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Tulip posted:While AA did give an incredibly inapt analogy for his participation in this discussion, when making dal it's best to put the turmeric in before the water even boils. O yeah, good call. But dal is kind of an edge case. I'd never do it for anything else off the top of my head, and as a good rule of thumb it still stands. Edit : well that was a hell of a snype. Uh, how about that Dogs in the Vineyard I guess?????
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Jul 22, 2020 18:25
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I boil spices every time I make chai e,. also, soup
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Jul 22, 2020 18:26
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Leperflesh posted:I boil spices every time I make chai Haha. You got me fair and square there. I should have added an implicit "when you're going to not be using the liquid".
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Jul 22, 2020 18:27
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The conclusion seems obvious. Play Spellbound Kingdoms, since it has chase rules.
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Jul 22, 2020 18:31
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Xiahou Dun posted:O yeah, good call. But dal is kind of an edge case. I'd never do it for anything else off the top of my head, and as a good rule of thumb it still stands. I think dal is the only form of lentils I've ever cooked. DitV remains my absolute gold standard for a general system, and it's so consistent that sessions with it are gold that sometimes I struggle with why I bother playing anything else (I haven't played DitV in years, unfortunately). What's kind of shocking is that it's, if anything, easier to hack into other genres than AW, since you don't need to make playbooks you just need to come up with "what are the stakes that bind the players" and "how much do I need to modify the escalation mechanics."
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Jul 22, 2020 18:34
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Absurd Alhazred posted:A vegetarian recipe I could provide you would involve me telling you "so, you soak a cup of lentils overnight, then strain them and let them sit in the strainer. Then fry some onions in a pot until they're easily breakable with your spatula, then pour in the lentils, mix them up and stir them for a few minutes, then add lots of spices, I usually use curry, cumin, and paprika, I do at least two rounds of adding the spices then mixing the whole thing up until it evens out, plus one teaspoon of salt, let it hiss for a bit while stirring occasionally, then add preheated water, bring to boil then let it simmer for probably 20 minutes although check once in a while, then add rice (about two cups with two teaspoons of salt), stir, add more water, then continue to come and stir occasionally, about every 5 minutes, until the rice seems soft enough, then check if it is ready, then you're good." So this here is actually a very good example. Cooking temperature is, for a lot of things, very very important. If you put your rice on high heat and leave it there, burnt rice. Turn it down too far after boiling, gross rice. So if you're writing a beginner's cookbook it's actually really important to say "Bring the rice to the boil, then turn the heat down to medium", not just "cook some rice". And that's just rice, one of the world's staples. If you're looking at stuff like squid then it gets too rubbery if you cook it too much OR too little. Those lentils, are those pre-shelled? That'll drastically affect the texture and flavour. Are the onions and lentils on high or low heat? If it's high heat there's a decent chance you'll stick all your lentils to the pan and end up with burnt lentil flavour everywhere. I like cooking with an iron skillet, is that a good fit for this recipe? Because some dishes can ruin a skillet and vice versa (I'd actually use a deep pan for this). You said add a lot of spices, would dill be a good addition to this? (No it would not) This is exactly how I remember my recipes, but if you gave this recipe out exactly as is to people who aren't practiced cooks a decent chunk of people would end up with a pile of burnt goop. Not every person, but enough. And this is just one recipe. In this analogy an RPG isn't a recipe, it's a cookbook. A cookbook which spends 30 pages telling you how to sous vide, and buries the instructions for "boiling" in an entirely separate book ("Throw some poo poo in some water. You might heat it. You might fill the water half way up. You might fill the whole thing.") Then someone comes along and complains that their bacon is all rubbery and you say "Well obviously you should fry it for longer" and they're staring at their sous vide machine wondering where you put the oil. Your recipe sounds delicious btw and I'm definitely going to cook it.
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Jul 22, 2020 18:44
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, and what temperature am I aiming at exactly, you haven't given me a SYSTEM for checking when it's done because you're just telling me to test and see, you're not giving me a SYSTEM LALALALA".
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Xiahou Dun posted:I. Uh. What.
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Jul 22, 2020 18:52
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Instructions need to be written with the audience's expertise in mind. An expert reader is burdened by excessive, exhaustive details of information they already have, preferring brevity and summarized steps. A beginner needs those details in order to not get anything wrong, but is also best off learning introductory/simpler procedures before advancing to those with a lot of steps that would all have to be spelled out very carefully in complete detail. The D&D analogy is the difference between introductory "what even are polyhedral dice? What does 4d6 mean?", intermediate "how to roll for initiative", and advanced stuff like "how to design and run a campaign." If you're writing information about how to put encounters together to form an adventure and then assemble adventures into a campaign, stopping to explain that, for Encounter A, your players should roll initiative vs. the kobolds, and they do this by rolling polyhedral dice, and "1d20" or "d20" means roll a twenty-sided die and read the number off the face that is on top, would be super annoying to everyone who is at a point of understanding the game to be figuring out how to design and run a campaign. Similarly, it's totally OK for AA to write a recipe that assumes the reader knows how to make rice, fry onions, balance different spices, etc.; this recipe presumes a higher degree of cooking competence. It's "OK" in that AA's presumption may be applicable to the audience AA is trying to address, and in this case, the analogy is that - at least in this thread, discussing game mechanics with other gamers who probably have a pretty advanced grasp on how games work - spelling out every detail isn't the default assumption of being necessary. I say all this while making no claim as to the validity of the actual analogy, e.g., whether or not "concrete examples" of D&D providing mechanisms besides character death for consequences need to be supplied to back up the assertion that D&D already provides mechanisms other than character death for consequences. I don't particularly want to take a stake in that argument, particularly since I don't know 5th edition.
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Jul 22, 2020 18:55
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Absurd Alhazred posted:A vegetarian recipe I could provide you would involve me telling you "so, you soak a cup of lentils overnight, then strain them and let them sit in the strainer. Then fry some onions in a pot until they're easily breakable with your spatula, then pour in the lentils, mix them up and stir them for a few minutes, then add lots of spices, I usually use curry, cumin, and paprika, I do at least two rounds of adding the spices then mixing the whole thing up until it evens out, plus one teaspoon of salt, let it hiss for a bit while stirring occasionally, then add preheated water, bring to boil then let it simmer for probably 20 minutes although check once in a while, then add rice (about two cups with two teaspoons of salt), stir, add more water, then continue to come and stir occasionally, about every 5 minutes, until the rice seems soft enough, then check if it is ready, then you're good." Except that the analogy you've provided there is the level of detail that D&D provides for combat. The level of detail for non-combat consequences is more like "Soak your lentils, then add fried onions and spices to taste, probably including paprika. Boil and simmer until cooked." And you only know to add curry because it's in the recipe title and cumin because it was in the ingredients list. Now I believe you could follow that recipe quite happily. But that doesn't make it a good recipe for a beginner or anything that the game itself has put real effort in.
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Jul 22, 2020 20:04
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Xiahou Dun posted:My person, I'm not like Pennywise stalking you from thread to thread as some kind of vindictive spirit. 
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Jul 22, 2020 21:33
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Man, where we're all you "the game saying you can or should do a thing isn't actually mechanics" people when I was arguing that technoir doesn't have mechanics to push players to spend enough dice and suffers from it? A bunch of people were all "Just tell the players to spend more. It's right there in the book - it says players should spend often." Made me feel like it was back at the dawn of 4e and people were saying "the fighter doesn't need marking mechanics. The GM can just attack the fighter to make him feel useful." How many times do we have to learn this lesson? If the mechanics encourage a certain kind of play, and that kind of play is the opposite of what the game intends, then the game has failed! (Unless it's some kind of artsy anti-game, I guess.)
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Jul 23, 2020 00:20
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My eyes glaze over whenever something too close to cyberpunk gets mentioned.
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Jul 23, 2020 16:14
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paradoxGentleman posted:My Priceless Perception® Ubroptics™ Interest Check™ by Priceless Perception® enters Counterblock™ mode by Priceless Perception® when Priceless Perception®'s patented Interest Check™ algorithm detects Content® related to _________. Splicer fucked around with this message at 16:50 on Jul 23, 2020 |
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Jul 23, 2020 16:47
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Absurd Alhazred posted:e: nm did you edit all your posts out of this thread??
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Jul 23, 2020 20:30
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Lt. Danger posted:did you edit all your posts out of this thread?? It sure looks like it! That's some very cold feet.
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Jul 23, 2020 21:24
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dang, must've rolled a critical failure in social combat
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Jul 23, 2020 21:42
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That's some truly impressive and methodical taking your ball and going home. Like, that must've taken time. They probably took a break. drat.
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Jul 24, 2020 02:36
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Tulip posted:DitV remains my absolute gold standard for a general system, and it's so consistent that sessions with it are gold that sometimes I struggle with why I bother playing anything else (I haven't played DitV in years, unfortunately). What's kind of shocking is that it's, if anything, easier to hack into other genres than AW, since you don't need to make playbooks you just need to come up with "what are the stakes that bind the players" and "how much do I need to modify the escalation mechanics." DitV is cool as a narration system but as a form of conflict resolution it's tedious because you know from the start whether you won or lost until you escalate. Roll dice. Are my numbers bigger? No? Guess I need to either escalate or concede. The whole 'raise/see' thing doesn't actually accomplish much.
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Jul 24, 2020 04:37
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bewilderment posted:DitV is cool as a narration system but as a form of conflict resolution it's tedious because you know from the start whether you won or lost until you escalate. I've never gotten to play it so take it with a bucket of salt, but I always took that as a feature not a bug ; the game is trying to get you to escalate. Certainly that wouldn't work in many situations, but in terms of the game wanting you to do a thing and then making you want to do a thing it seems to work. There's a larger discussion to be had on if that's a good thing to want to do, but DitV seems to have done it.
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Jul 24, 2020 04:47
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Hey all. Bored several threads in succession with my complaints about my current gaming group. I was directed here to the 'hyphz rehabilitation thread' and after reading up on that saga, at least I've only filled like, 5 pages with my issues? Wow. Anyway, basically I'm new to gaming, listened to a few podcasts, Nerd Poker and Rude Tales, read WTF D&D playthroughs, and of course computer RPGs. Friends listen to Chapo, Chapo does Call of Cthulhu so that's what we've been playing while quarantined. I feel like I like the *game* but have really really not been liking how it was played. Don't have a lot of background to judge the experience by, though. Foremost gripe among them is that it's the Berlin: The Wicked City Module, which is just the lamest squickfest of immature sexual exploitation and misogyny, DARE level understanding of drugs, and I could go on and on. But seriously, people need to know that this book sucks and don't spend money on it. I've been thinking about trying the game with other people just to get a feel for how it works when there's people who have played before, ever, let alone with many different people and game systems. It was also suggested that I'd have some luck if I volunteered to GM, which I would be happy to, with a caveat that I'm kinda new to this and have an idea what I'd like to do, but maybe my execution could use some work. Any interest in putting together a CoC group?
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Jul 24, 2020 04:48
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PipHelix posted:Hey all. I mean, I try not to advertise but you'e basically asking for : https://discord.gg/2Arxrc Send me a six pack or a bottle of something and I'll run a game of Trail of Cthulhu or whatever. Or run your own game. Go to town.
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Jul 24, 2020 05:09
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bewilderment posted:DitV is cool as a narration system but as a form of conflict resolution it's tedious because you know from the start whether you won or lost until you escalate. I've played it a few times where you couldn't see anybody else's rolls. Definitely gave it a more poker-y vibe. We've also generally ruled that you can't raise/see without fiction, which I've found really brings a lot of less confident players out of their shell.
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Jul 24, 2020 05:12
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Xiahou Dun posted:I mean, I try not to advertise but you'e basically asking for : https://discord.gg/2Arxrc Right on. The 'old' switch in my brain flipped sometime in 2017, because while generally Tech Proficient I find Discord horrifying and impossible to figure out. We use it at work to replace the control room that used to have 50 people in it at once, speaking of 'An experience I'm entirely unfamiliar with but still suspect is being done wrong somehow'. So maybe that's all it is. I'll have to create an account.
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Jul 24, 2020 05:16
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bewilderment posted:DitV is cool as a narration system but as a form of conflict resolution it's tedious because you know from the start whether you won or lost until you escalate. The trick here is that you can use two big numbers you have to make Raises that your opponent won't want to Take the Blow on, even if they have more dice and therefor more numbers. Maybe in Fallout (taking d10s means they could die even if they win the conflict), in fiction (killing a hostage means someone will die if they don't Give), or maybe what it means to them (Taking the Blow when you tell them they're worthless and a disgrace to the Faith means those words got to them, and might even have an impact on their character permanently).
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Jul 24, 2020 05:16
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Tulip posted:I've played it a few times where you couldn't see anybody else's rolls. Definitely gave it a more poker-y vibe. We've also generally ruled that you can't raise/see without fiction, which I've found really brings a lot of less confident players out of their shell. Doing it this way seems more reasonable (harder to do on a VTT though, you'll just need trust) since it means you can also escalate when you didn't need to, or try to drag things out before you realise you've lost (both of which I'd see as a positive). Fun fact: the PbtA 2d6+stat system is what it is directly as a response to complaints that DitV's system took too long.
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Jul 24, 2020 06:41
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bewilderment posted:Doing it this way seems more reasonable (harder to do on a VTT though, you'll just need trust) since it means you can also escalate when you didn't need to, or try to drag things out before you realise you've lost (both of which I'd see as a positive). The game is very much based on being able to see each other's numbers though. I mean, throughout the book there's a big emphasis on giving the Dogs (and especially the players) full information on what's happening and what's going on so they can make judgements. That staying true when the mechanics are used is very intentional.
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Jul 24, 2020 06:53
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PipHelix posted:Right on. The 'old' switch in my brain flipped sometime in 2017, because while generally Tech Proficient I find Discord horrifying and impossible to figure out. There is also, stickied here in Trad Games, a "gamers seeking games" thread where you can post that you're looking to play some Call and see what turns up; and, you can run a play-by-post game, or use the Pick Up Game thread in the Game Room subforum to see if you can just throw together a game with whoever happens to be around. Basically what I'm getting at is: there's a bunch of options, Xiahou's offer being a perfectly valid one, but not the only one if you find yourself allergic to Discord.
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Jul 24, 2020 06:58
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Leperflesh posted:There is also, stickied here in Trad Games, a "gamers seeking games" thread where you can post that you're looking to play some Call and see what turns up; and, you can run a play-by-post game, or use the Pick Up Game thread in the Game Room subforum to see if you can just throw together a game with whoever happens to be around. Basically what I'm getting at is: there's a bunch of options, Xiahou's offer being a perfectly valid one, but not the only one if you find yourself allergic to Discord. O God no. I'm Old World enough to be offended by the idea. I started that discord to make some people happy but I certainly haven't done a good job and it's mostly run but other, better, smarter people. (Not listing the mods because of a brevity and not to deny credit. You all own.) It's just my own stupid area to play games. Or well my areas are stupid. There are some other GM's who are doing good work. I was just trying to be helpful. If I wasn't it's user error.
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Jul 24, 2020 07:11
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Leperflesh posted:There is also, stickied here in Trad Games, a "gamers seeking games" thread where you can post that you're looking to play some Call and see what turns up; and, you can run a play-by-post game, or use the Pick Up Game thread in the Game Room subforum to see if you can just throw together a game with whoever happens to be around. Basically what I'm getting at is: there's a bunch of options, Xiahou's offer being a perfectly valid one, but not the only one if you find yourself allergic to Discord. Once you hit 35, it pays to spike your tech histamines once in a while. Maintain at least a familiarity with what's out there. I'm partly bitching because of a firmly held belief that any place, person or organization that hosts nazis, even passively or by omission should be cursed at least once in every breath in which it's spoken. Partly because, as mentioned, my experience with it has been as a work thing, with 50+ engineers and academics, overwhelming majority of whom also have no experience with the software and some of them double my own age, all yelling at me and one coworker in a single channel to do multiple things at once, while also having high-language technical discussions amongst themselves unintelligible enough to function as background noise and making it impossible to pick out the orders I'm supposed to respond to. This virus is great, because even with all that poo poo my thought process always concludes with 'well gently caress at least I'm still employed for now, and my company actually did a social distancing for real. This might be close to best-case scenario for non-millionaires'. I'll check it all out, but I'm already on that server. Thanks for the reccos.
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Jul 24, 2020 13:58
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PipHelix posted:I'm partly bitching because of a firmly held belief that any place, person or organization that hosts nazis, even passively or by omission should be cursed at least once in every breath in which it's spoken. WAit, what?
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Jul 24, 2020 14:47
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paradoxGentleman posted:WAit, what? Discord has basically no policies or oversight over its servers, so there's a bunch of Nazi servers (more interesting, a bunch of general gamer servers that have Nazi recruiters). This has lead to some comedy, because it's very easy to access everything posted on a server for as long as you're there plus people's accounts are persistent across servers, and has thus become the #1 tool for Nazi hunters because Nazis aren't good at opsec, which in turn has lead to some Nazis thinking Discord is a Jewish conspiracy. I believe one of the SA mods got caught exactly this way earlier this year.
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Jul 24, 2020 15:23
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I think painting it as a Nazi collection pit is a little unfair; discord's been pretty public about their efforts to cut down on white supremacy bullshit on the platform.
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Jul 24, 2020 16:33
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Leraika posted:I think painting it as a Nazi collection pit is a little unfair; discord's been pretty public about their efforts to cut down on white supremacy bullshit on the platform. Could be. All I know is when it broke big in the consciousness in 2017, that was what every story was about. It may be unfair to them, now, but I like to think of it as a business school case study warning to not ever let yourself be caught flatfooted. By the time the news thinks to look into how the Nazis interface with your service you should already be persecuting them to the ends of the earth on your own initiative.
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Jul 24, 2020 16:47
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Leraika posted:I think painting it as a Nazi collection pit is a little unfair; discord's been pretty public about their efforts to cut down on white supremacy bullshit on the platform. Oh I certainly wouldn't make that description, it'd be like saying that Hobby Lobby has a strong pro-BLM stance because people are buying supplies to make posters from them: just simply not a reasonable understanding of the link between policy and use. I'd describe Discord as very much in a wild west kind of situation, and Nazis have used it for their own purposes, but so have communists and a wide range of queer communities. PipHelix posted:Could be. All I know is when it broke big in the consciousness in 2017, that was what every story was about. It may be unfair to them, now, but I like to think of it as a business school case study warning to not ever let yourself be caught flatfooted. By the time the news thinks to look into how the Nazis interface with your service you should already be persecuting them to the ends of the earth on your own initiative. I think you got bamboozled by some extremely irresponsible news sources, unfortunately.
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Jul 24, 2020 17:47
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Discord is a platform. I'm sure there are nazis with discords, just like there are nazis with bulletin boards, slacks, twitters, facebooks, IRC channels, and usenet newsgroups. If you sell (or give away) a discussion tool, that doesn't make you responsible for what people say on private instances of that discussion tool. If the Discord folks are responsive to reports like "hey this discord is being used for nazi poo poo" and they shut it down once notified, that's about the best I would ever ask for. In any case: I don't much care for SA Discords (or IRCs or Slacks) in general because I find the pace too fast, and I always want to read every post, so if I haven't been on in a day and there's 10k new messages I want to go back and read them all and I never catch up. It's just... too much of a flood. Plus when I'm working, all those ongoing conversations are a constant distraction. But that's more just the nature of "active live conversation with a decently large group" than it is a problem with the specific chat platform. We use Slack at work and I find that much more controllable, because everyone creates channels and I can just ignore irrelevant channels. My half-dozen co-workers probably say ten things a day that I want to look at, so it's not such a big flood of info. But yeah it's just a tool for having a live chat with people, share links that get embedded, voice and video and screen sharing capability built in, lots of plugins and bots and stuff that are useful for like, dice-rolling etc., so it's a way to do gaming. Not gonna be for everyone. Nobody should feel bad about not wanting to use it; but also, I'd say you're not likely to run into nazis on TG-related discords. There's definitely some offsite slapfighting and grudging and shitposting and such because some of those channels are not moderated the way SA is moderated, so some caution is warranted; but generally, TG is full of pretty great people and a lot of very strongly-held beliefs about safe spaces and protecting diversity and not being nazis, so I suspect most every TG-related discord is going to mostly reflect that culture. e. I should say though that, per SA's rules: offsite stuff like discords are not SA, no particular discord is endorsed by SA, and we have rules about not importing offsite drama into the forums.
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Jul 24, 2020 18:56
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Leperflesh posted:In any case: I don't much care for SA Discords (or IRCs or Slacks) in general because I find the pace too fast, and I always want to read every post, so if I haven't been on in a day and there's 10k new messages I want to go back and read them all and I never catch up. It's just... too much of a flood. Plus when I'm working, all those ongoing conversations are a constant distraction. But that's more just the nature of "active live conversation with a decently large group" than it is a problem with the specific chat platform. Yeah that's kind of my experience. It's somehow this odd medial space where it's like, 75% a chat room but 25% persistent and ends up being really exhausting. That said, outside of the most public use case, I've really enjoyed having it for my two RPG groups, because it's like 5 people per server and there's integrated dice rolling and voice, and it's very easy to have like, "when is the next game" and "which rules decisions are we sticking with" in a persistent form. Discord does enable the creation of channels but for some reason the norm is to have channels that have 1000+ posts a day instead of breaking them down further. Anyway discussing chat platforms is a little dull and not really on topic. I'd like to ask something inspired by a good RPG, Blades in the Dark. Specifically, I am not familiar with any other systems where there's a big emphasis on the group as a character in itself with its own mechanical representation (I think Ars Magica does this? I would not say I'm familiar with AM). What goes into making such a subsystem successful? What variations or extensions of that system should be explored?
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Jul 24, 2020 19:15
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Tulip posted:DitV remains my absolute gold standard for a general system, and it's so consistent that sessions with it are gold that sometimes I struggle with why I bother playing anything else (I haven't played DitV in years, unfortunately). What's kind of shocking is that it's, if anything, easier to hack into other genres than AW, since you don't need to make playbooks you just need to come up with "what are the stakes that bind the players" and "how much do I need to modify the escalation mechanics." Is there a virtual tabletop of it somewhere [interrogation.. my keyboard is hosed up].
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Jul 24, 2020 21:37
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Leperflesh posted:If you sell (or give away) a discussion tool, that doesn't make you responsible for what people say on private instances of that discussion tool. This isn't always the case. I know you were referring to white supremacists' speech, but when the "speech" includes sharing copyrighted materials, even ISPs can be held liable if they knew it was happening. They don't have to go looking, but once somebody tells them, the clock is ticking.
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Jul 25, 2020 01:44
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homullus posted:This isn't always the case. I know you were referring to white supremacists' speech, but when the "speech" includes sharing copyrighted materials, even ISPs can be held liable if they knew it was happening. They don't have to go looking, but once somebody tells them, the clock is ticking. I assumed you could privately host Discord servers (like you can with teamspeak, mumble, IRC, I think Slack, several IM companies, etc.) but a little googling suggests you can't, in which case you're right: if someone reports misuse or violation of terms of service they can step in and shut it down, and hate speech etc. certainly should be in that category.
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Jul 25, 2020 01:59
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I'm not sure if this place is the best place to post this question but is making motivation cards with little objectives and small perks a good way in motivating players to be engaged in the game? I've been doing them for a while for my Coc shorts so the players would feel an extra drive to keep their character alive and focus more on the game. The objectives are usually pretty small like keep this character alive but don't let anyone know you're protecting them, or you heard that this dude has money stored somewhere so check out if the rumors are true and if they are steal it.
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Aug 5, 2020 17:56
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