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Like, 'Hey, players, how would you like to play a game where the secret conspiracy is the Jedi are actually terrible and you have to unmask them before they take over the New Republic and complete the master plan they started with Luke' is the sane, rational way to check interest in that kind of game.
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Dec 3, 2014 05:21
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Night10194 posted:Like, 'Hey, players, how would you like to play a game where the secret conspiracy is the Jedi are actually terrible and you have to unmask them before they take over the New Republic and complete the master plan they started with Luke' is the sane, rational way to check interest in that kind of game. It wouldn't be as much fun if I knew the secret conspiracy before even rolling up characters - just warn them that some of the core assumptions will be altered. Or if you had a really long-running campaign, subtly lead up to that as the capstone of the whole thing without irrevocably committing until near the end.
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Dec 3, 2014 05:24
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I feel like bait-and-switch games were considered a cool thing to do at one point, I remember that I used to see threads about them on RPGnet all the time, almost always some variation of "Hey I want to pull a bait and switch on my group, is this a good idea or the best idea y/n?"
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Dec 3, 2014 05:24
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Tatum Girlparts posted:I dunno, obviously I'd give my group a heads up of 'hey this skin basically involves me being a horribly emotionally abusive dickbag to the point of poo poo like self harm and all, that cool?' but I don't think I, the player, would feel too bad playing a character like that. I just think that the skin fits the supernatural creature well, and being on point should be a good thing for this stuff considering how much we've had to wade through that boiled down to 'the writer kinda didn't understand the concept they're going for here'. I hardly think it's my favorite skin ever or think it's really even top three or whatever, but I can dig the just unrepentant 'yea I'm going to make everyone around me hurt' in a game where emotional manipulation and abuse is already A Thing. I wouldn't permit that skin for precisely that reason: there's nothing to it but hurting people and getting away from pursuers. Even the Ghoul brings more to the table than that, mechanically. With a Harpy, the character is very likely going to always be an abusive rear end in a top hat because that's all that the Skin does. On the other hand, it's an excellent villain kit.
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Dec 3, 2014 05:25
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Shouldn't bait-and-switch games be done with eyes open? I mean, I would expect a game with evil Jedi to at least give a heads up like, say, "we'll be using some assumptions from KOTOR 2 about how the Jedi aren't as great as they make themselves out to be, so make your characters along that lines."
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Dec 3, 2014 05:26
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Alien Rope Burn posted:32 hours Hahaha ffffffffffffffffffuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck this guy.
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Dec 3, 2014 05:31
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Yeah, I've written most of this very quickly, and on second thought realized it's problematic to upend basic setting assumptions, because at a certain point you're not playing in that setting anymore. So you're absolutely right. It might still work for some settings, that's practically standard practice for Amber, but for Star Wars it would be too much to do without warning. Mind, as we'll see, Wick has no issue with lying to players about the game they'll actually be playing. Yeah, I was just commenting in general. It definitely works with more loosely defined settings-- you've got a lot of latitude for loving around with Greyhawk, and I remember Kwyndig putting a really awesome spin on the Paragons setting for M&M, but Star Wars? Not so much. Amber's a good counter, because sudden upsets and shocking revelations are the name of that game. What really throws me off is that you've got all of this passive-aggressive poo poo, twisting genre and setting expectations, and... collaborative worldbuilding. How on Earth do you get people to volunteer setting elements that can and will be used against them? You figure they might learn better after having their sheets used against them.
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Dec 3, 2014 05:33
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Davin Valkri posted:Shouldn't bait-and-switch games be done with eyes open? I mean, I would expect a game with evil Jedi to at least give a heads up like, say, "we'll be using some assumptions from KOTOR 2 about how the Jedi aren't as great as they make themselves out to be, so make your characters along that lines." Okay but then by definition it's not a bait-and-switch game. Literally the whole point of such a game is "players go in under one set of assumptions, GM then throws those assumptions out the window." You thought we were playing dungeon crawling D&D but surprise it turns out it's actually Star Wars and you guys are just on a backwater planet, here come the TIE fighters (literally a thing I saw someone describe). Or, closer to the topic, you thought we were playing a game of swashbuckling high seas adventure but surprise it's actually a game about weird aliens or Cthulhu or some poo poo, what the gently caress was 7th Sea's metaplot again, oh and there's no sailing going on either.
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Dec 3, 2014 05:34
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Bait and Switch can, however, work in one specific circumstance: When you're playing with people you know well and you know the thing you're doing is something they really like. But it's something that requires a long term relationship with a play group, and a lot of foreshadowing. And as was said above, always leave your options open to bail on the concept if they're really enjoying the original assumptions or don't bite on the foreshadowing. Like, if you're setting up some Weird War II poo poo, and you notice your players are actually mostly just really excited to play the 101st airborne or someone spots a hint and groans 'gently caress, dark wizard nazis, that's where this is going' you should leave it open to back out.
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Dec 3, 2014 05:42
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Yeah, even with a group that you're long-term friends with and you all know and trust each other, pitching a game in one direction then yanking it in another is a great way to gently caress things up because if everybody's on-board with your pitch then that's what they want to play. I mean, there are degrees. If in the course of playing through your D&D campaign it turns out that the organization the players thought was good and noble actually turns out to be a secret evil conspiracy that's not on the same level as "and now we'll play Star Wars only I'm changing everything around and not telling you so your reasonable assumptions can get you into trouble, tee hee." Also something Alien Rope Burn didn't explicitly touch on that's worth highlighting is that Wick has an entire chapter dedicated to passive aggressively (or just straight up aggressively) trolling players who bring minmaxed loners and aren't engaged with the game, when the very tricks and tactics he's been espousing in previous chapters are exactly how players fall into those sorts of habits. John Wick posted:[After I had my GMPC kill off her grandmother for no reason other than to be a huge rear end in a top hat] Malice retired the very next day and nobody bought a DNPC again. He's proud of this, but then goes on to complain about lone wolf minmaxers who'd rather play Starcraft than engage with his games. Go figure.
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Dec 3, 2014 05:52
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Davin Valkri posted:Shouldn't bait-and-switch games be done with eyes open? I mean, I would expect a game with evil Jedi to at least give a heads up like, say, "we'll be using some assumptions from KOTOR 2 about how the Jedi aren't as great as they make themselves out to be, so make your characters along that lines." Yea basically. You don't have to say 'ok guys heads up in this game Mace Windu actually fell to the dark side as some feared and has been slowly corrupting the Jedi order from his position of power into a more martial and authoritarian order than they were meant to be' but you should give a heads up of 'ok just as a heads up in this game we'll be going with the view on Jedi that they have some dark stuff bubbling under their zen monk stuff'. And yea, if the answer is 'yea, we'd like to try to fix the order then' maybe the best thing to do is to shift gears into less 'the Jedi slaughtered a planet and now there's a civil war!!!!!' and more to 'you found some hosed up poo poo being planned, now you have to try to appeal to your allies to prevent this'. Twists are fun, and can be great in storytelling, but there's no real fun about smugly going 'and you were WORKING FOR THE BAD GUY THIS WHOLE TIME BUAHAHAHAHA' when you haven't even hinted at that before. Like yea, no poo poo, the guy who's playing the entire world has the ability to declare the shining noble paladin conclave you've been helping Actually The Real Monster, he still has to make it kinda interesting.
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Dec 3, 2014 05:56
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Bieeardo posted:I remember Kwyndig putting a really awesome spin on the Paragons setting for M&M, When/where was this? It sounds interesting.
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Dec 3, 2014 06:03
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John Wick posted:When Rules Lawyer Bob gets hit with a blind spell, blindfold him. What? Even by the standards of the rest of this advice, what?
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Dec 3, 2014 06:18
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Night10194 posted:Bait and Switch can, however, work in one specific circumstance: When you're playing with people you know well and you know the thing you're doing is something they really like. But it's something that requires a long term relationship with a play group, and a lot of foreshadowing. And as was said above, always leave your options open to bail on the concept if they're really enjoying the original assumptions or don't bite on the foreshadowing. My thoughts as well. Basically, there's nothing wrong with subverting expectations...so long as you know your group well enough to know that they're going to be fine with the direction you're taking things and your decisions don't invalidate any of the character decisions (for instance having a D&D games where the gods die and divine magic is gone...when there's a cleric in the party). These sort of twists or surprises can be extremely effective and that effect is largely lost if you spell it out ahead of time. But it's even worse if it ends up pissing off everyone at the table. For instance, in a Star Wars game I was running I decided I was a bit bored with the whole "rebels vs. imperials" thing and decided to mix things up by throwing some cthulhu mythos into the mix. Basically started making the primary antagonists a group of cultists who worship beings that live in Hyperspace. And it worked fine because I knew my group would find the concept interesting and weren't particularly interested in Star Wars "canon".
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Dec 3, 2014 06:19
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30 hours Play Dirty part 7: "You get hit, you get hurt. You get hit again, you get killed." John Wick posted:I know what you need. Oh, yes. I do.  Episode 5: Dirty Fighting So John wants us to remove hit points to make combat more real. And gives us some ways to do it. The first is basically a two-hit solution. You take one hit, you're wounded, you take two hits, you die. Oh, you don't like it? Well maybe you're just not brave enough or smart enough, Wick says. Realism, yo! Then there's removing knowledge of hit points, which he credits to Jonathan Tweet or Danny Beech, where the GM rolls all the hit dice, keeps players' HP totals secret, and keeps all damage secret. You get a description of the damage and that's all. The next suggestion follows the last, which is to give people bonuses for being descriptive in fights, but also have particular damage thresholds of PCs' hit points to describe particular wounds. He gets way, way into describing the gory ends PCs meet: John Wick posted:If a player takes a 25% hit to the left arm, his fingers go numb, blood sprays in his face on regular intervals and the pain shoots up his arm, into his neck just behind his eyes. Don’t forget the fact that all the pressure in his blood stream is now compromised, making his heart beat a lot faster and a lot stronger as it tries to compensate. He’ll lose a bit of his vision from the pain, experience disorientation and possibly black out from the tissue trauma. Wick also mentions that you should reward creative and experimental moves in combat. Or that maybe you should require a "Wounding skill" to identify wound severity. "Yep, your arm's off." "I couldn't tell!" Then he discusses having one villain face off against a PC party, generally by pulling off every trick or advantage they can. John Wick posted:This is a mistake. Fighting a villain in his own lair, where he knows the terrain and they do not, is to his advantage. He knows all the safe places to hide. He knows where all the tricks and traps are. He’s not alone; he has his lair on his side. And, because Carter’s an Eagle Scout who follows the Scout’s motto, he’s prepared for such a contingency. Oh, shut up about Carter already.  There's a lot of  about how awesome Sun Tzu and Musashi are and how you should read their books.John Wick posted:So, your next combat should sound like this: Man, those dumb players, didn't they know they were walking into a real man's fight?  John Wick posted:How did you react when Tyson bit off a piece of Holyfield’s ear? That’s how you were supposed to react. Unfortunately, it just pissed Holyfield off, but the plan was solid. Yes, to champion dirty fighting, let's use an example where dirty fighting entirely backfired on Tyson. The thing is, this article is about a very particular kind of game. It's not a bad thing necessarily to be draconian with damage, but it's only one particular play style. It also ignores that all the planning, forethought, and creativity won't save you from a bad roll. And PCs take a lot more hits than NPCs do. On to the next one. Next: "It’s the reason I have such a problem with Star Trek." Alien Rope Burn fucked around with this message at 06:32 on Dec 3, 2014 |
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Dec 3, 2014 06:29
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Carrasco posted:What? Even by the standards of the rest of this advice, what? Method roleplaying.
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Dec 3, 2014 06:30
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John Wick posted:I know what you need. Oh, yes. I do. Jesus loving Christ. 
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Dec 3, 2014 06:30
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FATAL & Friends 2014: Christ, What An rear end in a top hat
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Dec 3, 2014 06:34
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quote:I know what you need. Oh, yes. I do.
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Dec 3, 2014 06:38
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Kellsterik posted:When/where was this? It sounds interesting. It was PBP stuff here, years ago now. He ran a staggered series of games based in part on events and characters from previous games, with house rules like making PCs at PL3 and having a suite of powers assigned by the GM at a dramatic moment, and a stash of mystery Power Points they could use to 'spin the wheel'. If I recall right, you'd declare you were spending X points on a spin, and you'd get a power that was guaranteed to be useful in the current situation, guaranteed to work the first time, and just about guaranteed to have some kind of drawback baked in. One character ended up with the ability to summon a Hound of Tindalos that was neutral to him at best, for example. Oh, yeah. Killing paranormals released their superhuman energies into the surviving powered population. The PCs in the first game kept a tight lid on that one, hoping to avoid a Highlander scenario.
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Dec 3, 2014 06:44
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John Wick is Bizarro Greg Stolze.
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Dec 3, 2014 07:12
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Ah, there's the whole 'WELL GO TO REALISM UNLESS YOU'RE SCARED' thing. Realism can be fun. I still need to go back and do a review of Albedo like I was planning, but that's a game where the attempts to make things somewhat 'realistic' is an actual part of the tone, which is intended to drive home that even for a professional soldier, fighting is exhausting, stressful, dangerous, and all around lovely. But realism is a matter of tone, as are all mechanics. Mechanics are designed to reinforce the general feeling you're going for with your game; realism should only be your goal in mechanics if it's part of the goal in tone. Also hahaha at the whole 'Cornering a guy in his home and taking him on 6 on 1? YOU FOOLS!' bit. That picture looks exactly like I always imagined Wick did, too.
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Dec 3, 2014 08:02
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The fact that Wick has kickstartered a second book of this poo poo proves everything ARB said in the first post wrong. Jesus Chist, if you are writing a second book on how to make your players absolutely loving miserable and "win" at a role meant to enable them, you haven't "grown," you're shooting backwards in time like Benjamin Button.
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Dec 3, 2014 08:39
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If Wicked wanted to "blindfold me for authenticity", I'd do it, then swing a PHB as hard as possible at his head. As I stomped and stomped, aiming for his disgusting facial hair, I'd ask if that was a critical hit, how many hit points he had left!? Edit: Also I hate that there's a John Wick movie. I assume Keanu smugly tells the camera operator how useless movies are, how unrealistic. Golden Bee fucked around with this message at 08:47 on Dec 3, 2014 |
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Dec 3, 2014 08:45
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MonsieurChoc posted:John Wick is Bizarro Greg Stolze. My God, this is completely accurate. Stolze wants you to have a good time and do cool things, and his writing exists to enable the PCs and players to do these things, while Wick is trying to 'win' at something he already controls, like a little kid being proud of winning an FPS with godmode on.
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Dec 3, 2014 09:24
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Literally the only good idea in those pages is the "stop quoting Monty Python you goddamned nerds" rule, because Appcalypse World does the same thing with letting players contribute to world building without also telling them to die in a fire
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Dec 3, 2014 09:37
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Don't forget "if you have to talk, whisper or pass a note." Tons of fun, that John Wick.
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Dec 3, 2014 09:42
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Kai Tave posted:I feel like bait-and-switch games were considered a cool thing to do at one point, I remember that I used to see threads about them on RPGnet all the time, almost always some variation of "Hey I want to pull a bait and switch on my group, is this a good idea or the best idea y/n?" And there are only two situations where it ever works. The first is if you know your players really really well (when you shouldn't be asking on a forum). The second is that it can work if you respect the characters and don't try to change them in the slightest. They were expecting what they were investigating to be a Mafia front; what you give them is either a Camarilla front or a Mythos Cult instead. (Or whatever). And do it while being careful to not change anything that's been established so far.
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Dec 3, 2014 11:09
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Night10194 posted:Also hahaha at the whole 'Cornering a guy in his home and taking him on 6 on 1? YOU FOOLS!' bit. That picture looks exactly like I always imagined Wick did, too. Reading that, I thought, "This is a man who masturbates over the final act of Watchmen."
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Dec 3, 2014 13:15
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22 hours Play Dirty part 8: "Like Super Chicken says, 'You knew the job was dangerous when you took it.'" John Wick posted:Not too long ago, a group of friends and I were sitting around a table, listening to Dennis Leary’s No Cure For Cancer, laughing ourselves sick. One bit caught us by the collar and threw us down to the floor: the Doctor Leary Psychoanalytical Seminar. You don’t need to deal with issues of family, you don’t need to deal with “stress,” you don’t need to grasp your inner child. What you need is a good, swift kick in the backside. Episode 6: Get a Helmet https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PzprzoQF1A The Wick wisdom of this chapter. "Life isn't fair." It's a lot of getting around to the topic of character death.John Wick posted:The first group are the Dicers. These folks insist that GMs don’t kill people, dice kill people. Of course, these are the same people who think guns fire themselves. Secondly, we have the Free Formers. These people insist that dice should never have influence over a character’s life. Of course, if you actually play in one of these games, you’ll soon find out that you’re playing second fiddle to the GMs NPCs while they tell you a story they could have done all on their own. Uh-huh. So he talks about how Star Trek sucks because characters are static and nothing changes, and how it sucks that "this disease has crept into our industry", "polluting it with the same purile fan-boy fiction we see on Trek webpages". And by "change" he means "people dying". First, he suggests having the PCs basically being supporting roles for the real heroes; he uses an example of a Star Trek game he was in where they were the expendable away team, while Kirk got to park his rear end in the command chair. And other examples. He tries to sell up being the sidekick. Well. A whole party of sidekicks. Second is to bring dead PCs back and have them try and gun the PCs down for revenge! Or something. It's a Call of Cthulhu example where an abandoned-for-dead character comes back for revenge, but I think he's just trying to say as long as a character isn't shown dead, you can bring them back? I'm not sure. Third is having the PC pick up an antagonist and turn them into a character. This is probably the most interesting bit in this chapter, I think, though Wick is so smug it's hard to swallow it down. He uses Batman's Talia as an example. John Wick posted:I was just watching Batman: The Animated Series with my wife and the villain was one of my all-time faves: R’as al-Ghul. Ugh. Ugh ugh ugh. Anyway, Wick points out all he really wants to do is make sure players get hung up on preconceptions, like being invulnerable or that all NPCs are antagonists. Which is a more valuable lesson to ponder at the start of this article than the beginning, but Wick is so focused on trying to pace his articles like a zen koan that the point is easily missed. Mucking with that sort of thing isn't necessarily bad, but at the same time, not everybody is in RPing for my immersion. On to the next one. Next: "His name is Hunter Rose. He’s one of the crime lords of the city."
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Dec 3, 2014 14:44
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Carter does sound like Max Lord, but my first reaction was Gregg 'Puppetman' Hartmann from the Wild Card stories. Of course this means I've publicly admitted to having read Wild Cards and thats bad.
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Dec 3, 2014 15:01
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"I hate games where people are sidekicks to GMPCs." "I make games where people are sidekicks to GMPCs so I can kill them off easier. Life Ain't Fair!" If Wick did as much physical gymastics as he did mental ones, he would have been an Olympic athlete and he wouldn't have written this poison. Why the gently caress would you try and put such abject shite forwards as good GMing ideas? Go gently caress yourself, John Wick.
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Dec 3, 2014 15:03
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Alien Rope Burn posted:You see it in one of the last Bayushi Kachiko cards, the one that has "Uikku suku diku" written in kanji on the doorframe. Alien Rope Burn posted:Then there's removing knowledge of hit points, which he credits to Jonathan Tweet or Danny Beech, where the GM rolls all the hit dice, keeps players' HP totals secret, and keeps all damage secret. You get a description of the damage and that's all. Alien Rope Burn posted:The next suggestion follows the last, which is to give people bonuses for being descriptive in fights, but also have particular damage thresholds of PCs' hit points to describe particular wounds. Golden Bee posted:If Wicked wanted to "blindfold me for authenticity", I'd do it, then swing a PHB as hard as possible at his head. As I stomped and stomped, aiming for his disgusting facial hair, I'd ask if that was a critical hit, how many hit points he had left!?  gently caress EVERYTHING AND RUN alarm I have.
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Dec 3, 2014 15:13
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AmiYumi posted:I just looked up the card: it's Bayushi Kachiko Experienced 2, and it's "Wick's [an] rear end (something?)". Definitely not "hole", but too smudgy for me to make out. It's just really bad Engrish. "Uikku suku diku" = "Wick Sucks Dick"
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Dec 3, 2014 15:23
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AmiYumi posted:I just looked up the card: it's Bayushi Kachiko Experienced 2, and it's "Wick's [an] rear end (something?)". Definitely not "hole", but too smudgy for me to make out. uikku wa asu o kamu kamu - to bite or chew
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Dec 3, 2014 15:36
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Kurieg posted:It's just really bad Engrish. "Uikku suku diku" = "Wick Sucks Dick" It's not really Engrish! It's how you'd write those words in katakana! I mean, you'd not normally do that, but it works for hidden message.
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Dec 3, 2014 15:38
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AmiYumi posted:I've heard of a number of systems doing that...as an extra flaw to represent nerve damage or being a golem or something like that, because it's such crucial information as a player and should be pretty obvious to the character (at least within certain thresholds). I thought this was a great idea when I was young, stupid, and railing at AD&D for not being realistic enough. I thought much less of it the one time we actually played with it, because the asshat GM wouldn't even let us know what our rested HP was. I'm pretty sure one of the party fighters rolled minimum, which made for a real barrel of laughs when he dropped every fight. quote:I went looking for the "Bayushi Kachiko stripper" story, but couldn't find it. Wick+gaming+blindfold sets off every Ugh. That one made it into the L5R write-up somewhere, if you've got archives or if it's made it to the offsite wiki yet.
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Dec 3, 2014 15:53
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I've never really flirted with realism in my games. I far prefer exciting, heroic (and sometimes bordering on or moving into over the top) action and such.
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Dec 3, 2014 15:55
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jadarx posted:uikku wa asu o kamu
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Dec 3, 2014 16:06
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Then we get a digression about how Wick can't get a non-gaming job, despite his game writing experience and winning awards, but since he doesn't own that work, he can't make money off of it. And so he quit AEG to make his own way... which he'd eventually find. I remember hearing people ask AEG employees when they'd get Wick back a long time ago. They'd laugh, maybe a bit nervously. Some bridge was burned. You see it in one of the last Bayushi Kachiko cards, the one that has "Uikku suku diku" written in kanji on the doorframe. There's the credits page for the Legend of the Five Rings RPG which credits a lot of last-minute work by a notable team of writers reworking Wick's manuscript. There's the Five Rings adventure I had playtested for Greg Stolze which saw Wick (and Ree Soesbee) rewriting the whole adventure without Stolze's input. There's the vitriol Wick has hissed about Ryan Dancey in other columns. But what I really wish I could find was Ryan Dancey's reply to it. (I don't even remember where it was originated; probably on the RPGnet forums before the Great Crash that wiped out a bunch of old content.) Dancey pegs Wick as a guy who likes to imagine himself as "The Wick," a Hunter S. Thompson style mad genius, while his fellow creators are nebbish nerds. He even goes on to describe an elaborate fantasy where The Wick crashes that geek Ryan Dancey's dinner party, and the evening ends with The Wick drinking wine in the hot tub with all the ladies enraptured by his manly wit, while that geek Ryan Dancey looks on impotently. Dancey concludes by saying that John Wick is a friend of his, but The Wick is an intolerable rear end in a top hat. (The joke was on us when it turned out that Dancey is also a self-aggrandizing flim-flam artist.)
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Dec 3, 2014 16:18
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