lifetime. Like I said, a sap. To achieve your goals, you are playing the DM. Note, I do not said playing against. The DM is not in competition with you, and you are not with him or her. Those who insist on seeing themselves locked in a struggle against the DM for gain have deluded themselves into thinking the structure of the roleplaying game is simple and clear. They see themselves as the protagonist and automatically brand any apparent opposition as the given antagonist. It's a me versus the world philosophy, whether the gain is rank or information or personal conquest. Like the heckler at a comedy club, this individual has missed the point. The DM is potentially your ally. You need his or her judgement to succeed at your tasks, and as I said, the DM's inclination is that you should receive it. Oh, the DM will try to give the opposite impression; the DM will seem to mind gently caress you and confront you with obstacles at every opportunity ... but it is all smoke and mirrors. Deep down, the DM's real desire is that you will thwart all of his or her obstacles and ultimately triumph. He or she just can't say so. As a player, you must rise above appearances. You must realize that this individual running the game has no animosity towards you or your character (or should have none ... but more about that later). Hopefully, the DM is a friend. It is up to you as a player to tap into that friendship and make it work for you. Having the DM on your side in a game, whatever the reason, is the brass ring ... and even though with a very good DM it will be hard to have, you've got to keep reaching for it. Otherwise, you're stuck with the success the dice can give you ... and the dice are somewhat less than reliable. Most often, most players do that by playing the DM's game. This is easiest, after all. The DM clearly wants things from the party ... adventure to this place, kill this monster, achieve this victory and so on. Ordinary players approach the game with the expectation of buying into that agenda - it is much easier than trying to push their own, and if their DM is at all high strung, there's less table drama in the bargain. It takes a little more chutzpah to deliberately subvert the DM's wishes in order for the player to achieve his or her personal ends ... but that is what's needed! Remember, you ARE your character. You have needs and wants too; and in the long run, your needs and wants should trump those of the DM. You're the one down on the ground, fighting the monsters, suffering the losses and taking the risks. It is your character that is going to live or die here ... a character into which you've sought to invest. If those monsters opposed to you die, the DM's world will go on. The DM can make more at a whim. But if your character dies ... that's it. Something that you have cherished and perhaps loved is gone forever. The DM in no manner can suffer a loss like that. You can. And because you can, you must recognize that this game is hinging on your emotion and not the DM's. That gives you precedence, here. You are the active ingredient, and so it is your actions that matter. You must stiffen yourself, then, towards winning the DM onto your side in order to win the game (achieve your goals). Some do this with rules lawyering, to corral the DM into actions that correspond to mutually agreeed upon limits to the DM's behavior. Some manipulate through wheedling, whining or out-and-out complaining. Some keep notes on every word the DM has said in order to flash those notes at the right time in order to compel the DM to adher to his or her own rulings. And some innovate. The first examples above, and other things players do along those lines, are terribly overt and any long-time DM with experience can see them coming and he or she will often ignore such attempts through gravitas: "I am the DM, and I do not sympathize." Some DMs will respond less kindly. Some DMs will fix rules against tactics like lawyering out of sheer meanness, in the sense that they will get their backs up rather than give ground, even when they're wrong. But 'innovation' is a very difficult thing to subvert as a DM, and in fact it is what all DMs crave. It's the sort of thing that softens a DMs heart ... so in a situation where the player is trying to innovate, and failing miserably, DMs will nevertheless go gooey and give more ground than they ought. Innovation is the DM's Achilles' heel, and it is what you want to shoot for as a player. What is innovation, however, and how to you achieve it? Well, to look at that, first we have to talk about your tools. Gearing Up I have often made jokes about players who set off to adventure and without having purchased any boots, stockings, food, belt pouch, quiver, harness and tack for their horses (though they usually remember the saddle), etcetera. The reason why is easy to understand. They've remembered to buy armor and weapons because those are things which they know they're going to need when the fighting starts. They've remembered to choose their spells for the same reason. They've remembered to buy backpacks and sacks because they have their eye clearly on the loot they're going to haul away. There's nothing worse than having to take off your rope and makeshift a sack out of it. What these players haven't learned to do is to visualize themselves in the world where they've chosen to run. They are 'there.' They're comprehension of the game is on the game itself, and that is no path to success where it comes to D&D. The game allows for far deeper introspection into the behavior and success ... and a good player knows to take advantage of that allowance. In the Thomas Covenant series, the main character, who is a leper, is compelled from time to time to give himself a 'visual serveillance of extremities,' or a VSE. The purpose of this results from the deadening of a leper's nerve endings, so that the skin lacks sensitivity to cuts, bruises or other damage ... and for a leper, this is deadly. An unobserved cut will be an untreated cut, which will fester and perhaps turn gangrenous before anything proper can be done. The circumstance can lead to the loss of body parts or potentially death. As a side note, I once slipped with a knife and severed the nerve connection between my thumb and forefinger, through the web of my left hand, and ever since there is a definite 'dead zone' in the touch of that my index finger. This is undesirable, as when I cook this is the finger that holds whatever I am cutting, and as such I must concentrate on not letting that numb digit stray out a little too close to the flashing knife in my right hand. The character, for all the player's identity with it, is like a large entity that lacks any tactile feeling. It is an extension of the player's emotional desires and motivation, but it cannot give back any physical signal that it lacks something important. You cannot feel its bare feet upon the road, and therefore you don't notice you haven't any boots until three sessions after the last journey to the market, when you're seeing suddenly that you've forgotten to purchase them. If you can look at your character in this specific way, you can see how important it is to have an organized, successfully sketched out representation of that character - the character sheet. The sheet is your VSE. It's not only the information you need to fight battles and measure your odds of success, it is also the indication of your general wellbeing. It is the only possible representation of your character's physical body, and far too often a casual approach to your character sheet will result in missed opportunities, confusion and - occasionally - epic failure. I once had a character who died because they had forgotten a potion of extra-healing they had received far, far into the past. The character got into a situation where they were cut off from the rest of the party, alone and bleeding. Without any surcease, or time to bind wounds, the character simply bled out. The potion was discovered when the rest of the party had recovered the body, and were dividing up the character's things. Some gentle readers will snort at the character's stupidity; others might recognize a sad tale for what it was. Certainly the player was less that happy about it. However you personally see it, we all know how long time play can pile up the sheets with notes and bits of information and so on ... and we know that not everyone at the table is doing as neat a job keeping all that stuff under control as others. Most everyone has had the experience of losing a critical sheet with the exact amount of experience, written in haste at the end of a running; or not being able to find something you know you have, except that it isn't written down. No matter how detailed and comprehensive a player's character sheet is at the beginning of a campaign, session after session piles up the data and information and material wealth to the point where it's management becomes a challenge for everyone. Being up to that challenge is more than merely having a head for accountancy ... it is being a good player. I can make some important suggestions, as follows: Don't keep loose sheets. It seems like a practical solution, as things that are loose can be moved around and reorganized, but if it's loose it greatly increases the likelihood that it will be lost. D&D tables tend to become terrific messes, and very often a sheet with scribbles on it that don't look important will be thrown out with the chip bags and the rest of the packaging that comes with game nights. Spiral notebooks are more secure - though I would recommend that you don't rip pieces out of them as you go along. An absent-mindedly discarded sheet can have things on it that were important and not necessarily noticed before that sheet hits the trash. Keep your work! Write neatly and label everything. It doesn't hurt to date things, either, as that gives a sense of how old a particular bit of information is. If you write the experience you want to add to your character somewhere, write that this random five digit number IS experience and add a date underneath. A date is only six figures with two dashes, and can save you a lot of misery. As regards neat writing ... I'm not clear why people who have been graduated for ten years cannot train themselves. Me, I don't write at all. I have literally lost the large callous that used to be on my middle finger, from the days when I wrote whole novels on paper ... and my writing is past legible. That's why I've moved all this sort of thing to computer - and things on a computer are very neat. So ultimately, I'd say get a computer. Barring that, however, force yourself to practice your letters, like you ought to have done in grade 1, and get past that bad habit. Rewrite your character often. Not only because it needs it, but because the act of rewriting is a VSE. It will move things from the paper into your conscious mind, so that when you are playing the game next week you will know where that thing is because you wrote it down. The worst thing is to have a very neat, very tidy sheet that contains a bunch of stuff you use all the time, but which you haven't actually looked at for more than a year because, well, that sheet doesn't need rewriting. Not looking is not thinking ... even if you've memorized the sheet. If you have memorized it, say it out loud every once in awhile to reinvest that stuff into your mind. In the real world, you could just look around your house to see what you had. Think of rewriting your character as a sort of general cleaning you would do in the spring or fall. By actually having to move around fifteen things in the storeroom to get at that summer stuff, you're reminding yourself of the books and gear and general stuff that you've forgotten all about. You may remember you still have all that, but the process of cleaning reminds you where it is. Organize your character valuably. The worst sort of organization for an rpg player would be to record all your equipment alphabetically. It is just as bad to push all the details about your character's background into a set of pages where they make up a story that you're probably never going to read again. Subdividing and cataloging a character is antithetical to the character's living self ... you wouldn't subdivide your own experiences. You wouldn't place the objects in your house in a circle along the walls alphabetically. By grouping objects together in the meaningful groups, we make them convenient for use. The kitchen things in the kitchen, the bathroom things in the bathroom. We keep some books on the shelves of our study and others in the bookcase in the hall. Still others we keep behind the toilet. So why would you list every book on one sheet, separate from the rest of your equipment list? The logical answer would be, "so I can find them." This seems systematic and reasonable, but it doesn't cause you to stumble across those same books in a way that would be useful to your character at an appropriate time. Your mind is NOT an organization of neat rows ... it is a group of clusters that makes interconnections randomly, depending upon chance and circumstance. The more sterile you make your character sheet, the less opportunity you will have for a happenstance idea that might make the difference between success. As an example, you're looking for something to burn, but because you have your books buried in a sheet at the back of your character, it doesn't occur to you at that moment or at that time that books are flammable. However, the player next to you records his stuff according to where it is on his character, and because he has 'book' written under 'three torches,' he makes the connection immediately. This may seem strange and counter-intuitive ... but in fact it is very pro-intuitive. Requiring yourself to remember what you have on the basis of where it is as opposed to what it is called or what category it sits in compels you to redirect your investigations towards seeing the character's collection of things as a whole. This, in turn, makes your character more real, more something like you would be in real life. The bag you carry around with you is probably a jumble of a lot of things, but you don't have any trouble finding anything in it because you remember what you've put there and you're able to retrieve it at will. I'm recommending that you try to achieve the same results with your character. And if I might add, rewriting your character often will help with that ideal. Another general comment I'd like to make would be about the intrisicality of things a character possesses. I have noticed there is too strong a tendency to see objects as whole parts. What I mean is that all too often a player will forget that backpacks and shields have straps or that the handle and head of an axe come apart. I'm astounded at players who find themselves stumped at having to haul something small up from 100 feet below when they only have "50 feet of rope" ... because they've forgotten that rope is made of strands that can be pulled apart and tied to make three times as much length. Perhaps it would not hold a character, but it will certainly drop a bucket down to a pond of unreachable fresh water and raise it again. The issue is that words written on a page do not have the 'sense' that real objects carry. No one would fail to notice that the straps from a pack would make serviceable bonds for a prisoner if the pack were visible ... but players will cast about for something and come up shy because all they have it the word on a page. Try to see past the word and at the nature of the thing itself ... so that when you are struggling to innovate an immediate solution to a problem, you recognize that you have more options than are necessarily self-evident. Innovation begins with seeing and restructuring that which is taken for granted. Remember too that the DM will likely take for granted everything your player has ... and by creating more use out of objects that seem to have their purpose neatly rendered, you will impress your DM; that's what you need to get out of this poor situation you're in and into one that lets you succeed. Proactivity If it seems I'm presenting the DM as a bit of a dupe whom you can manipulate, I mean that only as a half truth. I don't mean to say the DM will actually bend the rules to ease your way (though some will, either though inexperience or indulgence). You can't quite count on that. But the DM is a human, and humans are inclined to like those with whom they get along ... and strangely, DMs are soft where it comes to players who cleverly manipulate the world they've built. That manipulation ... or 'innovation' as I've been calling it ... is proof positive that their world is inspiring thought and creativity in the player. That is the DM's bread and butter, believe me. So if you've begun buttering up the DM by demonstrating how smart you are, your DM is bound to let you dig around with things that might otherwise be discounted out of hand. A DM, for instance, is ready to be a little more 'sandbox' with a campaign if the players show a willingness to play it well. What's needed are proactive players. I've already set a bit of a baseline there. You know what you want. You know who to get it from, or perhaps who to beat to death with it once the thing's in your hand. You recognize that to get those things you're going to have to be more organized in your character and ultimately in yourself ... and that should result in quicker reaction times when you're asked what weapon your carrying or whether or not you've got bandages ("Of course I have, they're in the pack on top of my spellbook, folded and halfway wrapped around the potion of animal control"). The next step is to carry that approach into the DMs world ... and that will bump you against the denizens of that world: all the NPCs and the monsters you'll find, some your friends and allies, some neutral and dismissive, and some of whom are wondering if your bones carry much sweet and juicy marrow. It is your role in the game to set out in their direction, direct the allies, influence the fence sitters and deny your bone packing to the rest. How you do this is up to you ... but it is important that you recognize the responsibility for doing this is YOURS. It must be said that many worlds and DMs are not anxious to give you this responsibility. For them, the game is to be presented like a set of midway sideshows, with the DM as barker to shout you onto this ride or urge you to bet your money on that booth. Here's the Funhouse, here's the Matterhorn, here's the ring toss, here's the coin toss. "Throw your dice and take your chances, hurry, hurry, hurry!" That's derisive and simplifying but what it isn't is unfair. The very act of seeing the Haunted House involves paying your money, getting into car on rails and being taken through a series of pre-planned, preset moments of thrill and split-instant terror. This or that jumps out at you and gets your heart racing and it IS a lot of fun ... when you're 16. When you're 16, the world is new and there are no cliches; there are no predictable endings to films and there are no flat and wooden characterizations. When you're 16, every word you write is brilliant and every thought you have is the first time anyone anywhere in the world has thought that. It is only with time and reading many books and seeing many movies that you begin to realize that most of what you thought was great in your youth depended so much on your perspective. Of course, this assumes that as you get older you do read a lot of books and see a lot of movies, and not all of one type. Some people never grow up. If you're prepared to spend all your time in prefabricated funhouses, then much of what I've written above is going to be of little use to you. Some of the details about the character sheet might be helpful, and some of that about having the DM on your side ... but all that I've written about winning and being the character will not be of much help. You're like Riker, Data and Worf in that very bad hotel from the second season of the Next Generation, described in the show thusly: "... I awakened to find myself here in the Royale Hotel, precisely as described in the novel I found in my room. And for the last 38 years, I have survived here. I have come to understand that the alien contaminators created this place for me out of some sense of guilt, presuming that the novel we had on board the shuttle about the Hotel Royale was, in fact, a guide to our preferred lifestyle and social habits. Obviously they thought that this was the world from which I came. I hold no malice toward my benefactors. They could not possibly know the hell that they have put me through. For it was such a badly-written book, filled with endless cliché and shallow characters... I shall welcome death when it comes." Put in that world, you do what you can. There's no opportunity to be proactive, and therefore the responsibility for 'running' your character is not yours. At best, like the characters in the show, you can 'solve the riddle' ... but unlike the characters in the show, who move forward to their version of the real world, you're put into another Hotel Royale to solve a different riddle. On the other hand, in a sandbox the responsbility IS yours ... and what you do with it reflects on you. For some, that's not a very good thing. It does not suggest a good time. To them, it is the difference between being asked to visit the carnival in town and in having to stay at home and make their own fun. They will take the carnival, everytime. What I've tried to do is to offer some basic premises upon which to make your own fun. Be the character. Have a goal. Take care of yourself by taking care of your 'physical manifestation,' the character sheet. All that's left to tell you is to set your jaw, be brave and make your own way in the world. The thing about being a hero in the books, you see, is that as the hero it's all laid out for you - like a video game. You know what you're supposed to do. But life isn't like that. Life is frightening. Life is full of opportunities to make the wrong choices. In life, there's a chance of humiliating yourself and looking stupid. No one appreciates that. So even though in D&D your actual person won't die (your avatar will) there are still things to lose ... the respect of other people, for a start. Specifically, people around a table with whom you're mostly not forthcoming. Or so I suppose. I've found that where you have a group of people who are prepared to be embarrassed in the eyes of one another, running a character in a sandbox is a lot easier. Expectations are lower and more indulgent. People are prepared to look 'silly' ... and therefore, far more willing to take risks and dare themselves to do things that might otherwise seem like a bad move. Judgementalism, not just coming from the DM, is a large part of the reason players beg to avoid sandbox play. It takes guts to have your character swagger into a bar, slap around a few of the customers and do it in a way that makes the other players at the table impressed. Too much finger wagging kills it very quickly - and for the gentle reader who has gotten this far, ask yourself how much finger-wagging you've done yourself, in the name of telling others 'the best way to play.' It isn't that you haven't meant well. You've only done at the table what I've done here ... tried to give your best advice. But human beings who are unfamiliar with getting up on their hind legs and taking action are easily overwhelmed. If you're a player (or a DM), you have to do more than BE proactive ... you have to encourage it in others. Each player must, in girding on their weapons and armor, gird on a sense of confidence in playing this game. It is not enough to pretend to be the character ... if you ARE the character, then you are taking the character's emotional risks and making those your own. And that is the brilliance of this game. There may not be another place where for three or four hours at a stretch, you can enjoy the emotion of spectacular overconfidence. In ordinary life, you have to worry about injury and disapproval - but in D&D you can be an enormous jackass, literally wallowing in your own glorification, and you can do it whether you prefer to be a 'hero' or not. It takes energy to reach down into yourself and find the will to be all that you would be if it weren't for the lack of resources or confidence ... but the reward is greater than merely a good show on the midway. The reward can be a transforming experience. It can tell you things about yourself you did not know; it can give you confidence in things you do that are not D&D. It can give you experience from your dealings with people that will contribute to your success no matter what you decide to do. There arn't many games that will do that. You're very lucky to have come across this one. So lift your character off the ground, walk boldly up to that guard and introduce yourself. Tell the guard what you intend to do. Tell the guard he better help you, or so help him you're going to explain it in clearer terms. Be gutsy. Take chances. Don't just dangle your toes in the water ... dive in!
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Apr 1, 2013 21:33
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Self-respect I wonder how useful any of this has been. I haven't filled this post with suggestions on how to find dungeons or how to set up traps to capture monsters for later fun and profit. I haven't given 18 ways to slyly get rumors out of townspeople or how to go about exploring the wilderness out of town. There's not a word here about the best possible order to march a party or how to pick a selection of weapons that will save your life when things get dark and scary. In short, there hasn't been any practical advice at all. And this was supposed to be about how to play a character. It isn't that I don't have opinions on how to do those things - I've been playing this game a long time, and I've written tens of thousands of words on this blog. There is a right selection of weapons to pick. There are good ways to explore the wilderness and towns are a good source of daily rumors (though I hate when a player asks for one like ordering ale in a tavern). Still, I think there's something suspect in anyone's perception of what's right and wrong about how to play YOUR character or what's bound to work best for you. Lest we forget, the rest of the faculty of which Neils Bohr also had years of experience where it came to physics. It isn't only how long you've been doing a thing ... it is also about how open you are to new ideas, and how willing you are to throw out everything you've believed in favor of an argument that's better. So I prefer to leave the practical day to day tactics of playing your character in your given world up to you. You know that world better than I. My firm belief only extends so far as to argue that you're not divided from your character, and that like in the real world, your success will arise from how you innovate your way out of troubles. That's all this has been ... a call to living, and living well, through D&D. It is a bit embarrassing to explain to others why you would play this game. Words like pretending and fantasy do not carry much weight with the adults of the world. If you were to tell them that you spent your evenings experimenting with quantum physics in an attempt to demonstrably prove that all we see is false, that might put your listeners back on their heels. But if you say that you're experimenting with your own personality, in the hopes of determining a better way to live or face the trials of the daily struggle, that seems ... unlikely. But no more unlikely - or simple - than facing down the demons of numbers and atomic structure. Introspection and self-improvement are laudable activities ... all you have to realize is that in playing D&D, that is what you are doing. It may be dressed up with combat and monsters, but the principles are there. You are acting the part of someone else, but someone else of your own creation. Which you are, in turn, shaping and reworking to suit your personal tastes. How is that different from what you've done this morning in waking yourself, washing and picking out your clothes, then heading into work to earn your daily bread? In fact, it isn't different at all. Only you're on the 'edge' when you're playing the game. In real life, the edge is a little too real, and mostly all you learn from it is to stay far, far away. In the game, you can get up close and personal ... and imagine what it would be like to be there, without having to be there. If you're playing with someone who won't let you go as far as you want - if they're imposing themselves between you and the edge 'for your own good' or because they've decided what edges are appropriate for you ... then you owe it to yourself to agitate against that. Even if you would hesitate to speak up for your rights in the real world, when your boss or your clients patronize you ... in playing D&D, you really ought to rise to the occasion. If 50,000 can stand on the steps of the Capitol and shout against exploitation and the curtailing of their freedom, surely you can stand up at the table, stare your DM in the face and say, "No, I will not go where you say! I will take the road north, because that is what pleases me!" It helps, obviously, to know what pleases you. You're not a child and you're not taking the north road out of sheer petulance. You have reasons for what you want to do, and like your real self in the real world, you don't like being told what those reasons are. You're prepared to strike north, find what you may find, deal with the consequences and see where the road ultimately takes you. And what you ought to expect is that the DM will facilitate your desire to do this. The DM has, presumably, designed something along the road that will be seen, that may take place, that will ultimately show the way to the next road and the next course of events. And when it happens that something is not going according to your tastes, then you, the player, will change your course and set off otherwise. And if it should become evident that you are somehow a dupe for others ... that every road leads to the same pre-determined Funhouse, and that you have no freedom at all to choose the path you will, then as a player, defensive of the character you respect and perhaps love, stand at the table and call "Foul!" Some people style the DM as the 'referee' of the game. The referee does not determine the outcome. The referee does not judge both sides in the contest and then tilt the playing field in the direction of preference. The DM asks the player what the player wants to do, and then the DM enables the player to do that. And if the DM won't, the player must rise from the table and cease the game - because the player has self-respect. That is the hardest decision a player can make ... but for the good of the game and in the long run for the good of yourself, it must be understand that you, the player, play the character, and no one else. It is no different than the decision that you make for yourself as a human being. You do not compromise your personal being simply because the liquor is available and the drugs are good. When you recognize that someone who's being nice to you, giving you a good time and all, is really just trying to gently caress you, that's where you draw the line and leave. Give your character the same privilege. If the game's aim is to exploit you, the game isn't worth it. Conclusion I love this game. It's been some great time since I've been able to play it, but if I could play, it would be actly along the lines described above. I think I might surprise a DM; I think I would buy a farm, something on the edge of the wilderness, and I would patiently tend my farm for a few years in the expectation of learning all there was to learn about that part of the world. Rather than depending on the locals for their intelligence, I would gather intelligence of my own. I would learn the names of all the local nobles and their children, I would investigate the river beds and chat up the miller and the local shepherds, who would know me by name as I knew them. I would walk through the forests and venture to the foothills or perhaps the ergs, if that were the environment. When I came across something dangerous, I would withdraw – perhaps after a fight or two – carefully noting down the location and determining the best means of encouraging my friends, the townspeople of whom I was one, to join me in eradicating that threat. I wouldn’t worry at first about how much experience or treasure I had … I think I could be part of the village in merely a running or two – for after all, in D&D, there’s no definite need to play each day in enormous detail. Then, by the time I was ‘ready’ to adventure, I would have the world in my pocket. It would be up to the DM to recognize that I was one of those locals who tells the party where things are, and what to do. So I would know not just the pathway between town and the abandoned mine, I’d know on a daily basis who used that pathway, what they used it for, why the mine was built, the descendants of the miners and which legends were true or false. It's the sort of approach that is usually not available to players, but only because they've been shoehorned into expectations they did not create. Rules about time and opportunity are for the most part unwritten rules which players had no part in making. And what is strange is that, on the whole, there are no horrid consequences for not following these rules. They only exist because it suits the sort of shorthand DMs need in order to manage a very complex world with far more opportunities than they're prepared to run. Players are short shrift because they have to be hammered into nice round holes that convenience DMs. The game is more than that. Players deserve more than that. I would like to see a gaming philosophy that argues that its the DM that must adapt his or herself to the square personalities of players. That can only begin with players who recognize that to play their characters properly and to the full extent of their opportunities, they need freedom. Not a little freedom. Lots of freedom. Freedom unending, without limitations on what choices they choose to make. This is, after all, a fantasy world. It is the player living out the fantasy. It is not the DM's fantasy. The DM making that fantasy possible. And if the DM doesn't like that, well, tough poo poo. That's not something the players need worry about.
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Apr 1, 2013 21:33
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quote:... TL:DR we should all join Bink Pulling in the steam tunnels? EDIT: This reaction post needs a grog tithe, and I'm in the mood for more RUST MONSTER GROG: quote:Seriously, come the gently caress on. Realism and consequences are not “fun”, according to Mearls and the other 4e writers. All those people who have enjoyed playing any other edition of D&D must be confused. Owlbear Camus fucked around with this message at 23:20 on Apr 1, 2013 |
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Apr 1, 2013 21:39
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quote:Paranoia - I play RPGs to have fun, not go on a murder spree against other player characters which is what every Paranoia game eventually ends up. I also don't like the inherent DM against the Players atmosphere.
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Apr 1, 2013 21:50
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GEExCEE posted:Benoist The grog hate-on for DW is insane. quote:
I just... I... poo poo, dude.
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Apr 1, 2013 22:13
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dwarf74 posted:I just... I... poo poo, dude. I mean, I get how people want things to be "gritty." WHFRP2 is a thing, and there's a certain charm to dying from a traumatic brain injury in a bar brawl or contracting a fatal case of the bloody flux. And a couple posts above you you've got someone grogging out about how the black comedy of Paranoia is badwrongfun because of the inherent clonicide. 4e insists on "narrative, epic deaths?," though? The system is pretty agnostic about how you die. I was inches from killing a guy by having him eaten by a giant frog, drowning on top of being slowly swallowed as the thing swam away from a losing fight between the party and some bullywugs. It would have been a memorable death, but "epic?" gently caress, Wesley Crusher's character died after boneheadedly running off on his own, dissolved helplessly in a pool of acid. E: My grog tithe for this post- Tarnowski on the humble rust monster, and the semiotics of elfgames quote:See, all of this is just an example of what's horribly wrong with 4e. Rust monsters that don't actually destroy items, "Parceled" treasure, so that a 6th level character can "expect" a 10th-level item but should never have a 30th level item... gently caress. It has no resemblance to D&D; its not the same game even a tiny little bit. Owlbear Camus fucked around with this message at 22:59 on Apr 1, 2013 |
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Apr 1, 2013 22:32
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dwarf74 posted:It's weird, because that's the exact opposite of how "moves" work in DW. How is it possible to get this so wrong? I know the perfect game for him. Two words: Oregon Trail. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Apr 1, 2013 23:14
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John Wick posted:Hi guys. Been a while, eh? Yeah. I know. Trust me, I know.
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Apr 1, 2013 23:18
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A bit of grog from 7th Sea
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Apr 1, 2013 23:20
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when my players are.... i no longer feel bad for DMs who hate on whiny players, also i have results about the entire party of wizards thing WARNING: LONG tonight we started our 'new' age of DnD/Pathfinder playing i had always been a player, i had DMed one campaign back in 3.5 and it wasnt really an exploration kind of thing, it was a combat a rival party and confront them without doing much exploring, kind of thing my criticism was that there needed to be more exploring, more dungeons, more puzzles, and more role playing, and i took that to heart i created and fleshed out a campaign setting i created a large city, with several developed NPCs with careers, and roles both for the mechanics of the game, and for the purposes of lives within the game world need a 'magic shop'? what do you need? i have a wizard who works in the college district of town who has access to any scroll you can think of need potions? i have an alchemist who owns the brewery in town who loves having someone buy something other than booze for a change need weapons or armor? i have a blacksmith who is bored of making tools need clothing, or jewelry made to later be turned into wondrous items? theres both a jeweler and a tailor in town there are thrift stores and pawn shops everywhere that might have the neat minor items that you want, no there isnt a handy haversack yet, you knew that already.... when i set the rules for this a month ago and thats just the start they all have roles in the city, and they all have reasons to be visited by my players i had purposely set aside useful items and starter kits and had them all easily copied and pasted into our groups facebook forum for easy look-up i did weights and encumbrances for everyone then, to avoid my players having unbalanced stats, and to avoid the terror that is min-maxing in a point-buy system, i gave my players the following stat array, to be placed wherever they liked 18 16 15 13 12 10 the only thing i banned was firearms and gunslingers, because firearms dont fit into the campaign setting all races were legal, all variants were legal 3.5 source books are legal for spells, magic items, and monsters for animal companions/summonings i designed encounters based on expected power levels of their lvl 3 characters they had moderately high ACs and HP because my players are optimizers who know how to kill things, and kill them well tonight they turned everything i thought i knew about my group into a pile of ash there were 4 players, they all decided to play.... wizards (and one sorcerer) and i told them that if they were all wizards they had to deal with the repercussions, because i know that wizards can do anything, and i know that you guys should know that they werent prepared for the repercussions, they werent diverse enough to handle it tonight they encountered ~20 kobalds 4 of them were cr 1/2 8 of them were cr 1 5 of them were cr 2 you have 3 wizards, and no one is bringing in anything that can attack them physically you buy a horse, and decide you're going to strap a bunch of gear onto it, but you didnt buy a saddle or rope or anything? was i supposed to just assume that you already have it? was it supposed to be free with the horse? i told you that no NPC was above lvl 2, and no magic items beyond what we randomly generate to be in thrift stores and pawn shops would be available, and im the bad guy when you have to take time for them to make things? or when you cant find wands or rods? you have the revelation that you three wizards can all pick different spells and just copy each others spellbooks allowing access to a lot more spells, and im the bad guy for wanting you to keep track of how many pages of your spellbook you are using? implying that you may need another spellbook in the future if your first one gets full you come up with a background story where you work for the college library and i decide you can get 10% discount on scrolls, and im the bad guy because you cant get them for free? you begged me to let you wake up in the middle of the night when you got attacked by 4 weak little CR1/2 kobolds, your team member on guard duty was taking them on, and then got upset when you didnt get a full nights sleep and couldnt prepare spells the next day? i even let you roll a d8 just to see if you lucked out and got enough hours anyway, you didnt, and again, im the bad guy i made these things knowing full well that a melee character with the 18 STR that i was willing to give them for free could potentially one-shot these things with a power attack, needing to roll ~10 (average) on the die to hit, and you're upset because you're wizard with a +0 STR and 1 BAB cant hit it? and i'm the bad guy? never mind the fact that i told you that you needed a melee type character, you even brought a spare pre made melee character in case everyone else wanted to play a caster, and i even offered to NPC one for you you have these amazing buffers and battlefield controllers, but no one to buff or protect, and thats MY fault? you make it to the inn that is overrun by kobolds, and you find that the doors to the individual rooms are locked, and you didnt bring anyone with skills to break into things? nor did you even think to look at the reception desk at the front of the room that i clearly drew on there for you to check for keys that i left there in case you didnt have a theif character, and once again, its my fault that you didnt think to do that instead of sneaking into the rooms and taking on smaller groups of kobolds, you pound on the doors, scream at the top of your lungs, and wake all of them up, while they are behind locked doors safe and sound so they have plenty of time to wake up and equip themselves before unlocking their own doors and coming out to meet you they are down stairs and behind a wall, and their stealth rolls mean nothing because you should have known where they were the whole time while you waited outside on the balcony for them? the kobolds sling could only potentially do 1 damage to you if it hits because of the crappy stats they have, yet its ridiculous that you get hit because you're the wizard and things are not supposed to want to hit you? 3 wizards and a sorcerer blow through all of their spells after provoking an army of kobolds to come attack them all at once, and they still have a boss fight to make it through, and im supposed to feel bad for these guys? i purposely created an open world for them to explore with plenty of other possibilities for them, but when you blatantly do things with ignorance in mind and dont pay attention to the already established campaign setting, i just cant feel bad... originally this was gonna be another "am i a bad DM?" thread, but i dont even feel bad, my guys are playing wizards, they take the most time and effort to play intelligently, and really only one did, and that one player is the only reason there wasnt a TPK, because he strategically bottled them in and created a pit limiting the number of enemies that could get to them at one time the absolute worst part about this entire thing is that the player that caused the most problems and complained the most is my roommate who said he wasnt even going to play this weekend, and he didnt know how to set up his character for pathdinder (because he's used to 3.5) and acted like it was MY job to make his character for him... "i wanna be a wizard" "okay, what do you want to do?" "you tell me, cuz i need help making a wizard" "do you want to blast things, or be a buffer, or what?" "i dont know, you arent helping me" eventually i made his character for him, but i had to help him with almost every detail it took us 2 hours to do character creation and taking out a bunch of kobolds took 3 hours.... 3 hours... and they were designed to be 1-2 hit KOs we didnt even get to the boss yet, and i have no idea how they are going to survive... hopefully all is not lost as i do have another group that i play with that i want to throw into this campaign, and see if they fair any better tonight i learned 2 things: 1) rime spell blaster wizards are awesome, just like i always thought and 2) a wizard is useless without a fighter to protect him it is obscene that my players couldnt beat down the monsters i threw at them, they fought these monsters: sh*tty kobold warrior 1 10 hp, ac 15 less sh*tty kobold warrior 2 17 hp, ac 16 kobold commander warrior 3 24 hp, ac 19 a lvl 3 party should not have issues fighting these things, especially when the commanders cant do more than 6 damage in a round when they max out on a two-weapon fighting spree... also its not my fault that you dont have a healer and had to pay full price for healing potions.... thanks for reading my rant, needless to say, i am no longer on the side of the players who want nicer DMs, because i shouldnt have to ignore entire game mechanics because "im a wizard, im supposed to be the best at everything!!!" it almost makes me want to kill their characters, all i know is i am definitely not going to accommodate their ignorance and just throw challenges at them that only one-dimensional players can handle, they are better players than that, and they know better #end rant
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Apr 2, 2013 00:08
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quote:what i am getting is your new to PnP and trained on DDO. ok do not dumb chr, if your in a real pnp group witha real dm dumping chr means you wont even be allowed to try to be taht socially adept nor think of clever social related plans. also dont dump int. I have known DMs that will pretty much shut down your right to talk with anything more then idiotic one liners like "I like Swords!" if your int is under 12. quote:real gamers play roll 3d6 per stat in order and take what you got. thats how I started dnd miss those days. quote:When people would rather roll their toon up than just use the 28 point pay system, I allow them to do so using 4d6 for each stat, but tell them not to choose their class until the rolling is over. Its fairly realistic - the talents and liabilities someone is born with / cultivated throughout their life would impact their choice of which adventuring class combination they would become. quote:We also did the 3d6 - then choose where to apply each of the 6 rolls... quote:That what I did and allowed ppl todo back in GM days of 1991-1995, AD&D mostly, a little DnD 1st. Pick class, then 3d6 x6, done, off to the cave and fight the rust monster on the left quote:that's true pnp, from 3 t o18, in order so u'll probably have a good class with some gimp stat (high str, average dex, low con, high int, low wis and high cha for example)
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Apr 2, 2013 01:00
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Gotta love that New Thread smell. In return, have some fresh grog from GITP:Giant In the Playground Forums posted:How do you handle laws in fantasy games? What kind of laws and punishments do you have? Buttfuckin': Literally Worse Than Slavery
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Apr 2, 2013 01:01
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quote:I would have loved some of the other writers to write for eberron then we might have gotten some good fiction for the world. quote:4th Edition is just about the worst steaming pile of *insert noun here* that I have ever had the displeasure of playing. Everyone dies constantly and then pops back up, abilities are like a video game etc. My friends and everyone I have played with says its like playing WoW on tabletop and would make a better videogame than a RPG. That being said, maybe it will translate better into online gaming. quote:Forgotten Realms, while certainly the most colorful and has the biggest fan following is also the most hardcore set-in-stone system out there. It has in-depth storylines and NPCs that are rock solid and fully flushed out. Any changes made to the world in game would have to either follow a storyline that we all know the answers to, or has to be completely made up (which most fanboys will hate). quote:I am a Pathfinder fan myself. quote:Sorry no 5E for me. \  quote:Oh yep I'm a fanatic - 2nd Ed. is my game - 3rd Ed is when D&D died - It's been great seeing the 3.5 players up in arms about 4th. quote:Yeah, I was a loyal fan of D&D from the boxed set (second hand) through 3.5 (several feet of shelf space worth of rule books and crates of modules) but 4e was the straw that broke the camel's back. Going back to the player base is a great idea ... too bad Piazo beat them to it! This poster literally posts about either Hackmaster or how much he hates Forgotten Realms (often both) in every post they make. They have 18,181 posts. quote:Other than ddo dnd is completely dead to me and wotc is a failed business I wont give them any of my money
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Apr 2, 2013 01:35
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Disagree completely. It is my opinion that 4.0e is nothing more than a money-grab and has resulted in an abomination hardly recognizable as DnD. This is, of course, only my opinion.
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Apr 2, 2013 01:42
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I can't say I give two shits about it... ...because, paraphrasing Tycho from Penny Arcade, that would imply I may give one poo poo about it. Now, don't misunderstand me. As a matter of fact, I'm of the mind that DnD 4E was the best thing that could have happened to the hobby. The reasons why will be mentioned below. First 4E came along, and no one followed (as attested by how DnD's playerbase dropped from 6 millions to barely 1 ever since 4E's announcements). Then WotC had this brilliant idea, by using the "evil internet pirates" as an excuse, they removed themselves from the pdf market thinking they could pull a "reverse Walmart" and cause the whole online RPG market to collapse. ...as we all know, they failed and, as a most unexpected side effect (to WotC at least), with DnD removed from the online market, a whole generation of otherwise small-time and indie publishers were able to flourish and thrive on the digital market. So, by releasing 4E and then withdrawing themselves from the pdf market, WotC destroyed DnD's hegemony and made way for new competition and innovation. Who would have thought the evil empire would turn out to be a force for good once all is said and done, huh? ...and then, look who comes back crawling? After having euthanized 4E way ahead of time, the DnD branch of WotC has to survive the following year without any new products to sell (as NEXT won't see the printers at least until next year). The solution? To swallow their pride and dig their "legacy" products from the grave and make their re-appearance in the online market like the Ex that comes back to you a year later expecting to find a human rag who'll throw him/herself back to his/her arms without a second thought, but instead finds out that you not only moved on, but also grew up and prospered. If DnD was still the only game around worth mentioning and if they still had a playerbase of six millions, this would be a solid idea. As it is, however, I don't personally know anyone who cares.
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Apr 2, 2013 02:35
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