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I'm pretty sure the most Fun I've had in an RPG was a freeform one-shot with a single rule (which had a handwaved in-universe explanation that didn't make a ton of sense): if you (the player) laugh, your character instantly explodes, and a replacement character shows up once you've stopped laughing. We had each character have a single magical power, with no repeats allowed on your future characters, so that your character actually felt like they died, instead of just saying they exploded and nothing else happened. The game started out kind of tense as nobody wanted to "lose", but quickly ended up being great. I'd definitely recommend it, possibly with a variant where if the GM laughs, they become a player and the player to their left becomes GM.
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Oct 29, 2012 23:21
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Friends don't let friends play in games where random die rolls can get a PC killed.
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Nov 14, 2012 20:52
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Nietzschean posted:The alternative being what, exactly? GM fiat getting PCs killed? Either non-combat oriented games, or if you must play an adventurey game, just don't have the PCs die when they go under unless it's dramatically appropriate and the player is ok with losing the character. I have never once had a character go unconscious due to die rolls rather than plot and thought "it'd be great if I could die here".
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Nov 14, 2012 23:58
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Nietzschean posted:Apart from some kind of deus ex machina, how would your perspective handle a situation in which multiple members of the party or the entire party were knocked out as opposed to killed? I don't see much of a mechanical or symbolic difference: in either case, you're sitting at the table while unable to do anything for a bit, and you don't get to play that character anymore. Of course you don't think your character dying is a good thing. That's the implicit motivation for you to avoid getting your character killed. PCs dying tend to muck up the works, not only for the individual player but for the rest of the team. This is also why I don't play in RPGs that are glorified skins on wargames. This isn't really the thread for this though and I apologize for the derail.
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Nov 15, 2012 00:05
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Yawgmoth posted:Then make a thread for it because I really curious as to where exactly you're going with this, where you're coming from, what you consider a "glorified wargame", and what games you do play that are so very different from the baseline. Sent you a PM.
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Nov 15, 2012 02:18
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RPGs fall on a continuum between what you thought they were and what you experienced. While what you found may not have been to your liking, there are other groups that may be more to your taste. I personally find getting into character impossible in standard in-person games, but find it easy and even fun in text-based mediums.
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Dec 4, 2012 00:39
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The actual problem here wasn't that the GM didn't want skill checks getting in the way of the mystery, it was a clash of expectations between the players and the GM. I've both run and participated in completely freeform RPGs where the entire premise was "solve these mysteries". Solving mysteries is/can be fun. Roleplaying is/can be fun. Doing both at the same time is/can be fun. There's inherently some disconnect in that you (the player) are solving the mystery and then roleplaying your character figuring it out, rather than roleplaying your character solving the mystery, but that hasn't really been a problem in my experience. There is a difference between mystery solving and pixel-hunting though, which is what the described scenario is.
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Jan 31, 2013 20:45
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Yeah that sounds like a way more entertaining night than bog-standard D&D. On that note, two sessions is "short" for a single dungeon? Was there more plot than that post indicated, or was the intention really to stretch out such a threadbare story over 3-4 sessions?
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Feb 8, 2013 01:41
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moosecow333 posted:Maid stuff It's really unfortunate your GM sucked so much; Maid RPG is a really solid game and a blast to play when you keep the wacky elements. It'd almost assuredly be even better if you dropped the whole fetishized maid thing, obviously, but the core game is extremely good. I'm not sure why anyone would ever want to play a campaign of it, though. Oneshots or nothing with that system.
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Mar 20, 2013 19:25
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Captain Bravo posted:The gnome immediately acts. This person sounds insufferable.
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Jun 24, 2013 18:47
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For reference, with a find that large, three families could replace all water usage with molten gold for a year.
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Sep 3, 2015 06:06
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Yeah honestly mage armor is more-or-less constantly up anyways, so making that be from a magic item instead of directly from the spell isn't really a problem. Martial classes wouldn't even choose to use mage armor because it doesn't stack with their actual armor.
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Sep 9, 2015 22:37
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My solution is to never spend more than ten minutes planning any session so I don't have time to get attached to anything before it gets derailed.
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Sep 9, 2015 23:43
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Just don't play non-casters in 3.x. There's like a whole chapter on spells, clearly the designers put more effort into that because who the gently caress wants to write a hundred spells otherwise?
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Sep 10, 2015 01:26
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MohawkSatan posted:Better option: Don't play 3.x, rock any of the million other superior systems out there. I mean yes but some people do anyways.
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Sep 10, 2015 02:00
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That's an acre cubed. As far as I can tell, a cubic acre isn't actually a commonly used term, but is a stand-in term for an acre-foot, which is the volume of a rectangular polygon one acre on the bottom, and one foot deep.
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Sep 10, 2015 08:23
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I've run a FSN-inspired game before as well and I absolutely cannot imagine trying to tackle the enormity of what you're describing. I had four players, who I forced to team up into pairs at least until the endgame just to make the logistics easier. They controlled both Master and Servant, and there were a number of NPC pairs as well (I upped the total number from 7 to 10). Trying to find 14 players you actually want to have at your table, work with all their schedules, and try to run a PvP game on top of that (PvP with player elimination to boot) sounds utterly hellacious.
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Nov 17, 2015 22:08
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I guess I'll go ahead and post the vague outline of the FSN game I ran since it had a lot of neat things. The system was homebrew (and a very wonky homebrew at that). As I said above, the PCs were forced into two teams to make it easier to manage. Sessions would alternate between the two teams, with occasional crossover sessions when they met. I was also originally intending to run the game through two "loops"--one PvP, where the setting is established, and one PvE, where the conflicts in the PvP loop are resolved. The PvE run never ended up happening (though it became a running joke in our group for a while to try to run it in gimmicky ways, so the setting has a bunch of cruft on it from all the mini-PvE sessions run). First off, the setup wasn't fighting over the holy grail. It was fighting over a portal to pseudo-heaven (our recurring multiverse has some weird cosmology I won't go into in this post; it's neat though so maybe later). The idea is that the inhabitants of pseudo-heaven were stretched thin and didn't want to devote full resources to defending the gate from incursions. The inhabitants of the world don't want to make them angry and get their world glassed, but also want access to the portal. The compromise was to have a FSN contest every so often, where the winner would be given safe passage into pseudo-heaven. That way, the humans got a hope of getting through, and the portal defenders didn't have to devote a lot of resources to stop hordes of people trying to get in. Of course, the plot twist was that the safe passage only applied to entering pseudo-heaven. All previous winners had been executed as soon as they reached the other side. Some highlights from the game: -Saber's master ignores all of his obviously broken combat powers and instead almost exclusively uses his power to talk to birds. -Saber's master (who has phylacteries)sets one of his phylacteries in a flying jumbo jet, in order to respawn there and then crash into the combat. This gets his servant killed when it crashes into the tower surrounding the portal, pissing off the gate guardian who decides to remove him from the contest -Rogue leaves notes and gifts to both PC teams in an attempt to get them to kill each other. Ending letters with "-XOXO Rogue" remains an injoke with us four years later. -Archer's master (who both Caster and Saber's masters know) commits suicide when Archer dies. Both of them find his corpse, and then completely fail to ask any followup questions or even check for a suicide note, which I had prepared. -The combat system is so wonky that nothing would have been affected if Rider had literally taken no actions besides stopping time, and attacking while time is stopped. -Lancer's player misreads Lancer's ultimate, concludes it sucks, and then decides to never use it. Here's the cast, as well, since there's some interesting powers at work here. Lyra (PC) and Caster (Nicholas Flamel)--Lyra was a mage specialized in illusions. Flamel could make one dose of elixir of immortality every 24 hours, and had moderately competent stats. The elixir could cure anything short of death. Eventually, Lyra devised a kill-switch device to dispense elixir, which was especially effective because this homebrew system has everyone reduced to 0 hp and unconcious before finally dying. Friedrich (PC) and Saber (Sigurd)--Friedrich was essentially a non-undead lich, in that he had phylacteries scattered about town. This player was mostly in it to have a good time, not to win. Sigurd was immune to non-AoE attacks except called shots to the back of his shoulder, and could summon a dragon made out of shards of his sword. Lyra and Friedrich were on a team. Friedrich ended up betraying Lyra during the climactic battle, though, before dying by breaking one of the rules of the game. Haya (PC) and Lancer (Hodur)--Haya was a mage specialized in setting traps, though ultimately this proved pretty useless somehow. Lancer had a really cool ultimate--he would throw his mistletoe spear at the target, and I'd ask them if they thought they'd survive it. If they answer "yes" then it does double damage. Celestia (PC) and Rider (Santa Claus)--Celestia was specialized in dispelling other magic, and had delusions of grandeur. Rider could stop time briefly (around the world in a single night!) and could pull out whatever a single person most wants from his sack. Rider was probably the second-most powerful servant after Saber, but Saber's player wasn't really playing to win, so Rider was the one to beat. Javed (PC)--Due to some weirdness, a fifth player wanted to join, but I ended up giving him a role outside of the master/servant dynamic. Javed was a disgraced inhabitant of pseudo-heaven who was hoping to reclaim his place as the guardian of the portal. Javed's melee attack could sever the bond between a master and servant. Haya, Celestia, and Javed were on a team, though naturally Javed's interests only aligned with theirs so far. Unnamed officer (NPC) and Rogue (Raven)--Rogue's master was an unnamed member of the national guard, sent in in an attempt to maintain the peace during the fighting. Rogue had several gimmicks--she could shapeshift, she could remove all sources of light from an area, and she could use the weapons and item-based powers of defeated servants. Unknown master (NPC) and Berserker (Yamato Takeru)--Berserker's sword reached out infinitely when swung, cutting through objects at all ranges, and sends out blasts of wind. In addition, he could go berserk to increase his stats to absurd levels. He was the first enemy faced by both teams working together. Friedrich's butler (NPC) and Archer (Annie Oakley)--Archer could declare a duel between herself and her target, preventing anyone else from interfering. Archer allied with Friedrich and Lyra in an attempt to balance out the two teams. Unknown master (NPC) and Ranger (Atalanta)--Ranger was killed by another NPC, off-screen. She could turn into a lion and summon a boar. Roland (NPC) and Assassin (Giulia Tofana)--Assassin could create an extremely deadly poison, and could blend into a crowd, becoming completely unidentifiable when she's with two other people. Her master possessed a servant-grade weapon, which bisected anyone it cleanly hit. Augustine (NPC) and Messiah (Jesus of Nazareth)--Augustine was a witch instead of a mage (again, our shared multiverse structure approaches byzantine at times), who had the ultimate goal of throwing the portal wide open. Messiah's main power was rising from the dead three days later, as long as the fight was still going at that time. The only way to prevent this was to win (by killing all the other opponents) while he was still down. Valentina (NPC)--The current guardian of the portal.
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Nov 18, 2015 11:02
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Kaza42 posted:So, a large FSN war has always been one of the things I've wanted to run but never could get off the ground. If you don't mind, could you share some experiences you had here and any advice/things you'd do differently? Sure! 1) Don't make it large! I think the two teams against the NPCs, who you force to remain in teams until near the end, worked well. 3v3 could also work fine. 2) Make your rules system airtight. One thing about PvP is that whenever you rule in favor of one player, you have to rule against another. Try to minimize the number of times you even have to make rulings. Homebrew might not be the way to go--existing systems might not encompass FSN perfectly, but they've all put a lot more thought into their rules than your homebrew will. 3) Either don't have player elimination, or somehow allow eliminated players to continue to interact with the game. 4) Make sure everyone feels broken in some way. That's part of the fun. My original plan (which I drifted from, but I think it's a good plan) was to have each team have a separate "big bad" NPC, with other NPC servants dying like chumps at the start, and another set being powerful enough to draw the teams together temporarily. It seems like there's a lot of interest in this game, so I'll try to dig up my logs (we did it on IRC) tonight and write up a summary of what happened.
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Nov 18, 2015 20:48
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Lots of GMs can't handle people trying something unexpected, and just default to saying "no" rather than adapting.
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Nov 18, 2015 22:10
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The ultimate solution is to never expect anything. You can come up with a hundred possibilities for what the players might do, and they'll find option 101 instead every single time.
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Nov 18, 2015 22:20
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the_steve posted:drat, all these Fate stories really make me want to play it. Is it an actual published system? Or homebrewed? Or what's it play off of? Fate/Stay Night is a Visual Novel/Anime with a very game-y premise that people like to adapt into TRPGs.
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Dec 1, 2015 06:16
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