I haven’t had very consistent games or groups of players. And most of my players are new to rpgs. And I feel like I am an experienced and capable GM, but ambitious. So all of this impinges on my experience lately. But I haven’t seen my players engage too much with their classes or the game rules too much yet. I am working with players who find a lot of safety in passivity, so finding their character is very very slow.
When we were playing b/x earlier this year, I wanted to embody a nostalgic fantasy tone and setting, but never felt like I found a solid footing into that genre.
We’re all improving and becoming more comfortable, but it’s been a process of building confidence and comfort among some players who are inclined toward playing but maybe not naturally inclined to roleplaying. So I have hope and I’ve been doing a lot to find the right style and system and tone, in addition to the usual GM stuff. Hasn’t been super easy, but I think it’s been more and more rewarding.
how much do your players influence the setting? I feel like engagement in the world is linked pretty close to feeling like one has some ownership over the setting
For instance, shrug is the only one with a dwarf character in NoRA so I rely on him to tell me what the dwarves are like (I of course introduce a lot of complications on top of what shrug tells me but in the whole I try to stay true to what is established about a character’s place in the world)
I try, and have had some success doing this. The player with the strongest character is the one who I have turned to to describe their position in the world and environment. So I think we really just need to play more sessions but the problem was always scheduling and missing people. I think to some extent I am inventing issues to imagine I have some control over the situation. The best solution I’ve come up with is PBP, because it’s allowed us to keep playing a game easily. Maybe we could transition one day to playing via video and voice.
The only time I’ve ever not played an rpg in person was a when we tried to get a fate game going over zoom during the pandemic and that didn’t work for non-format reasons, so I’d be way out of my depth trying to run something the way you’ve been doing it (but PBM has a proud history so why shouldn’t this work). But it does sound like either you’re short changing the other players for this one star player, or maybe they’re just less invested to begin with and it’s not really their thing. Could be a chicken and egg problem.
Some players are just “low engagement” by nature. They like to sit and roll dice when called upon to do so and check out the drama other people are spinning and that’s it. Sometimes these people graduate to being more fully invested players; sometimes they don’t; sometimes they do but it takes months or years of millimetrically slow growth… but they’re having fun. That was cool! they’ll say.
There’s nothing wrong with people with this disposition but you can’t have a table made up of them exclusively. Personally it sounds to me like vodselbt is doing everything right and just beating himself up unnecessarily. If everyone is having fun, the right things are happening.
I’ve had a good number of games where one or more players was completely silent and mostly just wanting to hang out with the other people at the table, not necessarily interested in playing the game.
This is a bit hard for me to wrap my head around but I think it makes more sense if I imagine it like them playing Settlers of Catan but not really knowing the rules but wanting to play with friends all the same. Except “play” in the sense that they’re just in the hangout, not like, adding to it or what have you. Which isn’t really an issue or anything until it’s a situation where 2 out of the 3 players are like this.
Completely silent is brutal and an actual problem. Like there is low engagement and then there is… no engagement.
But thankfully that doesn’t sound like what vodselbt is dealing with at least. If you’ve got folks who think their character is cool, know the basic rules, and can make timely decisions in high-mechanics situations (eg combat in trad systems), they don’t have to like, think complexly about their PC’s motivations, or extrapolate about the sociopolitical structure of the gameworld, or do actorly style improv rp to be a functional part of the group. You can let them develop an interest in those things, or not, at their own pace.
If you wanna be a Responsible GM you can regularly set them little hooks to kind of catch them to see if they’re ready to get deeper, but if they decline, that’s ok. Putting people on the spot and trying to force them into an rp/creative situation they’re uncomfortable with is neither effective nor kind.
this is one of my favorite threads that i cant keep up with just cuz theres so much going on in every single post
may i solicit tips/suggestions/favored ideas for PBtA games? im still vaguely trying to develop a one-two shot kobold-based game, and i love how punchy + narrative-oriented PBtA rules are. im just such a 0 experience GM/[tabletop] game designer and idk how well they’d work for a one-shot experience. i want to make something that would be like a chaotic random variable “multiplayer match” game, where winning and/or developing a character isn’t important it’s more about having one fun crazy session
Like i want players to be able to roll up something silly and fuckin go for it. “Play your character like a car you just stole” is my favorite philosophy it’s why i love the idea of kobold PCs, they should live fast & die young (and stay pretty)
No Country for Old Kobolds - pbta game about kobolds, haven’t played but it seemed like a pretty good one from the outside
Goblinville Gazzette - this is probably what you’d be most interested in, it uses a derivative of the Otherkind dice system also by the Bakers, which always produces fun story results
Simple World - an older pbta book, this one is ‘generic’ by design in the sense that its a template to make your own pbta game in as little time and page count as possible. A great way to develop your pbta idea is to slap it into here and build up from playtests.
none of these games are pvp by nature so you have your own angle for what you want to design that hasn’t really been done.
In general, you can do good one shots with pbta games without too much effort. The fact that they are zero prep (besides the good ideas in your head) by design makes them pretty straightforward for this format. If you want an idea of what that would look like in play, D Vincent Baker ran a one shot of Apocalypse World for an obscure youtube channel a decade ago, here. Not only is it a one shot but it is also very pvp-oriented so you can see how the system works in that context
Simple World, linked above, is quite good but also from an era before AW2e and a lot of later pbta games that really evolved the design (AW: Burned Over, Under Hollow Hills, Pasion de la Pasiones, Urban Shadows, etc) so treat it as a design starting point rather than something to be constrained by
/youtube did something that broke my ablocker and an rpgpundit autoplayed. I can’t believe he’s STILL obsessed with the Forge degrading the purity of essence of his hobby. I kind of remember dealing wih him on rpg.net way back in the day and he didn’t seem THIS terrible of a person, sort of like how that Alexanderian guy was just kind of annoying when he went by Justin Bacon, but now his writing repels me.
does pundit still punctuate all of his posts with what brand of tobacco he is smoking in his pipe that day
The only thing I remember from his rpgnet era was when he kept euphemistically complaining about how gay the blue rose rpg was and how that meant the setting was the worst ever made (he liked to bring up that its all “limp wristed”)
I did not watch all of the video so I could not tell you, and I stayed out of all the Blue Rose discussion at the time because I was writing a mecha pilots game for Guardians of Order that collapsed when Guardians did, and I wanted to not steal things from the Blue Rose game. Mine did not get approval and was never completed.
I put the name into youtube and clicked on the video at the top (allegedly some whining about Daggerheart and Draw Steel) and within 60 seconds he refers to his pipe and the fact he is about to smoke it
I found one of the 5th edition starter sets (with a bonus old greyhawk module stuck in it) at a thrift store a couple weeks back, and he’s got a credit in there as “rpgpundit”
