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Libertad!
Oct 30, 2013

You can have the last word, but I'll have the last laugh!
My problem with the Game of Bones isn't random die-rolling for conflict. It's that it's pretty much set up to generate an entire mini-game between competing groups, so you'd assume that the PCs would take some of those roles. You know, to give them a stake in the formation of the city's power structure. But the text actually says that it should be done without any PC input and when the PCs aren't even in the city.

This makes it the equivalent of setting up a random encounter between 2 monster groups in the dungeon where the GM rolls for the entire combat off-screen. And when the PCs come to that room, they see the aftermath of that encounter.

It's a poor execution of a cool concept.

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ProfessorCirno
Feb 17, 2011

The strongest! The smartest!
The rightest!
At a certain point the game is, quite frankly, just jerking itself off.

It's the endemic problem to 3.x. The DM can never just declare things happen - there must always be some sort of rule or roll behind everything. If the DM just declares something then they're cheating. You end up with poo poo like that one dude who stated it was physically impossible to have long term injuries and if the DM introduces an NPC who's missing an arm then the DM is houseruling the game unfairly. Or Frank "the rules exist to force the DM to do what you want" Trollman. It's taking the metagame and warping it to such a horrifying degree that it becomes inseparable from the actual game. It's the biggest thing I point at whenever I talk about 3.x seriously messing people up - because you get people who think "this is how games work" even though it's pretty much only 3.x that works this way in the entire industry.

It's ALSO what created the atmosphere that lead to 5e's utter lack of actual usable rules, because people began identifying "has rules" with "hates the DM." If there are no rules players can read and actually make sense of, then the DM can never be talked down by those nasty rules lawyers!

Yawgmoth
Sep 10, 2003

This post is cursed!

Arivia posted:

No, that works just as fine for generating inspiration. No collection of random tables is going to generate Waterdeep, Absalom and the City-State of the Invincible Overlord, but they can give you the skeleton to make your own versions on.
Yes, that was my point. Use the tables (in whatever method you deem proper) as an aid to create your own content. Using them as a substitute for creativity is bad.

S.J.
May 19, 2008

Just who the hell do you think we are?

All I know is that I'm perfectly willing to steal just about any idea from anything for my campaigns, but it still helps to have something that people might not recognize.

MadScientistWorking
Jun 23, 2010

"I was going through a time period where I was looking up weird stories involving necrophilia..."

Arivia posted:

There's nothing wrong with that. It's great inspiration - random tables and lists are common outside of gaming to give everyone a bit of creative juice. No one is an island of perfect creative originality always.
Yeah but even then you would think if you are engaged in a nerdy activity you could just use other sources of entertainment to rip off.

S.J.
May 19, 2008

Just who the hell do you think we are?

Seriously, just do both. Rip something off and either change it yourself or use some random tables to help you come up with ways to change it if you don't think your ideas are any good at the time. Nothing wrong with that.

Flavivirus
Dec 14, 2011

The next stage of evolution.
I posted this in the Kickstarter thread, but I'm running an introductory session of my post-apocalyptic world-rebuilding game Legacy this Friday between 8 and 10 pm, GMT. Essentially I plan on running through the setting building toolkit, family and character creation, to give people a feel for the possibilities. Full details are in this post, let me know if you're interested!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1549920133/legacy-life-among-the-ruins-world-rebuilding-rolep/posts/1046980

Meinberg
Oct 9, 2011

inspired by but legally distinct from CATS (2019)
Panels are a pretty big deal at Metatopia, as you might expect in an event with lots of notable names in the small press industry. I ended up attending fifteen, with most of the panels being either business or community oriented, with only a couple being about design itself. Since I went to so many, I'm going to just briefly touch on the panels, but if anyone wants any more information, feel free to ask and I'll follow up.

Outside of those categories, I also attended the Golden Cobra Winners announcement panel. The judges have a full list of the winners available online with their commentary on their decisions. As someone relatively new to LARP, going to the panel has definitely prepared me for next year's competition.

Community focused issues were big, especially in the light of the current exclusionary pushback that the games are currently undergoing. While the running theme was "Don't Be a Dick," there were a lot of specific advise as well, like creating internal harassment policies first, to make sure that the community managers have the tools and understanding needed to address harassment. The general sentiment of the speakers was optimistic, in spite of the harassment, and I heard multiple times that the treatment they see in public is far better than what they get on twitter. Shoshana Kessock specifically talked about her plans to create an anti-harassment initiative for the tabletop world.

Somewhere between community issues and design, I attended a couple panels about how to handle sensitive material in game design. In one, the panelists talked about how to adapt problematic material to games, with an emphasis on Lovecraft. The ultimate consensus was that there is no easy answer, and it's up to each designer to approach the material with awareness and knowledge, and to not whitewash the ugliness of these past works when creating their own works inspired by it. In the other, the panel discussed how to best handle Queer themes in games. James Stuart made an interesting comparison to video games, speaking about how the tighter narrative focus of a video game allows for a deeper engagement with a theme, while RPGs tend to be broader in scope and more player driven, rather than designer driven, in terms of theme. Avery McDaldno, meanwhile, stated that "mechanics and systems are political" and brought attention to how traditional design is very much from a privileged/colonial point of view, with the idea that the players simply determine the character's actions, rather than examining the biases and forces (both internal and external) that lead to those actions.

In terms of pure design, the main panel I went to was about hacking Apocalypse World, which included Vincent Baker on the panel. Among the more interesting take-aways is that everyone on the panel thought that Monsterhearts is the best Apocalypse World hack, that Lady Blackbird was in fact the first AW hack and released while AW was still in development, and that Baker put a large number of unusual mechanics into AW simply so that people would have more permissions when developing their own games. I also attended a panel about the senses in gaming, and there was a lot of interesting talk about how touch can be used mechanically, taking inspiration from Nordic LARPs. Finally, there was a panel about designing your first game, and the main point there is that you need an editor, you need to pay everyone who works on your project, and that playtesting is necessary.

In terms of business panels, the key theme was managing your expenses, and the importance of maintaining contacts. Freelancers have to be paid, taxes have to be paid, and DriveThruRPG's systems are excellent for PDF sales, royalties, marketing, and Print on Demand. Multiple times, the importance of having an accountant was stressed, as tax law is highly mercurial. For instance, printed copies of manuals and games in storage are taxed, because they are considered liquid enough to count as cash by many states. Cons were highlighted not only as a place to market games, but to meet people who can work with your company and provide value.

Again, if there any further questions, I'd be happy to provide some more detail.

Baron Fuzzlewhack
Sep 22, 2010

ALIVE ENOUGH TO DIE

Meinberg posted:

... Avery McDaldno, meanwhile, stated that "mechanics and systems are political" and brought attention to how traditional design is very much from a privileged/colonial point of view, with the idea that the players simply determine the character's actions, rather than examining the biases and forces (both internal and external) that lead to those actions.

... I also attended a panel about the senses in gaming, and there was a lot of interesting talk about how touch can be used mechanically, taking inspiration from Nordic LARPs.

I would be very interested to hear more about these two talking points.

Evil Mastermind
Apr 28, 2008

Meinberg posted:

Avery McDaldno, meanwhile, stated that "mechanics and systems are political" and brought attention to how traditional design is very much from a privileged/colonial point of view, with the idea that the players simply determine the character's actions, rather than examining the biases and forces (both internal and external) that lead to those actions.

Again, if there any further questions, I'd be happy to provide some more detail.

I'd like to hear more about this. Because I read that and my first thought was "holy poo poo that explains so much."

OtspIII
Sep 22, 2002


Those sound super good. Avery McDaldno talks are always great.

Do you know if they were being recorded? If they're going to be posted online I'd love to watch them.

As a semi-related side note, there's no chance anybody from here is going to be at Practice in NYC this weekend, is there? It's a game design conference, so you usually get a mix of digital and traditional games talks there. I went last year and it was pretty great.

Meinberg
Oct 9, 2011

inspired by but legally distinct from CATS (2019)

Baron Fuzzlewhack posted:

I would be very interested to hear more about these two talking points.

In terms of using touch, the techniques of Ars Amandi and Ars Marte were both brought up. The first is a method of showing intimacy between two characters through contact with the arms, in a way that while not being explicit is still very expressive. Ars Marte, meanwhile, is an attempt to replicate physical conflict through binding and grappling the arms of another person, to create a sense of conflict reminiscent of Greco-Roman wrestling. One of the presenters spoke specifically of a time where two PCs were using Ars Amandi as part of their character development, while he was focused on another player.

You can find out more on the Ars Amandi website and there are also web tutorials that can be used.

Evil Mastermind posted:

I'd like to hear more about this. Because I read that and my first thought was "holy poo poo that explains so much."

Avery offered two primary examples of the older, colonialist style of play. First, you have your basic OSR style of game, where the characters go places, kill things, and gain property, in the form of wealth, land, and people, in a linear progression towards greater power. Second, she called out Apocalypse World for its focus on the characters having continual agency. The characters always are in charge of their own actions as decided by their players, and that is reflected in the nature of the moves. Julia Ellingboe contrasted that with her own experiences as a black woman, saying "when bad things happen around me, I don't get to choose what I do."

Both of these systems exemplify the libertarian ideal of the self-motivated man, of people who always remain control of their agency and impose that agency on the world. In contrast, Avery talked about a game, whose name I can't recall sadly, where instead of saying what the character did, the player describes the processes acting on the character and asks other players at the table what the character does.

OtspIII posted:

Those sound super good. Avery McDaldno talks are always great.

Do you know if they were being recorded? If they're going to be posted online I'd love to watch them.

While the panels were recorded, I'm not sure if they're being posted anywhere. I'll get in touch with the con organizers, about that.

Kellsterik
Mar 30, 2012
That discussion about player agency sounds pretty fascinating! I wonder how being divorced from the consequences affects that sense of control as well- how many players hear "if you do this the city watch will be all over you" and think "nice, bring it on!" rather than "better back off"?

Did Avery give any more sense of how that alternative system worked in play? Was it meant for a particular genre of story?

Kellsterik fucked around with this message at 01:32 on Nov 12, 2014

Mors Rattus
Oct 25, 2007

FATAL & Friends
Walls of Text
#1 Builder
2014-2018

While that sounds really interesting, I can't say it sounds very fun.

Zurui
Apr 20, 2005
Even now...



Meinberg posted:

Avery offered two primary examples of the older, colonialist style of play. First, you have your basic OSR style of game, where the characters go places, kill things, and gain property, in the form of wealth, land, and people, in a linear progression towards greater power. Second, she called out Apocalypse World for its focus on the characters having continual agency. The characters always are in charge of their own actions as decided by their players, and that is reflected in the nature of the moves. Julia Ellingboe contrasted that with her own experiences as a black woman, saying "when bad things happen around me, I don't get to choose what I do."

Both of these systems exemplify the libertarian ideal of the self-motivated man, of people who always remain control of their agency and impose that agency on the world. In contrast, Avery talked about a game, whose name I can't recall sadly, where instead of saying what the character did, the player describes the processes acting on the character and asks other players at the table what the character does.

Avery is a smart woman and she's mostly right, but I want to slice apart the middle of this. She seems to be conflating the player agency on the world with the agency over actions. Agency over one's own actions in the face of uncontrollable adversity is a supremely minority perspective - see Dr. King's writings on how black Americans should react to oppression. Apocalypse World specifically is patriarchal and colonialist as gently caress, but there's nothing in the PbtA system that allows you agency over your character that is either of those two things. I mean, this is one of the core themes of Monsterhearts: you get to decide what your character does inside the limitations of what is emotionally possible. Everything else happens to you.

Also, there is an important distinction between a player's agency over the world (cooperative world creation, distributed decision resolution, and the like) and a character's agency over the world (the ability to decide what happens to a character and what she does). Extremes of each pull in opposite directions between egalitarian and oppressive.

Meinberg
Oct 9, 2011

inspired by but legally distinct from CATS (2019)

Zurui posted:

Avery is a smart woman and she's mostly right, but I want to slice apart the middle of this. She seems to be conflating the player agency on the world with the agency over actions. Agency over one's own actions in the face of uncontrollable adversity is a supremely minority perspective - see Dr. King's writings on how black Americans should react to oppression. Apocalypse World specifically is patriarchal and colonialist as gently caress, but there's nothing in the PbtA system that allows you agency over your character that is either of those two things. I mean, this is one of the core themes of Monsterhearts: you get to decide what your character does inside the limitations of what is emotionally possible. Everything else happens to you.

Also, there is an important distinction between a player's agency over the world (cooperative world creation, distributed decision resolution, and the like) and a character's agency over the world (the ability to decide what happens to a character and what she does). Extremes of each pull in opposite directions between egalitarian and oppressive.

I'm going off of my own memory and perhaps insufficient notes here, so I may not be representing her position with perfect clarity. She recently put up a post on google+ to expand on some of the ideas that she discussed on Metatopia. I'm going through it now, and I think it's a great read for anyone trying to bring queer themes into gaming.

Night10194
Feb 13, 2012

We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

Mors Rattus posted:

While that sounds really interesting, I can't say it sounds very fun.

Seconded. I can't see that making for fun gameplay, even if it makes for interesting thinking.

moths
Aug 25, 2004

I would also still appreciate some danger.



This also ignores the fantasy aspect, which is (I assume) a draw for many players. While it might be interesting to include outside forces that constrain a character's agency, the reason people are sitting down to play is to engage in fantasy activity that's otherwise impossible.

Zurui
Apr 20, 2005
Even now...



Meinberg posted:

I'm going off of my own memory and perhaps insufficient notes here, so I may not be representing her position with perfect clarity. She recently put up a post on google+ to expand on some of the ideas that she discussed on Metatopia. I'm going through it now, and I think it's a great read for anyone trying to bring queer themes into gaming.

This is a great post :) I wasn't aiming to throw a pillow at you so much as start a discussion. Maybe I should frequent Google Plus more.

Meinberg
Oct 9, 2011

inspired by but legally distinct from CATS (2019)

moths posted:

This also ignores the fantasy aspect, which is (I assume) a draw for many players. While it might be interesting to include outside forces that constrain a character's agency, the reason people are sitting down to play is to engage in fantasy activity that's otherwise impossible.

One of the games that I playtested, Faded Age, was actual pretty neat for the idea of exploring agency. Rather than playing the individuals in the world, you play the forces acting upon them. That way, the players still have a degree of control and input and power, but it demonstrates the effect that the exercise of that privilige has on the people of the world.


Zurui posted:

This is a great post :) I wasn't aiming to throw a pillow at you so much as start a discussion. Maybe I should frequent Google Plus more.

G+ is really the biggest social network used by TT gamers, in part because of how the technology allows for games to be played. However, being the biggest social network also means you have to deal with assholes and jerks and the worst of the worst. Still, if you focus on the good stuff, it can be a good place, I just recommend caution.

Also, discussion is good, just wanted to delineate between where I'm reading into things and what other people have actually said. This topic is especially interesting to me, since colonialism is a major theme of one of the games that I'm currently designing, and I want to present it in a way that approaches the material with the maturity and awareness required.

Libertad!
Oct 30, 2013

You can have the last word, but I'll have the last laugh!

ProfessorCirno posted:

At a certain point the game is, quite frankly, just jerking itself off.

It's the endemic problem to 3.x. The DM can never just declare things happen - there must always be some sort of rule or roll behind everything. If the DM just declares something then they're cheating.

I have a secret to this: half my current Pathfinder group is of people new to Pathfinder. But that's not really the whole story.

Between a day job, work projects, and making enough material for next week's adventure, I really don't have time anymore to run Pathfinder as-is or meticulously balance encounters. I actually had to stop writing F&F reviews and regular campaign journals because writing those took an hour and a half to write up each update; if I continued as-is, my workload would be too spread out and I wouldn't get anything productive done for any of them. My players understand this, even the PF veterans know how much of a headache running a game can be.

1. I make up stats for monsters and NPCs which are balanced against the party's expectations
2. if a rule takes 5 minutes or longer to resolve, I make up a ruling on the spot and continue on with the game
3. if a PC is at risk of becoming irrelevant due to lack of inter-party balance, the entire group discusses the issue so that everyone has fun
4. my most recent one this week, I ask my group what kind of subplots/NPCs/etc they want me to focus on so that I can calibrate future sessions for maximum enjoyment. Maybe they want a certain NPC to have more screen time, maybe they want less complicated moral quandaries. I take that all into account for future sessions.

A lot of times we're having fun in spite of the rules instead of because of it, and they know this yet don't care. A more group-based improvised input works wonders for easing the load and people don't really care if I'm hewing away from Pathfinder when the alternative is the game falling apart and becoming a farce.


I know that this is anecdotal evidence more than anything, but what I'm saying that this whole "rules as physics" simulationist thinking can be discarded from 3rd Edition. It's still a rules-heavy game, but knowing when to go "gently caress it, we're improvising" at the right moment doesn't make it any less of a 3rd Edition/Pathfinder game.

Libertad! fucked around with this message at 01:53 on Nov 12, 2014

Gau
Nov 18, 2003

I don't think you understand, Gau.
I never thought I'd say this to anyone, but why hell aren't you playing Dungeon World?

moths
Aug 25, 2004

I would also still appreciate some danger.



Meinberg posted:

One of the games that I playtested, Faded Age, was actual pretty neat for the idea of exploring agency. Rather than playing the individuals in the world, you play the forces acting upon them. That way, the players still have a degree of control and input and power, but it demonstrates the effect that the exercise of that privilige has on the people of the world.

How did this work? I'm picturing a character sheet for generational poverty and rolling a D20 to poo poo on NPCs' lives and dreams. While priviliged NPCs have a higher Wealth AC or something.

Libertad!
Oct 30, 2013

You can have the last word, but I'll have the last laugh!

Gau posted:

I never thought I'd say this to anyone, but why hell aren't you playing Dungeon World?

I own a copy but haven't gotten around to reading it and absorbing the rules. I'm actually making a list of RPGs I want to play sometime, and DW's on it.

It's due to equal parts too busy doing other stuff, reading other RPGs in my Drive-Thru backlog first, and already having 2 Roll20 games (a weekly Pathfinder, and a semi-weekly Labyrinth Lord).

I'd totally be up for playing (not DMing) a Dungeon World game, whether on Play-by-Post or Roll20 if I can fit it into my schedule.

Meinberg
Oct 9, 2011

inspired by but legally distinct from CATS (2019)

moths posted:

How did this work? I'm picturing a character sheet for generational poverty and rolling a D20 to poo poo on NPCs' lives and dreams. While priviliged NPCs have a higher Wealth AC or something.

The game we were playing was going for a Tolkein-esque setting, so one player was the Dark Forces, another was the Ancient Races, and so on. And basically they got to dictate the actions of their own purview, and then had varying degrees of ability to manipulate things out of their purview, which was determined by the result of a d6. Based on that result, either the player who rolled or the player of that purview would get to determine what happens, and then write down that event as a concrete happening.

It was definitely more freeform and storygamish, with an emphasis on the narrative of the world rather than the events of individuals within it.

Kellsterik
Mar 30, 2012
Hmm. That almost sounds more like a slightly more crunchy take on Microscope as a worldbuilding tool.

Kellsterik fucked around with this message at 02:09 on Nov 12, 2014

gradenko_2000
Oct 5, 2010

HELL SERPENT
Lipstick Apathy
Thanks for all the d20 responses, guys!

ProfessorCirno posted:

It's ALSO what created the atmosphere that lead to 5e's utter lack of actual usable rules, because people began identifying "has rules" with "hates the DM." If there are no rules players can read and actually make sense of, then the DM can never be talked down by those nasty rules lawyers!

Not trying to import the Next thread here, but this is kind of insightful as to why so much of the rules are just so Seinfeld, but then there's a set people seem to think that that's really a good thing.

When others are going "where's the point-by-point breakdown on how to create a race", the response is "well that just not how 5E does it. This is a fiction-focused freeform game and you have to work with these guidelines to make what you want to make fit within the game"

moths
Aug 25, 2004

I would also still appreciate some danger.



gradenko_2000 posted:

... This is a fiction-focused freeform game and you have to work with these guidelines to make what you want to make fit within the game"

Just like D&D has always been*!

*To people who didn't read the rules

Tollymain
Jul 9, 2010

by Jeffrey of YOSPOS
Those Ars Amandi/Marte things are pretty cool but they share a website with a hella :catstare: larp setting

e: for those who don't want to look, it's basically 2 parallel settings and one is gor with the numbers filed off and the other is basically what an mra thinks of when they hear the words "feminist utopia" :stonklol:

Tollymain fucked around with this message at 07:44 on Nov 12, 2014

Ratpick
Oct 9, 2012

And no one ate dinner that night.
So, my new job at an elementary school has lead to me organizing an RPG/Storygame club for some of the kids. I'm starting things with Happy Birthday, Robot! (in Finnish and with simplified rules because these are first and second-graders who haven't had any English as a foreign language teaching yet). Even though my background is in EFL teaching I have enough experience of elementary school teaching that I can probably use this as an opportunity to teach basic sentence structure without getting too in-depth.

After this week I'll probably be moving onto something more traditional but still kid-friendly. An idea I had was adapting Dungeon World (very much stripped down to the barest minimum) with some ideas taken from Gnome's excellent Little Necromancers for something like Fairy Tale Adventures: have the kids play characters from fairy tales, with each week having a new mystery for them to solve, like "The Tooth Fairy has gone missing and Tooth Trolls (not sure if that's a thing in English, but in Finland it's basically a bogeyman used to teach kids about the importance of dental hygiene) are running wild!" or something like that.

The funny thing is, even though I've been running RPGs for ages, I've never been more nervous about running a game than I am now.

The Supreme Court
Feb 25, 2010

Pirate World: Nearly done!
Dungeon World is a great idea: I'm sure there was a guy who wrote a blog on running it for kids and that they absolutely thrived in it with a little bit more prompting/ focused questions. I want to say it was a guy and his young daughter, but I think there was one with a school and a bunch of teenagers too?

Mitama
Feb 28, 2011

The Supreme Court posted:

Dungeon World is a great idea: I'm sure there was a guy who wrote a blog on running it for kids and that they absolutely thrived in it with a little bit more prompting/ focused questions. I want to say it was a guy and his young daughter, but I think there was one with a school and a bunch of teenagers too?

This one? http://dungeon-elementary.tumblr.com/

It's really great, yeah.

Tulpa
Aug 8, 2014

Meinberg posted:

In contrast, Avery talked about a game, whose name I can't recall sadly, where instead of saying what the character did, the player describes the processes acting on the character and asks other players at the table what the character does.

That sounds like A Penny For My Thoughts, which is a very well designed game though definitely not a game for every day play. It's very draining. Though I have nits to pick with Avery's talks they're not really worth picking since overall the talks are fairly productive.

MalcolmSheppard
Jun 24, 2012
MATTHEW 7:20

unseenlibrarian posted:

There's some conspiracy theories that the whole "We'll crowd all the other games out of the market" was basically just a snowjob for the Hasbro suits and it was really meant so that eventually Ryan Dancey could steal D&D out from under the company when the time came, and thus Pathfinder. I think this ascribes a level of competence and low cunning to Dancey that is not actually evident.

He claimed it was his plan all along to "free D&D." He did have his fingers in both the Open Gaming Foundation and Organized Play, which he was pushing as an organized play (duh) service for RPGs as well as card games. The he organized a slate of candidates for GAMA who won, and resigned over a situation where I must emphasize his fellow slate candidates did not ask the police to prosecute him for a crime due to any confidential email he may or may not have viewed.

So I think that until WotC abandoned the core-centered philosophy he championed, pushed a new edition and wished him well, he was interested in collapsing as much of the hobby into interoperable games using the D20 system which he could support through his own business ventures and continually keep in the spotlight. He was certainly prepared for D&D to be the locus of a game outside of WotC. But companies rapidly learned they could drop the D20STL and pump out their own core books. Nowadays the D&D segment has collapsed into Pathfinder and the retroclone cottage industry, so that's where he is.

Galaga Galaxian
Apr 23, 2009

What a childish tactic!
Don't you think you should put more thought into your battleplan?!


Ratpick posted:

So, my new job at an elementary school has lead to me organizing an RPG/Storygame club for some of the kids. I'm starting things with Happy Birthday, Robot! (in Finnish and with simplified rules because these are first and second-graders who haven't had any English as a foreign language teaching yet). Even though my background is in EFL teaching I have enough experience of elementary school teaching that I can probably use this as an opportunity to teach basic sentence structure without getting too in-depth.

After this week I'll probably be moving onto something more traditional but still kid-friendly. An idea I had was adapting Dungeon World (very much stripped down to the barest minimum) with some ideas taken from Gnome's excellent Little Necromancers for something like Fairy Tale Adventures: have the kids play characters from fairy tales, with each week having a new mystery for them to solve, like "The Tooth Fairy has gone missing and Tooth Trolls (not sure if that's a thing in English, but in Finland it's basically a bogeyman used to teach kids about the importance of dental hygiene) are running wild!" or something like that.

The funny thing is, even though I've been running RPGs for ages, I've never been more nervous about running a game than I am now.

This is cool and you are cool. Yes, infect the younger generation with our ways. :getin:

MadScientistWorking
Jun 23, 2010

"I was going through a time period where I was looking up weird stories involving necrophilia..."

Tulpa posted:

That sounds like A Penny For My Thoughts, which is a very well designed game though definitely not a game for every day play. It's very draining. Though I have nits to pick with Avery's talks they're not really worth picking since overall the talks are fairly productive.
Im kind of curious as to how you create such a game where it doesn't become something you don't want to actually play ever again. I see the merit of it and definitely have done things similar to that stuff before but the depressing undercurrent is something that was a mainstay of those games.

Meinberg
Oct 9, 2011

inspired by but legally distinct from CATS (2019)

Tulpa posted:

That sounds like A Penny For My Thoughts, which is a very well designed game though definitely not a game for every day play. It's very draining. Though I have nits to pick with Avery's talks they're not really worth picking since overall the talks are fairly productive.

Yes! That is the exact game that they were talking about.

MadScientistWorking posted:

Im kind of curious as to how you create such a game where it doesn't become something you don't want to actually play ever again. I see the merit of it and definitely have done things similar to that stuff before but the depressing undercurrent is something that was a mainstay of those games.

Hearing about the idea also brought to mind Shadowguiding from Wraith: the Oblivion, which is also not a very happy or chippy game. I think there's value to these games that go to dark spaces, though. While probably not something you'd want to play week in and week out, going outside of one's comfort zones occasionally can be very enlightening.

There's some similar stuff in my upcoming game, Goat Song, which will be available for public playtesting very soon, but which I'm hoping will be a bit less dire and bit more escapist, while still exploring the themes of the loss of agency and the way that myriad forces impact on an individual's actions and reactions. Game plug, go!

I'm planning to finish up my Metatopia report later today, by discussing the social and networking aspects of the con, which perhaps might be the most important part of it.

Edit: The panels were indeed recorded, and will be hosted online. I'll let you guys know when and where they're up.

Meinberg fucked around with this message at 19:34 on Nov 12, 2014

OtspIII
Sep 22, 2002

Tulpa posted:

That sounds like A Penny For My Thoughts, which is a very well designed game though definitely not a game for every day play. It's very draining. Though I have nits to pick with Avery's talks they're not really worth picking since overall the talks are fairly productive.

Nah, it's the stuff in life that you 90% agree with that you should be nitpicking. Just make sure to frame it in a 'this is really cool, so let's take it further/solidify its weak points' way instead of a 'this is flawed, go home' way.

grassy gnoll
Aug 27, 2006

The pawsting business is tough work.
Ho ho ho! Now you have a machine gun!

In the spirit of Secret Santa, have some Humble Bundle Steam keys for Insurgency.

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Maxwell Lord
Dec 12, 2008

I am drowning.
There is no sign of land.
You are coming down with me, hand in unlovable hand.

And I hope you die.

I hope we both die.


:smith:

Grimey Drawer
Not to sound like a grognard, but if you're not playing a character so much as the forces acting on them, is it still an RPG?

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