#Had a player show up to my table once with a character EXPLICITLY designed to piss of DMs

[palominocorn]

[Image description 1: a screenshot of two guys at a pool table holding cues, asking "But who versus? Who are we doing it versus?" End ID 1.

Image description 2: a screenshot of the Hulk in an action scene, spreading his arms out. He's saying "Big monster!" End ID.]

Tbh, just as like a general thing, I think "playing a tabletop roleplaying game is a bitter and ruthless power struggle between the DM and the players" is a bad attitude to have regardless of who you're "siding" with

[jq37]

Ok, a few Unsleeping City asks: 1-Thoughts on new ep? 2-CAMBRIDGE SANTALYTICA 3-The gang tries to meet up for drinks

**spoilers for mutant santa melee**

(I’ll respond to the other two parts of the ask in another post!)

We are back with our first battle episode of the season and our first chance to see the NY Crew really show their skills.

Ricky trying to keep Sophie's reckless ass safe because he has big golden retriever energy is great.

I can't decide if everyone taking this first fight more seriously than the first fight in FH is because they remember how badly they got womped last time and didn't want a repeat or because they were just playing older, more experienced characters.

I hate everything about these mutant Santas and I want it on the record. I mean, they're great from a game design perspective but I hate them.

"Mr. March, I'm gonna save you!"/"My name is Rick, by the way."

I thought it was funny that Ricky and Sophie both happened to hit the exact wrong type of Santa for their skillset for their first attack, back to back.  

Fig's Bardic Inspiration move was to do flirty winks at everyone. Misty's is to give big, theatrical compliments. I love it.  

Ricky dropping gun safety warnings mid MUTANT SANTA FIGHT.

"Fucking come out of your stupid cocoon! I know you're not a butterfly!"

I love it when rolls are happening at the table and Lou is loudly like, "This is terrible. I hate this." He did it all through the family rescue rolls in FH too.

"It's fine. It's fucking new York. What do you expect?"/"The NY that I live in and the NY that you live in are very different my friend." That's the real NY experience.

Sophie going, "F the minions, I'm going for the obvious boss Monster, I'll take the attacks," is such a good character defining moment. Also, the action-y music abruptly cutting off as the door shut was hilarious.

So Pete is hearing mysterious whispers and Sophie is hearing mysterious whispers and I'm Concerned, especially since it's the two newbies and it's not necessarily significant but it could be so I'm just mentioning it and tabling it until I have more info to speculate.

Misty turning to Kingston and saying, "Just like old times!" makes me want to know every single detail of their history together before the new kids showed up.

"Santa's my friend and he's fucking dead."

I like the homebrew rule for Pete's wild magic surge which makes the odds of one increase every time it doesn't happen because it ups the chaos factor and makes it inevitable rather than just a possibility which I bet has the potential to create some real tension in a long, drawn out fight.

The way Brennan kept describing Pete's arm as peeling like a banana when he used his magic grossed me out so much so, if that was the goal, you did it. Thanks, I hate it.

The, "Guess I'll just die," meme but it's Pete going, "Guess I'll just use this evil magic."

"Darling I love to be naughty. It's my favorite thing!" (Misty's chaos potential increases with every line she says).

"SANTA GETYCHO ASS UP." (Flawless bedside manner)

I forgot how fragile lower level characters can be! I'm glad so many of the party members have at least some healing spells (I think everyone but Pete and Sophie) as opposed to FH when it was basically just Kristen I think.

"He just gives us a PS4 and that's it."

Sophie monkey bars up Giant Eldritch Horror Santa's exposed ribcage and upercut-kick him because stripping Emily of her magic doesn't strip her of her creativity or flair.

"Darling, with me every day is a show. My life is a show!"

Sophie, upon being complimented by Misty: Oh my God. My new friends are awesome.

The idea of a dirty rat man summoning a unicorn is hilarious to me.

Pete's first Wild Magic surge just restores his sorcery points, which is great as a player but, as a viewer, I really hope we get to see some bombastic nonsense soon. Also, Brennan had the wild magic surge, in story, be the result of Pete's magic reacting to Kingston's, which I thought was a cool way to justify game mechanics.

"You're the opposite of Santa!"

Smites are GOOD you guys.

Sophie catches Santa and and Ricky (who has just killed the boss Santa) takes a selfie with them. Bless. Also, Sophie refuses to put down Santa for the rest of the fight.

Misty has an umbrella with a KNIFE inside of it which I LOVE.

The fight ends a little anticlimactically because, once you bum rush the boss, all that's left to do is clean up the minions.

Misty mentioned having Shoes of Titania and I wanna know if that's an actual item with a mechanical effect and what its stats are if so.

Ally realizing they only some of the Santas explode on impact basically at the end of the fight was classic DnD.

Santa sending people into his bag was giving me big Naddpod vibes.

"What the fuck happened?" --Santa, 2019

I don't like the implication of the gestating tadpoles with the Santa hats. Like, is Santa's hat organic? Is it just a part of his body? No thank you.

Pete just lying to Santa's face for absolutely no reason. Incredible.

Santa and Misty talking shop, just because, was such a fun 30 seconds of RP. I love RP that exists just to exist (and, sidenote, I also love when it comes back around and becomes relevant like in Naddpod (14 seconds of absolute silence...chicken)).  

"Santa, don't give this boy an egg."

"A very fancy egg for a very not fancy boy. But a good boy nonetheless."

Ricky on Santa: It would be crazy if you weren't real because you're such a good person. (Zac struggling to get through that was his second best moment of the ep).

Pete gives Santa a bag of coke and tries to dip when she sees cops because, magic or not, that's Who He Is As A Person.

Santa: Pete, your soul is in jeopardy. (lol, Santa knew his name on sight which, of course he did. It's Santa. Duh.)

CENTAUR HORSE COP. I love that as much as I hate the mutant Santas.

Ricky, horrified: Am I on the bad list?/Santa, who is still processing that Ricky never stopped believing in Santa:Ricky, no. (That was my fave Ricky line of the ep, in case you were wondering)

So, in this world, Christian (Catholic specifically) figures explicitly exist, which is good to know. Also, in last episode and this one, the grey faced child mentioned Lazarus which I thought was just a stylistic name choice but that's a name w/ specific Biblical connotations (that's the dude Jesus brought back from the dead for those not up on your New Testament) and it still might be irrelevant, but it's one more thing for me to tack up on my conspiracy board.  

"Santa, are you Cambrdige Analytica?"

Anyway, Heaven and Hell use the naughty and nice list to figure out who goes where so they're not being redundant which is wild because that means Santa essentially gets to decide morality for the rest of the world and, as of now, Pete is super going to hell based on the look Santa gave him when they were talking about who's on the naughty list.

Santa's list has been stolen which is, como se dice, Bad. The specifics aren't clear, but it's super not good. Also, Santa lets the group know that they might wanna figure out what's going on with Pete before he chucks deuces and goes home. So it seems like we'll be seeing him again.

I wonder what the timeline for this season is gonna be. Like, Christmas seems like an obvious time for a big, climactic setpiece, but it'll have to be a really compressed timeline if that's what they're aiming for. Compressed compared to Fantasy High at least.

Sophie, illegally cracking a Mike's Hard in Central Park in front of a cop: Um, we're magic. (She gets a ticket immediately)

That's it for this week! Next week the mob (the pixie mob maybe?) and Siobahn has awesome hair!

[okayideas]

untested game notes

These are rules for a idea I have for a tactical miniatures game in which simultaneous action selection is used instead of die rolls (except for a corner case if equally matched armies are equally committed to taking the first turn). Non-randomly-dealt cards abstractly represent degrees of resources a commander is willing to commit to one battlefield exchange or another, and if the game design actually works, choosing the right attacks to spend your higher-valued cards on will add an interesting layer of complexity.

UNIT STATS

Every unit has these stats: * armybuilding concepts (probably faction, point cost, maybe uniqueness and other restrictions; for now armies are prebuilt lists) * physical shape (for now, always a circle of some radius with no concept of facing direction; units are measured two-dimensionally as their base) * wound limit (removed from game when it has this many wounds) * move distance (for now, along any straight or curved path that doesn't overlap any units or move-blocking terrain) * maximum attack range (often 0; if not, measured along any edge-to-edge straight line that doesn't overlap any units or attack-blocking terrain)

A unit with non-zero attack range may have one or more penalty ranges, showing how many wounds less damage the unit does at certain subsets of its maximum range (always measuring from most advantageous point-to-point line that doesn't overlap units or attack-blocking terrain).

Every unit has a table for these stats. One row of the table is for "no advantage", others are for positive advantage values (e.g. a certain unit might have 3 rows for "no advantage", "1-2 advantage" and a "3+ advantage"): * normal damage (unit does this much damage, modified by opponent's normal defense, when it has this much advantage) * normal defense (unit ignores up to this much of opponent's normal attack when it has this much advantage) * critical damage (unit does this much damage, separately from normal damage and ignoring defense, when it has this much advantage)

There is design room for unit-specific special abilities such as flight, teleportation, and attacks that can hit multiple enemy units at the same time, but those aren’t present for now.

TABLE

The table has two starting areas and some terrain.

Terrain can be: * purely decorative (e.g. under an archway) * move-blocking but not attack blocking (e.g. a ditch) * attack-blocking but not move-blocking (e.g. a door, abstracted to provide solid cover but not reduce movement speed) * both attack-blocking and move-blocking (e.g. a wall)

Terrain is always functionally two-dimensional, defined by its base rather than any 3d sculpt it might have.

There is design room for concepts of hindering terrain or partial cover but those aren't present for now.

In the default game mode, the table also has an objective point in the center, equally reachable from both starting areas.

STARTING THE GAME

Each player writes a secret first-turn bid, then both are revealed. The player with the larger bid is the first player and the player with the smaller bid is the second player. If bids are tied, decide the first player randomly. (Once armybuilding rules are established, unspent points cost can be a tiebreaker before resorting to randomness.)

Each player takes a hand of eight cards numbered 0,0,0,1,1,2,3,5. The second player additionally starts with a number of boosts equal to the first player's bid.

The first player chooses their side of the table and arranges their units in the starting area, then the second player arranges their units in theirs.

Players then take turns, starting with the first player.

ON A TURN

On your turn, you can activate your units in any order. You can't activate the same unit more than once on a turn, and you can't activate a unit partway and then come back to it after activating a different one. Pre-measuring moves and attacks is allowed unless both players have expressly agreed that it isn't allowed.

To activate a unit, you can first move it up to its move distance, then you can have it attack an opposing unit that's in range.

If you attack an opposing unit and are in range of that unit's attack, and the target unit doesn't have a counterattack marker on it, then you are making an "opposed" attack; otherwise, you are making an "unopposed" attack.

When you make an attack, each player chooses a card from their hand and places it face-down, then both cards are revealed. If a player has any boosts, they MUST use one up, adding one to the effective value on their card, even if this does not help them.

If the card values (including boost) are equal, neither unit has advantage. Otherwise, the unit with the higher number has advantage equal to the difference of the two numbers, and the other unit has no advantage.

In an unopposed attack, the attack just deals damage to the defender; in an opposed attack, the units simultaneously damage each other. When determining range penalty in an opposed attack, measure ranges to give each unit its most favorable range separately; this may mean A’s range to attack B ends up considered a different distance from B’s range to counterattack A.

The damage A deals to B is the greatest of: * (A's normal damage) - (B's normal defense) + (A's critical damage) - (A’s range penalty) * (A's critical damage) - (A’s range penalty) * one wound if A’s critical damage is nonzero * zero wounds

Damage puts wounds on units and removes them from the game if they reach their wound limit.

When all eight cards are played, return them all to your hand (both players will do this at the same time).

After an opposed attack, if the defending unit is still in the game, put a counterattack marker on it so it can't oppose more attacks this turn. At the end of a turn, remove all counterattack markers. If no attacks have happened in a turn, note this fact, as it may be relevant for ending the game.

ENDING THE GAME

If both players' last units are removed from the game simultaneously in an opposed attack, the game is a draw.

If one player's units are all removed from the game and not the other's, the player with units remaining wins.

If any unit is on the objective point at the end of a turn, and the past four turns including that turn have had no attacks made by any unit, the player with the unit on the objective point wins. (This prevents either player from completely turtling; as long as neither player is trying to do that it should never come up.)

ADDITIONAL NOTES

I haven’t finished writing these rules yet; here are a few concepts that are in my head that weren’t explicitly spelled out in the above portions.

Since there are circular bases and no facing, these rules currently make most sense if interpreted as individual characters without vehicles. I am imagining a generic fantasy setting with little or no combat-related magic, but it doesn’t have to be that.

In flavor terms, the no-advantage level of a unit’s stats reflects its equipment and innate skill, and the amount of benefit it gets from advantage reflects its experience and training.

Advantage should always be strictly beneficial to a unit. Lowering normal damage and raising critical damage by the same amount is strictly beneficial, but lowering normal damage to raise critical damage by a smaller amount isn’t.

Critical damage mostly happens as a result of advantage; units that can do critical damage without advantage should be rare and expensive, and units at their best possible advantage level should almost always do at least one wound of critical damage.

A typical unit should generally be able to survive about 3-5 attacks from a similar unit without advantage; more defensive or aggressive units of course change this.

[ciathyzareposts]

Game 343: Camelot (1982)

Hardly anyone has won this game.

           Camelot

United States

Independently developed in 1982 at the PLATO mainframe at the University of Illinois

Date Started: 20 April 2019

           As far as we know, and until someone comes along with evidence of earlier creations, the first computer RPGs were developed by students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign using the PLATO educational system. The literal first one may have been a title with the file name m199h, but it is now lost. If m199h was first, The Dungeon (1975),  The Game of Dungeons (1975), and Orthanc (1975) were so close behind that it hardly matters.           

Camelot has a single character exploring via a tiny first-person interface. It has more equipment slots and logistics than the typical RPG of the era.

         The developers of these early RPGs did us a favor by creating what are, unarguably, RPGs. They didn’t muddy the waters like their counterparts on the commercial side, where you have to wade through a bunch of early titles that might technically be RPGs, but you don’t really feel like the developers were familiar with tabletop role-playing. The University of Illinois students played and loved Dungeons and Dragons and were explicitly trying to replicate the experience on the computer. Their first games offer a full set of RPG mechanics: character creation, leveling, equipment acquisition, and combat based on the attendant statistics. Even the graphics are reasonably good. They lack a certain narrative sophistication, but that’s a matter of quality, not definition.

The earliest games–the 1975 trio–all feature a single protagonist with fighter, cleric, and mage abilities entering a large and deadly dungeon pictured from the top down. As he defeats enemies (more often with spells than swords) and carries treasures out of the dungeon, he grows in power and experience, hoping to eventually appear at the top of the leaderboard. These games led directly to the Daniel Lawrence DND line and may have had some impact on the development of roguelikes.

In late 1975, Moria started a second tradition of PLATO games, this one characterized by first-person dungeon exploration, a town level (or menu town) with various services, and multiple characters per party. Each player only controls his own character, but multiple players can meet up, join together under a leader, and use various talk features to chat, plan attacks, and summon help. These games–Moria, Oubliette (1978), and Avatar (1979)–are essentially the world’s first MMORPGs. Avatar is still actively and enthusiastically played today.

Joshua Tabin’s Camelot (1982) is the last of the PLATO CRPGs, developed after the advent of the microcomputer RPG but without any influence from it. Instead, it unites the two previous PLATO lines, offering the first-person exploration, dungeon design, and advanced inventories of the Moria line but the single-character focus of the earlier Dungeon line. Multiple characters do explore the same dungeon, and can engage in some limited cooperation, but each character’s ultimate development and victory are independent of the others.          

Camelot’s backstory mangles the Arthurian legend.

          Players can control only one character at a time, chosen from human, elf, dwarf, hobbit, ogre, and pixie classes. Each class comes with fixed attributes in strength, intelligence, constitution, dexterity, charisma, and maximum age. The plot, which makes no sense in context, is that the character is a Knight of the Round Table in search of the Holy Grail. It exists somewhere in a 10-level dungeon beneath a menu town. According to the documentation, you first need to get Excalibur from the Lady of the Lake.

Dungeon levels are 16 x 16, organized into rooms. Every space between two doors is considered a room, even if long, linear, and twisting. The moment you enter a room, there’s a chance of an encounter with monsters, treasure, or both. Some rooms have messages (“you notice an empty wallet on the ground”; “there is guano spread on the walls and floor”) that help keep you oriented. All active players are sharing the same dungeon, and once cleared, rooms remain so until the next level reset, which happens every hour or when the entire level is cleared.            

Character creation. The different races have fixed attributes. I’m not sure how you live long enough to even get off Level 1 as a human, ogre, or pixie.

          Movement is by the waxd cluster, with SHIFT-W used to open doors. Other dungeon features include secret doors, traps, spinners, and teleporters–all features drawn from Moria and Oubliette and used with abundance in Wizardry and other grid-based dungeon crawlers.

It takes a long time to get any traction. A new character starts with his bare hands and a loincloth, and not enough money for much else. You have to get lucky with a few treasure rooms or combats before you can buy anything. Naturally, these early combats are pretty dangerous. You spend an awful lot of time running away and retreating back up the stairs to the inn, where you sometimes rest as long as a year to get back to full health. In more unfortunate cases, you die. The game’s permadeath is slightly blunted by relatively favorable odds for getting found and resurrected, although this comes with a loss of score, any money you were carrying, and sometimes an attribute.           

I live, but I’ve lost a point of charisma.

           If the game excels in any particular area, it’s in its encounter design. When you enter a room, you’re told how many enemies you face, of what type (unless they surprise you, in which case you just get a category), whether they’re guarding treasure, and what their disposition is. A peace symbol suggests friendship while a sword shows they’re hostile.

Like a lot of games, you have numerous options for dealing with enemy parties, including three fight options (berserk, regular attack, and critical hit), parrying, reasoning with the enemies (which usually leads to them asking for money to go away), or attempting to steal their treasure out from under them. The good things is that no matter what option you try, you get experience even if it only partly works. There are plenty of times that paying a few hundred gold pieces to get the monsters to leave voluntarily is the best course of action, especially if the party is going to be difficult. Otherwise, they’ll remain in the room, blocking your progress, until the next reset.           

Missing is the default outcome at Level 1. The demons guard a small treasure (the box to their left) and are hostile (the sword to their right).

           Combat is quasi-real-time rather than turn based. Dexterity determines how often you and your foes get to hit an attack key, but if you stand still and do nothing, enemies will keep attacking you rather than waiting for you to take your turn. The good news is that you can also simply run through the area–or turn around and flee–during this process, maybe taking a hit or two, but usually getting out of the area alive. With all these options, it’s often stubbornness that kills you.

Camelot has the most extensive equipment system of the PLATO games, with separate slots for weapon, armor, shield, helmet, gloves, belt, cloak, boots, ring, bag, spell, and “other.” The bag slot accommodates an increasing variety of bags that hold gold; otherwise, it’s very easy to get over-encumbered by coinage, with a consequent penalty to speed and accuracy in combat. You fill in the items slowly as you purchase them or, more commonly, find them in special treasure rooms. Scrolls and rings and such are the game’s only approach to magic. Particularly prized are manuals, which increase attributes permanently, and Potions of Youth, which reverse the affects of aging.              

My April character had amassed a lot of stuff, but a very low negative score.

         I played quite a bit of the game in April, and corresponded with developer Joshua Tabin, but I didn’t compile an entry for a rather stupid reason: I didn’t want to play it officially if I wasn’t going to win. But the game needs to be discussed, and winning seems so far off that it will likely be impossible, so I’ll just have to take the hit. Back then, I had a character up to Level 7, but he was getting old, and he had a negative score in the tens of thousands from multiple deaths and resurrections. I decided to start over with a new elf character, who has the greatest longevity.             

Leveling makes a huge difference. For the first couple of levels, the only mystery in combat is whether you’re going to “miss” or “miss wildly.” You have to hope to find rooms with treasure that boost your experience a bit artificially. In the rare fight, you might kill 1 monster in a stack of 6. Even with frequent (P)raying to your god (which you can do about twice an hour, restoring about 30% of your health each time), you run out of health fast and have to retreat to the stairs. Returning to the town level makes you rest automatically until your health is back to 100%, which may take literally years game-time.          

By Level 7–which might take 10 hours real-time, you’re probably powerful enough to clear the entirety of the first level. However, the game starts to introduce quests, which require you to kill a specific type of monster to make the next level. Sometimes, these monsters are only found one or two levels down, so you can’t dally on the easy levels forever.           

I’ll need to kill a “foot fungus” before I can level up again.

            Until you find other items that allow you to heal, you can (P)ray several times per outing to restore anywhere from 10% to 50% of your health. I’ve never had it work more than 5 times. After that, you have to return to the town if you want to heal. 

       Level 1 has mostly easy monsters but they often attack in groups of up to 6. Sometimes you have to just concentrate on killing one–perhaps exhausting all your prayers in the process–then return to the town, heal, get a new set of prayers, and return to kill another one. Enemies include various types of clerics, mages (who can put you to sleep), orcs, hobgoblins, “tweens,” gas spores and other types of fungus who can poison you, skeletons, and faerie dragons. Some rooms are designated “special treasure” rooms with each reset and typically have enemies found on lower levels.

There are two teleporters that take you to fixed locations on the same level. There is one spinner in the middle of a 3 x 3 room with a message indicating it’s full of fog. There is one room that tells you it’s hot every round. There are two stairways down.

Miscellaneous notes:

              When you enter the dungeon after each new hour (real-time) turns, there’s a chance–a good chance–that the dungeon will designate it “the witching hour!” and enemies will almost always get a surprise attack. In real life, only midnight is “the witching hour,” not every other damned hour. I think the witching hours may actually get more frequent as you get closer to Halloween.

I’m having a weird graphic glitch where sometimes a weird graphic obscures the already-small game window. I’m not sure if this is deliberate or not. It seems to happen more often during a “witching hour.”

There are more limited multiplayer options than in other PLATO titles, but they exist. Two players in the same room at the same time will attack the same enemy party and will then scramble for the treasure. You can have chats with other people in the dungeon. There hasn’t generally been anyone around during my explorations, but occasionally I’ve left the session running only to come back and find that someone tried a “Hello” while I was gone.

There’s no automap in normal play, but you can “Follow” any active player and see his position on a map. If you have two Cyber1 accounts (I don’t), you can play with one account and follow your character with the other account, thus creating a de facto automap.

There’s a way to tame some animals and have them as companions for a time.

Unlike most other PLATO games, treasure doesn’t help much with experience. You have to defeat enemies. Treasure is important for buying equipment and leveling up, however.

                       I’ve already mapped Level 1, so what I do is every time the hour rolls around, I start shading the rooms I’ve already cleared. When the hour is up, I clear my shading and start over. I figure it’s time to move on to the next level when you can completely clear the previous one in an hour. I have a Level 4 character that is capable of clearing about 2/3 of Level 1 in an hour, but he’s died a few times and thus has a very high negative score. He also has yet to find a single weapon, and during his last resurrection, his dexterity got knocked from 18 to 16. I’ll still probably continue with him because it took me 4 hours just to get him to Level 4.          

10% of the Camelot maze.

           The game was designed to be hard to win, and I’m not sure I have the patience for the whole thing. If I lose my character again, I’ll probably give up. Even if that happens, I have enough material from my conversations with Joshua Tabin to justify at least one more entry.

Time so far: 8 hours

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/game-343-camelot-1982/