tabletop rpg thread, second edition

strong disagree

classes and archetypes are great because I don’t have time to comb through dozens of pages of stuff to make a character and archetypes allow me to come up with a concept that fits with a given setting without any real effort.

also this still doesn’t do anything to treat the ‘melee combat is boring’ problem.

Like, I just talked about runequest, which doesn’t have classes or archetypes, and one way I would definitely improve it is by generating a feng shui style collection of archetypes that only need slight adjusting before they’re ready to play.

Truly the problem with every tabletop game is “why aren’t we playing Feng Shui instead”

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rangers are actually the ones that suck in combat in 5e, so much so that they’ve rewritten the class twice and its pretty much being replaced wholesale in a sourcebook.

to be fair, rangers also sucked in 3e. Rangers just suck

Yeah when I was reading the class I was like “this is just a fighter with less abilities and the things they get instead seem pretty goddamn useless.” Except the spells, I thought the spells might make up for it buuuuut I guess not.

Bards seem cool as hell in 5e.

The idea that every turn a rogue is just gonna try to meld back into the shadows and backstab guys over and over is just so goddamn dumb.

very very big difference between “here are some example builds in the rulebook to get you started or that we know just work if that’s all you’re interested in” and “everyone has to pick from one of the standard rpg archetypes or else fight the system to customize beyond that” which is heck of dumb

any tabletop game that locks me into a particular role from the get-go is not one i’m particularly interested in but i realize this makes me weird

On this tip, I will still always love Shadowrun, crazy baroque mechanics be damned. The character creation system rules, and there’s just… so much! What a fuckin setting, man.

I am sitting here thinking about redesigning fighter and rogue. Please don’t make me want to do this

It’s so useless I will never actually play these games and in my overtired and overstressed state it makes me like physically sad

this is one of those conversations that makes me anxious about the things i’m doing with my system that other people aren’t doing being for, uh, good reasons

wasn’t that long ago i’d get excited about meeting anyone into tabletop games in general, these days D&D/pathfinder just grate on me. like i have definitely gotten to be as much of an ass about this stuff as i did with vidcons forever ago

uh keeping threads on Watching is a good way for me to depressionpost maybe i’ll go chill for a bit

I’ve found D&D.pathfinder grating for far longer (oh god its been 12 years since I stopped regularly playing it), I just stay fluent in it because small aspects of it can be good as can some of the derivatives.

I wouldn’t design a game with 20 pages of perks, personally

Whichever edition of shadowrun had that priorities list for character creation was good.

Traveller’s lifepath system was also good.

I like systems where I can combine a few templates/archetypes into something new rather than just ‘here’s an infinite list of options, point buy your way to completion’

Haley your system seems rad as hell, just consult me and/or @shrug for armor and weapon and armed martial arts features ok

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You’re in direct conversation with your players so you have the most immediate and best feedback possible for what I assume are your goals.

Besides an excellent artifact of your heart’s labors, is the book an Actual Product? Thinking about accessibility and toe-dipping players is important depending on your goals but making the right choices for your players, right now, sounds more valuable.

What I’ve gathered is that you’re getting about a week of anticipatory prep from new players, yeah? A hang-out or two with someone else to walk them through character building? A valuable luxury at this time in your life

that’s a pretty harsh oversimplification but the fact that i’m taking it personally means i’m probably not in the right headspace to have this conversation again

past tense, sadly. the campaign was getting to be too much stress (and yes too much of a timesink also), plus since then i’ve sort of taken a hiatus from tabletop stuff in general to mess around in rpg maker and remind myself of what it’s like to enjoy making things and also how to actually finish them

not getting into the whole capitalism thing, i’d like it to be accessible enough for people to get into easily, yeah. i put a lot of thought into structuring and gating complexity. character creation wise, a new player needs to distribute some stats and roll up their health and they’re good, in practice it takes about 5-10 minutes. players shouldn’t need to worry about anything beyond that for 2-3 sessions unless the GM’s comfortable doling out experience quickly i guess. by the time perks come up a) players are invested enough in the campaign and their character to be okay with it, and b) they’re comfortable enough with the system and know what they enjoy so they can make informed decisions. there’s more i could get into, like perks being structured so that safe/straightforward choices are clearly labeled and front-ended, but i guess this post started with me deciding not to talk about this? why am i not sleeping

sorry to keep you up

So it’s intentionally restricted at start, unfolding as you go? I imagine some players can roll with that but others need to look down the future possibilities before leaping, when you really want to push them towards character-based abilities?

I asked about Product as a sidelong into, how professional do you intend this to be?

It’s probably worthwhile to watch a group of people who’ve never played roll characters with guidance, and a group of people who’ve never played roll characters/run a session with no interference (though you’d want to prep one with a book a few days ahead). Watching others interpret rules alone is brutal but necessary.

players who want to plan ahead are welcome to do so, obviously, but they’re not the kind of people i’m worried about when it comes to designing learning curves. if you want to describe in a little more detail how you’re worried this would alienate people it would be easier for me to address

well i’m currently trucking through a depressive episode so my half-joke answer is that it’ll never be good enough to publish lol

my serious answer is that i care enough about professionalism to spend literal days fixing minor formatting errors and inefficiencies across a hundred pages of spells, but actually that’s probably the same answer

rolling players in with guidance is easy unless someone has a lot of questions about magic (i don’t really know how to fix the fact that there are, in fact, seven schools of magic, given that they use the same few bullet points of a ruleset and all), never been confident enough/far enough along to try the second but yes, theoretically, eventually?

sorry, I’m not necessarily talking about your rules here but stereotyping about the shortcomings of a lot of classless systems (gurps, hero, et al) which are absolute hell for character creation.

having no classes works amazingly well when its a game where all the characters of a similar archetype/milieu or whatevs: Pendragon, Ars Magica, Call of Cthulhu,

while ostensibly classless, Traveller and other lifepath style systems work on trading a character’s starting age/stats/whatever for points in skill packages. Reign is an example system that has both options available, and actually teaches standard point buy first/as a default. its other system, ‘one roll character creation’, embeds a bunch of backstory elements and a bunch of skill/stat packages together and you don’t even need to randomly roll to make a character this way, you can just pull together a bunch of the templates and add them together.

I suppose I should clarify that when I say classes or archetypes, I don’t necessarily mean dnd style from levels 1-20 you’re a fighter (which I similarly find stifling of course) but rather a style where you start from something simple and generic and make it unique through time and future advancement choices.

to put it simply: packaging a bunch of interconnected choices into a single template is straight up better than ‘here are all the possible options, work out how to make your own fighter from here’, so much so that if/when I run medium-heavy crunch systems that don’t make templates, I will make the templates myself. Example builds don’t count imo, they’re too restrictive and don’t offer any guidance on how to do something similar but slightly different. for example, if a game has a sword and board fighter as an example build (with a bunch of feats/traits/perks to support that build) and I’m an enlightened person who wants shield and spear, how am I supposed to figure out which combos of stats and elements to take instead without combing through every single perk/trait/feat/skill/whatever to make that happen.

ah, yeah fair. just to clarify a little bit more about how my solution mercifully isn’t that, here is how that “just let me play a fighter” scenario would go: you flip to the Perks section. the perks are organized under stats and you can only take perks you have a positive stat for, which limits what you have to look through but more importantly means that if you just want to be stronger, you just look under Strength. conveniently it’s listed first just like it is on your stat sheet, and it’s just a two page spread! it’s split up into four half-pages, labeled in large font:

NOT DYINGNOT LETTING YOUR PARTY DIE
NOT CARING ABOUT DYINGUNARMED COMBAT

as we all know, these are the four essential components of being strong, just as “score things” and “magic doors” are two of the essential components of a videogame. “not caring about dying” has stuff for berserker-type characters, “not dying” lets you tank lots of stuff, etc. there are only like six or seven choices under each of those headings and the ones that are beginner friendly have three big stars next to them. you can just quickly compare between “i want to punch mages to death” and “i want a billion hp” and be done.

anyway yeah im going to bed for real now

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Guys you know what this means.

It’s time for another sb dnd game.

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I’m in the middle of my first-ever D&D game with this couple I’ve been dying to hang out with for ages, and holy shit is this game pure fun. Gonna just hit you with the bullets before my questions:

  • Campaign is set in an 1870’s fantasy America, where we’re doing jobs for the king of Baltimore and are on the tail of “The Betrayer”, their world’s John Wilks Booth resurrected by cultists.
  • I had no idea HOW MUCH gametime was devoted to just dicking around. Every play session is like 60% joking and hanging out and 40% actual goblin-in-twain-cleftin’
  • The DM let me make my guy The Thing from The Thing, who took the form of a conspiracy tabloid journalist after her meteor went down War of the Worlds-style. I now get to play around with being an obvious alien who gets all his information about humans from his Info Wars-style newspaper. At this point only our rogue figured it out, so she’s started feeding me completely false facts about humans that I take entirely at face value.
  • This game rules.

So, we reached a point where we got back to Baltimore and all split off to do little sub-stories before our next quest. I had my guy go back to the workplace of the form he assumed, where I did this delightful scene with the editor-in-chief, an angry, red-faced human man who’s for all intents and purposes Fantasy Alex Jones.

With that in mind, here’s my question: I need some insane fantasy-theme conspiracy theories for my guy to read and believe (and occasionally mention with confidence in an attempt to seem normal). Stuff like “wizards are just hucksters who dump hallucinogenic drugs into the water supply to make sheeple believe they’re magic” and “elves control all levels of government and are selectively trying to racecuck the humans into extinction”. That kind of stuff.

Only tricky part is that basically every insane conspiracy theory I can think of in a fantasy world seems like a completely plausible D&D campaign story.

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Gnomes breed monsters to protect gnomish interests and threaten the other humanoids into submission. You ever wonder why so many remote human villages get overrun by monsters? Its Big Gnome manipulating us! Makes you think doesnt it?

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Why are they building all those telegraph poles when you could just hire a wizard to send information through magic? Is electricity even a real thing, or is it some cover?

Know what, though?

Secretly, they’re constructing artificial leylines across the country to alter the course of the natural sympathies. A war to monopolize magic, rightfully held by all (who have the requisite closely-guarded arcane knowledge).

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