|
Ilor posted:Remember the part where I said "in all facets of the game? In a PbtA game you shouldn't hate to fail a roll because failing rolls is generally where you encounter unexpected and interesting consequences. PbtA games actually get less interesting late in the campaign when everyone's lowest stat is a +2. If you succeed at everything you attempt, much of the "play to find out" aspect is lost. Thus, if you are someone who either flips their poo poo or sulks every time the numbers come up against you, you are not going to have fun - in pretty much any RPG. Not to mention making everyone around you miserable. You don't have to flip your poo poo or sulk in order to not like losing. I don't see what's strange about wanting there to be interesting consequences from succeeding. quote:Remember the part where I said "renewable resources?" Your thought experiment staggeringly misses the point because you've made it about non-renewable resources. Were that resource renewable, you'd start with 1000 points and lose some, but before your next play you'd get back most or all of what you lost in the previous round. Such that by the end of all of your rounds of play everyone still has 1000 points. That's what "I rest to reset all my dailies" represents in D&D. No matter how hard the fight is, it has few if any lasting consequences. Last time I played chess I just played with a friend for fun. I didn't lose anything as a result of the game, the game had no consequences at all. I still enjoyed the game. It still felt different if I won or lost or if I stomped them or snagged mate with only a few pieces left. Probably thousands of games are played with no consequences every day. They're not all automatically boring because of that. For some players, tactical combat is like that. Granted, 4e D&D is better for those folks than 5e!
|
#
?
Jan 26, 2022 21:40
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 25, 2024 16:59 |
|
|
hyphz posted:You don't have to flip your poo poo or sulk in order to not like losing. I don't see what's strange about wanting there to be interesting consequences from succeeding. Yeah but we were originally talking about this: quote:if you've got a player who wants to play the dice odds like a casino, who'll say "well he hits me x% of the time and I hit him y% of the time and my HP are z% greater than his" and so on then they might want to talk this whole thing out before they roll any dice, and then they have to ask about all the other moves, and before you know it it's become exhausting and opaque. It's not better or worse than the other style of play, but I can see why people who prefer it might not engage well with AW. So what are we currently arguing about?
|
|
#
?
Jan 26, 2022 22:53
|
|
|
again, hyphz complained so much about how no one could ever possibly enjoy apocalypse world that a server got made to teach him different full of talented patient players and he was banned from it for being unbearable and a jerk.
|
|
#
?
Jan 26, 2022 22:58
|
|
|
DoctorWhat posted:again, hyphz complained so much about how no one could ever possibly enjoy apocalypse world that a server got made to teach him different full of talented patient players and he was banned from it for being unbearable and a jerk. That's not the reason why I was banned. I'm not arguing that no-one could ever possibly enjoy Apocalypse World. I did enjoy it. I am arguing that some people will never enjoy Apocalypse World, and those people are not "worse" as RPGers than others.
|
|
#
?
Jan 26, 2022 23:02
|
|
|
hyphz posted:That's not the reason why I was banned. Well, to prove that someone was a worse gamer than someone else would require us all to have a common metric or n-dimensional matrix of metrics for determining what constitutes good and bad play, and I hope we never have that. I do however think that the playstyle of the post from the last page, in which players refuse to commit to an action without trying to mentally model the following seven generations of consequences and outcomes, is insufferable in a gaming group and should be relegated to PvE computer games.
|
|
#
?
Jan 26, 2022 23:12
|
|
|
hyphz posted:Last time I played chess I just played with a friend for fun. I didn't lose anything as a result of the game, the game had no consequences at all. I still enjoyed the game. It still felt different if I won or lost or if I stomped them or snagged mate with only a few pieces left. Probably thousands of games are played with no consequences every day. They're not all automatically boring because of that. For some players, tactical combat is like that. Granted, 4e D&D is better for those folks than 5e!
|
|
#
?
Jan 27, 2022 00:08
|
|
|
hyphz posted:You don't have to flip your poo poo or sulk in order to not like losing. I don't see what's strange about wanting there to be interesting consequences from succeeding. There are. If you kill the local warlord who, while horrible, was holding things together...even if you got 10+ on every roll then there are absolutely going to be consequences. Partials and misses may make more complications in the moment that snowball into something else later or potentially foil your attempt, but the world of the game should always react and change to what the PCs do - fail or succeed.
|
|
#
?
Jan 27, 2022 00:32
|
|
|
Reopen the hyphz containment thread
|
|
#
?
Jan 27, 2022 01:46
|
|
|
YOUR UNCOOL NIECE posted:Reopen the hyphz containment thread
|
|
#
?
Jan 27, 2022 02:32
|
|
|
DoctorWhat posted:again, hyphz complained so much about how no one could ever possibly enjoy apocalypse world that a server got made to teach him different full of talented patient players and he was banned from it for being unbearable and a jerk. Since the sagas thread is gone can I ask what the story on this is?
|
|
#
?
Jan 27, 2022 08:31
|
|
|
I was also banned for being a jerk so I don't know all the details.
|
|
#
?
Jan 27, 2022 08:52
|
|
|
The plot thickens.
|
|
#
?
Jan 27, 2022 16:35
|
|
|
Ilor posted:Right, but we're not talking about chess. We're talking about RPGs. And RPGs in which the conflicts have no lasting consequences are pretty crap at creating a compelling narrative. But we may not care about creating a narrative, or are happy with a pre written one, but still enjoy the chess. I think this is being taken as me attacking PbtA, which is not my intention. Rather I just object to the claim that “PbtA is superior to non-PbtA for everyone”. I’m not going to post about the Discord. It would break drama importing rules for one thing, and the only place it would possibly belong is E/N. Even then, it’s an upsetting low point for me.
|
|
#
?
Jan 27, 2022 16:45
|
|
|
DoctorWhat posted:again, hyphz complained so much about how no one could ever possibly enjoy apocalypse world that a server got made to teach him different full of talented patient players and he was banned from it for being unbearable and a jerk. Please stop bringing this up. Hyphz is trying to obey our rule about not importing discord drama, but when people make this accusation it's not fair for him to not be allowed to respond. Hyphz, I think you know you have a habit of kind of being at the center of lengthy discussions about "how games be" in which nobody agrees with your perspective on the various "problems" you find in roleplaying games or specific systems; you need to try to limit those, or take the conversation to the games philosophy thread. At some point, you're really just asking folks to help you with your personal issues, and that's not what threads in TG are for.
|
|
#
?
Jan 27, 2022 19:15
|
|
|
hyphz posted:But we may not care about creating a narrative, or are happy with a pre written one, but still enjoy the chess. No one made that claim. Someone brought up a weird conversation with a friend who clearly had a bad experience with a bad GM (or read a weak PbtA rulebook) and you turned it into this whole thing. Anyways I think I fundamentally object to the notion that someone who treats an RPG like a chess game is an equally good RPG player as someone who understands that storytelling sometimes involves losing or success with consequences.
|
|
#
?
Jan 27, 2022 19:26
|
|
|
admanb posted:Anyways I think I fundamentally object to the notion that someone who treats an RPG like a chess game is an equally good RPG player as someone who understands that storytelling sometimes involves losing or success with consequences. Yes. Much the same way that someone who when playing chess gives all their pieces unique names and stories that make them unwilling to exchange or sacrifice them to win the game is not a good chess player.
|
|
#
?
Jan 27, 2022 21:37
|
|
|
tanglewood1420 posted:Yes. Much the same way that someone who when playing chess gives all their pieces unique names and stories that make them unwilling to exchange or sacrifice them to win the game is not a good chess player. This gives me Fire Emblem flashbacks.
|
|
#
?
Jan 27, 2022 22:12
|
|
|
Leperflesh posted:Please stop bringing this up. Hyphz is trying to obey our rule about not importing discord drama, but when people make this accusation it's not fair for him to not be allowed to respond. I'm sorry. It was unfair and inappropriate to bring up at all. Mirage posted:This gives me Fire Emblem flashbacks. Well, Fire Emblem uses character personalities to add tension to each battle scenario as players make decisions about what risks and sacrifices are acceptable, so at least there the dissonance is deliberate. DoctorWhat fucked around with this message at 22:16 on Jan 27, 2022 |
|
#
?
Jan 27, 2022 22:14
|
|
|
Also there is a long and storied tradition of "losing a match is the desired outcome with chess." There was a whole etiquette of losing matches to show respect or romantic interest in the medieval era, it's very cool. Have people done PBTA for WOD/COD? I'm thinking about doing it but don't want to duplicate work.
|
|
#
?
Jan 28, 2022 00:19
|
|
|
Now I understand that episode of Ted Lasso.
|
|
#
?
Jan 28, 2022 00:38
|
|
|
Tulip posted:Also there is a long and storied tradition of "losing a match is the desired outcome with chess." There was a whole etiquette of losing matches to show respect or romantic interest in the medieval era, it's very cool. I mean, sort of. It's been previously discussed in this thread that trying to do "this other RPG but with PBTA type rules" is not a great way to do PBTA and doesn't tend to play to its strengths (c.f. Dungeon World). But there are at least a couple of urban fantasy type PBTA games that I can think of that take stabs at the sort of stories you might tell with World of Darkness, even if they're not explicitly trying to do WoD per se. Undying, which is specifically about vampires, and Urban Shadows, which is heavily focused on debts and politics between various factions of modern monsters.
|
|
#
?
Jan 28, 2022 01:14
|
|
|
malkav11 posted:I mean, sort of. It's been previously discussed in this thread that trying to do "this other RPG but with PBTA type rules" is not a great way to do PBTA and doesn't tend to play to its strengths (c.f. Dungeon World). But there are at least a couple of urban fantasy type PBTA games that I can think of that take stabs at the sort of stories you might tell with World of Darkness, even if they're not explicitly trying to do WoD per se. Undying, which is specifically about vampires, and Urban Shadows, which is heavily focused on debts and politics between various factions of modern monsters. OK yeah good point. Like MOTW is sort of a WOD game but it's probably about as close as its gonna get. To clarify a bit more - I specifically am looking at Promethean: The Created 2e (which I've run for like 2 years off-and-on) and I like the theme and the supernatural "layer" but the core system of COD is rotten down to the foundation and I would not want to replicate that at all. I have ideas for how I'd try to make it work going all the way down to https://lumpley.games/2019/12/30/powered-by-the-apocalypse-part-1/ type stuff but I'm very scatterbrained and it's not a priority.
|
|
#
?
Jan 28, 2022 02:02
|
|
|
Tulip posted:Also there is a long and storied tradition of "losing a match is the desired outcome with chess." There was a whole etiquette of losing matches to show respect or romantic interest in the medieval era, it's very cool. I met my last girlfriend prepping a Masks adventure.
|
|
#
?
Jan 28, 2022 03:12
|
|
|
Urban Shadows 2e got a free demo release on DTRPG a while back, it's probably worth a read: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/333500
|
|
#
?
Jan 28, 2022 06:11
|
|
|
It still doesn’t solve the biggest problem with the first game, which is it’s a solo game for up to five players.
|
|
#
?
Jan 28, 2022 07:04
|
|
|
That's the World of Darkness experience! 
|
|
#
?
Jan 28, 2022 07:33
|
|
|
Golden Bee posted:It still doesn’t solve the biggest problem with the first game, which is it’s a solo game for up to five players. They tried to fix it with the 'hubs' mechanic so that you have a reason to be in the same place as another character. -- I recently heard about Stonetop and it seemed worth a look because while it's delayed in delivery to backers because of COVID and whatnot from last year, all the up-to-date preview/playtest material is free. Does anyone have any experience with it? To its detriment it looks like it keeps some Dungeon World-isms I'd rather it not, but I'm willing to look past that if the rest is cool and fun.
|
|
#
?
Jan 28, 2022 09:58
|
|
|
Oooh, does anyone have a link to where I can buy stonetop or the pdf? I'd like to support folks and this setting looks dead cool! I tried googling it and it just took me to the kickstarter.
|
|
#
?
Jan 28, 2022 11:15
|
|
|
Golden Bee posted:It still doesn’t solve the biggest problem with the first game, which is it’s a solo game for up to five players. That's every serious social game, though. That's a feature, not a bug. I don't know of any heavily social game where PCs have a strong incentive to stick together if one of them isn't a satellite to another (not necessarily in terms of plot importance, but in terms of relationships -- the mother that is accompanying her nobleborn son to reclaim his throne, for example, comes to mind). If you want a politics game where people don't all have a singular goal, this will naturally split the party.
|
|
#
?
Jan 28, 2022 15:16
|
|
|
bewilderment posted:They tried to fix it with the 'hubs' mechanic so that you have a reason to be in the same place as another character. As someone who has been in 8 sessions of Stonetop so far... The Dungeon Worldisms REALLY drag it down. All it's basic moves for in-the-moment action are just directly lifted from DW, Defy Danger and all, and it could really desperately use some moves designed to evoke it's mood/genre more. Also some playbooks really need some work, Like Blessed's attack option is just demonstrably worse than comparable stuff in Lightbearer and Judge, which would be ok if the game didn't still insist on HP and other old design ideas that makes combat such a focus. Steal the cool poo poo from it like the inventory and arcana and use them in better systems.
|
|
#
?
Jan 28, 2022 16:31
|
|
|
Transient People posted:That's every serious social game, though. That's a feature, not a bug. I don't know of any heavily social game where PCs have a strong incentive to stick together if one of them isn't a satellite to another (not necessarily in terms of plot importance, but in terms of relationships -- the mother that is accompanying her nobleborn son to reclaim his throne, for example, comes to mind). If you want a politics game where people don't all have a singular goal, this will naturally split the party. But in apocalypse world or TSTCATUP, there is scarcity and different locuses of control. The leader of a small society is going to have to deal with the toughest guy, the biggest gang leader, or the brainer. A maestro’d will hear if a cult is trying to take their patrons. And a sandstorm affects everybody. That’s less likely than having to deal with the smartest academic on campus or ‘a werewolf who also lives in Chicago’. It’s much harder to create realistic NPC triangles in a city of 5 million than in a town of 80. In monsterhearts, you have a reason to put all the characters in the same place nearly every scene, and spread rumors about other people, because it’s a game of a teenagers going to high school. There’s another modern Noncooperative game where everyone is a wizard adjunct, but it’s a comedy game so unrealistic favors and stupid, job oriented reasons to gather is in genre. Golden Bee fucked around with this message at 17:55 on Jan 28, 2022 |
|
#
?
Jan 28, 2022 17:53
|
|
|
Gothic monsters hang out at the same night clubs, it's how they do Monster Business.
|
|
#
?
Jan 28, 2022 19:07
|
|
|
Don't get me wrong, Urban Shadows 1e was bad about giving each PC their own personal organizational drama whose internal politics probably won't overlap with other PCs. But the genre is urban fantasy crime drama, and part of those genre conventions is everyone getting pushed together until all those schemes get tangled together. Players keep wanting to be moody loners who don't interact with other players, but that's a problem whenever a game in this genre doesn't go really hard at giving people a group goal. It isn't really something uniquely bad about it. (And I haven't looked at 2e, but establishing set locations where everything crosses over when you make your city is a good change.)
|
|
#
?
Jan 28, 2022 20:36
|
|
|
Golden Bee posted:But in apocalypse world or TSTCATUP, there is scarcity and different locuses of control. The leader of a small society is going to have to deal with the toughest guy, the biggest gang leader, or the brainer. A maestro’d will hear if a cult is trying to take their patrons. And a sandstorm affects everybody. Yeah I was thinking of settings where the 'world' is bigger than a couple city blocks, to be clear. The smaller your area the easier it is to keep PCs together, but once you go beond the 'one city block RPG' conceit, my experience is players scatter tot he winds and it's really hard to wrangle them together, to the point I would actually say that any rpg that is heavily social and focuses on a whole city should probably have mechanisms to keep players participating in scenes their characters aren't in, as NPCs. I think that's the only way to keep everyone engaged in most scenes without lots of finagling that damages the story.
|
|
#
?
Jan 30, 2022 19:33
|
|
|
I played in a few games of it set in Hawaii and even though it wasn’t enough to have people coincidentally running into each other a lot. On an island.
|
|
#
?
Jan 30, 2022 19:34
|
|
|
Transient People posted:Yeah I was thinking of settings where the 'world' is bigger than a couple city blocks, to be clear. The smaller your area the easier it is to keep PCs together, but once you go beond the 'one city block RPG' conceit, my experience is players scatter tot he winds and it's really hard to wrangle them together, to the point I would actually say that any rpg that is heavily social and focuses on a whole city should probably have mechanisms to keep players participating in scenes their characters aren't in, as NPCs. I think that's the only way to keep everyone engaged in most scenes without lots of finagling that damages the story. Why are the players making PCs that have no gravitational pull toward each other?
|
|
#
?
Jan 30, 2022 19:45
|
|
|
I have gravitational pull to many people in my life, doesn’t mean I run into them every day in interesting ways, and certainly not all at once. (And who knows if they run into each other?) If you make a game where the players explicitly aren’t a party and are encouraged to call in debts to collaborate, you have to have a very small sandbox to keep them bumping into each other. And urban fantasy is a very large sandbox, because it has functional airplanes, apartment buildings, and millions more NPC‘s than almost any other genre. Theoretically, space opera has more people, but you keep running into the same people in and there are far fewer ‘cities’. (Often they’re more like road trip movies where you spend a ton of time with the same people.) A college might be a good center as long as you aren’t at Berry, which claims a campus of 62 mi².
|
|
#
?
Jan 30, 2022 20:02
|
|
|
I feel like there's some sort of context to your play that doesn't make any sense to me; what it sounds like you're describing is that the players roll a random encounter table equal in size to the population of the defined play area on a real time clock and if don't roll a PC they don't encounter a PC or something until the next clock tick. I don't think that's what your describing because that doesn't make any sense to me but otherwise I don't know why the 'real' rate at which you bump into people would matter. I've usually played AW as not a party and the players continuously interact with each other for a few reasons. The first is one of the best design decisions in AW and one that I now forcefully import into any game that doesn't have it, which is to spend a significant chunk of session 0 on "ok how do you know each other? Who do you hate, who owes you, etc." No PC should enter the table without being entangled with every other PC. The second is that players are basically given the option of doing things with players+GM or with just GM. Other PCs provide huge amounts of assets for whatever your goal is, but also they provide an additional vector of interaction. The alternative, to leave players just hanging and doing nothing for chunks of time, just feels bad, so players tend to avoid it, even if bringing in Jimmy the Brainer who thinks you owe him and you haven't paid back is more an antagonist than ally, because at least its more people being active.
|
|
#
?
Jan 30, 2022 20:56
|
|
|
Tulip posted:I feel like there's some sort of context to your play that doesn't make any sense to me; what it sounds like you're describing is that the players roll a random encounter table equal in size to the population of the defined play area on a real time clock and if don't roll a PC they don't encounter a PC or something until the next clock tick. I don't think that's what your describing because that doesn't make any sense to me but otherwise I don't know why the 'real' rate at which you bump into people would matter. That's not really how social games have worked IME, really, and I can't say much more than that. To use an example of a game that I'm currently part of which has been running for a while, we have: -The rich heiress I play, who is currently reclaiming her family's birthright before trying to take over the city of New Orleans. -The were-alligator lady who's trying to settle down in a new city after losing everything and lay down roots. I just conscripted her to be my champion by offering her steady employment and using the golden touch I got from King Midas to give her half a million in salable gold so she can get a house to live in instead of seedy motels. -The totally-not-a-mad-scientist entropokinetist teacher's assistant, who is currently trying to find out who is trying to kill him and investigating leads in a local mystical library about his powers. -The crotchety old Wizard with a capital W who is representing the greater worldwide wizardly powers in the city (whom he wants to reform from their corruption, by using the city to create a new model for others to follow). -The dead man inhabiting his sword who used to be my character's boyfriend and just went on a long soul-searching journey to find out what he really wanted, who is currently trying to fix a tear in reality on the local fairies' dime. -The Ex-CIA agent with compulsively heroic instincts who is dealing with a preordained fate, who is currently acting as my heiress' intelligence spook. Very recently, we had a scene where everybody came together to help with a ritual to twist King Midas' curse so people gilded by it could still move around and do things. Before that, every character had like, four or five solo scenes each, advancing their plotlines. The spook went into a carnival that is the soul of the city's decadence alone to find a lost mayoral candidate, I went to my mystical gardener's former garden alone to retrieve her lost large adult son for her and taste the blood of the dragon-tree she grew, the Wizard (TM) rendezvoused with the spook before and after his infiltration into the carnival and otherwise spent his time finding ways to cut through the infinite bureaucracy of his corrupt organization to gain some backup, the sword-man went on the soul-searching voyage and happened to find a bunch of monsters who offered a good deal on a way to restore a disembodied soul (not himself) back to life, and so on and so forth. Each of these plots was for the most part talking and learning about people, and mostly didn't feature the other PCs, because everybody has very pressing business to deal with and cannot make time to burn a bunch of hours accompanying someone else on something they could handle alone. Everybody has a past with each other and strong current connections, but there's just too much poo poo to do to pair up. We need to cover tons of ground constantly, and that's best done by going solo, because the city doesn't rest and we cannot afford to either. Transient People fucked around with this message at 21:45 on Jan 30, 2022 |
|
#
?
Jan 30, 2022 21:43
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 25, 2024 16:59 |
|
|
Finally back to PbtA games. We got our party together for Apocalypse World last night, with a handful of wonderful emergent discoveries:
Also: my copy of Deniable Assets finally came in, and I'm surprisingly impressed reading through it so far. I expected Rutskarn to miss some of the themes but it actually does a pretty good job setting tone. I've still got a lot of the book to get through but tentatively optimistic about this as a backup game for us (or switching off arcs with our AW GM). May be worth looking into for folks who want a chance to play the unapologetic bad guy.
|
|
#
?
Jan 30, 2022 23:56
|
|
