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 Welcome to the Traditional Games chat thread! This is a place for:
All goons welcome. Standard TG/grey forum rules apply. You can find the 2019 thread here. Somebody fucked around with this message at 01:09 on Oct 11, 2020 |
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Jan 2, 2020 02:15
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| # ? Apr 24, 2024 08:15 |
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Why not start the new year by checking out the resolution thread?
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Jan 2, 2020 02:16
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Role-playing games are fun.
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Jan 2, 2020 02:37
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Board games are also pretty great.
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Jan 2, 2020 02:43
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And tabletop miniatures games are pretty rad too.
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Jan 2, 2020 03:20
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death to random crits, death to ability scores, d6 pools > d20, normalized distribution curves if we must have randomness at all 
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Jan 2, 2020 03:25
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:death to random crits, death to ability scores, d6 pools > d20, normalized distribution curves if we must have randomness at all Cosigned for everything but the first one
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Jan 2, 2020 03:33
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Admiral Joeslop posted:Role-playing games are fun. So far I'd say the results are conflicting
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Jan 2, 2020 03:52
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Smash the magocracy
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Jan 2, 2020 03:57
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:death to random crits 
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Jan 2, 2020 03:59
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It is also excellent to play card games such as poker.
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Jan 2, 2020 04:03
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More poker based RPGs
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Jan 2, 2020 04:17
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Impermanent posted:More poker based RPGs I got something called gunslingers and gamblers that has rules for resolution with poker hands. Too bad it's mostly hyperfactual wild west stuff otherwise. I should go through my folder and F&F some of the random stuff I've found...
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Jan 2, 2020 04:27
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Deadlands also used them I think. (Happy New Year!)
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Jan 2, 2020 04:30
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hyphz posted:Deadlands also used them I think.
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Jan 2, 2020 04:41
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More rpgs based on mimery.
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Jan 2, 2020 04:53
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I'm playing Adventurer's League right now and one guy is doing a voice that's like if someone's voice was cracking at all times. I'm dying although I dig my kenku monk pregen.
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Jan 2, 2020 05:05
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Pham Nuwen posted:I'm playing Adventurer's League right now and one guy is doing a voice that's like if someone's voice was cracking at all times. I'm dying although I dig my kenku monk pregen. I try my very hardest not to judge, but every time I see people roleplaying in public, someone is doing a voice they shouldn't be doing, delivering some incredibly stupid dialogue, or both. The time there was a D&D group in a board-game cafe talking very loudly and at length about crawling up a dragon's rear end in a top hat kind of takes the cake, though. Also, kenku in D&D 5e are pretty fun. Someone actually looked at this generic birdman race and said "hey, these guys should maybe have some flavor," and I appreciate it.
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Jan 2, 2020 05:11
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Tabletop games are good but I wish I actually had people to play them with irl
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Jan 2, 2020 05:17
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Nuns with Guns posted:Smash the magocracy No RPG war but class war.
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Jan 2, 2020 06:40
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Gobbeldygook posted:Yes. Hucksters play a hand of 5-card stud against the GM to determine if their spells work. It's not pure 5 hand stud cause they can gently caress with the odds and get more cards, if I remember correctly. And while that was a garbage system for a pretty garbage setting, just conceptually that concept always made me smile. It's one of those great interactions of fluff and crunch that I wish more people would take inspiration from. Also, person wanting to run a Redwall game : making new "species"is really easy in Mouseguard, I've done it. You basically just swap out the Nature verbs and riff off the questions in character creation to make it work. It's narrative enough that you'd really have to gently caress up to make it unbalanced. I've run the game with like hedgehogs and elephant shrews and poo poo and it still works great. It takes like 4 minutes and maybe a skim on wikipedia if you don't know that much about moles or whatever. I sincerely love Mouseguard as a really well designed game, and also because it told me a lot about my friends : one session I was GMing was about a snapping turtle attacking a village to lay its eggs. They tried attacking it head on, which failed terribly cause they were loving mice, and their immediate plan B was to worship the turtle as a dark god of death. I was expecting them to like try to convince it to move or something, there were whole plot threads they ignored ; instead they basically just acted out the plot of The Mist. It was awesome but now I know to never, ever be in a disaster with those fuckers.
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Jan 2, 2020 06:51
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I like to play, the games. The games; I like to play.
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Jan 2, 2020 07:05
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i have been thinking for a while that i would like fantasy games to get rid of the stats for races, and give you a pool of traits you can pick a few of to represent your characters life and/or biology. that way its less bio truthy, and also more flexible. in the bestiary books you could have a little box for each monster with some traits that work well to represent that monster as a character.
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Jan 2, 2020 07:51
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juggalo baby coffin posted:i have been thinking for a while that i would like fantasy games to get rid of the stats for races, and give you a pool of traits you can pick a few of to represent your characters life and/or biology. that way its less bio truthy, and also more flexible. in the bestiary books you could have a little box for each monster with some traits that work well to represent that monster as a character. That'd be good. Racial stats don't even make sense if you're doing point-buy, you just factor it in. Pathfinder has stats and traits, and the traits are pretty cool and there's lots of optional ones you can swap with for flavor. But they still have stats too.
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Jan 2, 2020 08:00
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juggalo baby coffin posted:i have been thinking for a while that i would like fantasy games to get rid of the stats for races, and give you a pool of traits you can pick a few of to represent your characters life and/or biology. that way its less bio truthy, and also more flexible. in the bestiary books you could have a little box for each monster with some traits that work well to represent that monster as a character. In the 13th age heartbreaker I’m working on, race/origin/background are all covered under one umbrella, and you choose which one’s giving you stats, a skill, and an encounter power and why.
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Jan 2, 2020 08:27
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Zaphod42 posted:That'd be good. Racial stats don't even make sense if you're doing point-buy, you just factor it in. Nah, stuff like stat caps mean they still matter. Also, they aren't equally distributed in 5E; Half-Elves and Mountain Dwarves, for example, get more points than most other races. Looking forward to D&D 6E when they will definitely fix the problems 
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Jan 2, 2020 08:33
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What would be a good system for doing a game inspired by Shin Megami Tensei? Not PErsona, but the original cyberpunk post-apocalyptic demon summoning world of the mainline series. So far I have Shadowrun, but it's not quite right.
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Jan 2, 2020 09:06
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Xiahou Dun posted:It's not pure 5 hand stud cause they can gently caress with the odds and get more cards, if I remember correctly. That was the bit that sold me on a game I was otherwise lukewarm-at-most on. Every time I've tried to play it it's been a clusterfuck, but the whole Hucketer thing was an incredible idea.
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Jan 2, 2020 09:15
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MonsieurChoc posted:What would be a good system for doing a game inspired by Shin Megami Tensei? Not PErsona, but the original cyberpunk post-apocalyptic demon summoning world of the mainline series. Maybe Esoteric Enterprises
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Jan 2, 2020 09:15
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MonsieurChoc posted:What would be a good system for doing a game inspired by Shin Megami Tensei? Not PErsona, but the original cyberpunk post-apocalyptic demon summoning world of the mainline series. elaborate hack of ars magica
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Jan 2, 2020 09:29
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To anyone here who does any DMing using original content, how much work do you put into it? How do you go about designing it? Obviously you have to have some kind of idea about what the party should be doing and so in that way you can have some control over things, but the party could just as easily end up going in a different direction entirely and obviously the DM can't account for every single potential player decision. I'm wondering because I've had an idea for a campaign kicking around in my head for a while and I'm curious to know what other people do when they design their campaigns, if they do it session by session, scene by scene, or if they just have a vague abstract outline they'll refer to occasionally, or if they really do just try to expect and account for a majority of player decisions.
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Jan 2, 2020 09:32
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Generally I work out the next big plot beat in advance, along the lines of "when the party finds the third crystal shard, I'll reveal their mysterious patron as their archenemy." Then I do some exposition to establish that, say, the third shard is in the lost jungle temple. Then I make a vague outline for the party's current broader task ("find the lost jungle temple) that features the route I'm broadly expecting them to go, the main stations on the way that I need to work into individual dungeons/areas as the party approaches, and maybe a spanner to throw in the works. This could look something like: "nearby city, cross the river, temple guardians (jaguar elf tribe), temple itself; competing expedition" At this point I have no idea what the temple or jungle will look like. Maybe I know what I want to use as a final boss encounter for this chapter. I focus on preparing the current area in depth, though, so at this point I'll have a fairly detailed breakdown of the city. This will generally feature a number of sub-tasks, and I try and think of different ways to approach them. ("Get a map; do favour for mysterious merchant, steal from thief guild, petition mayor") It helps that I know my players and what they're likely to try. I don't usually prepare much beyond the current area. If the party gets the idea to fly to the temple, I hopefully kept my prep work open enough that I can drop in a sub-task to get a flying machine ("do favour for mysterious merchant, steal from flying thief guild, petition mayor"), and then I know I have to prepare some kind of aerial battle ("thief guild wants their machine back") and can skip the river and possibly half the jungle (my notes at this point may feature the words "crash landing"). I try to pick up loose plot threads as I go. If the party left the competition behind in the jungle without a map, their surviving members surprisingly enter the climactic boss battle, mad with jaguar elf poison. One of them will probably already have turned out to be an NPC with a grudge from a previous chapter. My bottom line on all this is: prep only as much as you're probably doing next session, but prep it in detail. Have a structure in mind, but be prepared to shuffle it around. And something very important I haven't even really touched upon: come to an understanding as a group what level of linearity you want to do, and what level of deviation is okay. Some groups are totally fine with a predefined linear trip, some want to have the freedom to look for the fourth shard first.
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Jan 2, 2020 10:04
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FirstAidKite posted:To anyone here who does any DMing using original content, how much work do you put into it? How do you go about designing it? Obviously you have to have some kind of idea about what the party should be doing and so in that way you can have some control over things, but the party could just as easily end up going in a different direction entirely and obviously the DM can't account for every single potential player decision. Depends on the game I'm running. Powered By The Apocalypse stuff and stuff like it explicitly requires the GM to do less prep, since players in those games have a lot of control over the plot through their moves. More "traditional" systems (I mostly run 4e D&D and Strike these days), I usually start with a campaign concept and present it to the group. "I'm going to run modern-day pirates off San Francisco, in the Shadowrun universe, in the Strike system" for example. Then if people seem agreeable, follow up by asking them to make characters that'd fit the concept - "Make characters that want to do piracy and go on pirate adventures, looking for sunken treasure and raiding ships", kind of thing. That gives you your basis for the campaign and your starting point. Then secretly you determine where you want the campaign to end up, which doesn't need to be set in stone and can change as the campaign runs - I know my group are mostly interested in playing heroes rather than villains, so I decided that the campaign would end with them organising a rebellion against a force which invades the city, and defeating that invading force. Once you know your campaign's start point, end point, and what the characters are going to be like, you can start coming up with some fixed points in it - adventures you want to run, NPC concepts you want to include (for me it's a few words describing them, their age, nationality, accent, and one distinctive thing about their appearance), that sort of thing. Usually have adventure one be the kind of basic job the players are supposed to do - capture a ship, raid a dungeon, investigate a mystery, or whatever. Doesn't have to be too fancy, the players will just be finding their feet with their characters. Do try to introduce a lot of NPCs, factions, and locations early in the campaign, though, even if it's only a very light introduction. It's cool to fight the Pirate King in adventure 10, but it's much cooler if you heard a radio report about some joker calling themselves the Pirate King in adventure 1 and then get to fight them in adventure 10. Then once you've got all that, write the first adventure, and just write a bullet-point for each adventure after that. Run the first adventure, and keep as many notes as you can about what happened in the adventure - decisions the players made, enemies who got away, NPCs who owe them a favour, and so on. Try to include those in the next adventure if possible, but if that's not possible, stick the note under one of your bullet-points for a future adventure. It's easy to forget stuff like this and let it pile up, so be liberal with it.
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Jan 2, 2020 10:12
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While no plan survives encounters with the players, their only source of guidance is the DM. It's very easy to reroute players towards the next plot point. It'll take some improv but that's the life of of a GM. For example, let's say the quest is figuring out why the animals have gone rabid and you planned for them to come across a polluted river that leads them to the next scene. If they go, 'huh that's weird' and keep walking, you can point them back at the river when they do their own form investigation.
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Jan 2, 2020 11:06
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FirstAidKite posted:To anyone here who does any DMing using original content, how much work do you put into it? How do you go about designing it? Obviously you have to have some kind of idea about what the party should be doing and so in that way you can have some control over things, but the party could just as easily end up going in a different direction entirely and obviously the DM can't account for every single potential player decision. You're right in that you can't account for what the players are going to do but you can absolutely account for what's already happened. Having context for what's happening in the location the players are in can sometimes be all you need. If you know the situation, the individuals and factions involved, and most importantly the motivations and goals of those individuals and factions, you're more than half way there already and no one's rolled any dice yet! I recently wrote up and ran a little one-shot for our group using Mothership, which is essentially the Alien franchise with the serial numbers (and facehuggers) filed off. I really didn't know what the group was gonna do since we'd be making characters and playing it all in one night but it turned out really well. I made this PDF after we played it but most of it was in my head going into it. Knowing who the major NPC actors were and what they wanted to do before we started was really all I needed.
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Jan 2, 2020 11:08
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Admiral Joeslop posted:Role-playing games are fun.
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Jan 2, 2020 11:52
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So I'm wanting to try and actually be somewhat productive this year, maybe make some content of some sort, nothing set in stone yet, though I've got a couple rough ideas; 1) write up a supplement(or supplements) for Old School Essentials(this one has quite a few possible directions it could go) 2) a supplement idea I've had for a while for Blueholme, expanding upon the system it has in place for non human characters(basically it has a really elegant system in place for converting monster stats into use as a PC, I'd basically be doing the legwork and writing it all out so that other people can jump right in if they decide they want to play as a Troll or something) 3) do something with that idea I've talked about back in the last thread about an RPG that uses a modified TCG as it's combat system
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Jan 2, 2020 12:11
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In continuation of 'What system would work for Redwall?' Cairn would be pretty good.
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Jan 2, 2020 12:15
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My new year's resolution is to only game wearing pajamas. Also finish the homebrew 5e Vampire class I've been tinkering with for months
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Jan 2, 2020 12:46
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| # ? Apr 24, 2024 08:15 |
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FirstAidKite posted:To anyone here who does any DMing using original content, how much work do you put into it? How do you go about designing it? Obviously you have to have some kind of idea about what the party should be doing and so in that way you can have some control over things, but the party could just as easily end up going in a different direction entirely and obviously the DM can't account for every single potential player decision. This is how I'd do it: Give up the idea of being meaningfully "in control", and definitely give up the idea of accounting for every possible player decision. The most important thing is that the players buy into the fiction you're presenting (replace "the fiction" with "the setting" or "the world" or "the plot" if it helps). I find it much easier to get this to happen by constantly giving them what excites, interests, threatens, or scares them and constantly updating that as they change and grow than by trying to pre-make (via guessing what they'll want) a detailed fictional world that is somehow supposed to have an independent existence outside our collective imaginations. So Have a general idea of where you want the game to go. Have a session zero where you pitch this general idea to the group, and then they add suggestions and make characters together. Adjust your idea to match their suggestions and characters. Plan a session one that presents some key stuff from the pitch you made. Make sure it opens on an interesting and exciting scene - no historical "ten thouuuuusand years agooooo" exposition or "you all meet in a bar" poo poo. A fight, a chase, a murder, something like that. Watch how they play it. Watch what they're interested in and how they interact with things. Introduce a bad guy who you're intending to be a recurring character. If they kill him, then it's his replacement or superior who recurs, but watch carefully how they interact when you signal "plot-important antagonist". Always listen carefully to their plans and suppositions about what's going on, what'd be cool, what they're afraid might happen, etc. Then do an outline of your next few sessions based on what they thought was cool (and on what you thought was cool too - you get input!) Bear in mind that people are generally pretty awful at telling you what they liked, which is why you needed to be watching and listening as it happened. Then plan as much of the next session as you feel comfortable with, and when you run it repeat the process of listening for their cues and building more of that into the next session, and so on. When they're engaged and interested, you can plan a little further ahead. If they become less engaged or interested, dial back the planning ahead and go back to watching and listening and using that, and even asking "So... what do you all think might be coming up?"
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Jan 2, 2020 12:53
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