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hyphz posted:That's perhaps true, but what I argued was still the case - that it's not going to be fun. The player's interest in maxing their shooting and minning their climbing is that the game is about their maxed shooting, not their minned climbing. I used to joke it would be clearer to do character generation if instead of buying what you were good at, you bought what you were bad at, if that was what the game was actually going to be about. And yes, the player does want to be a good shooter, but bad climbing is the trade-off they chose to get there. If they put the trade-off elsewhere, then they'd be bad at something else, ergo they have opted in to being bad at climbing. If being bad at climbing were truly unacceptable to them, why wouldn't they have put the points in climbing? A thing can be about two things! The players' interest in playing a shooty person is exactly why you put plenty of stuff in for them to shoot. The necessity of a game to include challenges, some of which may not play to a PC's strengths or actively lean into their disadvantages, is why you put in the mountain. The former is nice for that player as an individual because it gives them their spotlight time. The latter is good for the group as a whole because it means spotlight time is shared and they don't resort to the exact same plan every encounter of everyone just spamming their best skill. (It is even good for the player who is disadvantaged, because it puts them in a situation where other aspects of their character can get spotlight, and they can roleplay being confronted by something their character finds difficult - and if you're doing things like this for all the group there'll probably be an encounter later on where the mountain climber is badly challenged but the shooter can do some clever trick shooting to save the day.) If a player is genuinely not interested in their character ever being in a situation where their top skill isn't a good and effective way for them to engage in the situation, if their interest is so narrow that they only care about shooting and taking a backseat so someone else's elite mountain climber character can get more spotlight for once is intolerable, then a traditional-style tabletop RPG is the last thing that they should be playing. They should play a skirmish shoot-em-up game, or a climbing simulation game, or whatever. To tell an actual story or simulate an actual world or provide an actual varied game challenge or otherwise to do what it sets out to do, a tabletop RPG needs variety, not static sameness constantly. If literally all a player wants to do is run around and shoot a gun and they have no interest in doing anything else, do not have them play a game where the skill list includes dozens of other skills. Have them play a game where the basic moves are "run" and "shoot gun". quote:One actually made a PC before the session using the character generator, the other two different. They weren't just messing with phones, mind you, they were talking about the phone game they were playing which I think had just come out at the time? I can't remember which one it was, I think it was one of the Marvel ones. quote:Nah, it's probably just British politeness crossed with the Abilene Paradox. Nobody wants to say anything in case everyone else thinks the opposite. quote:The thing is, I did have some sympathy to be honest, because "the quest giver turns out to be the villain" is so hackneyed by now that it can't be a good story just because it's done to death. I've sworn to never use it in an RPG, together with the "hey if you had done nothing everything would have been great" plot. So if the goal was to tell a good story he was arguably succeeding by flipping the script, but it didn't work so well (and I think the character wasn't a villain) Again: a story where characters do random poo poo out of knowledge they couldn't possibly have had (the PC doesn't know about the cliche because the PC hasn't played any IRL RPGs) is a bad story, as a rule. There are exceptions, but a traditional RPG is a poor format to be doing poo poo like Funny Games' fourth wall breaking stuff. Warthur fucked around with this message at 21:47 on Apr 22, 2020 |
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Apr 22, 2020 21:44
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hyphz posted:That's perhaps true, but what I argued was still the case - that it's not going to be fun. The player's interest in maxing their shooting and minning their climbing is that the game is about their maxed shooting, not their minned climbing. I used to joke it would be clearer to do character generation if instead of buying what you were good at, you bought what you were bad at, if that was what the game was actually going to be about. A lot of this stuff really sounds like your play group isn't very good at talking out problems instead of letting them fester. This isn't just... some uk politeness thing, this is clearly actually causing problems at your table, you know? And like, you should bring that up with them if you intend to play with them again at all. Because like... Sure, player one made their PC before, that's cool, but the other two people just blowing you off instead of trying to play the game because they didn't want to talk about not being interested in strike is really not cool. It's so easy to go 'eh, Hyphz, i'm not into Strike'. It clearly upset you, you know? You don't have to justify something that upset you when it's this kind of clearly like... easy thing they could have done to avoid that initial upset. You probably wouldn't have been upset if they just said 'I don't want to play strike', right?
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Apr 22, 2020 21:51
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I don't even know how much to engage with idea that this is "British" politeness for a dozen reason. 1)I don't even know if you mean it 2)I don't think it's true (I know plenty of British people it wouldn't apply to) 3)it's got some rather bizarre implications about other nationalities 4)it's still a bullshit excuse cause they're actually being incredibly rude, at best they're being non-confrontational, etc. Where do you find these golems made out of pure elemental passive-aggression? Night10194 posted:I think one of the things that stopped me from becoming a bad GM was the GMing advice on players who take lots of points in something in Ironclaw 1e, which I first played in high school. "They're not min-maxing, they're saying they want to do that thing. If a PC is the best swordsman from their home city, give them a kickass swordfight to show it off. Put major enemies in who challenge them to duels so that sometimes they can show off exactly how good they are." Instead of it being treated as something you punish PCs for. Exactly. If the game has the tools to make the greatest swordsman ever, and a player decides to do that, then they should get to be the greatest swordsman ever, i.e. they should get to, for example, show off how much better they are than some mooks by clowning on them, get challenged by a super-duelist NPC who can really test them and make them feel accomplished in their victory, and also, sometimes, be met with challenges they can't stab their way out of for the sake of variety and flexibility and sometimes letting other people in the party get them out of a spot. If the game has all these parts and the character making this definitely-not Inigo Montoya is a "problem" then someone done hosed up, but I highly doubt it's the player. The system (and to a much lesser extent the GM) shouldn't be enouraging/allowing players to do things that are against its expectations. That's just poor design. If we're playing Sense & Sensibility The RPG, yeah, it is pretty genre-inappropriate if someone rolls up as some kind of combat murder-beast ; however it's also a much bigger problem that someone writing the game made it possible to do that (why are there even rules for that if it's against genre??????).
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Apr 22, 2020 22:22
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I think hyphz needs to be like, rescued from this group and allowed to dm a starter module for some nice well-intentioned people
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Apr 22, 2020 22:42
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Farg posted:I think hyphz needs to be like, rescued from this group and allowed to dm a starter module for some nice well-intentioned people Hyphz recently GMed for a different group, playing a game about fairies that's both narrative and improv comedy, and by all accounts it went pretty well. Hyphz is convinced this is because it was comedy, not because the group were more trusting and trustworthy.
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Apr 22, 2020 23:01
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Joe Slowboat posted:Hyphz recently GMed for a different group, playing a game about fairies that's both narrative and improv comedy, and by all accounts it went pretty well. He knows, he just doesn't want to admit it. Which is why he'll expend endless effort on arguing about the possibility of mountains but won't begin to address things like Elector_Nerdlingen posted:Why not ask them to knock that off and play the game that's in front of them to find out what happens, instead of finding an un-fun way to not actually play the game that's in front of them?
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Apr 23, 2020 00:36
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hyphz, I have a serious question for you, and I'm not trying to insult or belittle you: are you neuro-atypical? The reason I ask is because a lot of your comments about things lead me to believe that even though I know you're a native English speaker, you parse language very differently than most people. You've expressed misgivings about sentences like "play to find out" or "be a fan of the characters" before which - as near as I can tell - stem from very stilted and literal readings of the individual words without grasping the gestalt meaning they are trying to convey. It would also explain your default practice of always tearing things down to first principles or looking at things as purely binary propositions. Similarly, some of the behaviors you've highlighted from your gaming group sound like people with communication/relation issues that are fairly common with people on the autism spectrum. And since people on the spectrum often tend to congregate with other people on the spectrum, it might make sense. This would give me hope that the people with whom you game are not terrible, hateful, awful people sent into this world to ensure that you can't have RPG fun, but rather ordinary folks with very specific (and different) communications issues, and further that many of the group dynamics you are seeing might just stem from your various individual communications issues not lining up. If that is the case, then we as a community need to be more specific about the terminology we use and the way in which we use it. I'm OK with doing that if it helps you get to the point where RPGs are a more enjoyable experience for you. And if I'm off base, let me know and I'll go back to marveling at how terrible your gaming group is.
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Apr 23, 2020 01:00
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Elector_Nerdlingen posted:He knows, he just doesn't want to admit it. Which is why he'll expend endless effort on arguing about the possibility of mountains but won't begin to address things like Not quite. It was the fact that it was comedy saved me from having to get stuck in the "if a PC is bad at climbing, how often do I put in a mountain?" question with no right answer, because that doesn't have to be a factor in a comedy (and short) game. If there was something oppressive going on in the setting then it'd have been much harder to get that balance right. Even then, there was one player (who had apparently only played 5e before) who instantly broke away from the group and then worked out that he could just give humans commands, since for a 1 foot tall fairy to order a human around was certainly Moxie, he could tag Brazen and Smooth Talker, and get 3d6 succeeding on any 4 or less. The rules don't say what the threshold is for telling someone to do something, only that they have to be Stressed Out in order to "no longer be a problem", but he wasn't giving any orders that would remove others from play. (He also asked if he could spend 3 points to make a "magic tape recorder" by using Craft, which was pushing it, but the image of a wooden cranked tape recorder which stored sound on wound-up reeds using a rose-thorn stylus was too good to pass up. Yes I know it's record players that use styluses) Both of those would have been much harder judgment calls in a game where challenge was supposed to be front and centre. Xiahou Dun posted:Exactly. If the game has the tools to make the greatest swordsman ever, and a player decides to do that, then they should get to be the greatest swordsman ever, i.e. they should get to, for example, show off how much better they are than some mooks by clowning on them, get challenged by a super-duelist NPC who can really test them and make them feel accomplished in their victory, and also, sometimes, be met with challenges they can't stab their way out of for the sake of variety and flexibility and sometimes letting other people in the party get them out of a spot. And that's what I thought until our player made the gun master and then complained it was boring to shoot everything, but at the same time, just noped out of any challenge that couldn't be solved with the gun because no matter what nifty idea he had, if I asked for a roll for literally anything in the process he would fail 70% of the time. Neopie posted:Because like... Sure, player one made their PC before, that's cool, but the other two people just blowing you off instead of trying to play the game because they didn't want to talk about not being interested in strike is really not cool. It's so easy to go 'eh, Hyphz, i'm not into Strike'. It clearly upset you, you know? You don't have to justify something that upset you when it's this kind of clearly like... easy thing they could have done to avoid that initial upset. You probably wouldn't have been upset if they just said 'I don't want to play strike', right? I wouldn't have, although it would have been nice if they had mentioned that before I made up a simple dungeon and some monsters and ran their balance by jimbozig  But I've certainly learned that apparently nobody on the planet is any good at responding to things in advance when it comes to RPGs.Warthur posted:And yes, the player does want to be a good shooter, but bad climbing is the trade-off they chose to get there. They might have been forced to make the trade-off in the game system, but they didn't in their heads about what they consider fun. They wanted to be challenged by shooting even though they're really good at it, action movie style. But there's no game I know of that actually provides challenges in that context, which is why I've talked about it before in the Jackie Chan context (because martial arts stunts are easier to visualise than gun ones). Plenty of games say you can fight back and forth around the tumbling vase; some of them will set up a situation where you are more likely to lose if you don't make up some stunt; and but none of them actually set up a situation where you lose if you don't see the vase that already exists and make use of it, like Jackie Chan's character would be presumed to be doing.
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Apr 23, 2020 01:02
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hyphz posted:Not quite. It was the fact that it was comedy saved me from having to get stuck in the "if a PC is bad at climbing, how often do I put in a mountain?" question with no right answer, because that doesn't have to be a factor in a comedy (and short) game. If there was something oppressive going on in the setting then it'd have been much harder to get that balance right. See? You'll type loving paragraphs about the impossibility of mountains, or how mountains only work in comedy games, and how you just don't understand, you just don't, sincerely. But you ignore the part where I told you what your problem is and how to fix it. Your players aren't playing the game that's in front of them. They're finding an un-fun way to not play the game. Why don't you just tell them to knock that poo poo off? I'll tell you why they're not playing the game that's in front of them after you actually engage with this point instead of evading it.
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Apr 23, 2020 01:42
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Elector_Nerdlingen posted:See? You'll type loving paragraphs about the impossibility of mountains, or how mountains only work in comedy games, and how you just don't understand, you just don't, sincerely. But you ignore the part where I told you what your problem is and how to fix it. What, just that one guy? Everything he did made sense in the terms he knew the system, and he and everyone else did seem to have fun. But apparently that was wrong?
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Apr 23, 2020 02:26
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hyphz posted:What, just that one guy? Everything he did made sense in the terms he knew the system, and he and everyone else did seem to have fun. But apparently that was wrong? No, Hyphz. Not the players that you don't usually play with. Your players. The players that you constantly post about. The ones who eternally seek a way to do something other than play the game in front of them. These guys, the same ones that I asked you about before. hyphz posted:In the case of encounter imbalance, that's fine, that's already accepted. But the "sometimes [I'll] disagree" thing is a pretty bad case, since it's basically saying that the way to get things to succeed is to do what I agree with. And I can predict how that will go - at least two players will barrage questions in advance of doing anything in the game in order to find out what I'm looking for. Why don't you tell them to knock that poo poo off and play the game? Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 03:06 on Apr 23, 2020 |
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Apr 23, 2020 02:41
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Elector_Nerdlingen posted:Why don't you tell them to knock that poo poo off and play the game? Because if they are breaking no rules of the system, nor totally failing to make sense, then if I tell them that, their immediate question is: “What, then, is your criteria for playing the game?” And I can’t answer reasonably. Why is playing an expert shot not playing Shadowrun or Feng Shui? Half of action and sci-fi heroes are in that category. If I restrict him from minmaximg, and as a result his character loses a gunfight and dies or suffers dramatic loss, he will say “So in hyphz rules, the only way to play is to lose?” hyphz fucked around with this message at 03:11 on Apr 23, 2020 |
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Apr 23, 2020 03:08
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hyphz posted:Because if they are breaking no rules of the system, nor totally failing to make sense, then if I tell them that, their immediate question is: Are these things that have happened, or purely invented scenarios you're saying must necessarily result from suggesting that someone change their playstyle to be more collaborative and mutually supportive? Also, do you consider it possible for a player to behave badly? What would a badly behaved player look like to you? Let's say the minimum amount of bad behavior that would make it a serious problem.
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Apr 23, 2020 03:14
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hyphz posted:Because if they are breaking no rules of the system, nor totally failing to make sense, then if I tell them that, their immediate question is: But they're specifically not playing the game in front of them, they're playing "figure out what Hyphz is looking for". You've clearly identified this in the post I quoted. e: It's not the first time you've identified this as a problem, either. Why don't you tell them to stop playing that, and instead play the game in front of them? e: I promise this is a good-faith engagement, and I'm leading into a point, but I need you to at least think about the words I've posted here before I can get to that point. The whole thing, but specifically the bolded parts. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 03:28 on Apr 23, 2020 |
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Apr 23, 2020 03:19
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If you have players who don't want to play, or who only want to be in as bad faith players to suck the fun out of it for everyone? Kick them out. There was this one guy, called Helpful_comrade, I knew once. Nobody liked him because he never wanted to play the game and would always drag it down by focusing on completely irrelevant random poo poo, like ignoring everything else in D&D to focus on his herd of sheep. Everyone got fed up with him and he got chased out because gently caress that poo poo.
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Apr 23, 2020 03:20
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Elector_Nerdlingen posted:But they're specifically not playing the game in front of them, they're playing "figure out what Hyphz is looking for". You've clearly identified this in the post I quoted. e: It's not the first time you've identified this as a problem, either. Because unless we are playing a super crunchy and detailed system, and a module, they could not do this. It is the game in front of them. Like, that’s my whole problem. I don’t know how I can run a game where I am involved in judgments or improvisation without my opinion of the situation or PC or player actions becoming the dominant factor in the game. I presume there’s a way in the light of what you’re saying but I can’t work it out.
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Apr 23, 2020 03:40
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hyphz posted:Because if they are breaking no rules of the system, nor totally failing to make sense, then if I tell them that, their immediate question is: I'm going to now play this logic out in a way I totally disagree with and don't endorse at all. I am sincerely just doing this to show how the logic is flawed and I mean nothing by it. This logic is terrible and I only do it to show how this obviously leads to bad gaming. What's the rule that stops me from punching you in the face if you do something bad to my character? If you're not gaming with people who are your friends or at least not-cocks then what's the loving point? I'm giving this as a purposely super extreme you should call the police version of breaking the social contract, but there's not a game rule to stop someone being huffy just like there ain't one to stop them from burning your apartment building down. This isn't an RPG problem. There's no rule in Starcraft that stops someone from shanking you either. I certainly don't wish that on you cause you're a cool person even if I don't understand you, but I'm trying to give an example of why out-of-play stuff can't be solved with game rules. It's all about actually wanting to work together to make a story. If you have some random psychopath in the mix, it's always gonna be lovely. (No seriously I'm not even a little bit threatening you and was just making an abstract point. I live on a different continent and I'm a schlubby dork who can barely function. You have nothing to worry from me.)
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Apr 23, 2020 03:42
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Because if you were to punch me in the face, I wouldn’t think “hang on, maybe he has a point.” If I can’t say what my criteria for playing in good faith are, then maybe I don’t know myself. If I have such criteria at all, consciously or otherwise, then meeting them just becomes another aspect of the game of “work out what (hyphz) wants.” And yes, sometimes the shot that finishes off a PC does hit their AC by one point, one point that they could have taken instead of spending it on climbing when there hasn’t been a mountain yet. And yes, creating “difficulty” in a story by requiring a minimum amount of loss to be suffered before victory is a trap that I may fall into, given that I don’t know another way of creating narrative difficulty.
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Apr 23, 2020 03:52
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Okay, so going with my (totally on purpose absurd because we both know it's beyond the pale) argument, where is the line between sock you one <====> leave in a huff <====> do weird rear end passive aggressive things in the game to ruin everyone's fun? I'm sincerely trying to figure out what you think a normal social contract is for play. When I play it's with my friends or at least people I think are pretty chill, and if poo poo comes up we just talk it out like adults. If someone can't do this they're ejected from the group into space.
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Apr 23, 2020 04:12
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OK. You're not going to understand anyone who's trying to help you, until you realise that "figure out what the GM wants" is not "playing the game", but is an un-fun game-adjacent activity that your players are engaging in instead of playing the game. You identified it as a problem. You ignored the people who tried to discuss it with you, and now that they haven't dropped it, you're tying yourself in knots trying to "prove" that it's not just not a problem, but is the only possible way to play. But here goes anyway:  Your problem is that your players are not playing the game, they're playing you.That's a learned behavior, and it's likely caused by experience with your insistence that you not be seen to have made anything up giving them the knowledge that in one of your games, there's always a pre-written correct solution for them to find. And you're letting them do it while insisting that if you don't let them do it, they'll do it.
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Apr 23, 2020 04:17
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I wasn’t the first GM for the group and I’ve been one less often than not, so it probably isn’t learned from me. But I just don’t see how it is not the game. If the final arbiter of whether or not the raid succeeds is me, then the way to do a successful raid is to match what will cause me to make that judgment. Any other aspect of the game is subsidiary to that. For a comedy game that works because what I want to happen and what the players want to happen - ie, funny or outlandish stuff - can be in sync without creating dissonance. But in a game with challenge, it’s dissonant for the players to have to want to “lose a little bit”. Telling the players “stop trying to work out what I want” seems almost paradoxical: “I want you to change your behaviour to stop changing your behaviour based on what I want!” Yes, I know this is what you said above, that I can’t see there’s any other way to play. But if there is, what is it?
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Apr 23, 2020 04:27
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hyphz posted:Telling the players “stop trying to work out what I want” seems almost paradoxical: “I want you to change your behaviour to stop changing your behaviour based on what I want!”
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Apr 23, 2020 04:37
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Oh for the love of God don’t blank me now. I almost had hope. What is the other way to play?
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Apr 23, 2020 05:52
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O sweet jesus christ be an adult and just talk to your players. Edit : and if they're assholes either give 'em a last chance after talking explicitly how they're loving things up, and if they do anything besides go "Yeah I'm really sorry things have been tough at work/O? is that what we're doing, I'm sorry, I had a different idea, my bad" Xiahou Dun fucked around with this message at 06:00 on Apr 23, 2020 |
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Apr 23, 2020 05:56
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hyphz posted:What is the other way to play? If you don't have a plan in mind, they won't be able to look for "what you want." Also, it sounds like these people were trained on RPGs by a super-lovely "gotcha" GM.
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Apr 23, 2020 06:27
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hyphz posted:Oh for the love of God don’t blank me now. I almost had hope. Don't be a loving arsehole, Hyphz. That's all there is to it. Pull your head out of your arse for one loving second and listen to everyone who's telling you exactly what you need to do instead of just waiting for your moment to go "AHA! GOTCHA!" and pull some lame fuckheaded language game.
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Apr 23, 2020 06:45
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Hyphz, like, I get that you're having trouble imagining things working any other way, but literally everyone here is saying most groups don't end up like yours. This is problem specific to you and the people you hang around with. It is not a problem with the games, because the rest of us simply don't have the problems you have, or to the extent we do, we're able to deal with them and still have fun. Stop trying to prove that birds can't fly and start focusing on how they do and why the rocks you're playing with can't.
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Apr 23, 2020 06:49
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Hyphz, there are a vast number of other ways to play. The key element, however, is to stop constantly thinking about what they're thinking about what you're thinking etc. Which is, again, a problem of trust. You need to be able to trust your players to take the actions that fit their characters, and they need to trust you will try to present a world that is coherent and interesting (but also won't let them completely destroy the story - you can tell them OOC, 'hey if you jump off this cliff it will just end the story and your characters will die, so don't do that'). Moreover, you need to be able to trust that they want to experience the world you invent and therefore, if you want there to be a mountain, there can just be a goddamn mountain and they don't get to say otherwise. But, in the opposite direction, they need to be able to trust that you want their input - you want to include their character decisions and build on them, not invalidate them. If they know that you care about their characters, and that if you're throwing problems at them it's because you want to help the character shine, then they will gladly accept problems and issues - if they're playing in good faith. If they're not interested in that kind of collaborative play, there is no way to make them stop being jerks the way they have been. If they just want to crush dungeons, and moreover want to feel like they outsmarted you but also complain when they lose... they are bad players. They are not trying to collaborate with you at all, not even in a friendly antagonistic way. They just want to beat you, and that's a miserable way to play. Working the refs is bad play, and these players are working the ref. You. You have been worked.
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Apr 23, 2020 06:50
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If you want specific advice about the other way to play that whatever it is that you do, I'm going to tell you to buy and read Apocalypse World, yes the whole thing, and then no, Hyphz, the whole loving book, all of it, and then play the game with people other than the regular pack of obtuse fuckheads who hate games and you and the concept of fun. Just do it. Whenever you feel doubts about whether or not the game can actually really for real be played in real life for real, instead of posting paragraphs about how you alone have figured it all out and it can't be done, either trust that everyone who's played the game isn't lying to you or attempting some kind of long con gotcha moment and play the game anyway or hit your own dick with a hammer. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 06:59 on Apr 23, 2020 |
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Apr 23, 2020 06:56
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Elector_Nerdlingen posted:If you want specific advice about the other way to play that whatever it is that you do, I'm going to tell you to buy and read Apocalypse World, yes the whole thing, and then no, Hyphz, the whole loving book, all of it, and then play the game with people other than the regular pack of obtuse fuckheads who hate games and you and the concept of fun. Yo, there's a particular thread for this now, which is this one, which means maybe don't come in at a 7 on the hostility scale? Chill the gently caress out. You can just not have the conversation if you're going to get mad online.
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Apr 23, 2020 06:59
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Neopie posted:Yo, there's a particular thread for this now, which is this one, which means maybe don't come in at a 7 on the hostility scale? Chill the gently caress out. You can just not have the conversation if you're going to get mad online. I don't think he's mad at all, just frustrated. Hyphz has been very polite and I appreciate that, but he's also dumber than a box of hair about basic things like not being a social idiot (which I totally get cause I have like all of them but I take pills and go to therapy rather destroy online conversations). Also still waiting on if you actually read the books cause you certainly ain't act like you done.
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Apr 23, 2020 07:12
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I don't know if this is related to Hypz-chat, or my own personal hangup, but I absolutely hate doing skill rolls in games until I see how the GM handles failure with someone ele's character, because I've seen a few too many GMs who use a failed skill roll as an excuse to make your character look like an idiot. Conversely when I GM I try not to have characters look bad as a result of a failed roll unless it's a comedy game, or the player has said that their guy is a bit of a clown or bufoonish type. I realise that IRL people do generally look daft as a result of failed physical actions (see the number of Fail videos on Youtube), but it's offputting when it's assigned by a person rather than an uncaring universe.
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Apr 23, 2020 07:14
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Hyphz, I realized something. You might be running into a wall because you seem to think that GMs can push modes of play onto their players without any buy-in from the players. They can't. Players have to collaborate with changes in style or approach, and in your case, the single most meaningful change you can undergo is getting your players to stop treating you like the enemy and buy into your stories, settings, and games. If players take an interest in the setting, then the difficulty of the Mountain Climb isn't arbitrary, it's there because there are mountains in this setting, which exists for its own sake as a place for stories or as a structure for challenges that make their characters, who are the stars of the setting, stand out. If players take a deeper approach to their characters than 'skimming the surface' they'll want to express character qualities other than 'optimal victory winner with OOC knowledge' and suddenly, entire worlds of new possibilities open up. If players understand that your job as GM is going to be to coordinate their character ideas and challenges to create interesting scenarios, rather than to be defeated, they'll stop trying to work the ref or do things like 'attack the NPC questgiver because they might betray them.' Like, that is something none of my players would ever do! They might decide their characters don't trust or want to harm a character, but it'll be because the character is a shady fucker, not because of OOC 'I'm certain they will betray us, because this game is about outwitting and defeating the GM's attempts to do things to our characters.' Hell, if players are trying to have a story happen, you can joke with them about how obvious a shady fucker's betrayal is, and they can rest assured that whatever happens will be interesting! Those are different play modes from yours, but they don't come solely from the GM running things differently. They come from player buy-in. They come from a social contract and a shared goal. In WTF terms, they come from the Wisher: The driving moral force that determines what the purpose of play is, what should be done, whether that's tactical team combat against enemies you've set up IC to be interesting challenges, character drama, exploration of a cool setting, whatever. That's what you need to articulate and moreover that's what they need to trust in and work with you to pursue - though I don't think your players will. So go play Spire with the CFA players and see what happens. Play to see what kind of wild plans they come up with, and try to complicate and articulate those plans and schemes with interesting characters, dangerous foes, and hard choices. Try to make the setting feel coherent by introducing the kinds of difficulties that make dramatic sense in their plans. Talk to them about 'ok, what seems reasonable to me is...' and get their input. Have a creative agenda that isn't 'they try to defeat you, and you desperately seek their approval.'
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Apr 23, 2020 07:18
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Angrymog posted:I don't know if this is related to Hypz-chat, or my own personal hangup, but I absolutely hate doing skill rolls in games until I see how the GM handles failure with someone ele's character, because I've seen a few too many GMs who use a failed skill roll as an excuse to make your character look like an idiot. I hate it too, but only if it's a random game with people I don't know, because then I'm never 100% sure if I can trust what they said the tone is supposed to be until I see what happens when characters fail. I know that my group isn't going to do banana peel pratfalls in a grimdark game about a desperate rebellion, and I know that they're not gonna give me a sucking chest wound if I jump through a window in a game about 4 kung fu dipshits running an ice cream shop with the power of friendship. But I'm never sure when it's strangers.
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Apr 23, 2020 07:23
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Nemesis Of Moles posted:my philosophy of roleplaying games is that liches are cool as gently caress Definitely agree, dnd is mostly flawed at best but the monsters kick rear end, and liches are top tier Wish liches were more of a pc thing
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Apr 23, 2020 08:47
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There's some ways to "play the GM" in a positive fashion in my experience. It is more or less never because you feel you have to do it because it's the only way to attain in-game success, though - it's good when you want to do it because you know what your referee enjoys and you're trying to make the game fun for them as well. To go back to the superhero example, you might do this by taking a weird niche weakness because you know your GM enjoys making up challenges which creatively engage with those weaknesses and would find it amusing to make up and play a radish-based supervillain or whatever. But this requires an approach of the game which is not about focusing hard on winning all the time and being more collaborative, which it's pretty clear is not just very difficult to hyphz but completely alien to his players too. Playing a board game instead of Strike sounds like a smart move in that case because it sounds like a group of people much happier with defined rules and overt competition than anything looser and more co-operative. Ilor posted:Go in with exactly zero plan. Respond to their actions and the results of their rolls with natural (not preplanned) consequences. Let those consequences have teeth, but allow them to fail-forward. If going from too many notes to zero notes is too much of a leap - or if your players simply won't trust that you aren't just making up arbitrary restrictions out of your own head, here's an idea for an adventure design format: - You define the broad parameters of the encounter. - If it is a potential fight, give the potential adversaries stats, define what they want, and unless what they want is specifically "fight/kill/gently caress up the PCs", add a note that reads "Anything the PCs do which can plausibly give the NPCs this, or lead to progress towards this, can be used as a basis for peaceful negotiation." - If it's not a potential fight, define the challenge or problem. Since it is a challenge or problem, define it in terms of what it makes difficult or impossible. Don't make this a whole shopping list of things! Make it a core, snappy statement of the central problem. In the mountain example the difficulty is "The terrain is extremely steep and the place the PCs need to get to is at the summit". Then add an explicit note that any plausible plan which is not invalidated by the premise of the encounter or requires the PC to exploit knowledge they can't plausibly possess can be attempted. Then run the game for your players and stick to what you have written exactly. Be true to this. Don't sweat it if a solution they propose isn't the one you would have used, because you haven't defined a specific solution anyway, just defined what approaches would either be difficult or flat-out impossible. Then show them the notes to demonstrate that you did in fact run the adventure as written. If they still consider the exercise an unfair guessing game where they need to pick the exact approach you were thinking of otherwise they're hosed, stop running games for them. RPGs are not possible with people who will not extend trust to you. Warthur fucked around with this message at 12:15 on Apr 23, 2020 |
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Apr 23, 2020 11:46
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Warthur posted:But this requires an approach of the game which is not about focusing hard on winning all the time and being more collaborative, which it's pretty clear is not just very difficult to hyphz but completely alien to his players too. The reason I'm recommending Hyphz read and then run Apocalypse World is the text of that game specifically and in detail addresses concerns about prep, honesty, and challenge in a collaborative game that you play without preparation.
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Apr 23, 2020 12:28
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I don't understand the distinction between a GM using a rules set to create an encounter to using narrative logic to create an encounter. Both are based on a specific logical structure.
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Apr 23, 2020 15:07
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Well, um, ok. I'm not sure what provoked the rear end in a top hat thing. I obviously haven't reread AW yet and I'm very unlikely to run it, mainly because it's a setting that has very little appeal to run (now Legacy on the other hand..) But I've been accused before of ignoring points like the above so I should respond. Also, I wasn't necessarily asking about my standard group, which is happily playing PF2e (even if that is getting a bit tedious at high level), but about general rules for other games. Here's the thing: no matter what's happening, the GM has to make decisions and unless they are making them completely at random, there will be patterns in that decision making. And, unless there is some external force involved, the players will always experience those patterns in play. That's all. It doesn't mean that the players' only motivation is to "play the GM", or that it's their only consideration. If we have a social contract that PCs do not commit rape, then the players know that doing so would likely upset the GM. That does not mean they consider that unreasonable, that they don't know it wouldn't upset the other players too. Hopefully their main reason for not having their PC commit rape is that they don't want to because that's bloody creepy. If we play Pathfinder 2e, then the player knows that if they start a fight they will likely be asked to roll initiative, which means they can predict part of the GMs behaviour. It's based on the game rules, but those are just quantified patterns of that type. Heck, the reason for the paradox post above was that if I say "hey, you guys aren't really playing the game" then now the players learn that I will say that if they play in that particular way. I can't order them to stop using the patterns they know about me, because that's just another pattern. It doesn't mean that the GM has an existing plan or story. All that means is that adherance to an existing plan or story isn't part of that decision making process. But there must still be that process. And that's where I have the problem with challenge. Because challenge is the case where the players at least want to believe that world is opposing them. But with no external reference the world is just the GM, and the players will see patterns in the GM's behaviour whether they actively try to do so or not, and that thoughts about overcoming a challenge will be dominated by those patterns unless they consciously blinker themselves. hyphz fucked around with this message at 16:12 on Apr 23, 2020 |
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Apr 23, 2020 16:10
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hyphz posted:I obviously haven't reread AW yet and I'm very unlikely to run it, mainly because it's a setting that has very little appeal to run (now Legacy on the other hand..) But I've been accused before of ignoring points like the above so I should respond. Also, I wasn't necessarily asking about my standard group, which is happily playing PF2e (even if that is getting a bit tedious at high level), but about general rules for other games. AW barely has a setting. It's far enough after the apocalypse that nobody remembers the before time. It's recent enough that people still have guns and cars. (Though honestly, changing that doesn't require a lot of heavy lifting.) There's a psychic maelstrom. That's it. Everything else comes from the table. The reason people talk about it so much is that reading it carefully and playing based on what it says - not on what it would say if you used the words as defined in D&D, but just on what the AW2 rulebook says - is as close as I've ever seen to being a procedural guide to having a fun time in a shared imagined space. You keep looking at gaming through the lens of overcoming or not overcoming the challenge, and frankly, I think you should broaden your horizons. As I've said before in this thread, while I understand why that's fun for some people, I think that it's a fun better had through computer gaming in 2020. The fun of RPGs is making up cool people and doing cool stuff. If you follow the rules of a game like AW2 properly, it's actually really difficult to end up in a situation where your players think you're trying to screw them.
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Apr 23, 2020 16:36
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