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Tabletop Games are RADch

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  • admanbadmanb unionize your workplace Seattle, WARegistered User regular
    admanb wrote: »
    I have very little interest in arguments about what is and isn’t OSR, but Zweihander is a retroclone and that’s good enough for me to use the blanket term.

    Stars Without Number has as much in common with Traveler as it has with OD&D.

    SWN (or at least the version I own) is literally B/X but in space.

    SWN (both versions) has a 2D6-based skill system which is definitely not in B/X.

  • webguy20webguy20 I spend too much time on the Internet Registered User regular
    edited September 2020
    Delduwath wrote: »
    Maddoc wrote: »
    It's less that they're doing it wrong and more that D&D teaches players that at any given time they have a list of Actions they have available to them, and they choose from those Actions.
    What I find amusing is that when 4th Ed officially recognized this tendency and codified it in the rules in a coherent and ergonomic way, the old guard rose up and declared with thunder and fury that what they want is a Highly Narrative Game, Actually.
    This can be a difficult habit to break when attempting to play a more narrative focused system where you are meant to describe your actions and then retroactively apply mechanics to it.
    Sure, it's a problem - when attempting to play a more narrative focused system. I think that for some folks, that kind of system isn't exciting, and I imagine that for some folks, not having a list of concrete Actions would be nerve-wracking and exhausting. I mean I agree with your core observation that D&D makes you develops habits that make it harder to switch to games of a different style, I'm just not sure that this makes them bad habits. Do you think that players who entered the hobby with PbtA can switch to D&D without friction?

    Preface: this is purely anecdotal, but ive found it way easier to get someone into a d20 game from other systems (genesys primarily) than vice versa. Now they were still a bit green with maybe a years experience with TTRPGs as a whole.

    These same folks also seem to have had an easier time picking up other rulesets, like blades, or other weird shit i find, versus the folks who have mainlined D&D.

    I think its like language. If you get a TTRPG player early, and expose them to multiple systems as they are developing as a player, they’ll have a greater understanding of the whole of the TTRPG spectrum. This is in contrast to the folks who the beginning and end of TTRPG is D&D and it’s clones.

    This isn’t to say people cant expand outward, but it does seem like its ALOT harder to get an experienced D&D player out of those ruts if they've never previously explored another system.

    One other benefit Ive found is that players coming into my games who’ve played games with a greater narative focus usually want to really work with me to help create and flesh out the world when we’re at the table, and have a better idea conceptually how to do that. I think the D&D adventure modules might be a bit detrimental in that regard. In that it presents the game as something the DM is presenting to us, versus a world we all inhabit. YMMV on that though.

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  • MaddocMaddoc I'm Bobbin Threadbare, are you my mother? Registered User regular
    This feels like a very semantic argument based on my using "bad habit" instead of, say, "D&D habit"

  • DelduwathDelduwath Registered User regular
    Maddoc wrote: »
    This feels like a very semantic argument based on my using "bad habit" instead of, say, "D&D habit"
    One of those is a value judgement, and I wanted to talk about how I disagree with that judgement. I know that in 99% of cases, when someone says "X is bad" - especially in an online conversation - what they are thinking is "In my opinion and experience, X is bad according to specific criteria that are meaningful to me", and writing the full disclaimer every time is exhausting and adds noise, but unfortunately I usually remember that only after I've made three impassioned counter-argument posts.

  • MahnmutMahnmut Registered User regular
    In DnD I'll try to describe doing something cool and then ten rounds of combat later I'm just like fuck it I hit it with a sword 7 damage, because that's all that really matters and describing superlative flips and twirls gets repetitive and affects nothing

    You can get here in Dungeon World; Dungeon World should have kept closer to AW's descriptive Harm clocks (at least for NPCs). You have to mindfully avoid situations where the players and the enemies are in a fictional stalemate until one side's HP finally runs out.

    Steam/LoL: Jericho89
  • DevoutlyApatheticDevoutlyApathetic Registered User regular
    So learning a new game system is a skill. If you only do it once you will not be as good at it as somebody who does it often. D&D's culture tends to have a large proportion that doesn't practice this skill much more than once a decade (edition changes.)

    That's a bit separate from D&D being born from a war game with a wizard hat on.

    Nod. Get treat. PSN: Quippish
  • Der Waffle MousDer Waffle Mous Blame this on the misfortune of your birth. New Yark, New Yark.Registered User regular
    admanb wrote: »
    admanb wrote: »
    I have very little interest in arguments about what is and isn’t OSR, but Zweihander is a retroclone and that’s good enough for me to use the blanket term.

    Stars Without Number has as much in common with Traveler as it has with OD&D.

    SWN (or at least the version I own) is literally B/X but in space.

    SWN (both versions) has a 2D6-based skill system which is definitely not in B/X.

    And classes, levels, D&D-style attribute bonuses, descending AC and saving throws aren't traveller.

    Steam PSN: DerWaffleMous Origin: DerWaffleMous Bnet: DerWaffle#1682
  • admanbadmanb unionize your workplace Seattle, WARegistered User regular
    So when do folks describe this stuff? Before or after you roll dice and figure out what happened?

    I'm curious what other people do.

    I think this question sneakily engages with wider ideas about how to run RPGs and I want to dig into that.

    Let's use a good ol' fashioned climbing-a-wall example. Your group is infiltrating something and you tell them there's a wall in front of them; the rogue says, "I take it at a run, jump, put one hand on top of the wall and use that to propel me over" but you interrupt:

    "Sorry -- the wall is actually quite tall. 10', with nasty-looking spikes on top. And you know this is where the guard patrols start."

    The rogue nods, "oh, in that case I'll run up the wall and stop at the top to check for guards and take it more carefully."

    "Make a climb check."

    Now you have a few options. If the rogue fails you can rewind the fiction -- "your feet fail to find purchase on the wall" -- but that's not very fail-forward of you. Instead, you can incorporate the fiction as described to the failure condition, "you peek over the top of the wall right as a guard is passing. They don't notice you, but you don't notice the brick you're using crumble and fall -- the guard definitely heard that, and you have a split second before they turn -- what do you do?"

    By not holding too tight to describe before vs. after you get a better base of fiction to work off of, which makes it easier to come up with interesting and logical consequences on the fly.

  • StraightziStraightzi Here we may reign secure, and in my choice, To reign is worth ambition though in HellRegistered User regular
    Mahnmut wrote: »
    In DnD I'll try to describe doing something cool and then ten rounds of combat later I'm just like fuck it I hit it with a sword 7 damage, because that's all that really matters and describing superlative flips and twirls gets repetitive and affects nothing

    You can get here in Dungeon World; Dungeon World should have kept closer to AW's descriptive Harm clocks (at least for NPCs). You have to mindfully avoid situations where the players and the enemies are in a fictional stalemate until one side's HP finally runs out.

    Yeah, my GM has at times reacted poorly to the fact that we have three party members that can output a truly tremendous amount of damage (fighter, barbarian, ranger) and set us up against enemies with absolutely massive HP pools and no real alternate solution beyond powering through them

    Those fights are slogs, and I end up switching from fun utility fighter mode (lots of defend actions, spotting weaknesses in enemy fighting styles, intimidating my foes) into just maximizing damage

    Which sucks not just for me getting bored with Hack and Slash every turn, but for my GM as well, because I'm not about to fail a Hack & Slash the way I might a Defend or a Discern Realities or whatever

  • JacobkoshJacobkosh Gamble a stamp. I can show you how to be a real man!Moderator mod
    So learning a new game system is a skill. If you only do it once you will not be as good at it as somebody who does it often. D&D's culture tends to have a large proportion that doesn't practice this skill much more than once a decade (edition changes.)

    That's a bit separate from D&D being born from a war game with a wizard hat on.

    I would also say that D&D supports, or at least makes possible, a lower level of player engagement than a lot of other games. You can kind of suckass your way through a D&D session by gently snoozing through the talky parts and mumbling "I attack" during the HP shaving parts in a way you absolutely could not do in a session of PbtA or Genesys or what have you. I've had no shortage of players who've done this, in fact, and I've been one myself a few times, showing up to a morning session hungover or just a rocky mess. If you don't do it too often or too egregiously, you can halfass your way through whole campaigns like this.

    That's an extreme example, of course, but there's also lots and lots of people who are perfectly content to just stay in first gear and kind of sit there attentively but passively, waiting for their turn to cast a spell. They're here to play the fun boardgame that you tell jokes about. That's what they want. They're not interested in thinking about their character any more deeply than what's required to fill out the boxes on the page. That shit is work, they don't do it naturally on their own time, and it's just the price of admission to get to the dice-rolling part they enjoy.

    And that's fine. I don't think every D&D player is potentially fungible to all other systems or game styles; I don't think every guy piloting Bob II the Fighter is a budding roleplayer yearning to spread their wings and fly. Some people are very happy in first gear and that's fine.

    I just wish D&D didn't go the extra mile to make it harder for people to switch. It teaches both players and DMs so many habits that are useless or even actively detrimental in most other settings or systems. The biggest game in the RPG hobby, instead of being a gateway drug, acts more like a...portcullis drug.

    rRwz9.gif
  • DevoutlyApatheticDevoutlyApathetic Registered User regular
    admanb wrote: »
    So when do folks describe this stuff? Before or after you roll dice and figure out what happened?

    I'm curious what other people do.

    I think this question sneakily engages with wider ideas about how to run RPGs and I want to dig into that.

    Let's use a good ol' fashioned climbing-a-wall example. Your group is infiltrating something and you tell them there's a wall in front of them; the rogue says, "I take it at a run, jump, put one hand on top of the wall and use that to propel me over" but you interrupt:

    "Sorry -- the wall is actually quite tall. 10', with nasty-looking spikes on top. And you know this is where the guard patrols start."

    The rogue nods, "oh, in that case I'll run up the wall and stop at the top to check for guards and take it more carefully."

    "Make a climb check."

    Now you have a few options. If the rogue fails you can rewind the fiction -- "your feet fail to find purchase on the wall" -- but that's not very fail-forward of you. Instead, you can incorporate the fiction as described to the failure condition, "you peek over the top of the wall right as a guard is passing. They don't notice you, but you don't notice the brick you're using crumble and fall -- the guard definitely heard that, and you have a split second before they turn -- what do you do?"

    By not holding too tight to describe before vs. after you get a better base of fiction to work off of, which makes it easier to come up with interesting and logical consequences on the fly.

    Note the switch from a mechanical focused, "do you climb the wall?", to a narrative focused focused "Do you encounter problems when you climb the wall?". That second is way healthier for a flowing game to use.

    Nod. Get treat. PSN: Quippish
  • ElvenshaeElvenshae Registered User regular
    Steelhawk wrote: »
    So why does D&D get deuces dropped on it, and other systems don't?

    I want to respond to this part specifically. And I want to make it clear that I'm responding to this as, primarily, a D&D DM, a D&D player, a huge fan of Pathfinder, and as someone who unabashedly loves the Forgotten Realms (being a playtester for the 3E setting book is one of my gaming highlights!) and Birthright and Eberron and etc. Like, I fuckin' love me some D&D.

    D&D gets outsize deuces dropped on it, to the extent it does, I think, because of three things.

    First is that D&D is, without a doubt, the biggest elephagorilla* in the room. It's the biggest roleplaying game, the one that has the most discussion going on around it on all corners of the web. It is, in fact, synonymous with tabletop roleplaying for the majority of the population. It had actual** movies released in real theaters about it, back when that was a thing that happened. (Even if we don't talk about them much.) So, naturally, it's going to collect an outsize portion of shit because it collects an outsize portion of everything.

    Second, D&D gets flak because people continue to insist that D&D does "everything." And, from a broad-enough viewpoint, this is true. People have run games of D&D that focus on investigations, on kingdom management (remember that I love Birthright, and Kingmaker is my GOAT), on romances, on chandelier-swinging pirate adventures complete with boats, on LOTR-style epic quests***, etc. But the mechanics of D&D - the actual rules which determine which dice you roll and when and what numbers you need to get - are not that broad. They give you a launching-off point, some inspiration, but there really isn't anything in the rules that tell you what it takes to set up a Thieves' Guild. (Contrast with, e.g., Shadowrun, which in its character-creation rules tells you what you need to do to start with an allied biker gang, for instance.) Instead, the DM is supposed to take the rules as inspiration and figure it out themselves. Accordingly, it's not really D&D that's telling you how to do it. It's your group deciding how to do that. But many ardent defenders of D&D don't separate out "what the rules of D&D directly enable" vs. "what we added onto the rules to get what we wanted from it." And, in some ways, that's understandable, because for everyone at the table, they were absolutely playing D&D when they did those murder investigations, and TTRPGs by their nature include quite a bit of "add on some things to get what you want from it." The question is largely one of degree.

    But, one thing I've absolutely come to appreciate - and its visible in the tabletop design space, in computer games, etc. - is that the rules mechanics you build are the ones you want your players to engage with. The things you provide pagecount and mechanics for are what your game is actually about. X-Wing is about building a squadron of fighters and support ships, carefully maneuvering them around a battlespace against an adversary, and cursing at d8s. You can hack it into, for a random example, a campaign where individual pilots mature over time, but that's not what X-Wing is about (it's what Heroes of the Aturi Cluster is about, and you can see some of the seams there where a game was repurposed to do something it wasn't originally built to do, just like adding seafaring adventure to D&D reveals some issues with, e.g., assumed 2d battle spaces, the swimming and encumbrance rules, etc.).

    For many ardent defenders of D&D, "I did this while playing D&D" is synonymous with "D&D does this," and I think, realistically speaking, that's wrong.

    Lastly, a lot of other games are, in various ways, reactions to D&D - and they've been made with the understanding that the rules you write are the things your game does. Thus, when someone challenges D&D and says, "It doesn't do murder investigations well!" the ardent D&D defender will say, "Yes, it does! We did one last week (using a bunch of houseruled stuff and some off-the-cuff rulings)!" When someone challenges Gumshoe and says, "It doesn't handle mass combat well!," the ardent Gumshoe defender will say, "Yeah, no kidding; if you want that, you should play [Foo]." The ardent Gumshoe defender understands that their game is built to do a couple of things well, rather than "everything" poorly. And this is in part because, back to point 1, the only people who know or care about Gumshoe are people who have specifically sought it out, rather than just sort of culturally attaching to it - so they're more likely to have thought about point 2 and how it applies to Gumshoe and are also likely to have played D&D at some point in the past, too, and can compare and contrast.

    * A wizard did it.
    ** Ehhhhhhhh ...
    *** Low-level D&D, for most of its life, is insanely lethal. Higher-level D&D is somewhat less lethal, but insta-death is basically a possibility across the entire game cycle. High-lethality doesn't mesh with long-form, character-driven drama. Similarly, the rules for d20 Star Wars Revised edition did a poor job at emulating the SW movies because the critical hit system made every attack from any given mook potentially lethal, with something like a near 10% chance of a random PC getting instagibbed between 1st and 20th level, ignoring literally every other potential way the characters could die. That's not really the way Star Wars works for the main protagonists.

  • SteelhawkSteelhawk Registered User regular
    I'm going to awesome that post because 1) it was good and 2) Elephagorilla.

    (Its mostly #2)

  • StraightziStraightzi Here we may reign secure, and in my choice, To reign is worth ambition though in HellRegistered User regular
    Thinking about D&D, although more tangentially to this conversation perhaps.

    For the sake of argument, let's say that D&D's resolution mechanism (1d20+skill) is good. This is a statement I might actually agree with, for the record. I don't terribly like the pass/fail nature of it and I think it's too swingy, but I think there is something intuitive about the idea. You have a variety of things that you know how to do to varying degrees, you add in a bit of random chance, and you can either do a given task or not.

    And that can be the whole game. You can play an entire game where you have the conversation of like:
    Player: I swing from a chandelier down to the ground floor, landing in front of the marauder.
    GM: Great, that's an acrobatics roll - DC 20.
    Player: Success!
    GM: Alright, on their turn they grab a vase off the nearby table and swing it towards your head - do they hit with a 13?
    Player: No such luck. I dodge out of the way, letting the vase smash into the wall behind me, and draw my axe and chop off their head.
    GM: Alright, roll your attack.
    Player: Does an eighteen plus three hit?
    GM: Sure does, now they're beheaded.
    That of course doesn't have hit points or anything like that, and I'm guessing you would want to build some of that stuff out if you were actually trying to play that game (even something as simple as increased difficulty for an instant kill, or having to work against disadvantage). Or maybe not, I don't know, maybe you do want your players to be able to one hit their enemies - there's absolutely a sort of game where that could feel appropriate.

    But there's also a lot of fiddly stuff associated with D&D. And I think that's part of the difficulty we've identified here. If the entirety of D&D was just 1d20+skill, I'm not sure that anyone would have a problem with Major Illusion as written - it would be the same as swinging from a chandelier, you just roll your illusions skill and if you succeed then your illusion succeeds, resulting in the desired effect. But most spells (and many other things) are more fiddly than just a pass/fail situation.

  • MaddocMaddoc I'm Bobbin Threadbare, are you my mother? Registered User regular
    I do actually also think they are bad habits, mind you, insofar as my experience has been that it makes it actively more difficult to play many other games.

    For people who are only interested in playing D&D, that's fine. As someone who is interested in game design I think that only being interested in one game is a shame and also an utterly alien mindset.

    To address the other issue yes I think someone who learned, say, Apocalypse World first will have an easier time also playing D&D than vice versa because there is nothing inherently wrong with describing your action and then figuring out which mechanics to apply to it in D&D, I just think the system does not encourage that sort of gameplay and I think that Player-who-started-with-PbtA will more than likely adjust their play style at least while playing D&D to something that engages with the system more efficiently (either that or they just won't like D&D)

  • webguy20webguy20 I spend too much time on the Internet Registered User regular
    Straightzi wrote: »
    Thinking about D&D, although more tangentially to this conversation perhaps.

    For the sake of argument, let's say that D&D's resolution mechanism (1d20+skill) is good. This is a statement I might actually agree with, for the record. I don't terribly like the pass/fail nature of it and I think it's too swingy, but I think there is something intuitive about the idea. You have a variety of things that you know how to do to varying degrees, you add in a bit of random chance, and you can either do a given task or not.

    And that can be the whole game. You can play an entire game where you have the conversation of like:
    Player: I swing from a chandelier down to the ground floor, landing in front of the marauder.
    GM: Great, that's an acrobatics roll - DC 20.
    Player: Success!
    GM: Alright, on their turn they grab a vase off the nearby table and swing it towards your head - do they hit with a 13?
    Player: No such luck. I dodge out of the way, letting the vase smash into the wall behind me, and draw my axe and chop off their head.
    GM: Alright, roll your attack.
    Player: Does an eighteen plus three hit?
    GM: Sure does, now they're beheaded.
    That of course doesn't have hit points or anything like that, and I'm guessing you would want to build some of that stuff out if you were actually trying to play that game (even something as simple as increased difficulty for an instant kill, or having to work against disadvantage). Or maybe not, I don't know, maybe you do want your players to be able to one hit their enemies - there's absolutely a sort of game where that could feel appropriate.

    But there's also a lot of fiddly stuff associated with D&D. And I think that's part of the difficulty we've identified here. If the entirety of D&D was just 1d20+skill, I'm not sure that anyone would have a problem with Major Illusion as written - it would be the same as swinging from a chandelier, you just roll your illusions skill and if you succeed then your illusion succeeds, resulting in the desired effect. But most spells (and many other things) are more fiddly than just a pass/fail situation.

    This is just basically doing 4e skill challenges for everything, a combat would just be looking for a certain amount of successes before an amount of failures. Id be down to try that.

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  • MaddocMaddoc I'm Bobbin Threadbare, are you my mother? Registered User regular
    Also this thread is reminding me that I need to crack open my copy of Bubblegumshoe

  • StraightziStraightzi Here we may reign secure, and in my choice, To reign is worth ambition though in HellRegistered User regular
    webguy20 wrote: »
    Straightzi wrote: »
    Thinking about D&D, although more tangentially to this conversation perhaps.

    For the sake of argument, let's say that D&D's resolution mechanism (1d20+skill) is good. This is a statement I might actually agree with, for the record. I don't terribly like the pass/fail nature of it and I think it's too swingy, but I think there is something intuitive about the idea. You have a variety of things that you know how to do to varying degrees, you add in a bit of random chance, and you can either do a given task or not.

    And that can be the whole game. You can play an entire game where you have the conversation of like:
    Player: I swing from a chandelier down to the ground floor, landing in front of the marauder.
    GM: Great, that's an acrobatics roll - DC 20.
    Player: Success!
    GM: Alright, on their turn they grab a vase off the nearby table and swing it towards your head - do they hit with a 13?
    Player: No such luck. I dodge out of the way, letting the vase smash into the wall behind me, and draw my axe and chop off their head.
    GM: Alright, roll your attack.
    Player: Does an eighteen plus three hit?
    GM: Sure does, now they're beheaded.
    That of course doesn't have hit points or anything like that, and I'm guessing you would want to build some of that stuff out if you were actually trying to play that game (even something as simple as increased difficulty for an instant kill, or having to work against disadvantage). Or maybe not, I don't know, maybe you do want your players to be able to one hit their enemies - there's absolutely a sort of game where that could feel appropriate.

    But there's also a lot of fiddly stuff associated with D&D. And I think that's part of the difficulty we've identified here. If the entirety of D&D was just 1d20+skill, I'm not sure that anyone would have a problem with Major Illusion as written - it would be the same as swinging from a chandelier, you just roll your illusions skill and if you succeed then your illusion succeeds, resulting in the desired effect. But most spells (and many other things) are more fiddly than just a pass/fail situation.

    This is just basically doing 4e skill challenges for everything, a combat would just be looking for a certain amount of successes before an amount of failures. Id be down to try that.

    Yeah, actually, that's a great way to think about it

    You'd want to break out combat stuff into skills in some way, as things like base attack bonus or spellcasting modifier aren't actually skills in the specific D&D sense of skills, but that wouldn't be that difficult to do

    I worry it would get too abstract, with everyone just providing their various aspects of the skill challenge not really congealing into a proper scene, but I do think it would be worth a try

  • Der Waffle MousDer Waffle Mous Blame this on the misfortune of your birth. New Yark, New Yark.Registered User regular
    edited September 2020
    I've been informed that at some point OSR stopped being strictly synonymous with oD&D retroclones and expanded to include stuff inspired by other 70s/80s systems so Zweihander and SWN (whether b/x or traveller) are absolutely OSR.

    I am also now enamoured with Mausritter.

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  • StraightziStraightzi Here we may reign secure, and in my choice, To reign is worth ambition though in HellRegistered User regular
    Maddoc wrote: »
    Also this thread is reminding me that I need to crack open my copy of Bubblegumshoe

    Oh did you also just order a copy before it went out of print?

  • MaddocMaddoc I'm Bobbin Threadbare, are you my mother? Registered User regular
    Straightzi wrote: »
    Maddoc wrote: »
    Also this thread is reminding me that I need to crack open my copy of Bubblegumshoe

    Oh did you also just order a copy before it went out of print?

    I have had it for a couple years now actually, grabbed it at PAX awhile back but never really sat down and chewed through it

    My one regret in life is that I was never able to be a mystery solving teen

  • DarmakDarmak RAGE vympyvvhyc vyctyvyRegistered User regular
    Maddoc wrote: »
    Also this thread is reminding me that I need to crack open my copy of Bubblegumshoe

    Why would you put bubblegum on your shoe? 🤔

    Also, why are detectives called "gumshoes" anyways?

    JtgVX0H.png
  • StraightziStraightzi Here we may reign secure, and in my choice, To reign is worth ambition though in HellRegistered User regular
    Darmak wrote: »
    Maddoc wrote: »
    Also this thread is reminding me that I need to crack open my copy of Bubblegumshoe

    Why would you put bubblegum on your shoe? 🤔

    Also, why are detectives called "gumshoes" anyways?

    A gumshoe is an old fashioned term for those like, rubber things that you put over your dress shoes

    They're designed to protect your shoes from rain and mud, and also tend to make your tread a bit quieter, which is where the connection specifically comes from

  • Beef AvengerBeef Avenger Registered User regular
    edited September 2020
    A lot of DnD frustration also comes from: in trying to do everything and failing to acknowledge its weaknesses, it creates bad GMs and players who fail to capitalize on its strengths. You have to actually understand what a system does to make the most use of it

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  • Hexmage-PAHexmage-PA Registered User regular
    edited September 2020
    I'll admit a very large part of why I like D&D has nothing to do with the rules. It's the fact that there's nearly fifty years of lore to sift through. I get to go through all that lore, find what I like, and play connect the dots with it. It's why I always make my own scenarios and campaigns and never run pre-published adventures, at best scavenging through them for pieces to extract and repurpose. I also really enjoy the concept of interplanar politics between gods, archdukes of the Hells, demon lords, efreeti, Primus, etc.

    For example, take the demon lady of fungi, Zuggtmoy.

    l2rl2c4pp0jl.jpg

    Throughout my research I've found a number of facts about her spread throughout the editions that I find fascinating:

    - Zuggtmoy once manipulated four different cults of Elemental Evil to serve her will, assuming the false persona of the Elder Elemental Eye. She even crafted a kind of demonic, fungus-infested, shapechifting earth elementals called rukarazyll to assume human form and act as priests for the Cult of Ogremoch, the evil prince of the Plane of Earth. Her alliance with Ogremoch earned Sunnis, the good princess of Elemental Earth, as an enemy.
    - In the Abyss Zuggtmoy has an alliance with Haagenti, a demonic alchemist, who is using samples from her domain of Mycoriji to create a new fungal respiratory disease. Zuggtmoy plans to trick several druid circles into believing she is a nature spirit that is leading them on a quest to cure the disease, corrupting their minds as they go.
    - Zuggtmoy is also an ally of Graz'zt, the Demon Lord of Hedonism. The both of them oppose Lolth, the demonic goddess of spiders and the drow, and try to cause chaos for Lolth's followers in the Underdark.
    - Zuggtmoy once had a tryst with Torog, the god of suffering, slavery, and imprisonment. Their offspring was the demon lord Ugudenk, a miles long worm who wants to create an interplanar tunnel from the Abyss to the Underdark, where his father dwells.
    - Zuggtmoy's realm was ransacked by the demon lord of frost giants, Kostchtchie (himself secretly a creation and pawn of Graz'zt's lover Iggwilv the Witch Queen). The chaos allowed Juiblex, demon lord of ooze, to gain a foothold in Zuggtmoy's realm and war for dominance. Mortal adventurers may be surprised to find that Zuggtmoy is very keen to employ them to fight Juiblex's forces and to locate treasures Kostchtchie stole from her.
    - As part of her campaign to drive Juiblex from her realm Zuggtmoy once opened portals to the Plane of Water to wash away the lord of ooze and his slime pits. The attempt ultimately failed, but an avatar of Juiblex called the Hermit who supposedly knows many secrets of the multiverse now lives in a thoroughly polluted region of the Plane of Water.
    - A city populated by mortals and descendants of mortals exists in Zuggtmoy's demonic realm. Known as Xhubhullosk, the citizenry are kept captive by myconids and forced to worship Zuggtmoy, either by willing faith or unwilling infestation by mind-altering fungi.
    - Zuggtmoy can infest creatures with spores that cause them to become mindless, fungus-ridden pawns. The resulting spore servant can mutate if the infested creature had a particularly wicked soul, gaining unique abilities.
    - A nameless grave to a forgotten goddess of rot and decay associated with the Underdark exists in the fortress of the god Nerull in the plane of Pluton. Could it be that Zuggtmoy is the remains of that goddess, animated into a demonic mockery of what she once was by her own fungi? Maybe she hates Lolth because she wants to take Lolth's spark of divinity and become a goddess again. Maybe she doesn't even know her past life.

    And that's all just for one demon lord! There's plenty of connections there to other characters and locations as well that I can use as I see fit. For instance, Zuggtmoy has an alliance with Graz'zt, but Graz'zt's on-again-off-again lover Iggwilv secretly created and manipulates Kotschtchie, who attacked Zuggtmoy's realm and led to Juiblex's ongoing occupation. Did Graz'zt want Iggwilv to do this, or was she acting of her own accord? Further, if Zuggtmoy's son Ugudenk wants to create a massive tunnel from the demon realm to the Underdark, does she plan to take advantage of her son's actions if he succeeds and use the tunnel for her own invasion? Plus, given her abilities, you could imagine unique circumstances where other creatures want to ally with her; for example, a remote village where all who die rise as zombies due to a curse could cooperate with myconids loyal to Zuggtmoy to instead turn the recently deceased into spore servants that instead protect the village, resulting in a cult of Zuggtmoy forming.

    I could always just take all the lore D&D created and use it in another system, but it'd feel weird and almost disrespectful, in a way.

    Hexmage-PA on
  • DelduwathDelduwath Registered User regular
    Maddoc wrote: »
    Also this thread is reminding me that I need to crack open my copy of Bubblegumshoe
    Maddoc wrote: »
    I have had it for a couple years now actually, grabbed it at PAX awhile back but never really sat down and chewed through it
    :mad:

  • Hexmage-PAHexmage-PA Registered User regular
    I will also say that, as someone who has only played D&D, I was under the impression that it was a pretty rules heavy system and that many other RPGs are comparatively rules light and freeform. As in, I ignorantly assumed that the way D&D handles Minor Illusion was how many other games did everything, with many things left to Game Master fiat.

    I'm not sure where I got that idea, honestly.

  • DevoutlyApatheticDevoutlyApathetic Registered User regular
    Hexmage-PA wrote: »
    I will also say that, as someone who has only played D&D, I was under the impression that it was a pretty rules heavy system and that many other RPGs are comparatively rules light and freeform. As in, I ignorantly assumed that the way D&D handles Minor Illusion was how many other games did everything, with many things left to Game Master fiat.

    I'm not sure where I got that idea, honestly.

    The popular trend the last few years has been more towards lighter more narrative games. They certain take up a lot of the discussion space here. There are some very crunchy games out there though that put D&D to shame. Pretty much any edition of Shadowrun is crunchier than D&D by any metric you choose.

    Which is a whole other discussion, how to measure crunch. Some of it is the number of specific versus general rules. Another strong metric, to me, is how many choices are made during character creation. D&D you've got race/class/background, skills (sorta) and maybe some spells? Even counting each attribute as a choice you're at like a dozen choices, most with a small number of options. That is nothing compared to some games out there which are entirely point buy or some variant of classless.

    In general I'd put D&D has fairly middle of the pack. Some editions have been crunchier, 3 and 4, and 5th started lighter but is swinging heavier as all editions do as cruft builds up.

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  • Beef AvengerBeef Avenger Registered User regular
    edited September 2020
    Hexmage-PA wrote: »
    I will also say that, as someone who has only played D&D, I was under the impression that it was a pretty rules heavy system and that many other RPGs are comparatively rules light and freeform. As in, I ignorantly assumed that the way D&D handles Minor Illusion was how many other games did everything, with many things left to Game Master fiat.

    I'm not sure where I got that idea, honestly.

    DnD is extremely rules heavy in some areas while rules light in others, but it mixes and mashes those two domains together all over without acknowledging the difference. Exactly like how we've talked about illusion magic. Magic is pretty rules intense in a lot of ways, you have X spell slots a day, you can only recover those slots in specific ways, this spell does Y damage on this roll and inflicts this status condition which if you go to the appendix you'll see affects these other rolls in this specific way... while this other spell is described purely in flavor text and the result is totally dependent on the GM.

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  • DrascinDrascin Registered User regular
    edited September 2020
    Elvenshae wrote: »
    Lastly, a lot of other games are, in various ways, reactions to D&D - and they've been made with the understanding that the rules you write are the things your game does. Thus, when someone challenges D&D and says, "It doesn't do murder investigations well!" the ardent D&D defender will say, "Yes, it does! We did one last week (using a bunch of houseruled stuff and some off-the-cuff rulings)!" When someone challenges Gumshoe and says, "It doesn't handle mass combat well!," the ardent Gumshoe defender will say, "Yeah, no kidding; if you want that, you should play [Foo]." The ardent Gumshoe defender understands that their game is built to do a couple of things well, rather than "everything" poorly. And this is in part because, back to point 1, the only people who know or care about Gumshoe are people who have specifically sought it out, rather than just sort of culturally attaching to it - so they're more likely to have thought about point 2 and how it applies to Gumshoe and are also likely to have played D&D at some point in the past, too, and can compare and contrast.

    I do feel like there's something to be said for non-specialist games. I once read a comment that went more or less "we can laugh at the people hacking D&D to have a murder mystery in their campaign instead of just playing Gumshoe, but when you get down to it, if you just want to have a murder mystery episode in your fantasy A-Team campaign, it is much easier to staple passable investigation stuff to D&D than staple passable A-team mechanics to Gumshoe", and honestly I remember it because I thought it hit the nail on the head. Learning systems is a much bigger commitment than just taking whatever you're already doing, so if someone is doing D&D or Genesys or something and doesn't want to be arsed to learn a new system and would rather just sorta hack together enough for passable off-genre, more power to them.

    And like. Telling your players "okay, and now you have to learn an entirely new system for next campaign" is a big ask. Most of us here are extreme outliers. We read RPG sourcebooks for fun. In my experience, your average player will spend three months playing a Wulin campaign before they start remembering how the River works without prompting.

    (...and to be honest, even I am tired enough that my energy to just learn new systems is at an all time low, because, you know, everything in the world. I've been invited to a Star Trek adventures game and I don't know if I'll manage to actually give the book a once over to join)

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  • webguy20webguy20 I spend too much time on the Internet Registered User regular
    Drascin wrote: »
    Elvenshae wrote: »
    Lastly, a lot of other games are, in various ways, reactions to D&D - and they've been made with the understanding that the rules you write are the things your game does. Thus, when someone challenges D&D and says, "It doesn't do murder investigations well!" the ardent D&D defender will say, "Yes, it does! We did one last week (using a bunch of houseruled stuff and some off-the-cuff rulings)!" When someone challenges Gumshoe and says, "It doesn't handle mass combat well!," the ardent Gumshoe defender will say, "Yeah, no kidding; if you want that, you should play [Foo]." The ardent Gumshoe defender understands that their game is built to do a couple of things well, rather than "everything" poorly. And this is in part because, back to point 1, the only people who know or care about Gumshoe are people who have specifically sought it out, rather than just sort of culturally attaching to it - so they're more likely to have thought about point 2 and how it applies to Gumshoe and are also likely to have played D&D at some point in the past, too, and can compare and contrast.

    I do feel like there's something to be said for non-specialist games. I once read a comment that went more or less "we can laugh at the people hacking D&D to have a murder mystery in their campaign instead of just playing Gumshoe, but when you get down to it, if you just want to have a murder mystery episode in your fantasy A-Team campaign, it is much easier to staple passable investigation stuff to D&D than staple passable A-team mechanics to Gumshoe", and honestly I remember it because I thought it hit the nail on the head. Learning systems is a much bigger commitment than just taking whatever you're already doing, so if someone is doing D&D or Genesys or something and doesn't want to be arsed to learn a new system and would rather just sorta hack together enough for passable off-genre, more power to them.

    And like. Telling your players "okay, and now you have to learn an entirely new system for next campaign" is a big ask. Most of us here are extreme outliers. We read RPG sourcebooks for fun. In my experience, your average player will spend three months playing a Wulin campaign before they start remembering how the River works without prompting.

    (...and to be honest, even I am tired enough that my energy to just learn new systems is at an all time low, because, you know, everything in the world. I've been invited to a Star Trek adventures game and I don't know if I'll manage to actually give the book a once over to join)

    To add to this, some games are easier to bolt shit onto than others as well. Genesys is a system that is very bolt on friendly. It is designed from the ground up to be generalist, which is a huge boon in letting you run whatever you want, but it comes at the experience of mechanical depth. It'll never be as crunchy as shadowrun even though is can approximate that kind of game decently.

    I think if D&D recognized that in itself people love to bolt stuff on and designed towards it, It could be real big! Hell you could release small splat books to really drive it home. Need a murder mystery? Here's a 20-50 page splat book on how to bolt that on to the game. Same with sailing, or court intrigue. Right now that market is completely served by the secondary content creators, to varying levels of success.

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  • admanbadmanb unionize your workplace Seattle, WARegistered User regular
    edited September 2020
    admanb wrote: »
    So when do folks describe this stuff? Before or after you roll dice and figure out what happened?

    I'm curious what other people do.

    I think this question sneakily engages with wider ideas about how to run RPGs and I want to dig into that.

    Let's use a good ol' fashioned climbing-a-wall example. Your group is infiltrating something and you tell them there's a wall in front of them; the rogue says, "I take it at a run, jump, put one hand on top of the wall and use that to propel me over" but you interrupt:

    "Sorry -- the wall is actually quite tall. 10', with nasty-looking spikes on top. And you know this is where the guard patrols start."

    The rogue nods, "oh, in that case I'll run up the wall and stop at the top to check for guards and take it more carefully."

    "Make a climb check."

    Now you have a few options. If the rogue fails you can rewind the fiction -- "your feet fail to find purchase on the wall" -- but that's not very fail-forward of you. Instead, you can incorporate the fiction as described to the failure condition, "you peek over the top of the wall right as a guard is passing. They don't notice you, but you don't notice the brick you're using crumble and fall -- the guard definitely heard that, and you have a split second before they turn -- what do you do?"

    By not holding too tight to describe before vs. after you get a better base of fiction to work off of, which makes it easier to come up with interesting and logical consequences on the fly.

    Note the switch from a mechanical focused, "do you climb the wall?", to a narrative focused focused "Do you encounter problems when you climb the wall?". That second is way healthier for a flowing game to use.

    Yep. I was gonna put in something there about conflict resolution vs. task resolution but it ruined the flow.

    I had an interesting example of complex conflict resolution in my BURNING WHEEL* game last night, but I couldn't find a way to fit it into that post that wasn't self-indulgent, so here's my self-indulgent post! The prelude to this is that I think one area where even experienced GMs can easily lose track of let it ride is with social skills. It's just as easy to fall into the trap of persuasion-as-mind-control and give it too much power as it is to make the PC make a separate roll for every single argumentative sentence -- which might be appropriate in a skill challenge situation with high stakes, but that's rare.

    The PC, who's an acolyte at a church (of the state religion) in frontier town that had recently welcomed a military division which he knows is important (because they came with a General and attached wing of the same church) but doesn't yet know why, was going to talk to the visiting Pater (the head of the visiting branch) on behalf of his own Pater. There's a quiet power struggle going on between the visiting church and the local church and the visiting Pater sent his own acolyte to fetch the local Pater for a chat. Being the host is the dominant position here, so the PC was sent to reverse the invite.

    The PC was very up front about reversing the invite so that was the first roll we had to make. It was a Persuasion roll, which are difficult rolls in Burning Wheel especially against a major social player like the Pater, so there was no need to put another obstacle in front of it. The role wasn't directly related to any of the PC's Beliefs -- while he definitely has skin in the game of which church is dominant, he's a schemer who's out for himself, so as long as he comes out ahead it doesn't matter to him who "wins." That said, the purpose of the Persuasion roll was not just to establish which Pater would visit the other, but to establish the PC's initial relationship with the visiting Pater.

    As it turned out the dice smiled on him and he succeeded with aplomb. The visiting Pater agreed to to the reversal, but more importantly invited the PC in to chat. At that point we ended up in a very deliberate and tense conversation with a lot of saying-something-without-saying it** that touched indirectly on why the military division was here as well as where the PC's loyalties might fall, eventually landing on a moment where the Pater asked him some seemingly-unrelated question about religious doctrine***. It was at this point that I realized that while no specific attempt to convince the Pater of anything had been made, we had hit an inflection point where their relationship could change dramatically and the let-it-ride from the first Persuasion roll that opened this doorway in the first place no longer applied. I said as much and asked him if he felt the same way -- a very important step to make sure you're both on the same page in a vague situation like this. He agreed and attempted the second Persuasion roll, which failed dramatically and that door -- for the moment -- closed.

    *caps because I am playing BURNING WHEEL, and I'm playing it EVERY WEEK. It's a 1-on-1 game which helps mitigate a lot of the issues with Burning Wheel and it's fucking sweet!

    **there's a reason this is a 1-on-1 game and it isn't just that Burning Wheel is complex

    ***I cannot emphasize enough just how on our bullshit we are

    admanb on
  • ElddrikElddrik Registered User regular
    admanb wrote: »
    admanb wrote: »
    I have very little interest in arguments about what is and isn’t OSR, but Zweihander is a retroclone and that’s good enough for me to use the blanket term.

    Stars Without Number has as much in common with Traveler as it has with OD&D.

    SWN (or at least the version I own) is literally B/X but in space.

    SWN (both versions) has a 2D6-based skill system which is definitely not in B/X.

    The 2d6 skill system is new to SWN from B/X, and it is the same dice as Traveler and counts skills 0-4 like Traveler, but it isn't really as much Traveler as it is B/X.

    I'd say it's 90% B/X, 10% Traveler, in terms of inspiration.


    I do tend to agree that D&D gets an unnecessary amount of shit thrown at it because it's the RPG that everyone knows. Not everyone who tries a game is going to like it. D&D has so many more people who have tried it than any other RPG, if 10% of them dislike it enough to complain about it online, that 10% is more than the entire population of almost any other game. Only a few really big other games can even claim 10% of the population of D&D as their entire playerbase. So D&D just gets so much more vitriol.

    Even in this thread, a self-selected RPG enthusiast location; we've basically all played D&D at one point or another, and we've also all played our own other RPGs but not all the same ones.

  • NarbusNarbus Registered User regular
    I'd say a big problem with D&D is that it's setup explicitly so that the DM is the arbiter of the rules, and then, in 5e at least, they gave the DM the least amount of help with the rules that was possible while still technically printing a DMG. The DMG gives zero information on combat. That's all in the Player's Handbook. Most of the DMG is about how fun it is to build a world, which is really the last thing a new GM needs to be doing.

    I think part of the reason D&D gets dunked on about its rules so much is that they give so few to the player who is expected to interact with them the most

  • DarkPrimusDarkPrimus Registered User regular
    It's good to describe what you intend to do. Then, depending on the results of the roll, you/the GM can narrate how it doesn't quite succeed that way, or how the enemy out-maneuvered you, or how you exceeded expectations.

  • webguy20webguy20 I spend too much time on the Internet Registered User regular
    edited September 2020
    DarkPrimus wrote: »
    It's good to describe what you intend to do. Then, depending on the results of the roll, you/the GM can narrate how it doesn't quite succeed that way, or how the enemy out-maneuvered you, or how you exceeded expectations.

    Yes this! Tell what what you are attempting. Then we can most easily come to an understanding of what skill check is needed, and then based on the result of that check, Either the outcome happens as attempted, or something *else* happens, depending on the scene and what the DM has going on. I also think it's good practice to not just have binary successes and failures. If a player absolutely crushes the check? maybe they get an added benefit or outcome. If they just barely fail scaling that wall? Maybe they scale the wall, but slip on the way down and take 1d4 damage as they land ackwardly. If they are picking a lock and do it perfectly? Well they get through the door, and they get a sneak peek that there are some bugbears around a table playing cards, just a touch of free info without an additional skill check, or you could give them advantage on a perception check right after the door opens. whatever.

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  • MaddocMaddoc I'm Bobbin Threadbare, are you my mother? Registered User regular
    I'm a big fan of "Succeed on a failure but with consequences" as a DM tool because it keeps things moving, and is usually more interesting than "Nope you failed, what now"

  • DelduwathDelduwath Registered User regular
    I always think about how 3rd Ed designers realized that "I lockpick the door to this abandoned, deserted ruin. I fail? I lockpick it again. Fail? Lockpick again" ten times in a row is not fun or interesting, and added the Take 20 rule, but - if my memory is correct - they did not go so far as to say "Just fucken let them open the lock without a roll, who cares, literally nothing rides on this".

  • admanbadmanb unionize your workplace Seattle, WARegistered User regular
    edited September 2020
    Delduwath wrote: »
    I always think about how 3rd Ed designers realized that "I lockpick the door to this abandoned, deserted ruin. I fail? I lockpick it again. Fail? Lockpick again" ten times in a row is not fun or interesting, and added the Take 20 rule, but - if my memory is correct - they did not go so far as to say "Just fucken let them open the lock without a roll, who cares, literally nothing rides on this".

    I don't think there is a rule I hate more in all of TTRPGs than "take 10" and "take 20" because they simultaneously hide the problem they're solving and then they fail to solve that problem.

    They're not merely bad and broken rules, they actively stunted the development of the players and GM that use them.

    admanb on
  • DarkPrimusDarkPrimus Registered User regular
    If it is not something where a player's failure is interesting, then don't make them roll a check in the first place. Just fucking say they succeed at doing the thing and let them move on the to the interesting thing.

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