Ideas that give boners to GMs

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Whipstitch
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Post by Whipstitch »

It helps if you give someone a highlighter. Bitches love highlighters.
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Post by Blicero »

My ACKS games generally involve player-made maps. It slows progress down because I have to make sure that the maps are sufficiently accurate, but it allows the players to develop a sense of ownership over the environment. And it helps the group keep track of what sections of dungeons have already been visited, what sections should probably be returned to, and what features probably contain secrets. I've never used an actual maze though.
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Post by phlapjackage »

I mean, a dungeon can be kind of "maze-like" and all that. Mapping a dungeon-crawl is totally something that can be fun. Hell, making maps in general is cool and like said above, helps immerse the players in the game and environment. But I think asking players to map (and play) a proper maze and just draw this would be boring without some way to abstract it out.

In my head, the maze from the movie Labyrinth is how things would run. The movie didn't show her choosing every single direction - it showed her using chalk (lipstick, +2) to help find her way, it showed the maze working against her (flipping tiles, -5), and then it cuts to a few locations where she finds actual stuff to do other than choose left/right/straight.
Last edited by phlapjackage on Mon Aug 22, 2016 4:14 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by Kaelik »

phlapjackage wrote:I mean, a dungeon can be kind of "maze-like" and all that. Mapping a dungeon-crawl is totally something that can be fun. Hell, making maps in general is cool and like said above, helps immerse the players in the game and environment. But I think asking players to map (and play) a proper maze and just draw this would be boring without some way to abstract it out.

In my head, the maze from the movie Labyrinth is how things would run. The movie didn't show her choosing every single direction - it showed her using chalk (lipstick, +2) to help find her way, it showed the maze working against her (flipping tiles, -5), and then it cuts to a few locations where she finds actual stuff to do other than choose left/right/straight.
Again, if you reduce "the maze moves around you" to "-5 to a die roll that doesn't even matter" then I really just want to point out that you don't actually want to do a maze at all.
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Post by Ice9 »

Yeah, and if you let people roll Decipher Script instead of really translating a document in another language, you didn't want to do script deciphering at all!

Which is to say that you're right in a way, but also wrong in a way. Mazes as a thematic element are different than maze-solving as gameplay, and not everybody who wants one wants the other.
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Post by phlapjackage »

Kaelik wrote:Again, if you reduce "the maze moves around you" to "-5 to a die roll that doesn't even matter" then I really just want to point out that you don't actually want to do a maze at all.
You could have a point, this could be abstracting it out too much.

What differences are there between a dungeon crawl (where I would expect the players to make choices of which direction to go and draw maps and all that) and a maze crawl (where it seems that drawing a map and making many direction choices would be tedious) ? For example, I'd say a module like ToEE is a dungeon crawl and not a maze, even if the dungeon is maze-like. To my mind, it's mostly that a maze would involve a lot more need for players input that doesn't really matter and nothing happens after a decision ("which direction do you go? Ok, now? Ok, now? Ok, now?...") (this is again assuming players can't / don't have creative solutions available like fly or the like)

I mean, I think most adventures probably would include a maze at some point (if only for flavor and because they're a well-known fantasy trope). I guess depending on how invested your group is in drawing maps on graph paper and making lots of L/R choices decides how much you abstract it.

Unless there are other ideas on how to run a maze ?
Koumei: and if I wanted that, I'd take some mescaline and run into the park after watching a documentary about wasps.
PhoneLobster: DM : Mr Monkey doesn't like it. Eldritch : Mr Monkey can do what he is god damn told.
MGuy: The point is to normalize 'my' point of view. How the fuck do you think civil rights occurred? You think things got this way because people sat down and fucking waited for public opinion to change?
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Post by Kaelik »

phlapjackage wrote:
Kaelik wrote:Again, if you reduce "the maze moves around you" to "-5 to a die roll that doesn't even matter" then I really just want to point out that you don't actually want to do a maze at all.
You could have a point, this could be abstracting it out too much.

What differences are there between a dungeon crawl (where I would expect the players to make choices of which direction to go and draw maps and all that) and a maze crawl (where it seems that drawing a map and making many direction choices would be tedious) ? For example, I'd say a module like ToEE is a dungeon crawl and not a maze, even if the dungeon is maze-like. To my mind, it's mostly that a maze would involve a lot more need for players input that doesn't really matter and nothing happens after a decision ("which direction do you go? Ok, now? Ok, now? Ok, now?...") (this is again assuming players can't / don't have creative solutions available like fly or the like)

I mean, I think most adventures probably would include a maze at some point (if only for flavor and because they're a well-known fantasy trope). I guess depending on how invested your group is in drawing maps on graph paper and making lots of L/R choices decides how much you abstract it.

Unless there are other ideas on how to run a maze ?
Look, if your one and only goal is to convert a maze you saw in real life into the game, then just... don't do that.

If you are presenting a maze to D&D characters, the minimum that needs to be going on is moving walls and encounters inside the maze. Like, the absolute minimum. Yes, Saying "Right/Left" 500000 times in a row is a waste of everyone's time, which is why you don't do that. There is nothing wrong with having encounters that are placed in a moving maze in advance, and then having PCs try to figure out the rules for the moving walls and try to avoid encounters (or find them to beat them up and have them tell them things about the maze).

Every single level 1 Fighter with Power attack is capable of beating any stone maze you make like this:

Image

So if you don't have a better idea for a maze than that, just don't put a maze in there at all.
DSMatticus wrote:Kaelik gonna kaelik. Whatcha gonna do?
The U.S. isn't a democracy and if you think it is, you are a rube.

That's libertarians for you - anarchists who want police protection from their slaves.
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Post by phlapjackage »

Yeah, that makes sense. And I guess for that to work, a GM shouldn't be creating mazes that look like this for the party, but instead should be simpler and more like this (in abstract).
Koumei: and if I wanted that, I'd take some mescaline and run into the park after watching a documentary about wasps.
PhoneLobster: DM : Mr Monkey doesn't like it. Eldritch : Mr Monkey can do what he is god damn told.
MGuy: The point is to normalize 'my' point of view. How the fuck do you think civil rights occurred? You think things got this way because people sat down and fucking waited for public opinion to change?
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Post by hogarth »

I thought of another one:

* The PCs have to do lengthy experimentation to figure out what an object is (e.g. a magic item, a piece of alien technology, etc.)
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Post by Dogbert »

Stonewalling, because fuck proactivity.

Forcing questgivers on proactive players... again, because fuck proactivity.
Last edited by Dogbert on Thu Sep 01, 2016 2:24 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by radthemad4 »

What's stonewalling?
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Post by Dogbert »

radthemad4 wrote:What's stonewalling?
I don't want you to know.

I'll raise DC to "fuck you."

Then, I'll revoke your internet access so you can't google it.

Then break your kneecaps so you can't travel to the library.

Then I'll burn the library.

Only until my penis-extension NPC has schooled you for not knowing and you have gone through the hoops I want you to.
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Post by hogarth »

I've been reading the module "Tears of the Burning Sky", and it made me think of some more boner-inducing ideas:

* Monsters that explode when they die.
* NPC "allies" who are designed to be useless and annoying but the PCs are supposed to feel guilty if they kill them.
* Treasure that is extremely heavy or otherwise very difficult to move.
Last edited by hogarth on Fri Nov 18, 2016 11:33 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Ice9 »

One-shot items.

I was reading a blog where the author suggested giving out primarily one-shot items, because then the players don't end up relying on the same ones repeatedly. And it made me think of Numenera, where that's the default.

As a GM, one-shot items have a lot of advantages:
* Can give out more of them without it becoming redundant.
* Less worry about balance - if one turns out to win everything, it'll just do that a single time, not forever.
* Makes encounter balance easier. If the PCs have a lot of potent one-shot items, they can survive an overly tough monster, and still be threatened by a weaker monster (since using up items is always a cost).

But as a PC, I don't like them:
* I tend to hold off using them, because I'm always thinking that a more important opportunity will come up later.
* Winning by using a permanent item - "Hell yeah, this thing is awesome." Winning by using a one-shot item - a partial victory that weakened you.
* Can't use them just for fun. With a Decanter of Endless Water, you can amuse bystanders, soak that annoying NPC, use it to jet-ski, etc. With a one-shot "Lake in a Bottle", you need to save it for something important.
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Post by OgreBattle »

One shot items get hoarded, like how I never ever used elixirs in Squaresoft RPg's.

Now items that expire or items with a recharge time that conveniently works as "once a session" can see use, like how any game where food goes bad I'm just eating wolf steaks every 10 minutes
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Post by Longes »

The way Numenera works around hoarding is by setting a hard limit to the number of consumables you can carry.
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Post by deaddmwalking »

Longes wrote:The way Numenera works around hoarding is by setting a hard limit to the number of consumables you can carry.
Which is immersion breaking. Making it a less than ideal solution.

I do like the idea of 'recharge' on items.
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Post by momothefiddler »

Longes wrote:The way Numenera works around hoarding is by setting a hard limit to the number of consumables you can carry.
I haven't tried that personally but it sounds like it would be a constant gamble - use too many, and you end up under your cap, use too few and you lose some of the new ones without even using them, use exactly the right number and you end up... exactly where you were before.

So a gamble where the perfect result is that you manage to break even.
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Post by Longes »

deaddmwalking wrote:
Longes wrote:The way Numenera works around hoarding is by setting a hard limit to the number of consumables you can carry.
Which is immersion breaking. Making it a less than ideal solution.

I do like the idea of 'recharge' on items.
There is in-game reasoning in Numenera, said reasoning being that too much cyphers (numenera's consumable artefacts) in close proximity to one another give you cancer.
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Post by hogarth »

Ice9 wrote:One-shot items.
Good example.
Ice9 wrote:I was reading a blog where the author suggested giving out primarily one-shot items, because then the players don't end up relying on the same ones repeatedly. And it made me think of Numenera, where that's the default.

As a GM, one-shot items have a lot of advantages:
* Can give out more of them without it becoming redundant.
* Less worry about balance - if one turns out to win everything, it'll just do that a single time, not forever.
* Makes encounter balance easier. If the PCs have a lot of potent one-shot items, they can survive an overly tough monster, and still be threatened by a weaker monster (since using up items is always a cost).
Don't forget that, for the stingy GM, they're a good way of giving NPCs powerful magical equipment without letting the PCs use it afterwards (cf. drow weapons that disintegrate in the surface world).
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Post by Chamomile »

Do people actually never use elixirs in Final Fantasy just because of sheer hoarding instincts? I know I'd stock up on potions of every variety whenever I reached the inevitable point where I had more gil than God and could buy anything I wanted, and then I'd always try to use the weakest amount of healing I could in case I needed the stronger stuff later. Since I rarely needed to heal HP and MP at the same time, this means I almost never use elixirs even when I have 99 of them, but that was just because my characters were already hooked up to an intravenous drip of x-potions.
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Post by Kaelik »

Chamomile wrote:Do people actually never use elixirs in Final Fantasy just because of sheer hoarding instincts? I know I'd stock up on potions of every variety whenever I reached the inevitable point where I had more gil than God and could buy anything I wanted, and then I'd always try to use the weakest amount of healing I could in case I needed the stronger stuff later. Since I rarely needed to heal HP and MP at the same time, this means I almost never use elixirs even when I have 99 of them, but that was just because my characters were already hooked up to an intravenous drip of x-potions.
If you deliberately play with the intention not to use elixers unless you need to, then you develop strategies and parties and levels enough that you don't need elixers, so it self reinforces until you just have no reason to use them. I mean, you can, like when I play the pokemans, I sometimes just break my hoarding pattern for the elite 4 to beat it a little sooner than I otherwise would, but aside from that never use consumables except out of battle to heal status effects that last.

Haven't played FF game in a long time so they might have changed, but I doubt it.
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The U.S. isn't a democracy and if you think it is, you are a rube.

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Post by radthemad4 »

When I played Final Fantasy 6 I just taught every party member Osmose (drain mana from enemies) and some of them had healing spells, so it wasn't necessary. In Temple of Elemental Evil, I'd rest after every encounter (sometimes this resulted in more random encounters that interrupt rest, but I'd keep doing it anyway till the party successfully rested).

If there's any way to rest and gain full health and mana and stuff without spending items I'll use it even if it takes longer. If none is available, I'll use the cheapest currently available option (e.g. walking all the way back to the inn) and even then only if I really think I'd need to for the next encounter (i.e. if I go forward and die repeatedly and have tried every strategy I can think of which doesn't involve using items). Sometimes I'll use items if I hit the inventory cap or something, e.g. I see bazooka ammo over there on the ground and I'm already at max capacity, so what the hell, fire a few rounds.
Last edited by radthemad4 on Sun Nov 20, 2016 3:51 am, edited 3 times in total.
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Post by Whipstitch »

(i.e. if I go forward and die repeatedly and have tried every strategy I can think of which doesn't involve using items)
Yeah, perma-death encourages a use it or lose it mindset whereas the ability to reload your games creates a perverse situation where experimenting with stingy tactics is actually a conservative strategy in the big picture. After all, the only way to well and truly lose in such a situation is by creating an unwinnable/excessively difficult save file.
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Post by Username17 »

Certainly in D&D video games you end up getting showered with special darts and wands of minor attack spells and shit that could be used on an individual action to be slightly better than a regular attack action in one way or another. Those almost never get used.

The "feels good" portion of doing slightly more damage with an attack is counterbalanced almost entirely by the "feels bad" of losing an item forever. Shit like Lightning Javelins is just bad. Players don't want that shit.

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