thanks gary. I’ve found a few pieces on myminfactory already. but I need investigators and stuff. thinking of going the abstract route for enemy tokens so that the actual monster can still be imagined. there is this account on myminifactory that makes models of historical abstract sculptures, and I think these will be my figures for Human, non-Human Creature, Monster, and Thing Which Should Not Be – in that order.
omg I love this $65 gelatinous cube of transparent plastic
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Yo!!! I love this too.
Pipe dream fantasy: but when I get more time (probably after graduating), I think I’d like to develop this scenario I am running for Call of Cthulhu into a self-published module. Would involve more playtesting and iteration, designing a nice PDF book, but that would be a fun project to actually link my writing practices with those twinkly eye ambitions of mine to Write For Games someday. It’s going really well so far and everyone is excited by it!
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Crosspost
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Do you mean playing TT remotely, with online tools to facilitate things like dungeon crawling and rolling, or converting a TTRPG to a CRPG, like going from D&D to Baldur’s Gate?
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I mean the later.
I don’t know about literature - so I’ll just type up some things that I feel are lost in translation.
You miss all the emergent gameplay that comes from a group of people making decisions that aren’t mapped out in advance, and the GM reacting to that to craft narratives together. That’s the biggest part. You have an enormous, very powerful verb set in many TTRPGs, and you can apply that verb set to anything that is established as existing. You can just like, fly in D&D, or turn into a bird or a sea creature, or walk into one tree and out of another one on another planet. You can talk to any living thing if you know the right language or spell. You can give any living thing sentience. And that’s just what’s built into the game’s magic systems - you can kind of think of whatever you want to try to do, and then figure out the mechanic with your GM.
In tabletop some of these choices are balanced by material component costs, uninterrupted time required, spell slots, time pressure, or skill checks. But they’re all possible. If you tried to do most of that in a scripted game, it would break the intended sequence in a way that wouldn’t make sense and could lead to lots of other issues, if it worked at all. So games compensate by making a few tracks that most people will be fine with, and people expect that it’ll be basically choose your own adventure with fights. More recently, the choose your own adventure-style character interactions have gotten a lot more complicated, so it’s possible to do a dumbed-down version of infinite choice that still feels like it’s reflecting your established behavior, like Disco Elysium’s thought cabinet.
I’ve only played a couple of multiplayer CRPGs that include player choice (Moon Hunters & Divinity: Original Sin are the ones that come to mind), but in my experience they don’t capture any of the chaos and group work you can do in TTRPGs. It’s just reading choose your own adventure together and taking turns picking the path. There are a couple moments in DivOS where players are making choices that can diverge, but that’s about as interesting as I’ve seen it become. Combat-wise is a different story, I feel like combat mostly translates fine, minus some flexibility in avoiding or influencing fights.
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Oh yeah and AI Dungeon is “adaptive” but is very disjointed machine rambling and usually turns into a nightmare. There are / were “scenarios” (pre-filled out info the AI holds onto for theme, etc.), we tried a few a year or two ago and they kept turning into alt right nightmares. And there’s no multiplayer afaik so it’s just a committee typing in the prompt window, still.
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Yeah there’s no substitute for a DM’s brain.
And even if you had a true AI, in a videogame context you’d still need to be able to produce assets in real time to depict the AI-DM’s decisions (though I suppose that would probably be trivial in a world with true AI)
oh yeah the source material they used for AI dungeon was like a singular fan fiction source that just made recurring reactionary characters and like incredbiliy gorey situations right?
oh wait i found it
https://www.theregister.com/2021/10/08/ai_game_abuse/
the stuff about them banning players for the AI’s behavior is whack
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official free tomb raider ttrpg
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These mechanics seem… whatever but I can’t say this isn’t a great premise for a ttrpg campaign. Whether it needs its Own Separate Game is another question, but that’s always the question every time someone makes a new ttrpg
I like the built in Lore DCs for learning about monsters, but nothing else about this looks good
Ran my second session as a DM last night, went pretty well overall. I’ve still got more to learn on memorizing combat status effects and understanding enemy AI under effects like charm, but, beyond that, I was pretty happy with it. Had @gary there to help out as well, so that made me less nervous.
Two of my players were DMs I have, both with different gameplay philosophies - one strictly by-the-rules, the other more focused on how fun the game is - so that was actually pretty great to see their takes on unknowns in the game.
One-shot was the delightful module called A Wild Sheep Chase by Winghorn Press, where the group gets approached by a frantic sheep carrying a Speak With Animals scroll. They find out that this is a wizard who uses a Staff of True Polymorph to fix problems in the town, and that she got jumped and turned into a sheep by her disgruntled apprentice.
For the initial encounter, I had a white-wash mat where I sketched out what I figured a bustling town center would look like (see photo), then just populated it with a bunch of figures the host had in a box. As they went into combat, the civilians would move around and get in the way as they fled.
Ultimately they made it to the home of the apprentice, where they snuck up on him and stole the staff off his back, avoiding most of the encounter. Gary then used it on him to “polymorph him into a dead guy”, which barely failed, instead turning him into a gibbering mouther, after which the battle spilled out the window and into the front lawn, involving polymorphed apes and a bear.
One DM’s character was a min-maxxed paladin/warlock that could fly, who was very boisterous, heroic, and Tick-like, the other DM’s character was David Lynch as Gordon Cole, always talking extremely loudly as Lynch (he was a gnome). Other players had an edgelord dark-past halfling, and a baba yaga-type teifling with a tarot card deck. Incredibly funny to play with this group.
I think the only things that threw me for a loop were combat status effects, with stuff like, how to break Charmed vs how to break Suggestion (they immediately disabled the orc by suggesting them bathe in the fountain for 8 hours), and little things like the AI of a charmed enemy in a group (they charmed the bear). The DMs helped on that front, and I think all I really need to do is just memorize more stuff out of the book for combat status effects. For example, I had no clue what being hexed was, I had to rely on the player to explain it.
I also had to take a lot of things on faith like, “I do 28 damage based on this chain of attacks”, which I didn’t really understand and had to take the player on faith. Probably would do well to review their character sheets prior to the game better to understand that is and isn’t possible.
Overall though, went well!
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yeah this was great! probably the most complicated things we could’ve thrown at you too - special status effects, tons of new subclasses, multiclasses, nets, aasimar
i think you balanced the first fight well because one of us went down and the rest of us were pretty hurt too, felt very suspenseful right til we got that teleport off
that david lynch voice and characterization were both extremely good, ‘fix your heart or die’ is a great catchphrase. everyone else’s characters were also very good thematically, ‘the tick that fucks’ and ‘charlatan baba yaga’
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I always thought that Iceblink Luck would be a great “we just got a teleport off” song in a movie
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