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Author Topic: Babble About Roleplaying Games  (Read 4900 times)

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Bongo Bill

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Re: Babble About Roleplaying Games
« Reply #20 on: May 31, 2008, 12:50:54 AM »

It's a little psychological reward mechanism. They are motivated to seek it because players are motivated to seek EXP no matter what.
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Re: Babble About Roleplaying Games
« Reply #21 on: May 31, 2008, 01:20:43 AM »

My first D&D game was me (CG Sorc), with two other characters I can't remember, and a CE Fighter.

Who went out of her way to interfere with the plot as much as possible.

No one really plays with her anymore, and I have a very strong hatred of my players purposely fucking with others.
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MadMAxJr

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Re: Babble About Roleplaying Games
« Reply #22 on: May 31, 2008, 09:30:09 AM »

I think XP rewards are the wrong way to go; if followed to the logical conclusion, you'll end up with a level disparity between PCs.

If the RPG doesn't have a Karma system in place, you should invent one.  If a player does something creative or follows a clue, give him a Karma.  Let him spend the Karma to reroll a die, cause an enemy to miss, or otherwise influence the game.

I don't have a problem with level disparity between PCs, as long as it isn't more than a level or two (tops).  Heck, even new players who join a game I have in progress, they're required to be one level below party average. Everybody else worked for their character, and I don't see why they should jump in with an equal amount of awesome but none of the work to get there.  Anyway, back on topic.  The idea is that if someone pulls ahead from these micro-rewards, the others should start getting the idea that maybe THEY should use their head a bit more often.  This is going to vary greatly from group to group due to social habits of the players.  Also if the GM makes an entire campaign in such a way that only one particular character or class is capable of getting the micro-rewards, you are doing it wrong.  If everybody progresses at the exact same rate, and gets the exact same XP from every encounter/trap/other XP gift and everybody gets a cut, your slacker players may do only the minimal amount necessary to gain rewards from the game.

Karma/Action Points/Bonus Dice.   I prefer to work mostly with what the system gives me.  If I have to invent a new rule layer, it's a step away from the game listed on the book cover, and one step toward MadMAxJr's [book cover name].  As I saw in d20 Modern, Action points can be awfully powerful.  In D20 Modern, they were a finite resource.  You got X amount a level, and there was no way to get more.  This made it a fairly valuable resource.  If you start dishing them out as prizes, they begin to be less of a valued item, since you know there is a chance to get more.  I could have ported the Ebberon rules for Action Points over, but Ebberon is for filthy magic robot lovers who can reforge themselves and become a better human than humans are, who don't know the splendid glory that is Iron Kingdoms.  Right, where was I?

The system in D&D already accounts for XP rewards.  No, it doesn't say to give them out as I suggested but XP is a reward where it generally takes a few thousand for there to be any significant impact.  Under the system I've used, at most it gets a person a level ahead maybe one session ahead of everybody else, and gives them a little bit of bragging rights.  Microrewards barely factor in at all when the group is at higher levels.  If your group begins to seethe with envy over somebody getting ahead, to the point where it creates loud argument at the table, I'd say there is something wrong with the group.  If someone is four levels ahead of the party average, you're using your incentives wrong.

I would rather reward individuals for specific cases of moving the plot forward, than dividing up each prize to the entire group.  And from the materials given to me by the rule system, XP seems to be the best tool for that.  Unless you think I should be handing out daggers every time they progress the game?
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Guild

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Re: Babble About Roleplaying Games
« Reply #23 on: May 31, 2008, 11:35:13 AM »

That was exactly what Bongo and I said.

So, uh, TAKE THAT everyone who's not Max, Bongo and I.
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Zach

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Re: Babble About Roleplaying Games
« Reply #24 on: May 31, 2008, 12:35:29 PM »

Which is fine, really!  But I still keep trying to design homebrew rules allowing a player to choose to be a nonparticipant in a certain challenge, forgoing all actions but providing a minor bonus or penalty to a participant of that player's choice every round.

The Hollow Earth Expedition game that I'm in right now has seen a lot of that. I'm not sure if it's an official rule or something stolen from Savage Worlds, but the GM allows us to spend style points/karma on each other. Sometimes the ratio is 2:1, other times 1:1. (Tangent: Perhaps you could implement a shifting ratio based upon emotional bonds or the relevance of the assisting character to the task at hand.)

So if my boorish cowboy wants to assist with the ex-Nazi science officer's lockpick check, he can clap her on the back and give a big ol' grin (and a style point.)

Other times, the exchange works more like the much-lauded Prime Time Adventure's Fanmail system. My boorish cowboy does something incredibly dangerous, but all the same awesome. None of the other players want to do it because it is dangerous, but say to themselves, "Wouldn't it be awesome if he did turn that abandoned windmill into a weapon of mass destruction?" In that case, a player would pass me a style point without comment. Or leave a trail of them, leading me to my doom.

It's a little psychological reward mechanism. They are motivated to seek it because players are motivated to seek EXP no matter what.

True enough. I'm always amused by players who do grunt-work like fetching sodas and cleaning off the map board for a pittance of XP. This isn't because they're being helpful and contributing to a functional social mechanic, but because they're doing it so cheaply. I figure, what's the use of doing "extra" work when the GM is going to give less than 100 XP for it, when I can get ten times that by stabbing a shark in the head with a stick a few times. (Or more pointedly, I get more experience for saying, "I play my harmonica. Everyone gets +1 to hit and damage," than for keeping precise, in-character notes concerning the shifting foundations of the world.) It comes down to pride, I guess. I'm going to help people out because I want to, not because they're waving a few crumbs in my face.

It's when the rewards start getting worthwhile that I beg and scrape like the rest of the mob.
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Guild

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Re: Babble About Roleplaying Games
« Reply #25 on: May 31, 2008, 12:46:04 PM »

Quote from: Zach
[I play with] ...players who do grunt-work like fetching sodas and cleaning off the map board for a pittance of XP.

Wow.
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sei

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Re: Babble About Roleplaying Games
« Reply #26 on: May 31, 2008, 01:58:40 PM »

From the player getting sodas out of the kitchen, "Roll to see if I get drunkhow much dignity I salvage."
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MadMAxJr

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Re: Babble About Roleplaying Games
« Reply #27 on: June 02, 2008, 07:49:39 AM »

Custom Campaign Settings

(For an added bonus, install this font, then reload the page.)

Preexisting campaign settings are great, when there is a well established world and history. The players are free to read up on the details and become involved with the story.  But players will probably read the parts they shouldn't be familiar with too, such as notable adversaries, monster entries, and in the worst cases they've read the module you're using.  Usually I'm willing to live with the risk of metagaming that stems from this (people searching for hidden loot that is hard to come across, unless you've read the book.), if the players are making good use of the portions intended for the player to read.  If I get a bit longwinded on this one, admins are free to fork this one into it's own topic elsehwere.

So I've been kicking around some ideas for a new setting.  I intend for it to be flavorful, and designed so that there is a solid ground of fluff information to play with, and a vast amount of unknown.  While brainstorming, I came across some old Ravenloft materials, and the old PSX game Legend of Legaia.  The evil mist is a great means of controlling the domain/region size of the game, and gradually introducing more content.  In Ravenloft, the mist was the edge of the realm.  In Legaia, there were generators.  In mine?  I'm not going to tell you.

I will introduce my idea with a short narrative, but I want to set it up first.  This is set in a small (as of yet unnamed village), with lots of russian/east european flavor.  Their village sits upon a series of hills, close to a coastline to the east.  An ancient, well fortified stone wall encircles them on the non-sea sides, scarred from battle and age.  A small, but dense grouping of pine trees dot the tops of some of the hills.  There is a small potato farm in the southern end.  The coastal side has an elaborate dock, yet it is host to only simple fishing boats.  The village itself also contrasts the dock, with very simplistic stone structures and a few wooden ones.

Pretend there are Russian accents, because I don't want to type excessively in broken English.  And, since I'm at work, and I'd like to keep the job, I'm going to do this in small installments throughout the day, if possible.

***

People of the Mist

This village is old.  We too, are old.  We come from old empire.  What was it?  We do not know.  It was generations ago.  Is not important.  We have some texts of old age.  Most are descriptions of places, and maps that we cannot discern.  The mists make it too difficult to venture out.  But within the wall?  We do fine.  But needing are we of room to grow.  For time being, resources are adequate.  But soon we will use more than what returns yearly.

We worship our gods of old, alongside the gods of new.  The old out of respect, and the new because blessings are more plentiful.  But the gods of old are important.  The artificer caste strictly follow the gods of old, and it is they who craft the tools for traveling the mist.  Treated longcoats, flat grey with colored trim, that stretch from neck to ankle.  It is assumed they are patterned after old empire uniform.  They are usually lined on the inside with the finest armors we can craft.  Alchemical masks to cover the face, carefully crafted with glass formed from thunderstruck sand.  It is these that allow prolonged exposure to the mist with no danger.

We are told the mists are a punishment toward the old empire.  We do not know why.  Hidden in the mist are relics of the old world, other isolated villages, precious resources, and answers.  The mists also harbor evils of new world.  Abomination and abberation alike stalk the new world.  The twisted and unnatural creatures only linger within the depths of the mist.  Most are utterly terrifying.

We send our brave out to hunt and explore.  Predatory and docile beast of nature still live in mist, it does not harm them.  The unnatural do not go out of their way to slaughter them as they do with us.  The brave we send out take up the duty to find what we need to move forward as a people.

***

More to come.  I've got a lot on this one, and I'll probably get some more ideas at lunch.

Also, if you think you can't read the titles with that font installed, just copy-paste that thing into notepad.  I will be using that font for in-game handouts (PDFs) which will have plain readable english underneath it.  The idea is that not every word in the language is remebered by these people, so when they discover something new, it will not be translated.  Players are free to do the footwork to figure out what it says, but the character won't know.

Other details.  The villiage is mostly human, but it does contain specks of the D&D race spectrum.

To combat metagaming knowledge, the monsters I will use will be for the most part unique in appearance, but will use the complete stat information for a monster presented in the MM.
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MadMAxJr

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Re: Babble About Roleplaying Games
« Reply #28 on: June 02, 2008, 09:01:29 AM »

Custom Campaign Settings Continued

So yes, the idea is the players are pretty much gas-mask stormtrooper characters right out of a Funker Vogt song about war.

A good deal of the game is going to play upon 'Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic'.  This will be apparent in the artificer caste, which is the ideal background for any magic using character.

The artificer caste are the few who gain enough meaning from old texts to create items of the old empire, and make use of old-empire knowledge (magic).  The gas mask is the prime example.  They obviously do not have the technological means to make these things, but they do have the magical means, which is a multi-step process that can be studied from an old manual.  Usually they are looked up to as the higher-educated members of the village, typically pulling double duty as craftsmen and educators in the village.
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Doom

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Re: Babble About Roleplaying Games
« Reply #29 on: June 02, 2008, 12:31:16 PM »

I think Evil Characters can work, but they're a hefty challenge for any DM and require the player in question be intelligent, patient and lucky.

So, three stories!

1st) In the days of yore, the #3m crew which was like Endril, Kemru, me, Psychick and Md and I don't remember anyone else had uber-DM Interface. We played some D&D once and I rolled as a Bard taking prestige as Assassin. Kemru was sort of our party-leader-guy and I was his old friend type. I was also stark raving immoral. Later gear upgrades in that game would involve me replacing one of my eyes with a magical one from a boss, or letting a naga's magical artifice heart bond to my chest.

I generally made the evil work, though it was strictly Neutral Evil type. I wasn't running around and slitting throats for kicks, but everything I did generally made the rest of the party  :wat: pretty hard.

Two noteworthy incidents.

First off, we had to get into some floating fortress thing where a lot of slave trading was done and waht not. I immediately assumed duty as the party Face and sold two of our teammates into the humilating "inspection" process, the first step of being bought as slaves. This allowed us to break in rather easily and do whatever it woz we were doing(I think we made the fort self-destruct and killed the Lich in charge.)

The second was that for whatever reason, a schism arose. "Aha", you're thinking, proof that evil characters can't work in parties. Not really. We'd gone several sessions with me along, and I suppose at some point I decided to just go for broke because(in character), the party wasn't digging my antics no more. Especially Kemru. Feeling betrayed by my old friend, and seeing as we were in his home town of Elf Land, I went all out. I stealth-checked my way around town killing freely, broke into a noblewoman+children's house, paralyzed the lot of them and then made a crude fuse leading to a mostly-full necklace of fireballs.

Confronting me on the pier, we had a fight! The cleric disintegrated me as the first action of the first round. We all had a grand laugh and my time in the game was done. It's been several years now, but I recall that I had been missing sessions and work was making it hard for me to show up at all, so I went out with a bang. The party probably got shoehorned into the next plot point by the Elf Land officials to serve out punishment, since we were a team/crew on a ship or something. Inter's a great DM and nothing I ever did fazed him. Hell, he probably prodded me to start replacing my human parts with monster ones.

2) Shinra has been evil in my games twice. The first time was really great and nobody knew and the game falling apart completely independently of all this probably cut off a fantastic revelation in a later session.

The second time was my ill-fated Arcanum 2 Campaign, in which some bad meta gaming not-on-the-part-of-the-evil-character ruined the entire campaign because of the evil character. Lemme explain.

Shinra wanted to be a not-too-honorable gangster type and run around doing underworldly things. In one of the cities, I proposed that the party could pick up several leads. The goody-goods would pick up info in the town while he murdered some whistle-blowing guardsmen out in the woods. A party split is nothing I can't handle, but what happened next made me face palm so hard I broke my nose.

The party's chief goody-good(lawful good soldier type) disregarded Shinra's high Move Silently/Hide rolls and followed him. Like a sucker, I thought I could make it work. A lot of innocent guardsmen were butchered and Goody-Good snapped. Here I thought they might be mutually bond together in guilt or some sort of blackmail arrangement for character tension.

Needless to say, my misjudging blew the deal and the campaign died there once the PCs started trying to kill each other.

Oh! And I remembered while typing all this up..

3) One of the only campaigns I've ever DMed in full and probably my best was started as a pure-evil party. It started as a Disgaea parody and evolved rather sublimely into an epic level campaign with use of Book of Vile Darkness Devil Prince stats. Alright!

So I don't write off evil characters, but you'd better believe I handle them with fire-retardant material.
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Guild

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Re: Babble About Roleplaying Games
« Reply #30 on: June 02, 2008, 01:31:00 PM »

I made an all evil campaign called Evil on Erran. The idea behind it was that the characters had a mutual enemy: A man with Superman-like powers named Alunitus. The game officially ends when Alunitus is dead.

So the players start to backstab each other. I encourage it because I'm awarding experience for evil acts (torture checks, mass murder, psychological trauma... it was all pretty dark but at the same time creative and hilarious). At the very end two of the PCs are plotting the death of Alunitus while the third has secretly already disarmed and enslaved him. The third sets a trap for the other two and the final battle boils down to a two-on-one free for all. At the end all three survived and ran away.

During the course of the game I awarded progressively larger rewards for soul-selling. The first character (necromancer) traded his soul to Nerull for 2 ability points. The second (beguiler) destroyed his own soul for the ability to dominate a person of a certain HD once per day at will with no save. The third (something something book of nine swords) traded for 2 ability points and the ability to look into the future once.

I then proceeded to dictate how the three grew in power separately, unable to work together due to their selfish hearts. They eventually attained semi-godhood and just as they were about to step through the door to heaven to assume godhood Pelor steps in the way and says "I implore you: do not step through this door. It would lead to an imbalance in power and the destruction of all of Erran."

They didn't listen (as Pelor had planned) and as the first two step through ZOP they become nothingness (in the case of the self-soul-destructor) and enslaved to Nerull (in the case of the necromancer). The third wisely looks into the future in which he accepted Godhood and chooses instead to step back onto the material plane. He saw himself enslaved to the Devils of the Nine Hells whom he'd sold his soul to. It seems no soul can be a god if it is indebted to another. From there, I orated, he grew in power until he eventually warped the physics of heaven itself and tore through it, will intact. He went on to conquer millions of other worlds and eventually became the embodiment of evil in the omniverse, rather akin to the Dark Side.

It was epic.

I guess the key to having evil characters in a game is to know your players and diffuse their pettiness as it happens, encouraging them to work together with interesting plot and oh hell just be a good GM.
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Shinra

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Re: Babble About Roleplaying Games
« Reply #31 on: June 02, 2008, 03:34:11 PM »

doom really understates how handily i murdered those guards, and what lead up to it.

we're trespassing on the king's land, and goody-good paladin is standing in the road in front of an incoming guard patrol. who proceeds to arrest her. while we're on a secret mission in a foreign country that our country had shaky relations with at best.

so i proceeded to use chameleon psionics to sneak through the brush to their camp, used thunderstones to deafen and surprise them, and then used leaping/charging monk attacks to kill them off one by one, ending each round with new hide/move silent checks to keep my prescense hidden. I also targeted horses before riders and let the horses crush the guards.

sure, it lead to an out of character meltdown on behalf of the paladin that sunk the game, but...

doom should have let me kill the paladin.
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Detonator

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Re: Babble About Roleplaying Games
« Reply #32 on: June 02, 2008, 06:52:40 PM »

3) One of the only campaigns I've ever DMed in full and probably my best was started as a pure-evil party. It started as a Disgaea parody and evolved rather sublimely into an epic level campaign with use of Book of Vile Darkness Devil Prince stats. Alright!

I won't argue how awesome that campaign was, but did we ever do anything that was truly evil?

Personally, I think good/evil in RPGs is pretty dumb, since most characters believe that they are good, and villains are much more interesting if they are deeper than crushing puppies for fun.
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Shinra

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Re: Babble About Roleplaying Games
« Reply #33 on: June 02, 2008, 07:11:11 PM »

3) One of the only campaigns I've ever DMed in full and probably my best was started as a pure-evil party. It started as a Disgaea parody and evolved rather sublimely into an epic level campaign with use of Book of Vile Darkness Devil Prince stats. Alright!

I won't argue how awesome that campaign was, but did we ever do anything that was truly evil?

Personally, I think good/evil in RPGs is pretty dumb, since most characters believe that they are good, and villains are much more interesting if they are deeper than crushing puppies for fun.

hacking up a bunch of prostitutes and making a rotten mummy arm out of them was pretty evil. Human sacrifice on at least two occasions.


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McDohl

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Re: Babble About Roleplaying Games
« Reply #34 on: June 02, 2008, 07:25:17 PM »

Personally, I think good/evil in RPGs is pretty dumb, since most characters believe that they are good, and villains are much more interesting if they are deeper than crushing puppies for fun.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcbazH6aE2g
There are always exceptions to the rule, of course.
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TA

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Re: Babble About Roleplaying Games
« Reply #35 on: June 02, 2008, 09:40:24 PM »

3) One of the only campaigns I've ever DMed in full and probably my best was started as a pure-evil party. It started as a Disgaea parody and evolved rather sublimely into an epic level campaign with use of Book of Vile Darkness Devil Prince stats. Alright!

I won't argue how awesome that campaign was, but did we ever do anything that was truly evil?

Personally, I think good/evil in RPGs is pretty dumb, since most characters believe that they are good, and villains are much more interesting if they are deeper than crushing puppies for fun.

hacking up a bunch of prostitutes and making a rotten mummy arm out of them was pretty evil. Human sacrifice on at least two occasions.

Oh, don't be silly, prostitutes aren't people.
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Re: Babble About Roleplaying Games
« Reply #36 on: June 03, 2008, 05:38:48 PM »

The thing is, alignments that aren't neutral tend to reflect inhuman characters. That's cool. If say, you're a demon or an angel. I don't think you want many characters playing far outside of that spectrum.
It is something of a weak descriptor in any case.
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MadMAxJr

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Re: Babble About Roleplaying Games
« Reply #37 on: September 05, 2008, 07:39:00 AM »

Digging this thread back up to test the waters on some ideas.  I liked how Diablo had prefixes and suffixes that corresponded to particular kinds of bonus.

Weapon properties:

Light [Melee / Ranged Weapon]
+1 to hit / -1 Damage (Min 1)
+5G to item cost.

Heavy [Melee / Ranged Weapon]
-1 to hit / +1 Damage
+10G to item cost

Double [Crossbow type]
On hit, weapon does +1 damage.
On miss, re-roll the attack at -2, damage as normal.
Load Free weapons become Load Minor
+30G to item cost
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Re: Babble About Roleplaying Games
« Reply #38 on: September 06, 2008, 08:07:54 AM »

There was a Dragon article with mundane enhancements to weapons and armour, mainly of the sub-100g variety. You had attributes like acid-etched (resists rust and corrosion), basket-hilted (resists disarming); the most powerful I think was "reinforced" armour, which cost a lot but added a full +1 to armor class.

I started adding these to weapons, shields and armour that dropped in my game; it adds detail and makes them more interesting.
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