Minor game stuff from around the web for commentary...

[Orca]

I remember seeing that thread. Jedipotter's problem was seeing everything as a conflict between the GM and players, and that one of the GM's weapons was enforcing odd rules like spell components, and so there should be rules to stop players 'cheating' by stockpiling spell components like chips of mica.

The core mechanic of A*W seems to derive from the thought that critical hits and misses are fun, how about we make normal results 'fun' in the same way. Quite a different issue, even if the mockery is similar.

[PhoneLobster]

It's pretty clear the guy basically responds to any player ever doing something unpredictable that disrupts his precious and alarmingly fragile railroad with "Rocks Fall, You All Die".

He is the stereotypical archiac 2nd ed era shitty GM, he needs to read The Good GMing FAQ.

His sticking point is that he hasn't managed to learn the very first thing on the list of things a good GM needs to learn.

There needs to be some sort of GM boot camp for guys like that and the first day needs to be basically nothing but push ups and humiliating bullshit while some loud mean asshole endlessly yells "YOU ARE NOT FUCKING GODS YOU DUMB LOSERS!".

[Longes]

http://www.sailthe7thsea.com/
The horror! The horror!

[Longes]

Interview with the Wick regarding the 7th sea and upcoming remake

[TheFlatline]

Interview with the Wick regarding the 7th sea and upcoming remake

Has anyone ever done a really good swashbuckling game?

I haven't found one if they have. Which is a shame because you'd think it'd make for a lot of fun.

Main problem I can see is that you'd have to make combat really interesting and dynamic. And TTRPG kind of blows for that.

I could see a Warhammer Fantasy 3rd card system where you assemble a tableau of moves that you could use in different ways. The aggressive/defensive concept behind that would actually work pretty well if rewritten to not be so shitty.

Barring that, I could also see a Card Hunter style combat system where you assembled a deck out of abilities and fighting styles you learned. Terrain on the battle map could be represented by cards you could temporarily "draft" into your hand if you were in a position to make use of them.

Other ideas could be similar to Yomi, where the idea was basically to anticipate what the opponent was going to play, but man that'd be hard on the DM.

BattleCON might make for an interesting fight system. Each action is basically divided into two cards, and you have like 4 and 4 depending on your fighting style and class let's say. Then the cards all interact. Still would have to figure out how the GM would avoid going out of his or her mind in a general scrum.

[OgreBattle]

Interview with the Wick regarding the 7th sea and upcoming remake

Other ideas could be similar to Yomi, where the idea was basically to anticipate what the opponent was going to play, but man that'd be hard on the DM.

I read through Osprey's "Ronin" skirmish game and they have an interesting mechanic that relies on "yomi" somewhat, a combat pool that enhances a model's attack/defense capabilities.

1) Every model generates X amount of combat dice that are used for offense or defense. A highly skilled samurai may generate 3 dice while a green conscript generates 1.

2) when combat happens, each player secretly divides their combat pool into offense and defense, then both reveal at the same time.

3) the offense/defense dice are shared within a side, so if you used your samurai to generate 3 defense dice, those defense dice can be used by your green conscripts too. Or in turn the conscript's lone die may be used to enhance the samurai's attacks.

These lead to interesting decisions like if a guy is heavily outnumbered, he may choose to use his combat pool purely for defense in the hopes that allies reach him next turn, or perhaps throw it into offense to go out in a blaze of glory.

For a swashbuckling game that combat pool can also being used for interacting with terrain features. If two opposing sides try to use the same terrain feature for a bonus, then whoever dedicated more dice wins. So there's also a bidding aspect to it. Or another way to do it is moving to that terrain feature gives you bonus dice to add to your combat pool so characters are encouraged to run around grabbing bonuses.

[RadiantPhoenix]

Interview with the Wick regarding the 7th sea and upcoming remake

Has anyone ever done a really good swashbuckling game?

Didn't someone here say 4e D&D was a swashbuckling system?

[Berkserker]

Perhaps you saw http://www.gnomestew.com/gming-advice/a ... in-maxers/ already and just didn't think it was that interesting. My apologies, if so, for reposting. It's a bit dated, but the sentiments involved don't age badly.

As my understanding of game mechanics has begun to grow, I came to a few realizations about games, especially d20 games, which made me realize that I have been too hard on my fellow gamers who have been min-maxing those games.

I feel like an apology may be in order…

I think he's looking at the matter from entirely the wrong angle. He's forgetting that D&D is a team game, and if you're not pulling your weight then you're letting the team down, you're letting your forefathers down, and you're letting all the goddamn gods on Mount Olympus down. When you don't at least optimize a bit, someone else has to pick up the slack. While it obviously doesn't directly concern me, I wouldn't mind also seeing an apology for letting down his team and making them carry him.

[silva]

The core mechanic of A*W seems to derive from the thought that critical hits and misses are fun, how about we make normal results 'fun' in the same way. Quite a different issue, even if the mockery is similar.

Actually, its the other way around: the fun in PbtA games is found in the 7-9 range (success at a cost, or hard choice), which is the range that, baring exceptionally good / bad stats, will be the most common/frequent one coming up.

[Prak]

More to the point, it's actually less "realistic" to not min-max. I mean, sure, some people in real life purposefully make less than ideal choices, sometimes even for aesthetic, but no one is going to go get a degree in Diseases of the Rich, and then go and voluntarily take a job as a garbage collector, and people who are 5'0" with all the jumping ability of a rock know that basketball is not going to be their strong suit.

People "min-max" in real life, and so to say that my character cannot be set up to be the best necromancer, or whatever, they can be is insulting.

[tussock]

Prak, in the real work there's people get MDs and then go do something else because they discovered it wasn't right for them. Insurance adjusters chuck it all away to go design and self-publish some radical new game when they can't even write very clearly, which probably isn't great odds when you think about it.

There's also people who are short as a short thing and play all the basketball they can find time to play because they love it, quite often get into coaching just to spend more time around it, but if they can't do that they still play. Have whatever job lets them play more basketball.


In RPGs, people might even want to play a small girl who cut up dragons with a giant sword but is otherwise quite dainty and too weak to carry armour. In 3e that means your character's going to be awful, but other games it'd be fine.

3e/PF is kinda special in how it has an incredible number of options, let alone in combination, and almost all of them are not anything like as good as strait Clerics, Druids, or Wizards.

[Mechalich]

It is also that min/maxing in 3e/PF often fails to produce characters who are interesting, or have any weaknesses at all - or at least weaknesses that will actually impact the gameplay in some significant way. In fact, it tends to produce characters who have incredibly strange idiosyncratic lifepaths designed to justify making oddly specific and often counter-intuitive choices of personal advancement at very specific time intervals designed to match a spreadsheet.

Very few people in any world have sufficient freedom to base their lifegoals around a spreadsheet timetable for their personal education, experiences, wealth, and everything else. A fully optimized D&D character is based around a 'build' that refuses to tolerate deviation.

Example: lets say a character has an adventure involving flying around on a griffon, decides he loves griffons and wants to buy a griffon cub and raise one as a mount. Sorry, Wealth-by-level needs those coins for magic item Y and cannot permit this purchase. Likewise a character can't fall in love and spend a handful of skill points learning elf poetry to woo his new lady friend - those are a precious resource and every point must be accounted for.

Playing off builds makes perfect sense in video games, where the story is usually not open-ended and there's a discrete set of challenges and a single (or small subset) of options designed to meet those specific challenges that simply work better than others and methods of meeting challenges that are not already programmed into the scripted game are unnecessary because those challenges simply cannot occur.

While it is perfectly okay to play RPGs as cooperative video games those already exist. Many people want to have an RPG experience that does not involve them being the most badass-MFer around but still tells an interesting story. Playing a sub-optimized character in most video games, even those with in-depth storylines, generally doesn't give you any new, different, or better storytelling options. It just makes the game harder to beat.

[Kaelik]

That's not a problem with builds, that's a problem with Pathfinder design, stupid skill systems that rank elf poetry on the same scale as knowing what spell is about to kill you, and WBL.

[Prak]

Prak, in the real work there's people get MDs and then go do something else because they discovered it wasn't right for them. Insurance adjusters chuck it all away to go design and self-publish some radical new game when they can't even write very clearly, which probably isn't great odds when you think about it.

There's also people who are short as a short thing and play all the basketball they can find time to play because they love it, quite often get into coaching just to spend more time around it, but if they can't do that they still play. Have whatever job lets them play more basketball.


In RPGs, people might even want to play a small girl who cut up dragons with a giant sword but is otherwise quite dainty and too weak to carry armour. In 3e that means your character's going to be awful, but other games it'd be fine.

3e/PF is kinda special in how it has an incredible number of options, let alone in combination, and almost all of them are not anything like as good as strait Clerics, Druids, or Wizards.

Yes, there are certainly people who make stupid decisions that run counter to what they want to do and are good at. I mean, I've been in college for 10 years, so I'm sort of an example that there are people who make stupid and/or poorly informed choices. Because trap options and peer pressure exist in the real world just as they do in games. But I'm pretty comfortable standing by my point that when someone does something in real life, they usually (barring being an idiot, or actively discouraged/interfered with) try to do it in the best way possible. At least if they're actually interested in it. I'm talking people who say "I'm going to be a doctor because I love helping people and making money!" not people who are peeling potatoes and pushing spreadsheets because their boss told them to.

[Dogbert]

It is also that min/maxing in 3e/PF often fails to produce characters who are interesting, or have any weaknesses at all

...his lips move, but all I hear is "Stormwind fallacy Stormwind fallacy Stormwind fallacy..."

Only a player can make a character "interesting" or "boring," qualities which are completely unrelated to how effective a character's build is. As a matter of fact, the most boring characters I've seen have always been played by basket weavers, because Mommy GM constantly has to pull their bacon out of the fire and lay the answers to all problems at their feet without any input from the PCs whatsoever (because, being basket weavers, their characters can't do anything on their own power). THAT is as boring as a woman whose definition of sex is just lying there like a sack of potatoes and moaning.

Want to identify a lazy writer or otherwise uncreative storyteller? Ask them their opinion of Superman. Lazy/uncreative storytellers will bitch that "he's boring" because they can't think anything other than Low Level Plots to save their lives. Obviously, not everyone can be Mark Waid or Geoff Johns, but only the most mediocre writers assume that, just because they can't do something, that thing can't be done.

[Mechalich]

Only a player can make a character "interesting" or "boring," qualities which are completely unrelated to how effective a character's build is

Not related to efficacy true, but they are related to effort,and the amount of effort a player puts toward a character is to some degree zero-sum and the more effort put into spreadsheet construction the less that is put into everything else.

Worse, if the game inherently channels outcomes in a certain way, min.maxing will prevent the develop and existence of certain character types. In 3.X/Pf the Tier I classes are simply better than everyone else and really a fully optimized party has no reason to have members of any of the other classes at all - so you're flat out rejecting something like 80% of possibilities completely out of hand.

There are problems with extremes on both sides of the equation. Building a character who is non-functional or deliberately incompetent is a problem that is just as severe as any min/maxing problem. You can and should kick Hawkeye out of the Avengers. Having the system allow you build Superman is not inherently an issue. The problem is if the system pushes you build superman and only superman. Yes you can tell great Superman stories, but you can't tell great Justice League stories if the Justice League contains Supermans 1-20.

Yes, there are certainly people who make stupid decisions that run counter to what they want to do and are good at. I mean, I've been in college for 10 years, so I'm sort of an example that there are people who make stupid and/or poorly informed choices. Because trap options and peer pressure exist in the real world just as they do in games. But I'm pretty comfortable standing by my point that when someone does something in real life, they usually (barring being an idiot, or actively discouraged/interfered with) try to do it in the best way possible. At least if they're actually interested in it. I'm talking people who say "I'm going to be a doctor because I love helping people and making money!" not people who are peeling potatoes and pushing spreadsheets because their boss told them to.

I think you are vastly overestimating the logic and determination of our fellow humans. Think of what percentage of the population has moderate to severe problems with alcohol, cigarettes, and other drugs, obesity, or gambling. It's huge, and those vices are all fairly obvious sources of issues that can easily derail your life. There's also the people who struggle with depression and other chronic mental illnesses, people who struggle with chronic physical illnesses. And you have the families of these people whose lives are impacted trying to care for those who are suffering. Driven personalities are the exception.

Most player characters are assumed to be such exceptions, of course, but even those people can have all sorts of issues. Most often, there are multiple commitments. It is extremely common to have to choose between one's career advancement and one's spouse, or one's kids, or one's siblings, or even against the town where you grew up. or you could simply have two completely unrelated interests like Civil War history and motorcycle racing.

Even when people do min/max heavily, they won't have the same goals. One wizard might desire pure unadulterated power, another might desire to explore the myriad planes. The unadulterated power build might be better at everything than the planar explorer build (including planar exploration after some number of levels shake out), but why would the planar explorer spend ten levels and however many in-game years learning something orthogonal to his interests in order for a later payoff?

[Maxus]

Stormwind fallacy stormwind fallacy stormwindfallacy

No. Effort into a character is not zero-sum. Bad roleplayers are just going to play badly. And that's okay. Roleplaying games aren't for everyone, and some people get off on the mechanical challenge and should be playing Warcraft or, hell if I know, ME3 multiplayer or something. The traits, though, are not inversely related. Some folks like both the roleplaying AND having something for the brain to chew on until it spits out the desired result.

F'rinstance. In the game I currently run, the party's heavy hitter, who generally ends stuff with a full-attack, is also the most engaged roleplayer. He seriously likes interacting with other characters and NPCs and making my brain have to spew stuff on the spot (the bastard). Making a character who can survive and even excel combat is just his means to an end and, actually, covered in the character's backstory.

And don't even talk about tendencies among players as if that gives a justification to screw over a player. If someone's caring about their character's DPS or ability to survive a Color Spray, that's often more than just munchkinism--fuck, I try to make sure my characters can't go down in one shot to any one thing because, mainly, I'm lazy and don't like spending an hour or two making a character and backstory more than I have to.

These days, since I learned something about the craft (largely around here), I can generally make a character last an entire campaign and form long-term interactions with the rest of the party and the NPCs.

[Mechalich]

No. Effort into a character is not zero-sum. Bad roleplayers are just going to play badly. And that's okay. Roleplaying games aren't for everyone, and some people get off on the mechanical challenge and should be playing Warcraft or, hell if I know, ME3 multiplayer or something. The traits, though, are not inversely related.

I said effort is to a degree zero sum. Insofar as effort is a function of time - and in the character design phase it largely is, and time is for players and DMs a limited resource, then effort is zero sum. yes the most engaged players will spend vast quantities of time on mechanics and character development, but just as you need to build the rules to prevent the machinations of bad DMs, you need to build them to prevent the machinations of bad players as well.

More broadly a character can be built to a concept or they can be built to a mechanical build. In some systems it is possible to pick pretty much any traditional concept and build out according to that concept any arrive at something that, while not mechanically optimal by any means, is at least functional. That is not possible in 3.x/Pf - which, as @Kaelik correctly pointed out, is a system specific problem.

For example: if you have a pathfinder party with a fighter, a rogue, a cleric, and a wizard (the 'classic' setup), the players of the cleric and the wizard can do pretty much whatever they want. They don't need a build, they'll be fine, and even if they make some mistakes along the way they have built in mechanisms to change spell choice and thereby restructure their approach. In order to even come close to keeping up and remain viable in any situation at all, the fighter and the rogue will have to take very specific builds that require them to meet specific advancement benchmarks - ones that impact their potential backstory - along the way.

It should be possible to have a player build a character organically - meaning taking new traits/levels/whatever as they come as it would seemingly make sense from the characters immediate perspective and needs, and have that spit out a result that is, sometime down the road, still a viable character even if it is less powerful than the mechanically optimized route. In 3.x/Pf that is not the case. Even if the player avoids most obvious trap options, an inefficient build cannot function in a party next to a full optimized one (usually even of the same class, never mind across tiers). That has consequences for players - as people who are not necessary bad players, but those who are not deeply invested in a particular system, wanting to play a classic but highly un-optimized archetype (like a drugged-out low constitution rogue), or simply new can easily get frozen out of the action.

3.x/Pf, as a system, permits a tremendous amount of min/maxing. I think it's too much, at least if you permit a majority of the sourcebooks (not for nothing are calls for 'core only' games made). The level of variance is such that someone who is building a character off a spreadsheet and an inexperienced player who's just going with their gut will not be able to contribute together in the same party without a lot of active management by the GM, and that's a problem.

[tussock]

Mechalich, there's a couple things wrong with your argument.

1: People totally get more invested in things they spend more time on.

You can make a BD&D character in ten minutes, but that's not an extra hour you get to think about back story, it's an hour you've spent dungeon crawling already with no back story at all. Spending a long-ass time making a 3e character gets people far more attached to the things (to the point people start talking about character death being verboten).


2: The market research on RPGs says people really like min-maxing.

3e could have been a vastly simpler game, but their research showed that what people who buy RPG books want is options that they pick through to find the good ones. That's why you have feats with prerequisite chains and shit, people pay money for it. There's a Toughness feat so you can feel smart about not taking the Toughness feat. You have to put in bad options so people can feel good about the ones they take instead.

Games where you write whatever the fuck you want on your sheet and still get +3 for it because that's the mechanic, they're still not immune to min-maxing (because you can have +3 to being batman, or to underwater basketweaving, and one of those is better) but they also don't sell. No one cares.

The problems with class balance in 3e largely arise because the classes that are harder to learn to play are supposed to give you better results once you do. Easiest class? Monk, don't even have to pick equipment. Worst class? Monk. Hardest class to figure out? Wizards. Best class? Cleric, because they also fixed "no one wants to play the cleric" from 2nd edition, in several ways.

Hell, you know in 4e where you could chose from 8 classes and then, like, four of seven powers that all worked pretty well, feats that barely mattered, that collapsed the market. What do people buy instead? Pathfinder. Chock full of trap options and characters that take four hours to make.



So 3e characters get a tonne of time spent on them, because they are hard to make and because you can make bad choices along the way, and that all makes people care a lot about them and give them little stories and stuff. Also gets way more money spent on books, like an order or two of magnitude.

[Mechalich]

3e could have been a vastly simpler game, but their research showed that what people who buy RPG books want is options that they pick through to find the good ones. That's why you have feats with prerequisite chains and shit, people pay money for it.

There's an interesting paradox here, one that's actually mostly unrelated to everything else but I think is relevant. People who buy RPG books (as in books plural, probably more than one per year over multiple years) are a subset of people who play tabletop RPGs. The precise size of that subset is probably unknowable, but I suspect it's less than 50% of people who game regularly, and even further down when you count casual gamers. It's a standard hobby problem - a small portion of the most hardcore people spend most of the money, creating market distortions.

Creating a complex system with many trap options, counter-intuitive mechanics, and various other mechanisms that reward system mastery may sell well because it appeals to the desires of gaming nerds for whatever specific reason, but that does not make it a better system. In the same way that making a magical high school drama full of panty shots, moe girls, a milquetoast protagonist who has a special hidden power, a childhood friend, and is paired with the cutest girl for no reason moves anime DVD sales in Japan but tends to be terrible.

Yes, pointless books full of terrible mechanics that are largely useless (ex. Stormwrack) sell much better than pointless books that are full of bad fluff (ex. The Complete Ninja's Handbook) which is an interesting factoid about the hobby, but doesn't tell you anything about how to make on point books full of good mechanics or on point books full of engrossing and coherent fluff.

[tussock]

but that does not make it a better system.

Who says the simple system with clear and balanced options, and other such stuff that are oft-lauded goals, are "better" in any meaningful sense?

Like, there are a whole bunch of simple systems out there in cheap and convenient formats and sometimes even with good art, and they just don't sell much and no one really plays them. You can play Microlite d20 for free and do everything 3e does only "better", but no one does.

There's one constant commercial success in the whole industry, where Wizards are complicated bullshit hard work to use (or even keep alive) and also surprisingly better than everyone else, which has outsold and had more players than every other option for the whole 40 years of it's existence. When the brand name did otherwise and finally made Wizards and Fighters balanced like everyone asked for, it died.

Pathfinder made the full-casters an even better option and took over. What if that's not a coincidence? They did get Monte on board early then and suddenly drop all the options that were going to make Fighters have nice things, backtrack on the extra feats they'd already promised by splitting all the good feats in half.


Those players who buy a lot of books, they also organise games and keep talking about it to their friends and talk people into running the thing and get new games going when the old one dies. No one else really cares that much, but they care even less about balanced games that their obsessive friend never talks about.

[Kaelik]

Like, there are a whole bunch of simple systems out there in cheap and convenient formats and sometimes even with good art, and they just don't sell much and no one really plays them. You can play Microlite d20 for free and do everything 3e does only "better", but no one does.

Yeah no, the only thing Microlite d20 does better is simulate the most boring game imaginable where you roll to hit and then damage, and no thought or strategy exists at all. They also forgot that saving throws exist, because they are fucking dumb.

[Orca]

The core mechanic of A*W seems to derive from the thought that critical hits and misses are fun, how about we make normal results 'fun' in the same way. Quite a different issue, even if the mockery is similar.

Actually, its the other way around: the fun in PbtA games is found in the 7-9 range (success at a cost, or hard choice), which is the range that, baring exceptionally good / bad stats, will be the most common/frequent one coming up.

Yeah, that's what I was saying; someone who liked the wacky stuff that a GM might come up with on an unusual roll (critical hits & misses) decided to make a system where it happens on a usual roll instead.

[Longes]

Out of curiosity I've decided to read a published Vampire adventure.

Setting
Clash of Wills takes place entirely in a fictitious County of Galtre. The author assumes the lands of Galtre to be located between London and Nottingham in England.

Dark Ages Vampire, you had one job...

[Username17]

Out of curiosity I've decided to read a published Vampire adventure.

Setting
Clash of Wills takes place entirely in a fictitious County of Galtre. The author assumes the lands of Galtre to be located between London and Nottingham in England.

Dark Ages Vampire, you had one job...

I have no idea why you'd do that. There are real counties between Nottingham and London. Buckinghamshire, Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire, Northamptonshire, and Leicestershire. Very notably, literally all of the counties in that area use the "shire" nomenclature. So if you were going to make a fictitious county in that area, it would have the suffix "shire." Of course, the adventure is about shit in an Earldom, and Earldoms have the name of the primary city rather than the county. So the Earl of Northampton is in the County of Northamptonshire. Similarly for the Earl of Bedford, the Earl of Leicester, the Earl of Buckingham, and the Earl of Hertford.

Seriously man. You had one job. This isn't even obscure. It's fucking administrative divisions of England. Even in 1997 it was just a trip to the public library and five minutes of research. Anyone who was half the history buff necessary to be taken seriously as a Vampire Dark Ages author should be able to do that in their sleep.

-Username17