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Evil Mastermind posted:Watching someone trying to "get" PbtA games and asking things like "wait, I can't start with an established setting att all?" or "but why do I have to follow the Agenda?" is oddly depressing in a way I can't really articulate. I admit, having never run or played PbtA but having read a lot of the books, including AW2e where Baker tells me not to do a set storyline, seriously, he's not loving around, I'm more than a little concerned about how much I can/should prep when coming up with games, especially since some of my players need to have context to build characters off of rather than the normal PBTA method of building context off of what characters are generated. Edit: Like, I'm brainstorming a AW game where I have a specific location in mind as well as an idea of what the psychic maelstrom is, and I -think- that's allowable prep, but then my natural instinct is to brainstorm some NPC ideas and Baker tells me very specifically NOT do to that so my instincts are shot on how exactly this is supposed to go. I dunno. I'm sure this isn't as complicated as it seems, but I'm an anxious person at the best of times and I haven't done a lot of game running so I treat it as very fragile, and PbtA games seem to have this undercurrent of "if you play this incorrectly the whole thing falls apart and your players will blame you" that isn't comforting. 
KirbyJ fucked around with this message at 22:23 on Oct 13, 2016 |
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Oct 13, 2016 22:11
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KirbyJ posted:Edit: Like, I'm brainstorming a AW game where I have a specific location in mind as well as an idea of what the psychic maelstrom is, and I -think- that's allowable prep, but then my natural instinct is to brainstorm some NPC ideas and Baker tells me very specifically NOT do to that so my instincts are shot on how exactly this is supposed to go. It's okay to have ideas and inspirations, just don't settle on what you're doing until character creation and much of your first session. If your players need more grounding, you can discuss your ideas with them, see if they're cool or have ideas on your own and mark them down. I would suggest just trying to do a little bit of collaborative ground rules on the setting if your players need it. That being said, picking a playbook should be a "yeah, whatever" kind of decision anyway, what sounds cool. At least at the table, you're not supposed to fret your decisions the way you do, say, class and feat selection in d20. The PbPs here on SA tend to be another fuckin' story, but the PbtA culture here runs counter to the spirit of PbtA in general, IMO.
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Oct 13, 2016 22:26
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KirbyJ posted:I admit, having never run or played PbtA but having read a lot of the books, including AW2e where Baker tells me not to do a set storyline, seriously, he's not loving around, I'm more than a little concerned about how much I can/should prep when coming up with games, especially since some of my players need to have context to build characters off of rather than the normal PBTA method of building context off of what characters are generated. If your players need context to build characers, build your world first. Tell your players where you'd like to set the action, give them some background if you have it, and start asking questions. Last time I ran AW we settled on having a town in on the Baja California Peninsula, so I started asking questions like "It's a desert here, where does the town get its water from?" and "Tell me about that place nearby that nobody goes if they can help it. Now tell me about that places that nobody goes to, period." After we made the area, we made characters, I asked some character-focused questions - "Where do you live" ("In a scrapyard about ten miles from town, rigged up with just an insane amount of booby traps." "In a locked room in [the scrapyard's] sub-sub-basement. [Player 1] has no idea how I got there." I have some weird players) and had everyone make a few NPCs, and just ran with it. I think the trick is to not ask those people that need structure questions first or last, they need to feel like they have time to think but not like they're getting in the way of gaming. Alien Rope Burn posted:The PbPs here on SA tend to be another fuckin' story, but the PbtA culture here runs counter to the spirit of PbtA in general, IMO. Yeah, but the PbtA PbPs here tend to be loving awesome to read, so there's that.
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Oct 13, 2016 23:03
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Alien Rope Burn posted:That being said, picking a playbook should be a "yeah, whatever" kind of decision anyway, what sounds cool. At least at the table, you're not supposed to fret your decisions the way you do, say, class and feat selection in d20. The PbPs here on SA tend to be another fuckin' story, but the PbtA culture here runs counter to the spirit of PbtA in general, IMO. Could you elaborate on this for a second? Because to me, it seems that picking a playbook is pretty huge decision. It literally shapes what sort of story you tell and what sort of character you will play.
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Oct 14, 2016 00:13
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paradoxGentleman posted:Could you elaborate on this for a second? Because to me, it seems that picking a playbook is pretty huge decision. It literally shapes what sort of story you tell and what sort of character you will play. It is- to an extent. But it's not like some games where if you pick a given class where that absolutely defines you, and moreover, most PbtA games are relatively short compared to the usual (intended) assumptions of many RPGs. Many PbtA games let you pick up abilities from different playbooks, and at the top end of things, swap your playbook, play multiple characters. It's at the very least not like a game like D&D or Vampire where you're heavily penalized for dipping outside of your purview, and you don't have to be as invested. In addition, you usually don't have to spend as much time worrying about the mechanical side of things and what feats or merits you need to be functional. Ultimately what it comes down to is that quite often the playbooks are designed to shape your concept, rather than having a preexisting concept that you try and stuff into a playbook. Granted, I do the latter all the time, but that's part of my own foibles in trying to interact with PbtA.
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Oct 14, 2016 08:39
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Chthonian Highways Alpha Playtest is out. For Free! Mad Max meets Post Apoc Cthulhu Mythos. http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/185802/Chthonian-Highways--Alpha-Playtest-Kit
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Oct 14, 2016 19:17
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Law of the Universe: Any time a discussion begins about the Sword & Sorcery genre, within a minute it will immediately turn into an argument over Conan's favorite breakfast cereal, and how the movie showed him eating Count Chocula when the books clearly wrote that he only ate Franken-Berry.
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Oct 15, 2016 04:25
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Granted, I do the latter all the time, but that's part of my own foibles in trying to interact with PbtA. PbtA can never fail only be failed
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Oct 15, 2016 05:56
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Elfgames posted:PbtA can never fail only be failed Strangely, this is true, the core tenets are so simple that they can't really break. The only times you see problems in PbtA games is from poorly designed playbooks/moves or players who keep trying to treat the game as if it was a completely different (usually simulationist) game.
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Oct 15, 2016 06:09
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Elfgames posted:PbtA can never fail only be failed
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Oct 15, 2016 06:18
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Simian_Prime posted:Law of the Universe: Any time a discussion begins about the Sword & Sorcery genre, within a minute it will immediately turn into an argument over Conan's favorite breakfast cereal, and how the movie showed him eating Count Chocula when the books clearly wrote that he only ate Franken-Berry. Well Franken-Berry is the superior Monster Cereal, so that makes sense
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Oct 15, 2016 09:14
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drrockso20 posted:Well Franken-Berry is the superior Monster Cereal, so that makes sense only cause they don't make fruit brute any more
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Oct 15, 2016 09:37
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Elfgames posted:only cause they don't make fruit brute any more Well of the main three that is
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Oct 15, 2016 09:42
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Found this at the Old Game Store today. I didn't grab it, but it did make me think of you folks. It touts itself as the "realistic RPG".
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Oct 16, 2016 02:50
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Evil Mastermind posted:Found this at the Old Game Store today. I didn't grab it, but it did make me think of you folks. It touts itself as the "realistic RPG". Now I'm interested in Giant Psychic Insects from Outer Space.
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Oct 16, 2016 02:53
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I'm surprised there isn't a F&F for Don't Look Back Terror is Never Far BehindTM
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Oct 16, 2016 02:54
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Kwyndig posted:Now I'm interested in Giant Psychic Insects from Outer Space.  thought. I'd buy that Arabian Sea Tales magazine though.------ Simian_Prime posted:Law of the Universe: Any time a discussion begins about the Sword & Sorcery genre, within a minute it will immediately turn into an argument over Conan's favorite breakfast cereal, and how the movie showed him eating Count Chocula when the books clearly wrote that he only ate Franken-Berry. Elfgames posted:only cause they don't make fruit brute any more Helical Nightmares posted:Meanwhile on /tg/ Fully agree with running the "Department of Transportation" games in Unknown Armies by the way. Rename the campaign "Unknown Places"? "Terra [latin term for Suppressed or Imprisoned]"? Anyway, I would combine the "Department of Transportation" /tg/ idea with the offhand comments about breakfast cereal. Perhaps foods are the easiest vector for Exiled Places to bleed into our reality. This would explain things like the periodicity of the McRib, candies and breakfast cereals you can't find even a shred of evidence they even existed, and fruits like durian, dragon fruit and star fruit. In addition (ripped from Men in Black) supermarket rags often bleed in from other Exiled Places as well. Bat Boy Found! Type of stuff. Perhaps the increasing automation and removal of workers from the supermarket is a strategy to try to prevent this bleed over. Helical Nightmares fucked around with this message at 03:08 on Oct 16, 2016 |
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Oct 16, 2016 02:55
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Zephirum posted:I'm surprised there isn't a F&F for Don't Look Back Terror is Never Far BehindTM This store is basically an elephant graveyard of old RPG books and board games. They still have old MS-DOS games in original boxes.  That's pretty much all RPG books and magazines. There's a disturbingly large amount of d20 stuff, and ancient games I've never even heard of. Did you know there was an RPG based on Ralph Bakashi's Wizards? Or Starship Troopers?
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Oct 16, 2016 03:04
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Evil Mastermind posted:There was an episode of System Mastery for it. Yes and yes, but I don't have a copy of Wizards.
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Oct 16, 2016 03:08
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I'm reminded of Warzone Matrix in Cleveland, which is a disaster area of accumulated nerd cruft. Most hilariously, somebody though it would be a good idea to get it set up on google maps, so you even take a walkaround of the bizarre rat's next that is its interior. I remember when I first walked in there I accidentally came in through the back door while some guys played Starcraft 2 with pizza boxes and mini flats stacked around so thickly you could barely walk through it. Nobody stopped me as I walked into the front from the back. I guess they thought I knew were I was going.
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Oct 16, 2016 03:35
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To my eternal shame I didn't get a picture of the GMs hand puppet wizard.
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Oct 16, 2016 03:56
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Yeah, my local is deep with garbage supplements. No weird RPGs, sadly. Is there a pax meetup thread? The Aus one is coming up.
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Oct 17, 2016 00:07
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The Intercept ran a piece on a person's experience playing tabletop roleplaying games inside prison: I Am Fully Capable of Entertaining Myself in Prison for Decades If Need Be quote:ANYWHO, AFTER THAT first FBI raid I started reading those little guides on life in prison that one finds online and noticed several references to role-playing games. When I got to the jail unit at Federal Correctional Institution Fort Worth shortly after my arrest, then, I immediately started agitating in favor of a campaign of Dungeons and Dragons or whatever was available, to begin ASAP, with the wooden table in the little corner library to be requisitioned for our use. A huge black guy awaiting trial on complicated fraud charges happened to have the basic mechanics memorized; I drafted him to be the dungeon master. Soon enough I’d also managed to recruit a white meth dealer who was familiar enough with the game to help the rest of us create our characters, a large and bovine Hispanic gangland enforcer who wanted to try the game and was at any rate influential enough to help us secure control over the table, and a fey Southern white guy for atmosphere.
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Oct 17, 2016 03:34
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I'm fully capable of entertaining myself in prison and I need no rpg book or paraphernalia, just a piece of soap and some good friends who I can drop it. (USER WAS BANNED FOR THIS POST)
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Oct 17, 2016 03:45
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gradenko_2000 posted:The Intercept ran a piece on a person's experience playing tabletop roleplaying games inside prison: 
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Oct 17, 2016 15:25
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What game is currently the sparkle in every goon's eye for now? What's the new hotness, in other words, on these forums?
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Oct 17, 2016 15:57
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Talisman. Grab it while FFG still has the license! [edit] Oh, I have mistaken this for the board game thread. It'd be funnier there (slightly). Lichtenstein fucked around with this message at 16:34 on Oct 17, 2016 |
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Oct 17, 2016 16:12
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Covok posted:What game is currently the sparkle in every goon's eye for now? What's the new hotness, in other words, on these forums? I'm hyped for Scion 2e, myself.
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Oct 17, 2016 16:19
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I can't speak for all goons, but Delta Green and Fellowship are the two strongest recommendations I'd make for recent releases. And then I did back the Swords & Wizardry Complete reprint, GURPS Dungeon Fantasy, and Mutant Crawl Classics. I'm also a huge fan of Red Markets and can barely wait for the full book to come out.
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Oct 17, 2016 16:32
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I'm still in love with Strike! and I plan to post a recruit thread for a new game soon. I'm also eyeing Beyond the Wall and The Sprawl as well for other ideas. They look really great.
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Oct 17, 2016 16:44
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I don't think I really have "current" darlings, but I'm still digging the hell out of Fragged Empire and am hoping to run it myself soon. I've also been getting into Shadow of the Demon Lord, an OSR-ish dark fantasy game. It's got three really good things going for it: 1) Few fiddly modifiers and bounded math. It's a d20-based system, but instead of getting a bunch of +/-X tweaks to your rolls, you either get boons (+1d6 to your d20 roll) or banes (-1d6). You can have multiples of each, in which case they'll cancel each other out, then you roll what's left and take the highest die. So three boons and one bane means you roll 2d6 and add the highest die to your roll. And since the game caps at level 10, numbers are designed with that in mind. 2) Multiclassing that doesn't suck. Hard to believe, I know. The way it works is that there are three tiers of class: Novice, Expert, and Master. At level 1 you take a Novice class (Magician/Priest/Rogue/Warrior), then when you hit level 3 you pick one of 16 Expert classes that are more specialized, then at level 7 you pick your Master class, out of 64 options, which is very specialized. Each class keeps giving you things as you level up (and you get another racial ability at level 4), so you're always getting something new each level. What's more, there's no stat or class requirements so you can mix and match all you want as long as you can justify it in the narrative. You want to be a priest who becomes a berzerker who then masters Chronomancy? Sure, go for it. 3) Support. Robert Shwalb has been releasing short 5-6 supplements every week for the past few months of new adventures, monsters, classes, and subsystems. There's also been larger supplements detailing the world and having region-specific classes and such.
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Oct 17, 2016 17:24
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Serf posted:I'm still in love with Strike! and I plan to post a recruit thread for a new game soon. Did I ever say that as I was trying to come up with a better name for Sacred BBQ, I came up with "Beyond the Walls" and then googled it to find that there was this game called basically that? So if Beyond the Wall didn't exist, Strike! would have been called Beyond the Walls.
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Oct 17, 2016 18:21
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Covok posted:What game is currently the sparkle in every goon's eye for now? What's the new hotness, in other words, on these forums? Codex, A Feast for Odin, Gloomhaven
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Oct 17, 2016 18:56
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My body is so ready for Gloomhaven.
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Oct 17, 2016 20:19
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Masks, Fellowship, and any of the FFG Star Wars stuff are kinda darlings. Scion 2e is what I am most pumped about.
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Oct 17, 2016 20:22
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What's the word on Scion 2e? Does it look like they're fixing 1e's rather substantial issues?
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Oct 17, 2016 20:45
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Evil Mastermind posted:What's the word on Scion 2e? Does it look like they're fixing 1e's rather substantial issues? You can find its new basic system on DTRPG for free. Heard they are importing some fate elements and stuff.
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Oct 17, 2016 20:46
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This is something I've been trying to wrap my head around ever since I started going into Roll20's LFG forum (because I have read the rest of the internet) on the off chance there is a game worth joining there is not, I know. Paid GMing. People charging for a spot in their game, and people actually paying it (in theory). It just makes me go full  any time I try to fathom the logic of this. Having dealt with customers of many stripes, I can't imagine wanting to run a game for anyone I would have to call a customer, and as a player I doubt I'd ever want to be in the game of someone who thinks they're so amazing at running a given system that they would rather not play than run a game for free. because to me, there'd always be that unspoken "you have to let me do <thing> because I paid you" and "you can't kick me from this game because I bought it" kind of feeling in the background from the players, and an "oh god I have to poo poo something out because this game is now a job and it's a deadline" from the GM. Am I missing something? Because to me, it smells like a desperation move from the failure-to-launch club so they can get mom to stop asking them to get a job.
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Oct 17, 2016 21:35
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*Plutonis wistfully remembers the tales from /tg/ about the pinoy who paid people to gm and play with his Half Fae Catboy*
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Oct 17, 2016 21:42
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Evil Mastermind posted:What's the word on Scion 2e? Does it look like they're fixing 1e's rather substantial issues? They've pretty much gone down a list of everything you're likely to remember as an issue in 1e and said they're going to fix them.
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Oct 17, 2016 22:17
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