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I am shocked and appalled... (role playing general conversation)

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  • I need to geek on a thing I just wrote for a system I'm working on because I'm kinda proud of it and nobody else is really around.

    So I'm writing this Magical Girl game. It started as a hack for the game I wrote above but I really quickly realized I wanted it to be a bit deeper. Specifically I wanted to have it to dive into character's emotions as a mechanical element.

    So the thing I'm writing now is that as part of character creation you put together pairs of traits and flaws about your character, which act as a little package of skills and bonuses as well as areas your character isn't so great in. Each Trait also ties into what I'm calling "Events", which attach themselves to your character when important stuff happens.

    So, for example, the Event "One of your Friends Got Badly Hurt" pops up because one of the party members got their ass kicked. Different characters are going to interact with that event in different ways. The character with the Righteousness trait is going to start uncontrollably climbing the Power Meter until whatever did the hurting gets taken out, at which point the event goes away for her. The character with the Coward flaw, on the other hand, loses the will to fight and will flee the scene.

    There will be positive events too, you beat the shit out of one of the big villains and you get the Confidence event that'll boost a bunch of traits. And events will kick in that create drama; if a member of the team kills a human, it's gonna fuck up pretty much everyone to various degrees, and it kinda fucks the really empathic characters over.

    This will also tie into the interpersonal relationship system the game has; your Rival can smack some sense into your cowardly ass to keep you in the fight and such. I'm a bit hazy on that part; I'm not sure if that'll hook directly into the Events themselves, or the way they are resolved.

    Also, this makes character development kind of easy, because I can make getting your flaws tripped issue you advancement points and you'll eventually be able to spend those to flip Flaws into more positive Traits. So eventually the cowardly character can turn that Flaw into an "Overcame Cowardice" Trait that gives them a second wind when bad stuff goes down.
  • I need to geek on a thing I just wrote for a system I'm working on because I'm kinda proud of it and nobody else is really around.

    So I'm writing this Magical Girl game. It started as a hack for the game I wrote above but I really quickly realized I wanted it to be a bit deeper. Specifically I wanted to have it to dive into character's emotions as a mechanical element.

    So the thing I'm writing now is that as part of character creation you put together pairs of traits and flaws about your character, which act as a little package of skills and bonuses as well as areas your character isn't so great in. Each Trait also ties into what I'm calling "Events", which attach themselves to your character when important stuff happens.

    Have you looked at Fate systems? Fate Core is free.
  • First ever test of my Magical Girl system today. Learned a lot and am in the process of rewrites. The basic system is solid and stuff was generally happening in line with the tone I was aiming for. Ended up cutting the increasingly atrophied concept of spell difficulty entirely because it wasn't stopping the dedicated mages from cleaning house, but it was preventing the more martial characters from getting off their buff spells, and I linked it more strongly into the action points system. I also had to nerf hats.
  • So you're saying I can't wear a floppy hat two meters in radius anymore?
  • ThatGent said:

    So you're saying I can't wear a floppy hat two meters in radius anymore?

    Well, you can, but you can no longer cheese it to basically roll a dozen dice at a time for spellcasting.

    You basically build your character's ability set by building a costume out of parts. So, like, if you pick a lot of the adorable frilly Cardcaptor Sakura stuff you tend towards more of a support build, whereas a marching band western military uniform will build you more into a technical fighter. You can, of course, mix and match; the current test party includes what is essentially an adorable knight who is half kawaii as fuck and half plate armour, who basically hides behind a big tower shield while wandering the fight buffing her friends. I'm really proud of how this syncs into the personality system (players build personalities by assigning events to emotions) because she's actually, mechanically categorized as a fearful character; bad things happen, she moves towards the Fear emotion which kicks off stat changes in her character, the same way our berserker character's reaction set means they'll get mad when somebody gets hurt.

    Even in a test game where shit is breaking every two seconds, people were for real roleplaying! I was quite satisfied.
  • This is sounding interesting. What sort of mechanics do you use to encourage role playing?
  • ThatGent said:

    This is sounding interesting. What sort of mechanics do you use to encourage role playing?

    The characters sort of revolve around a modified form of Plutckit's Emotional Wheel, and I've paired the emotions off on it. They choose from each set a motivating and demotivating emotion; if you are mostly motivated by positive emotions like joy and intrigue you're a classical hero, and if you're mostly motivated by negative emotions like hate and distrust you're more of a classical anti-hero. When events occur, characters move around the wheel in accordance to the personality they set out.

    Even without mechanical reinforcement, that works super well; you force everyone to think about your character's personalities as more than just buzzwords right at creation because they have to work out how their character reacts to things, and having the character's feelings right out in the open on the sheet reminds them. It's not subtle, but the characters are playing teenagers in high-stress situations so that's excusable!

    That said, there is mechanical reinforcement. Characters get larger dice pools for certain tests and lower thresholds for the powering up mechanics if they're on their motivating emotions, and the resource individual players use to move around the wheel of their own initiative is limited and used for other things as well. So the other options available are to actively do stuff to proc events that get you back in the zone, or to interact with other characters. At the start of the game you place all the others characters in the party as well as important NPCs on the emotion wheel as well, which syncs to relationships with them. Again, by making players write down who their friends are, who their rivals are, that goes a long way right there, but by interacting with those characters they are able to move each other around the emotional wheel, as well as changing the relationships between one another. I really like this because it quite fits that conceit (teenagers in high stress situations) and avoids having a status quo within the party.

    The GM also throws out events when interaction occur. For example, if one character leaps in front of another to take damage for her, the GM throws the Protected event at the character who got saved. That has a temporary effect on their emotions, and might also move their view of that character depending on their personality profile. For example, the saved character is paranoid and so now distrusts the character who saved them more. Or one character murders somebody in cold blood and everyone who finds out rolls the "Sin" event, so characters are pre-determined to be angry or disgusted by or attracted to that character. Yeah, it's not terribly freeform, but it makes sure players are thinking about this stuff. It's up to the players to figure out how to interpret it and roleplay it.
  • I had to leave an NWOD campaign that had been going for 6 months because people were stupid and taking 15 mintues for each turn, were more interested in the stats being accrued and only spoke in character after say "I say".
    The GM's hints to keep the story going were not strong enough.

    Kind of disappointing.

    Wish there were people at University who were willing to try out Burning Wheel without denouncing it.
    Yet everyone is gushing over 5th Edition D&D.
  • I'm halfway through the 5e starter set adventure. We have a couple player's handbooks in the group. The adventure itself is dry and artificially constructed (everyone in the group was making MMORPG jokes about the breadcrumb NPCs in the tavern pointing to the quest hubs), but I just want to make some generic comments on the game independant of that.

    It's not going to be as good at being a tactical fantasy miniatures combat board game as 4e was. YMMV, but that was one thing 4E D&D was really good at and I liked it some of the time when it actually felt interesting. I did not enjoy it in the long form campaign storytelling context, it felt forced and repetitive, but it was fun in places.

    It is easier to pick up and play than 3e or 4e. Like Moldvay basic set easy and better organized.

    Most of the numbers are better tuned that any of the other editions I've played so-far. It still has first level lethality, but I believe that's intentional.

    I think it may suffer from some of the same weaknesses older editions had that 3e and 4e tried to "fix" by having rules for everything. This is always going to be a conflict for some groups, and I know it's avoidable with the right people, but I'm positive there will be push back over time from people that want systems and consistency across the board. It's just part of the inherent conflict created by so many people using one game system to try to emulate so many different types of game (tactical, dramatic, silly, serious, challenging, relaxed, etc).

    Spells and magic items are once-again exceptional. I like that. There might still be some amount of expected +x weapons and +y armor cooked into the numbers, but I can live with it and since scaling was drastically reduced it's not even as big of a deal.

    I'm having fun so-far, but I need to finish the starter set and go into running the kind of game I want to run. I will say, the fact I'm excited to do that is a good sign.
  • I need to break down this horrifyingly OP test character my playesters vomited up for Five Across the Heart, because it's the kind of cheesiness that warms my soul. It uses a really clever intersection of a bunch of different moving parts, namely combining spell particles, costume parts and the character's Aspect (their associated element) in a really clever way.

    So, normally you are only able to cast 1 spell per turn, hard limit. There are only two exceptions in the game, and both are mutually exclusive base costume parts, essentially entirely separate classes. The one relevant for this discussion is the Absurdly Puffy Outfit, the base part of choice for support mages. It makes it so that any spell with Restoring, the spell particle that converts damage done into healing, can be cast with the support spell stat Connection, even if it is normally an offensive spell. The other thing it does is let you cast up to three spells using Connection per turn. This allows a user of this outfit to lay down a lot of healing and shields and such for their group.

    So the player started with that, and got terrible with it.

    Next, they took the Fire aspect. Fire is the aspect you take if you're really aggressive because it throws damage over time onto enemies, and one of the corollaries is that if something includes Fire, it can never heal damage.

    Finally, the character took three relatively innocuous components. Sleeves from the kit focused on ramping up your power level, which give you Equilibrium, the stat that caps your PL, every time you land a damaging hit. The Overdrive Core from the Kill-la-Kill inspired Violence Idol kit, which you turn on and it sends you rocketing uncontrollably up in Power Level, which is a dangerous item at the best of times. And the base spell particle Dart, which shoots out three small projectiles that each apply on-hit effects, but do minimal damage. Plus a bunch of misc spell particles, including Punishing, which adds extra damage.

    Only then was the dark plan revealed.

    Fire is worded such that it can never heal, but nothing said you couldn't apply healing spell particles to it. Just that they wouldn't do anything. So this character starts off by casting Healing Dart, which counts as a Connection spell but still does damage, three times for a total of nine projectiles. Each hit is buffing her Equilibrium by 1, so if she targets squishiest she's quickly flying up a meter that is normally very difficult to climb. This allows her to pull the cord on Overdrive Core real early, meaning she'll be at the max PL of 10 almost immediately. Already super overpowered, but because PL directly translates into the game's action economy, it also means she now has enough action points to take Dart and start piling spell effects, including the bonus damage one, onto it while still being able to spam it, for a potential total of 36 damage in a turn plus fire effects, enough to kill absolutely anything in the game.

    I immediately changed the wording on the Fire aspect and the entire build fell apart. But gold star!
  • This is pertinent to my interests. It sounds almost like how one can make an incredibly strong character in savage worlds by taking role playing penalties. Which usually results in an extremely proficient wizard-doctor-mechanic-stunt driver-sniper that is always a hair trigger away from being an extremely proficient bloodthirsty psychopath-action hero-idiot.

    How soon can we create such abominations in your world?
  • ThatGent said:

    This is pertinent to my interests. It sounds almost like how one can make an incredibly strong character in savage worlds by taking role playing penalties. Which usually results in an extremely proficient wizard-doctor-mechanic-stunt driver-sniper that is always a hair trigger away from being an extremely proficient bloodthirsty psychopath-action hero-idiot.

    How soon can we create such abominations in your world?

    I haven't currently got any way to make characters who are a little off to get more power, but people have tried. For example, on the day they had to go fight cops for a playtest, one of them made a psychopath character who got angry when her toys broke, and used anger as a motivating emotion, so there was nothing stopping her from killing cops.

    Save for all her friends restraining her, because they got hit with fallout events from the actions and it was forcing them to spend Equilibrium to avoid being overwhelmed with disgust/horror/sadness at their comrade slaughtering innocent police officers. :P

    I'm hard at work on the third draft of the rules, but there's a lot more to go. I'm running another playtest today or tomorrow featuring the Black Moon Clan analog the Paradox Exiles and their super annoying regenerating robot servants.
  • I just ran, bar none, the best RPG session I've ever run. Everyone in my crew has taken to Burning Wheel like a fish to water and one All Star player essentially made a Dave and Joel "DIDN'T YOU KNOW IT WAS ME" play that blew everyone's mind.
  • edited October 2014
    Jordan O. said:

    I just ran, bar none, the best RPG session I've ever run. Everyone in my crew has taken to Burning Wheel like a fish to water and one All Star player essentially made a Dave and Joel "DIDN'T YOU KNOW IT WAS ME" play that blew everyone's mind.

    Masago the Silkspinner???????????

    Man, playtesting new games is awesome. Yesterday I ran the first real test of my small GMless party RPG Collateral Damage, which is a game about sci-fi disaster response that basically models the plot arcs of shows like Dirty Pair or Dominion Tank Police. The system broke down entirely midway through the test and I had to rewrite it on the fly (my math was way off) and it somehow ended up really fun anyway, especially due to the team's ability to roll 1s on every dice, regardless of size.
    Post edited by open_sketchbook on
  • I mentioned this on the Kickstarter thread, but they're rebooting Paranoia.
  • Played My Life With Master last night. What a brilliant game! The most surprising thing was that it was written more than 10 years ago! Late to the party, eh?

    We did a bit of a festive game with the master being an evil german toymaker. He wanted all the orphans working for him and wanted all the milk in the village for them to drink. I promised my love that I'd rescue her cow from the master's milking machine (think of the torture machine from the Princess Bride) but the master demanded I kill the cow for making too much noise (the sound of ultimate suffering).

    The other characters got good endings but mine was self destruction. So I became a broken toy maker just carving figures of our dead master (I borrowed from Daedalus' ending in some tellings of the Icarus tale).
  • I just read my Night Witches PDF, and... I think it might be the best RPG I've ever read.
  • Dang... I haven't had the chance to dig in yet. Will try to read it this weekend and hopefully take it for a spin this summer.

    What in particular do you like about it?
  • Burning Wheel, character burning for a campaign set in Westeros, north of the wall, retrieving the horn that awakens the giants. I'm pleased with these lifepaths: City born, Student, lead to Religious, Zealous Convert, lead to Outcast, Gravedigger.

    Thomas Kirkwood is Faithful, but miracles won't work on people who don't worship the old gods of the forest. My friend Sean is playing Thomas's oldest sister, who definitely doesn't give two shits about the old gods of the forest. Thomas spent more RPs on his ditch-digging equipment than he did on his sword. He is grave-wise, cemetery-wise, and bone-wise.
  • I'm sure this will stimulate plenty of discussion in the wrong way, but whatever:

    Can anyone offer me some compelling reasons as to why I should get into tabletop RPGs? I can understand that a tabletop RPG's core appeals include group storytelling and group problem-solving, and I can definitely see why some people may enjoy RPGs. However, I really don't feel the need to read 60 pages of rules just to learn how swinging my sword affects target X because wandering around while daydreaming to melodic music is good enough for me.

    Also, I abhor group-work and co-op board games, so the group problem-solving aspect definitely falls flat.

    Or, should I just not force myself to get into hobbies where I may experience more agony than amusement?
  • Don't play games where you need to read 60 pages of rules for swinging a fucking sword.
  • Actually, don't play games that aren't at least interesting to you—with the possible exception of giving one-shots a chance.
    Hethalos said:

    I can understand that a tabletop RPG's core appeals include group storytelling

    "Group storytelling" is often a terrible, throwaway description when discussing rpgs. Most rpgs don't have rules for telling a story. Playing an rpg generates a story, but the act of play isn't necessarily "storytelling".
    Hethalos said:

    and group problem-solving … Also, I abhor group-work and co-op board games, so the group problem-solving aspect definitely falls flat.

    Depends on the game. So far, it sounds like you're describing a particular kind of dungeon crawl experience.
    Hethalos said:

    Or, should I just not force myself to get into hobbies where I may experience more agony than amusement?

    So what are you looking for? Is there a genre or movie or TV show or book or whatever other medium that you'd want to explore by roleplaying a character?
  • okeefe said:


    Hethalos said:

    Or, should I just not force myself to get into hobbies where I may experience more agony than amusement?

    So what are you looking for? Is there a genre or movie or TV show or book or whatever other medium that you'd want to explore by roleplaying a character?
    Actually, I think not. Maybe I should just stick to my good ol' board games.

  • Hethalos said:

    I'm sure this will stimulate plenty of discussion in the wrong way, but whatever:

    Can anyone offer me some compelling reasons as to why I should get into tabletop RPGs? I can understand that a tabletop RPG's core appeals include group storytelling and group problem-solving, and I can definitely see why some people may enjoy RPGs. However, I really don't feel the need to read 60 pages of rules just to learn how swinging my sword affects target X because wandering around while daydreaming to melodic music is good enough for me.

    Also, I abhor group-work and co-op board games, so the group problem-solving aspect definitely falls flat.

    Or, should I just not force myself to get into hobbies where I may experience more agony than amusement?

    I think your main problem is that your view on what roleplaying games and tabletop roleplaying is, are skewed. Of course I'm not blaming your for that, roleplaying is extremely varied hobby with many styles and schools of play, but even in the nerdy/geeky circles people usually only know about D&D and the style of play it promotes.
  • Apsup said:

    Hethalos said:

    I'm sure this will stimulate plenty of discussion in the wrong way, but whatever:

    Can anyone offer me some compelling reasons as to why I should get into tabletop RPGs? I can understand that a tabletop RPG's core appeals include group storytelling and group problem-solving, and I can definitely see why some people may enjoy RPGs. However, I really don't feel the need to read 60 pages of rules just to learn how swinging my sword affects target X because wandering around while daydreaming to melodic music is good enough for me.

    Also, I abhor group-work and co-op board games, so the group problem-solving aspect definitely falls flat.

    Or, should I just not force myself to get into hobbies where I may experience more agony than amusement?

    I think your main problem is that your view on what roleplaying games and tabletop roleplaying is, are skewed. Of course I'm not blaming your for that, roleplaying is extremely varied hobby with many styles and schools of play, but even in the nerdy/geeky circles people usually only know about D&D and the style of play it promotes.
    Oh, I see.

  • If you need to be convinced then the games are probably not for you.
  • More often then not, I like to pit my players against each other as the GM. I can't wait for all of my players to turn on this one guy who is becoming more and more of an insane ruler every session. Maybe I prefer tragedy?
  • edited February 2015
    One of the things I'm super into in writing RPGs is compressing information. I like defining common terms and being specific about things wherever I can so that rules can be explained briefly and simply.

    For instance, the first solid two pages of 5 Across the Heart are just a breakdown of all terminology. This is what a Dice Pool is. This is what a Statistic is. This is how high numbers go. Always round up. Never negative numbers. That kind of stuff.

    I ran into an interesting challenge today on one of my refinement passes. I'm switching a system from set target numbers (For which I use X+, in contrast to +X for Statistic modification) to an incremental system. Thus, a target could be increased or decreased dynamically. This gives both me and GMs a lot of control over curves, but I ran into an interesting problem.

    There's no common convention I can find to do this. + and - would be confusing in a context where iteratively modifiable dice pools also exist and use those.

    For now, I've settled on using ▾X and ▴X to do this. It works fairly well; "This challenge will be at +1 and ▴2" is pretty readable once it's been defined. But I would like to ask the learneneded peoples of this forum if they've ever seen another way that might be clearer? It's a bit counter-intuitive at first that ▴ makes things harder and ▾ makes things easier.
    Post edited by open_sketchbook on
  • My advice would be to not change the target number ever.
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