#it really is just some of the characters playing an rpg campaign together in between their usual bullshit

[duckapus]

Mushrooms & Morons: the Legends of Zabadoo

An SMG4 AU Side Story

SMG4's managed to set up another game of Mushrooms and Morons with Mario, Luigi, Bowser and Toad, and now Meggy, Bob, Karen and Juliano have joined the fun as well! This time, rather than just playing vaguely fantasy-ish versions of themselves in silly hats, they have actual characters... which I have not come up with yet. Their party has been tasked with traveling all across the Kingdom of Zabadoo and probably, hopefully saving it, having many adventures along the way.

Unfortunately, 4's DMing hasn't improved as much as he seems to think it has, and the group is bigger and wackier than ever, so things are unlikely to stay on the rails for long.

[txttletale]

youve mentioned offhand ur issues with thirsty sword lesbians, have u talked at length abt this somewhere before and if not do u want to? i want to hear ur thoughts hehe

now before i get into this i want to clarify: i like thirsty sword lesbians, overall! i think it takes some of the best stuff from monster hearts and refines it -- i think it does great and exciting things with pbta playbooks -- i think anyone making a pbta game should check it out because it's full of valuable ideas -- and i've had a lot of fun playing it!

however, i think it's just as flawed as it is brilliant. there's a few different flaws but the biggest one for me is a catastrophic clash between two things the game is trying to be. one on hand, it wants to be a catradora rpg. there's no shame in that, i love games that wear their influences on their sleeves--TSL¹ wants to be a game about kissing your rival after you've both been disarmed, about having a fraught and complicated relationship with your girl best friend who abandoned you to serve the dark lord, about having homoerotic sword duels where your blades lock and you stare into each other's eyes for just one second too long before one of you kicks the other in the chest. i think that's an admirable goal for an RPG and one that TSL hits a lot of the notes of--the fact that the move to "Figure Someone Out" has special questions you can only ask someone when you're duelling them is incredible design. the Strings system, adapted from Monsterhearts, the ability to fluster your enemies when you use the Entice move, the constant focus on what characters desire and how their actions conflict with those desires--so much of the game is working towards that!

unfortunately, the game also wants to be about queer resistance to homophobia and capitalist/imperialist hegemony. this is clear in its sample settings, with their eyerollingly on-the-nose conflicts like defending 'queertopia' and fighting the evil sorceress 'repressia'. but much more importantly, it's clear in the game. several of the playbooks are defined by their relationship to sexual hegemony--the beast is about someone who is othered and monsterised for expressing their existence and the seeker is about someone sheltered and prejudiced moving past that and discovering themselvs and others. like, it's not subtle--

and to be clear, there's nothing wrong with that, either. just as i like a lot of TSL's swashbuckling girl-romancing flirting-at-swordpoint mechanics, i really appreciated how (although the game's outlook on what these forces are is predicably liberal and its tonal approach to these things is one that i personally find teeth-grindingly insufferable) these things are actually integrated into its mechanics. playbooks like the beast and the seeker (and the rest!) imply something about the world the game is set in and its sexual politics. this game is meaningfully queer in the way something like dream askew is, in that its mechanics ask you to actually explore your character's queerness specifically. this is good, and it's something that elevates it above about 90% of ttrpg stuff that sells itself as queer.

so if both these things are good, what's the problem? well, it's that they're two great (or at least--interesting) tastes that go fucking horribly together. the fundamental problem that i have with TSL and one that i think takes a lot of work to get around in your own campaigns is that it simultaneously wants you to be fighting (on the individual level) a lot of antiheroic ultimately sympathetic hot girls you can flirt with and kiss--a lot of 'i can fix her's or 'she can make me worse's--and on the broader narrative wants you to be fighting institutional queerphobia (and often, although this is nowhere near as actually supported by mechanics, a more generalized 'imperialism' or 'capitalism' or 'bigotry'). so you end up fighting 'those stupid sexy homophobes'--people who are according to the text (not just 'lore', but the rules text, the mechanics you're playing with!) simultaneously the violent enforcers of cisheteropatriarchy and a bunch of fuckable lesbians with sympathetic backstories.

& i just think those things are fundamentally at odds. the result is a game that if you try and play it at face value works at cross purposes with itself, attempting to do two perfectly valid things without considering what happens when the streams cross.

it also has a few other flaws--like many other PBTA games, its balance falls apart if you play any long campaign (my group and i had to figure out special alternative level-up rewards!) but it comes with no inbuilt way to neatly conclude a campaign or character. its tone is something that, as i often mention, i absolutely cannot fucking stand--it has a certain sense of humour that feels profoundly dated to me and was never my cup of tea when it was in vogue. this is something i try not to hold against the game bc it is very much a personal taste-level 'cringe' reaction but the game lays it on pretty fucking thick.

more to its detriment, it is profoundly, gratingly liberal in the exact way people who deploy that tone usually are. its understanding of anything outside queerphobia specifically is just a purely aesthetic & thoughtless 'imperialism is bad!'. it manages a more nuanced understanding of homophobia, but it only manages it on the individual level--for a game about queerness and about fighting systems of cisheteronormativity, it has no systemic or material understanding of these systems and no interest in establishing one.

and finally--and this is just one paragraph but it's so fucking awful i feel the need to complain about it here because i think about it often as an example of something i never want to write:

this sucks! real bad! so deeply fucking silly to reassure people in your game that you called Thirsty Sword Lesbians that it's okay if you want to be cishet. like, it would be one thing to make a game where you can neatly extract the lesbianism and have the same game, a surface-level aesthetically queer game with no actual interest in queerness except as a marketing term. it would fucking suck but this paragraph would at least describe such a game. but TSL isn't that!!! . 'thirsty sword cishets' would be a very different and much worse game! awful and self-defeating paragraph. deeply silly concern to address and give airtime to. i didn't buy a game called 'thirsty sword lesbians' to be told 'its okay to be heterosexual i pwommy'

so yea just to reiterate: i like the game overall, i think there's a lot of good valuable stuff in there designwise despite all this. but i'm very ambivalent about it--ironically, i feel a love-hate relationship with this game about love-hate relationships. i admire it and yet i despise it! i long to put it at the tip of my sword and slowly tilt its cover up so that the pages look up at me coquettishly but with burning anger in their page numbers. if this book was a person id hatefuck it, is the joke, thats the joke im making, here, in this post. thanks

¹ i call it TSL whenever i can because the name 'Thirsty Sword Lesbians' makes me cringe out of my fucking skin. genuinely horrible name. i'm sure it's funny the first time you hear it, i got a mild chuckle the first time i heard it to, but it's such an obnoxious thing ot have to say repeatedly when seriously discussing it. should have stayed a placeholder name amiguitas

[jennamoran]

The Far Roofs: the Magician

Hi!

Today I’m going to talk a little bit more about my forthcoming RPG, the Far Roofs. More specifically, I want to talk about one of the characters for the bundled campaign: the Magician.

So the characters for the Far Roofs campaign are, loosely speaking, about halfway between pre-generated characters and classes.

Pretty close to playbooks, I think; close enough for the Powered by the Apocalypse and Forged in the Dark stuff I've read to have influenced some of the details ... but, ultimately, they're coming out of a different stream of development. They just aren't quite the same.

Nor are they really pregens, or classes.

They are just ... what they are.

One of them, for instance, is the Magician.

If you play the Magician, what you're saying is, when you were young, you had a brush with a Mystery---one of those roof-haunting divine monsters I've talked about. It was traumatic, and you tried to forget, but now you've just come back from away (changing jobs, finishing a major project, finishing school, whatever) and you're learning your childhood nightmares were real.

The rest of who you are? What you're dealing with?

Well, that'll be up to you.

The Magician comes with some pregen stats, that you can rearrange if you want to. It comes with access to two "powersets," and you can choose four powers from them starting out.

(There's a set of four that the game recommends that are subtle enough that you can tell yourself you're just a regular person. If you want. For a while.

... that'll be up to you too.)

Most of all, what being the Magician gives you is four character-specific stories, of which the first is Coming Back:

Coming Back "You’ve been away, working on an exhausting project or studying abroad or something. Now you’re back … and getting dragged into the affairs of rats and Mysteries. You try to work out how you fit in."

To get you started on that story, the game gives you three things you'll want to answer or define by building words out of letter draws over the course of ... well, probably, a large number of sessions. In sum:

how can I possibly hold myself together through this?

do I even believe the Far Roofs are real?

[your relationship with the rats]

It also gives you a "quest," a place to start on all this, which basically boils down to

a premise: "you need to figure out how to live with this damage"

a few tools to draw bonus letters, and

the extra question: "can I really face the far roofs again?"

You'll finish that up, and at least make a start on figuring out what to do here, after which you can move on to a second, third, fourth, or even fifth quest if you're not done figuring out the three big story-based challenges yet.

When you're done, after you answer those questions and however many you needed for quests ... there's another three stories. All the while, there's some bigger-picture group stuff that's going on too.

In practice, I do think these stories will take a long time. It is possible to speedrun the stories in this game, to blur through the campaign in like twenty hours of play .. but it'll be about as weird as any other speedrun.

If you're not doing that, I figure it'll be a couple of sessions, maybe even 4+, before you even answer one of those questions.

You'll draw maybe five letters in a session, and use some of them on the group story or subplots, and all the while you're developing your understanding of the proper answers while you shuffle the letters around.

Like, let's walk through one way it might go.

Maybe you draw NA in the first, slowest session. You could treat that as an N/A answer to something, but let's say you're not really into that. Like, burning through the questions fast doesn't help you, any more than it does in real life:

You want something that means something, that helps you crystallize how your character addresses that question.

That might wind up being N/A, but probably not in the first session or two! Not until and unless it feels right.

So let's say session 2 gives you ... NPLG. And now you can decide that you're a PAL of the rats and that's one question down ... but again, that only really works if you are or you want to be, right?

It's s a very specific choice, PAL. It's not for most, really.

It might not be for you.

More likely, I figure, you just ... have NANPLG there ... and none of that answers your questions at all.

Session 3. EEGEN. NANPLGEEGEN.

So you look between that and your questions. Between that and the four major challenges you have to address:

how can I possibly hold myself together through this?

do I even believe the Far Roofs are real?

[your relationship with the rats]

can I really face the Far Roofs again?

And, maybe ... PLAN?

PLAN isn't bad for the first answer. I guess it was already there back in session 2, but I didn't see it until now. Maybe you didn't either. It's not bad, either way. At least, not for my version of the Magician; yours might, of course, differ a lot.

What else can we find in those letters?

GLEEP ... is ... not helpful.

LENGE ... isn't even a word!

(Update! On review, it turns out it is a word in Hungarian, and there's also a song, so like if you know the song or Hungarian you might get something out of it.

... but typical Magicians probably won't.)

Session 4, anyway, brings us up to NANPLGEEGENLMAEA.

... no O, Y, or S, which means we still can't answer basic questions like whether you believe the far roofs are real with a simple NO or a YES. Same on whether you can face them again.

In fact, without O, we can't even "LMAO" at the very idea of being able to hold things together in the face of it all!

What can we find?

...

GLEAM is in there. It's a good word, but unless it fits something that's going on in the game or your personal take on things, it's unlikely to help.

LAME to self-chastise yourself is ... good if it's something your character keeps saying, but otherwise no.

LEAN, maybe?

Like, maybe you're LEANing on the rats for spiritual and mental support?

Conveniently (I'm drawing these from an online letter server, so they're not rigged) you even have two LNA at this point, meaning you can use up LEAN and still have PLAN in your pocket.

... let's do that.

Let's go ahead and answer two challenges with PLAN and with LEAN, leaving us with GEEGNMA and two questions left:

do I even believe the Far Roofs are real?

can I really face the Far Roofs again?

GEEGNMA. Dang. So close to having ENIGMA!

... I guess you do have ENEMA but that doesn't seem relevant.

AMEN ... not that useful, honestly, either.

NAME?

AMEN or NAME might help with some miscellaneous task, but not with the two questions at hand.

The next session brings us LSIRK.

GEEGNMALSIRK.

... which does give us ENIGMA as an option. We could answer a question with basically, "I dunno, it's an enigma."

... but of the two questions we have left,

do I even believe the Far Roofs are real?

can I really face the Far Roofs again?

... ENIGMA only really works for the first.

And that's totally fine! Except there are a few in-game incentives I haven't really talked about and in fact won't talk about here to encourage you to address the quest-question first.

So, what else?

SEE? SEER? Again, they only work for "do I even believe the Far Roofs are real?"

... let's table this until session 6.

Session 6. We get the letters OAEUWH. We now try to answer the questions:

do I even believe the Far Roofs are real?

can I really face the Far Roofs again?

with letters from GEEGNMALSIRKOAEUWH.

... we have an O now.

I don't like just answering the second question with "NO" but it's now possible, at least. You might do that, with your Magician, anyhow.

MAYBE, like YES, must still wait on a Y.

WHO CAN?, on a C.

...

Oh! But there's OW, for "yes, I believe they're real, but it really hurts"

WHO for "if I decide who I am, maybe?"

Those are rough. They might feel better, though, after keeping them in mind for a bit during play.

WHEEL ... is not helpful. Nor WHALE.

WHOA?

WAIL?

... I actually like WAIL here, though I hate using up that I and taking ENIGMA off the table. But, like:

"can I do this?" answer: incoherent wailing

That ... feels like a solid answer for someone who is both doing it and doesn't really think they can. Maybe not in your group and your circles. Maybe not for your Magician. But for some Magicians, at least, it makes sense.

The question

can I really face the Far Roofs again?

came from the first quest, and so when you answer it with WAIL, you move on to the second one. That gives us a new premise, a new set of card-drawing options, and a new question:

what did/will I find on the Roofs that I actually need?

So now we have GEEGNMSRKOAEUH and our questions are:

do I even believe the Far Roofs are real? and

what did/will I find on the roofs that I actually need?

Do you maybe need a KO? A ... RAKE?

A ... GROAN?

GROAN is a good answer to "do I even believe the Far Roofs are real," at least for the kind of character who answered "can I really face them?" with WAIL.

Let's ignore the incentives I mentioned earlier, then, and do just that, giving us the following set of challenges and answers:

how can I possibly hold myself together through this? PLAN

do I even believe the Far Roofs are real? ... (GROAN)

[your relationship with the rats] LEAN

can I really face the Far Roofs again? ... (WAIL) and

what did/will I find on the roofs that I actually need? ????

plus, EEGMSKEUH.

What do you need, that you can find on the roofs, that you can make out of EEGMSKEUH?

Do you need ... an SKU?

SEEK ... it's probably good to stick SEEK in your pocket, like, in case you figure out some way to use it as a "the journey is the destination" sort of thing, but the idea's a bit thin.

... let's say you don't use that yet.

The next session draws AABHR, for a total letter set of EEGMSKEUHAABHR.

... if there were a T, we could use BREATH.

... I guess, if there were a T, we could also have TEA.

I look at those letters and want to do HOPE, but in fact, we only have two letters from HOPE. We have an M, so we're closer to HOME ... but is the thing you find there really a home?

There's SHAME, but unless that's exactly your character arc, that's probably not what you need, that you find on the roofs.

GEM? HUGE? RAM? ... just a couple more letters and maybe we can get RAMEKIN, and honestly, you do need one of those, everybody does, but ... well, you don't have the letters for it.

GAME?

Let's say you push it off one session more.

The next session brings SRIHO.

Now we have EEGMSKEUHAABHRSRIHO.

... HOME is now possible, and strong, but only if there's stuff happening in game to lead up to it.

SHEER ... doesn't work.

Not quite enough letters for RHINO.

We can do BEARS, but you probably don't need that many bears. SOME RIBS ...

Ah, here we go:

RISK.

That could work. Let's say that it does.

You needed to get out of your comfort zone. You needed to do something scary. It was the only way to discover you could.

And if that's your answer, you can finish out the story now:

how can I possibly hold myself together through this? PLAN

do I even believe the Far Roofs are real? ... (GROAN)

[your relationship with the rats] LEAN

can I really face the Far Roofs again? ... (WAIL)

what did/will I find on the roofs that I actually need? ... RISK

Roughly eight sessions in ... really, 3-15, in practice ... and you've got your first personal storyline cleared. The next one will have you deal with some ghosts.

Thirty-two sessions to finish all four; after that, there's some options, but they're not as personal.

... but if your group has scheduling issues, or even if it doesn't, you might have trouble ever seeing 32 sessions of anything. You're not going to use this stuff up. You'll just hit a number of satisfying narrative stops for your character along the way and at some point the game will end when some player moves away or scheduling gets too rough or, optimally, when one of the larger group storylines ends or a couple players finish stories at once and everyone goes: "yeah, that's an ending."

Even if you've got a really solid group that meets really often, the campaign should keep you going for a good few years of play.

And now you know a bit about both the campaign and about what the Magician is like!

[skipppppy]

Anyway I’m bored and Carmen Sandiego renaissance is on the brain. What are these characters like when they aren’t focused on the main plot?? Non VILE/ACME/Caper related dialogue seems so few and far between.. I wish we got to see their lives outside work. So I made some headcanons abt it

CARMEN

Player was her first exposure to the outside world so she probably holds a lot of his nerdy interests close to her heart. She’s not the best at video games but plays them regardless. She especially enjoys sci-fi horror movies from the 80s that go big on practical effects

Finding random trivia about different countries is genuinely one of her favourite hobbies. The little info segments she does are not part of the edutainment show. She is genuinely just like that. This woman is a trove of fun facts please let her unleash them upon you

In the same vein she LOVES quizzes. After missions she will drag Team Red to any bar doing a trivia night in her vicinity and will wipe the floor with everyone there. Fear her

Enjoys people watching. It’s why she’s so good at charming strangers despite her socially stunted upbringing. She’ll sit alone in a busy train station for hours and watch everyone pass her by

PLAYER

Look. We know this kid is a nerd. It’s canon. But which niche of nerdiness does he fall into exactly?

Despite being an avid gamer he isn’t very competitive about it. He prefers single player rpgs, especially ones with active modding scenes. He doesn’t even know what vanilla Skyrim looks like he probably wasn’t even born yet when it released

He will, however, duo queue with Carmen on unranked Overwatch. They are both terrible at it and think it’s the funniest shit

Enjoys sitting back and watching a good speedrun. Will have a video of someone doing a stupid BOTW challenge in the background while he hacks security cameras and such

Runs a DnD campaign for Team Red which they’re all crazy invested in. Shadowsan is the only one who doesn’t care for it but he keeps rolling nat 20’s on the dumbest shit and derailing the campaign and he finds everyone’s reactions too entertaining to stop. They have a rivalry only a DM and a stupidly lucky rogue could have

ZACK

We already know he’s kind of a meathead that enjoys sports and cars and cheesy action movies but I also think he has a lot of softer hobbies that he keeps to himself bc he knows they won’t take him seriously

He’s a secret crocheter. He’ll mend the team’s clothes when they rip but that’s the extent of their knowledge. He’ll sit for hours by himself and knit while listening to music. Sometimes Shadowsan will find a new pair of socks in his bag. When Carmen got sick once she woke up with a handmade blanket draped over her. Ivy has her suspicions but doesn’t wanna intrude

He loves animals. He never really brings it up because no one ever asks. He always checks out local zoos and aquariums if he has the chance. Grew up watching Steve Irwin-esque nature shows and still does to this day

His love of eating is less out of greed and more his own form of cultural appreciation. Idk what happened to his and Ivy’s parents but for reasons he can’t explain their cooking is one of the few things he hasn’t forgotten, so he has a lot of sentimental food-based memories. And experiencing other countries cuisine connects him with that

IVY

PERIOD DRAMAS. They don’t have to be good they just have to be steamy. She enjoys the hot women in pretty dresses. She and Carmen watch Bridgerton together and laugh about how historically inaccurate it is

She LOVES renfaires and similar high fantasy roleplaying communities. Someone please buy this woman a suit of armour

As an engineering prodigy AND fantasy buff she has a massive interest in Blacksmithing and Swords. That’s her designated lesbian hobby. She’s been trying to politely worm her way into a conversation with Shadowsan about the blade he returned to his brother for months now but isn’t sure if it’s too personal of a topic for him so she’s nervous

Her sweet tooth encompasses more than just chocolate. She’s secretly grateful to Zack since he takes most of the flack for being a glutton. She makes note of any bakeries they pass by on capers so she can come back later in secret and go ham on the pastries

SHADOWSAN

I think his interest in Samurai history starts and ends with his love for Hideo. He’ll happily discuss it and he’s studied it passionately, but out of a sense of respect and duty to do right by the brother he betrayed

He will NEVER, EVER admit it to anyone but he genuinely misses the adrenaline rush from committing petty crimes. He was a criminal for over 20 years. Lifestyles are hard to shake and change isn’t linear. He’d never succumb to impulse but he’s just kinda bored

He microdoses on the urge by pranking people. Everyone always blames Zack so he never gets caught. He also enjoys sneaking up on people and making them jump. He’ll always insist it’s unintentional. It isn’t

He’ll read and meditate and train to keep himself centred but he’s still a rowdy young punk at heart. Team Red is the first taste of freedom he’s had after a lifetime of VILE faculty monitoring him. The first thing he bought for himself after settling in at the San Diego HQ was a motorbike. The second was a new tattoo. The third was a potentially lethal amount of whiskey that he drank in one sitting

JULIA

We know she has a passion for history outside her work in Law Enforcement so she definitely goes to all kinds of museums in her free time. She’s the kind of person who enjoys learning just for the sake of learning (she and Carmen have that in common)

Outside of that she’s surprisingly good at karaoke? She gets stage fright but really likes singing and will go all out if you hype her up. Her taste in music is the exact opposite of her appearance and personality. Lots and lots of death metal

An aficionado for different types of tea. She keeps like 10 flavours in her house at all times. She especially likes floral ones that taste light and sweet. She hates iced tea with a passion though

Goes to botanical gardens whenever the weather is warm and the season is right. She likes the history of the old manor houses but she also loves admiring the landscaping and the blooming flowers. She could sit on a bench surrounded by local flora and fauna for hours

DEVINEAUX

Chase is an entirely different person when he’s off the clock. The unhinged high-energy maniac who froths at the mouth about La Femme Rouge goes dormant once he gets home. Especially after he got stranded on VILE island. That really gave him some introspection about work/life balance

The biggest, softest, sappiest hopeless romantic you will ever meet in your life. Passion is just part of his nature and he gets his heart broken A LOT. It’s why he throws himself into his work

He’s a really good chef. Like REALLY good. Before he was a cop he did a few summers as a line cook in his teen years and he retained most of the knowledge. His pantry is STACKED and he tries out recipes he picked up from his ACME travels in his free time. He’s a tad snobby about it because he’s French but you will not complain about the stuff he feeds you

Old movie enjoyer. His favourites are film noirs, cheesy romances, creepy eastern european animation and german expressionism. He has a fervent hatred of Marvel

Also one of those insane people who get up at 5am to do cardio. One morning before a mission he met Agent Zari with barely a glisten of sweat on his forehead and sadly informed her that he only got to run 15k and he wished he had time to do more. That was the first time she ever knew fear

[open-hearth-rpg]

#RPGCovers Week Ten Rolemaster series (1985 on) Angus McBride

In my youth, there was a cohort of players about five years older than me, some of them part of my sister’s crew and others just among the rabble at the game shop. There was a certain kind of “elitism” to what folks played. When Champions came along, Villains & Vigilantes became passe for example. Rolemaster, in its original incarnation of heavy stock parchment booklets and glossy magazine-style supplements, was one of those. It was the fantasy rpg the cool, older kids played. 

And throughout high school it was what I gravitated towards, giving up on AD&D entirely for the more rarified air of RM (ironically paired with Harn, but that’s another story). Rolemaster at that point was a weird set of printings and editions, a mess which looked incoherent and made it hard to tell folks exactly what they actually needed to buy.

Then in 1985 Iron Crown Enterprises consolidated everything into a set of books with a standard cover design and unified art. These became the standard for years (if you ignore the layout and design of the weird Rolemaster Companions). What really pull them together, beyond the book design, was McBride. 

Angus McBride had already been doing Middle Earth RPG covers for years. They were all great. Before that he’d been an illustrator for various Osprey Men-at-Arms series, bridging that gap between wargaming grognards and role-players. These RM were great because we got to see repeating, iconic characters– kind of a first I think. I don’t know that we’d had other games with recurring figures and an implied story. 

The first three books: Character Law & Campaign Law, Arms Law & Claw Law, and Spell Law used them effectively. Plus you could now buy a box that had all of them bundled together. Ten years later, ICE would reuse these images with a new cover design for their Rolemaster Standard System, with a few new books with new illustrations by McBride that sort of fit in with the existing story and sort of didn’t make any sense (see Creatures & Monsters). But as Rolemaster began to crash and go through multiple editions and changes, they lost control of their cover designs, leading to an absolute chaos that, ironically, felt more like first edition’s mess.

[subbyfoxelf]

gencon 2024 after action report, part 2: day 2 (friday)

previously on gencon con report.

i had a pretty light day on friday in terms of scheduled events, which i think is something i'll try to do differently if i (hopefully) go back next year. grammy had a gm shift that started basically immediately, and mommy had a game in the afternoon that i wasn't part of, but vi had a couple hours before we parted ways so we decided to spend a couple hours at the boardgamegeek hot games room.

the hot games room is basically a large room with tables for folks to play at and a library of popular new release board games. i think the games were in alphabetical order, i say "think" because literally right at the beginning of the line was a copy of arcs, and we really didn't need to look at any of the other games once we saw that they had it considering the rave reviews it's been getting.

after getting a chance to play it, it's incredibly easy to see why it's been such a critical success. arcs is a game about space colonization and conflict with plenty of optionality in how you approach it. there's a lot of unsurprising mechanics like resource management and earning victory points, and of course rolling dice to resolve space conflict, but also some slightly more unexpected ones like a light trick-taking aspect to resolving actions on each turn.

above all, it's complicated & multifaceted without being intimidating. we were able to pick up the rules in no time, and once we did gameplay was smooth & exciting. this also feels like a game with a ton of replay value, and that's just the base game. there's also a campaign expansion that i'd love to try somewhere down the line when the game is more widely available. (the lgs i work at had it in stock for a minute because we backed the kickstarter, but it sold out basically immediately. again, after playing it it's really not difficult to see why.)

after this there was a rather long gap in my schedule that i made the somewhat ill-advised choice of trying to fill by looking for mtg singles in the vendor hall. it didn't take long for the sensory overload to get to me, and to make matters worse i was basically in the middle of the huge hall and literally couldn't find the exit for a good 30 minutes or so.

when i did finally make it out, i made a beeline for the quiet room, but when i got there it was literally full. if i have one piece of feedback for the event, they REALLY need more than one quiet room. finding literally no respite after that vendor hall honestly kind of broke me and i ended up in pretty rough shape, just kind of wandering aimlessly through moving crowds of people until i finally found a relatively quiet corner of one of the satellite hotels to just kind of collapse in for a while. and honestly if there had just been another quiet room this would have been easily avoidable.

anyway, after a while to recover i met back up with grammy & cj, waited for mommy to finish vir game, and we all got some food before heading to our second game with all four of us together, brindlewood bay.

brindlewood bay is for sure in contention for my favorite rpg we played at the con, though it's difficult to compare to my other favorite for reasons that will become clear when we get to it in the next post. brindlewood bay is a pbta cozy mystery rpg that is something of a marriage between what i imagine golden girls is like (i've never watched it) and murder she wrote. basically, you're a team of old lady sleuths who need to solve various crimes while also gradually learning about some larger eldritch threat lurking in the shadows. (we didn't get too far on that track, it feels like that's more for a longer campaign than on your first sitting.)

during character creation you pick a sort of detective superpower (mine, which i sadly didn't end up using, was encyclopedia brown's ability to use one piece of real-world trivia to help solve the mystery), an overall style (i picked hippy-dippie; see! told you it would come up later), and a "cozy activity" (i picked gardening, because i think that's the old lady activity i'm the most likely to develop later in life). after you pick all your traits and the few stats you need to fill in, you go around the table and suggest some resources for each other to have access to. one of the other players had cooking as their "cozy activity," so the party gifted that player an herb garden, and they gifted my character an "herb" garden since her hippy-dippy style felt at least a bit weed-coded.

another thing that came up rather organically is that my character & mommy's ended up being the "and so, they were roommates!" brand of lesbians, and the entire table including the gm seemed to get a big kick out of that.

this was my first experience with pbta, so i don't have much to compare it to, but i wouldn't be shocked if a lot of these games more or less come down to "if you/your playgroup like the premise/vibe you'll enjoy it," and i really think gencon helped "break the seal" on these sorts of games for me, and i'm hoping that'll translate into me being a bit more adventurous about trying more games instead of just watching the pile of games we own but haven't played get bigger & bigger.

but yeah, that was a wrap on day 2! only two games, but definitely a case of quality over quantity, so no complaints here.

[ciaossu-imagines]

I hope you’re having a good day💖💖 For the writer ask game

1: What is the best compliment you've gotten on any of your works?

9: What genre is your favourite to write?

23: Is there a project you want to talk about?

- R

Thanks so much for sending something in! It really feels nice – to be honest, I’ve been having an absolutely horrible couple days, with some IRL drama (got into a nasty fight with a friend), feeling burnt out but unable to ask for help or to take a break in all spheres of my life, irl and online, feeling a bit taken for granted overall, and it kind of culminated this morning with some nasty hate in my inbox lately that I had to delete, and finding out that my follower account has dropped from 1420 to 1352…the biggest mass exodus of followers this blog has ever had, I’m honestly doing absolutely shitty and had to have a good cry this morning. I’m trying to remain grateful, focus on the positives in my life, reread all the compliments I’ve gotten both on here and through texts from other friends, all love I’ve ever gotten online and IRL, and continue to write my Christmas queue, my Secret Santa gift fic, and my Christmas gifts for friends though, trying really hard, and since these asks all require me to focus on those things, I’m going to answer these and make myself get into that mindset 😊 Thanks so much for the ask again, my lovely, and the wonderful questions.

What is the best compliment you’ve gotten on any of your works?

Each and every compliment I get on my work and my writing, honestly. I cannot say how much every compliment I get on my writing means to me. Even something as simple as ‘I really liked this’ makes my heart sing, as I pour a lot of time and effort into things with the main focus of my writing always being on trying to make others happy, to be able to make someone’s day a little happier. I’ve received some amazing compliments saying that people think I’m a kind person lately and those really touched me. Someone said that my writing made them read things outside of their fandom recently and that one really did make me tear up with happiness. There’s also an old review on one of my really old works that I’ve saved and often go back to look at where they were very upset, almost to the point of getting rude, because the work in question had wrapped up and the story was now complete. To have someone get so emotional because the fic in question was now finished and they were so upset that they wouldn’t be getting to read anything more for it really made me feel very…proud in a way, just knowing that someone was so into what I was writing that the idea of not getting to read it impacted them.

What genre is your favourite to write?

I love writing isekai, reader inserts, slice of life, comedy-action, fantasy/paranormal, and urban fantasy. I’m also a big fan of school-based things, both reading and writing them, just because it’s a setting that lends itself to a lot of different genres and story plots.

Is there a project you want to talk about?

I’ve mentioned before that I’m huge into ttrpg’s. They’re a whole lot of fun and while I can get some of my IRL to play really short little sessions with me, it’s rare and far between. I’ve been playing around with a one-page RPG that I found and have managed to make a full blown, but on the shorter side, campaign out of it and I’m really hoping, maybe around February or March, giving them enough time to make their characters, that I might have found some online friends or readers who’d be interested in getting together through Discord voice call once every week or two and running through the campaign.

[roadandruingame]

RaR Musings #17: Simulation in Games

I got into it lately on the merits of game design, and definitions of mechanical tropes like roguelike and roguelite, and whether rpg, jrpg, RP game, and roleplaying game all had different feels, and if a game like Alan Wake counts as an rpg or not. (To be clear: If a game has you play as a character, who makes decisions as a cross reference between that character's identity and the environment and challenges at hand, in a way that defines the character or changes them in some way, it's a roleplaying game. This means that just about every product people recognize as a 'game' released in the last 30 years is, likely, a roleplaying game, in some way, because it turns out, people like when you attach narratives to things.)

Roguelikes have existed for years, but really came into their own in the last decade, because the promise of an enjoyable, if difficult, gameplay loop that rewards player skill and requires significantly less brute-force design work by the developer. It means you can have a lot MORE game, with a lot more playtime, for less, relative to a game where every dungeon is hand-crafted and every enemy and item intentionally placed. But, because the game throws the entire catalogue at you from the get-go, there's an enormous learning curve, and without a sense of progression, many get bored or frustrated. Rogue-lites took the idea of the roguelike, and made it more consumer friendly, enabling progression over time, but still with major losses from death in randomly-generated environments.

Tabletop games follow these concepts as well. In a ttrpg, a host player meticulously crafts a dungeon, placing enemies and items; an enormous amount of work, and without a library of pre-built campaigns, one that leads to DM burnout sooner or later. Some games provide randomly generated tables, but having to reference tables and subtables doesn't feel very fun; that's computer work. Other games try for a mix of the two, with a host that helps ensure content is distributed smoothly, but the game is mostly running by itself, and so there's less work on the host's shoulders.

In each of these cases, there's different degrees of Simulation: a natural follow-through, where Action A, produces Result B, but that in turn, leads to Result C, and so on, but sometimes, a host is responsible for deciding what the Result is, forcing Action themselves or by presenting a scenario to another player, or stopping the Result chain for narrative or balance reasons. Often, a computer is designated the host, and it's ability to make these determinations are a simulation in itself, based on random number generation, weighted by the designers of the game. It's the main reason why a game like Baldur's Gate 3 can have up to four players, and none of them are actively causing the game to function, or even just one player, who controls multiple characters, but still doesn't cause the game to exist.

But tabletop roleplaying game enthusiasts are shy of this. They want to feel immersed, that their game and world and characters are real; they don't want to know that it's random, or that the DM just decided something arbitrarily, or made it up. They don't want to see how the sausage is made, because somehow it's less impressive if it's the result of hard work, and not effortlessly conjured to your dinner plate. It's also this distinction that spooks most players out of ever evolving into a dungeon master themselves: they worry that they need to have somehow ascended to become brain-kin with the fantasy world and master all it's mechanics and intricacies, to memorize statblocks and enemy and item locations, maps and lore and and And and. The revelation that a lot of the time it was made up on the spot disgusts them, because it threatens the immersion.

I muse about this because I'd set out to make Road and Ruin explicitly playable with no dungeon master. Host responsibility is shared around the table, either together, or passed to the next. A certain amount of simulation is required, then, to make sure the game actually functions, but the notion that each player would be responsible for taking turns coming up with what happens next disgusts and horrifies people. They want to feel immersed, not be taken out of it, and they want to guess what happens next and be proven right, not make up what happens next and then it just does. But in all the "the DM is a player too! :)" arguments I've ever seen, never have I ever heard anyone acknowledge that these benefits of immersion and not knowing what happens next extend exclusively to the adventurers, and never to the DM themselves. Sure, players can do things that the DM didn't anticipate, but that means work rather than discovery, as the DM scrambles to make up what happens next, not merely just guessing and being proven right.

Road and Ruin has been described as (read: accused of) being a game that only dungeon masters can play, because only dungeon masters are versed in the techniques being employed here. Which is a really interesting argument, because, like... why do games like DND build their entire functionality around the existence of these supposedly rare people? While it's true that not everyone is an artist or designer, or versed in fantasy or storytelling tropes, why is it the only concrete way for players like this to get to PLAY a game is to rely on a computer to take the reins from them? That a DM can be a player, but that a player can't be a DM?

If nothing else, I'd want Road and Ruin to have enough simulation elements that I, myself, could be a player in the game, WHILE being the host. That I could generate the story as I go, and be proven WRONG, make mistakes, and die, not just spend tens of hours lovingly crafting a narrative and building a world, only for everyone to trample it and litter, climbing aboard the magical mystery tour, expecting to be trucked from one narrative moment to the next. That I could show, by example, how exciting it is to come up with plans, and the twist of being proven wrong, and that other players might be emboldened by it to the point of wanting to try it for themselves. And finding, it's not actually so different from how they were playing before.

I still struggle with reducing the amount of math baked into the simulation, and make it more about player choice, but I also have to have systems where Something Happens, regardless of where the players are and if they're doing anything to provoke it. Realizing you've dropped your wallet somewhere after you've been travelling for hours, making the choice to look for it, meeting someone who found it, and getting to learn about who they are and what they're doing there, or finding a hidden cache of treasure, but it's too much for you to carry by yourself, certainly without notice, are both things I made up on the spot based on the same [GOLD] card, out of a deck of 52 cards, but with a diceroll determining the event was "Bad, but resolved", and "Good, but at a cost". If the game needs someone like me to be able to come up with those conclusions as the game master, then by all means, I'll do it, but as a player, I had no idea those events were going to occur, and I'll be just as capable of making decisions about what to do about them as everyone else at the table.

[galacticdrift]

My BigBadCon2024 games/PCs

The Expanse RPG (Phoenix Wu, pilot): This was a good intro to the Expanse RPG system! We played a fun module where our transport ship encountered an automated SOS and checked it out, only for things to go horribly, horribly wrong… I think the system is, hm, not really for me all in all, but I still enjoyed getting hands-on exposure to it!

Dread (Jeanette Harris, stagehand): There was no way I was letting BigBadCon go by without playing some Dread, and happily I got into TWO very different but great scenarios. The first one, The Phantom of Off-Broadway, was mostly a black comedy, and had fictional scenes and songs for the fictional stage show that started going off the rails when the leading lady was found dead -- by yours truly, the stagehand. I had a funny, weirdly mutually-respectful dynamic with the overbearing scenery-chewing elder statesman actor playing the role of the ghost in the play -- not to be confused with the actual ghost(s) haunting the production.

Abyssal (Charlie, bartender/The Haunted): Honestly I don't generally tend to vibe so well with the Blades in the Dark style dice pool systems (as compared to the 2d6+X PBTA ones), but Abyssal does feel like Lara & Ash sanded off some of the ways that those grate on me, and having Lara herself run the game was of course wonderful.

At one point while we were on break I made the comment that any time any game focuses on my character (our goal was a casino heist in 70s Vegas, to fund Charlie opening her very own bar), I'm like 'wait, hang on, there seems to have been a mistake, shouldn't we be paying attention to someone else right now?'

Anyway I do love Charlie and her ghost raccoon buddy Lo Mein though, and I genuinely wish that oneshot would turn into a whole campaign.

To me there's something INCREDIBLY compelling about The Haunted being mostly just a regular alive person who happens to be in close contact with death/ghosts, in contrast to the other playbooks who have been fundamentally changed by some force and are on a slow slide toward alignment with that force. Like, yeah, The Haunted kind of is, too, but mainly just by being on an accelerated path toward the same inevitable end that every mortal faces.

Dread (Cal Hashimoto, exogeologist): This was the other Dread scenario I played, The Fermi Paradox, and WOW it was absolutely stellar (BA DUM TSSH). We played a mining crew landing on a moon of Uranus and discovering some cosmic horror, & what made it great for me personally was a) all the hard scifi nerdery I got to really lean into, & b) the way our character questionnaire answers at the start got tied in to the action of the plot and turned out to connect the different characters together.

Defy the Gods (Dumuz, The Revenant): In addition to Charlie, Dumuz really lives in my head now and I would LOVE to play a whole campaign as them with the table we had. In just the 1 session, we developed a burgeoning PC romance between the Revenant & the Sword, and I got to swing big by using the eponymous 'Defy the Gods' move to defile a temple and humiliate the god who wanted me destroyed (just because I lied to him to persuade him to help me escape the Underworld, I can't imagine why he was mad).

I find the playbooks for Defy the Gods really interesting and creative -- like The Revenant for example being someone who, having returned from the dead, is embracing a whole new life & identity, and who could quite readily serve as a face or expert kind of role given the skills they have access to.

The system reminds me a little of AGON, with the invocation of epithets, and certainly also of games like Apocalypse Keys, Abyssal, and Demigods, where you have a "nova" kind of state you are at risk of reaching whether you want to or not, and there's only so many times you can draw from that well before your character transitions into a whole new state of being.

One of the juicy things about Defy the Gods in particular compared to those others is that almost every single roll is risky in that "flying too close to the sun" way, because for almost EVERY possible move, doing TOO well is actually a worse (but more interesting) outcome in most cases than just barely scraping by.

And, of course, like with Abyssal, it was a delight having this game run by the creator herself as well. :) I'm so interested to see how the system continues to develop.

[britcision]

And this is literally what I mean about Matt Mercer unfinding my goddamn family

10 years after their last fucking meeting? 10 years? They haven’t got the whole gang together in 10 goddamn years after the Uk’otoa fight?

And yeah sure they’re meeting up in bits and pieces in between I’m sure they’ll mention it, if they remember, but this is why American rpg game endings suck

“And then they all went their separate ways from the people they had seen every day and saved the world with and didn’t really think about each other ever again (unless we want them to reunite for a DLC)

But be super invested in their interpersonal relationships anyway. It won’t change the ending, but your choices totally matter”

(Ignore that c3 is only 6-7 years after the M9’s final campaign ep and the Ikithon fight and has not even hit the full year yet timeline consistency is fucking hard okay)

(Gonna be fun to see how they handle that Caleb and Beau were canonically off with Bells Hells without the rest of their friends when the solstice started, I’m hoping for “this is how the rest of the Nein go rescue them” and also CADUCEUS GODDAMN CLAY

They fucking STOLE his “deal with Molaesmyr” DIVINE MISSION PERSONALLY SENT TO HIS ASS BY THE WILDMOTHER and just haven’t even addressed it so I’m double hoping for Some Kind Of Goddamn Explanation for what exactly the Clays are doing about The Evil Cursed Forest They Literally Fucking Live In And Their Goddess Personally Paged The Lot Of Them To Deal With Before It Tries To Eat Their Fucking House Again

I will accept “Caddy stayed home he likes it at home and let the others handle it” (cuz that went super well and in a way that totally wouldn’t have traumatized him last time) if I must but for fuck’s sake the only elven amputee they ever met in game is Keyleth’s lost mother how the fuck did they send the new party to The Woods By Caddy’s House His Family Were Personally Charged With Fixing and not run into a single fucking Clay?????)

Also since the one thing we know happened to Beau and Caleb around the solstice was getting yote to destinations unknown (hopefully together) the reuniting aspect is gonna be fun while the magic’s fucked 👀

I’ll admit to a passing curiosity about how much of Bell’s Hells current solstice-and-Ruidus-heavy plot line they’re going to let the Nein deal with in the one shot but honestly not enough to catch up with Bells Hells

Like. Matt’s not gonna let them deal with anything important to Bell’s Hells “offscreen” for that campaign. He’s just not gonna. So hunting Ludinous for sport would be fucking excellent, but I don’t think he’d let them do it?

If they were visiting Vox Machina to rescue Vax it would not just be a Mighty Nein headline

Matt isn’t gonna let them just handle anything that Bell’s Hells have been building up to for months and months

I thought we’d gotten a pretty solid grip on everything that was happening with the moon… as part of the Bell’s Hells plot that’s been building for months and months

Beau and Caleb are explicitly involved in the Bell’s Hells plot that has been building for months and months but explicitly under Matt’s thumb, not Liam and Marisha’s

(And he’s gonna have to give them just all the juicy plot stuff the Empire Sibs have been doing that they might not have told the Hells because this is the first time Matt’s taken over a PC and then given them back at a point explicitly later in the timeline

So Liam and Marisha need to know what their characters have been doing last week while Matt controlled them for Bell’s Hells to play them in line with how Matt played them

And Liam literally built Orym as an excuse to reuse all his c1 knowledge he hates keeping information separate between characters but Orym can’t know what Caleb’s been up to)

[patmax17]

Hi

I'm not sure I get your point, tbh.

On one hand, if a player is warping all attention towards himself, making the time miserable for anyone else, all other people playing (and being hurt by his behavior) should talk to them and explain the problem. Then two things can happen: either the player wasn't aware of his behavior, or that other people didn't find it as enjoyable as they did, and in that case they can just stop the behavior and problem solved. Or, the problematic player turns out to be an asshole, and at that point the only thing to do is to stop playing with them.

Now, in my experience D&D has two big issues when talking about this problem. DISCLAIMER: My main experience is with D&D 3.5, I played a bit of 4th edition and I'm not really up to date with 5E (but from what I get, at a high level the game follows the same principles). Correct me if I'm wrong

First, the game has some intrinsic traits that make such behavior especially frustrating: D&D expects the DM to have a plan for how the story should go and the player can disrupt it. Most rules revolve around combat, and a player character can reasonably kill any non-heroic NPC if they want.

Second, the DM guide puts the DM as the only people in charge to ensure the players are having a good time. They're responsible for any rule questions, they have to prepare the story and move it forward, but they also have to solve issues between the players (IIRC 3rd ED DM guide expected the DM to also be hosting the game, and being responsible for the snacks, but I might very well be misremembering this).

There's also this widely spread convention of resolving out of game stuff in-game ("kill their character", "make the NPC unkillable", "use this spell to prevent the character from ruining the story", and so on), but I'm not sure if that stems from something written in the books or if it's a behavior that emerged from D&D culture. I do remember the DM guide stressing how you should try to talk "out of game" as much as possible, to not "do metagaming", and the things could be tied.

All this put together means that when a player is ruining the game, the DM is expected to deal with it, but nobody knows how.

How do you avoid that? Well, on one hand, play with people who aren't assholes. With that out of the way, there can be people who have wildly different expectations about the tone and mood of a campaing. Talking openly about that *BEFORE THE CAMPAIGN STARTS* can go a long way in getting everyone on the same page (or letting people opt out if they see the other players want to play something they don't like). If you're unfamiliar with it, The Same Page Tool is a good way to set expectations: https://bankuei.wordpress.com/2010/03/27/the-same-page-tool/

Another way to avoid this situations is to play games that don't have a story to be "ruined". Any open-ended story RPG lets the players do whatever they really want, without ruining any pre-concieved story. I'm thinking of Apocalypse World, Fate, On Mighty Thews, but also completely different games like A Taste for Murder, Fiasco, Polaris, or A Penny for my Thoughts. These games often have extra safeguards in place for the player characters (they often go by different rules than NPCs and have a different kind of agency, they can't be just killed off and their agency is at least partially protected, compared to NPCs).

And lastly, sometimes there's just nothing else to do than to have the though conversation with your friend. Maybe they have different tastes in RPGs, and there's nothing wrong with them. I have friends I enjoy playing boardgames and wathing anime with, but I would not like to play RPGs with them. Or maybe they just aren't the pleasant person you thought them to be.

Sorry for the long post, but it's a topic that's quite important to me, and it took me years to understand some of these things

I think a lot of the advice about running tabletop RPGs that you get on this site tends to forget that groups typically have more than one player. Like, yes, facilitating player agency is any competent GM's goal, but y'all, the reason the player who wants to immediately stab every named NPC in the face is reviled isn't because control-freak GMs don't like having their plans ruined. It's because if you let that player have their way, they're the only one who gets to exercise any agency at all. Either the entire group only does what the maximum-disruption-all-time-time player wants to do, forever, or they kick that player out of the game. Those are the only options – and that player knows it. They're exploiting the group's natural tendency to seek consensus to issue a tacit ultimatum: "either everyone does what I want, or the in-game drama escalates to out-of-game drama". That's why people hate dealing with that player – it's not just a GM thing.

[martenpounce]

Just a silly question here: I'm a master of a table of rpg based on that Warriors adventure game(the remastered version), and i'm close to end my campaign, i was wondering what my next campaign can be about, and i thought of using your Journaling game in some way, of course i would create a different combat system(probably mix with the Adventure game) for more fun sessions, do you think it would be possible?

ooo that sounds interesting. i havent considered how the game might be adapted into a traditional ttrpg but i have enough experience playing them to come up with some ideas probably

i think it would depend on what kind of experience youre looking for with the game. to my understanding, the adventure game is player character focused, with the pcs going on missions that the gm sets up and runs. the journaling game instead focuses on the whole clan, and doesn't account for individual skills of each cat.

to turn the journaling game into a multiplayer experience, i have two ideas:

sort of like you proposed, use the adventure game - or some other system - for the "uptime" of the game, where the player characters are doing a mission or whatever. the pcs would have stats and mechanics for fights and skill checks and etc, but npc clan members probably still don't need them (or like... all npc warriors have the same statblock, all npc apprentices do, etc). in "downtime" between these missions, the journaling game serves as a way to progress the clan as a whole. maybe there are as many days per season as there are players, and the gm plays the clan leader, working with a different player each day to go through the daily tasks. also during this downtime, players could volunteer their pcs for patrols/hunts/forages, and earn xp based on the results - of course, those results would need tweaking to play well with the individual stats of the pcs, so a pc who has been established as really good in a fight doesn't randomly die to a rogue on patrol. ive never played the adventure game, only skimmed it, so i dont remember how progression/xp for pcs works. as for how many seasons there are between uptimes... maybe either base it on when the gm wants to run the uptimes (like a mission that should occur specifically in winter, or a certain timeskip length), or roll 1d4 so there's a year between them at most?

less like you're intending i think, but still could be interesting - do something in the vein of the quiet year, where the results and rolls act more as prompts for the players to follow, for collaborative storytelling. either everyone works together to build/run one clan, or maybe each player has their own (there would need to be a deeper system for clan-to-clan interactions if that were the case). in this case there wouldn't be a single gm running things.

[equalseleventhirds]

Okay so this is GM anon, to answer your questions: as a friend group we definitly lean towards sci-fi and adventure, as in we enjoy movies in those genres so we know and enjoy the conventions thereof. Horror too, but in the style of Scream watch-alongs, or watching scary movies to make fun of them (and hide that you're feeling creeped out) no actual like gore or serious contemplative horror. I don't really know if it's better to go with more serious of more silly games, I was def looking at the more silly stuff bc the serious ones feel really awkward to me (but that might be informed by the fact that most serious RPG's I've heard are longform? The actors get really deep and attatched to their characters and I can't really picture feeling that intense? But maybe I'm just biased to think that short games are always more comedic and silly?). I think I'd prefer more rules/guided games to start with, I think it'll help with getting started and not freezing up when you can't think of something. I think puzzle games or like a heist or mystery sound great! Social interaction too, that's def one of the plus points of RPG's and games over watching something, that you're spending the whole time talking to eachother. Tbh I really don't know what would be best to focus on, I'm just spitballing, I just think something with a clear goal. We usually have at least a couple of hours time together, but it's not necessary for a game to last that whole time. Thank you so much for taking the time to do this!! I'm in a different timezone, it's actually pretty late for me so if I don't answer any follow up questions, it's bc I'm sleeping LOL

hi again gm anon! glad u did not wait up for me bcos it took me a while (i have...... many games), but here is a handful of recs for you!

first up, i think generally caltrop core games might be p good for a beginner; it's a very simple d4 system with very structured rules (how much depends on which game, but generally it's turn-based with set actions to choose from). there's still room for roleplaying & improv ofc, but it's easy to keep a handle on the table. there's been a caltrop core game jam with lots of submissions before, and ofc u can browse the tag on itch, but something like crystal souls or cursed confections might be fun for your group!

futuristic scifi 'group of thieves/scoundrels/rebels/etc do a mission' games are also very popular (i own like........ 20? 30? some are cyberpunk and some are spaceships and just. lot of em.) and also generally have a decent structure to work with (altho less turn-based than caltrop core, usually). a lot of them are geared towards longer campaigns, but can be done as a one-shot if you ignore some of the between-missions stuff. or do it as a post-mission cooldown thing. u kno. (lots of them are sorta forged in the dark based, but the slightly less complex ones i think are good for beginners; fitd can get really involved, but there are also simplified ones!)

you might enjoy offworlders, off the grid: resurgence, xanadu, subway runners, what's so awesome about hacking the planet, weasel overdrive, make our own heaven, bubblegum wizards 2, or dwindle.

and finally, i do love a dungeon crawl; keeps everything to a relatively small & defined space, but you can get weird with it (npcs in a dungeon? yeah! timespace fabric folding in a dungeon? yeah!) and it's a place to do all the puzzles and riddles and inexplicable creature encounters you generally don't get a chance for in a 'here you are in A World' sorta game. also, easy to keep short (my game sessions tend to run 4+ hours for oneshots, but in a dungeon crawl you can just. skip to the last room lmao.) games designed for dungeon crawling tend to lean more horror (if they don't lean..... d&d, basically), but i tried to pick ones where you can either take out most horror elements, or choose to play them lighthearted and chill/campy. you may like crwlr, the dark below, or the empty house.

.......and that's some basic game recs for your group; should be fine for 3-4 players, or even for one-on-one play if you can't get everyone together, altho that's not the ideal. as far as games specifically designed as two-player games, i know there are a bunch of them on itch, but most of them are gmless (usually asymmetrical gmless, but still gmless), and many of them lean heavily emotional (altho some are silly!). i'm not sure if you have different requirements in mind for a two-player game; lmk and i'll see what i can do? altho probably not until after this weekend, i got some stuff to work on for school T_T (this is....... part of why i'm not actively looking to gm rn, even tho i waaaaaant to. too many school.)

oh also podcasts! i know there's more than this around, but you can always check out oneshotpod for shortform games of many kinds! international podcast month also has some oneshot ttrpg episodes; i gmed a game of dwindle this year that was lots of fun! i'll poke around for more sometime, but for now i rly gotta get some sleep lol.

[scripttorture]

Hi! I realize that this probably isn't the sort of thing you usually get asked, but I am a beginner game master planning my first tabletop rpg campaign. And depending on how things play out, it may be that at some point or another, the players might want to try to get information from a character unwilling to give that information to them. Now, as I'm sure you're well aware, it's not exactly a rare thing for heroes in action movies and stuff to beat people up (or threaten to do so) to get them to reveal what information without the story framing it as torture or a bad thing at all, and since this is such a widespread trope in mainstream fiction, I'm worried my players might think to do the same in our game.

So, do you have any suggestions on how to steer them away from resorting to torture and direct them towards proper interrogation in the game, without having to make it an explicit house rule that torture won't get you anything useful? I could technically make that a house rule, but I'd really rather not since we're all pretty inexperienced and it's gonna be confusing enough navigating the official system written down in the rulebook, without keeping track of additional made-up rules that exist because I say so.

Session Zero. You need a session zero.

 This is basically a pre-game session where everyone gets together and discusses what they want from the game, players and GM. You talk about expectations, the kind of game you want to play and the comfort levels of everyone around the (virtual) table. Players usually talk about the characters they want to play and it’s a good chance to decide if any of the player characters knew each other before the adventure. It can also be used to get a little bit of roleplay in to help the players get a feel for their characters and the GM to get a feel for the setting.

  And these are generally useful things to have sorted before the first game. But you can also use the time to figure out if there were subjects or themes players wanted to avoid completely and if there were any subjects or themes they want warnings about.

 Make notes about what your players say and do. I made the rooky error of not doing that my first time (you can always ask again and correct these mistakes.)

 If you don’t want to make a hard rule about torture my advice is to bring it up during session zero and discuss it with the players up front.

 You can say outright ‘I know torture doesn’t work in reality and I’m uncomfortable with tropes showing it positively in the game. I want to have fun in the game too.’

 To be honest I think that kind of direct approach is better for everyone because speaking in euphemisms or trying to hint at something can be genuinely misunderstood. And then people get frustrated with each other.

 In game it’s important to reward the behaviour you want to see. Give players XP for good roleplay and for interviewing and investigating things. Give them items.

 I know it probably sounds obvious but rewarding players for roleplay instead of just combat encourages them to roleplay. Rewarding them for creative non-violent solutions encourages them to think outside the box. If they use their skills to avoid a fight give them the XP as if they won it. Apply the same process to investigations.

 It’s also really important to give players multiple options and have a back up plan for if rolls go badly.

 The first area my players got to was a spooky abandoned town and they were looking for the people. They rolled high and found a trail going into the forest. But if they’d rolled low the NPCs they arrived with would have directed them to the next town over and they’d have been told to investigate the forest, some rumours about something coming out of the forest and the general direction the missing people probably went.

 Making sure you’ve got multiple ways players can get information should help. Because unless you’ve got a table of people who just want to kill stuff (no judgement on that but it doesn’t sound like the kind of game you want) players are looking at all the options.

 Having NPCs around to point out options players didn’t consider can help too.

 My players just completed a murder-mystery style investigation and they did an incredible job. They interviewed loads of NPCs, collated notes on who had seen what and went through the luggage of a suspect confiscating spell components before the show down.

 Because the party didn’t have anyone with a high degree of magical knowledge (or knowledge of the culture they were in) I gave them a helpful NPC with that knowledge. And I used him to prompt them occasionally. For instance at one point they were interviewing a suspicious ‘wizard’ and the conversation was going in circles. They were rolling high so they knew the ‘wizard’ wasn’t lying but they also didn’t trust his answers.

 I had the NPC ask if they could see the ‘wizard’s’ spell book. The players passed it around until it got to a player who could read the language it was written in. The player found it was full of poetry, no spells at all. Between that and casting spells to detect magic and the like they figured the ‘wizard’ wasn’t lying, he was just… deluded.

 Remember that a maximum roll doesn’t mean success; it means the best possible outcome. That does not always have to be what the player wants. Rolling a 20 to persuade a guard the character just attacked to let them go and give them back their weapons probably shouldn’t work. Unless there’s something else going on. If the prison is being attacked by zombies may be things should go differently.

 Don’t be afraid to say ‘no’ sometimes. Not everything players want is a good idea for the game. As GM you’re responsible for creating a good time for everyone. Which includes you. Refusing things that would cause you distress, or just more stress to figure out in-game, is perfectly valid.

 Really talk to your players about the kind of game they’d enjoy and the kind of game you’d enjoy. Work out if those things are compatible.

 Sometimes they won’t be. I have plenty of friends who I wouldn’t want GMing for me, because what they like in a game and what I do are very different. And that is OK.

 Don’t feel pressured into including elements you’re uncomfortable with. The game is for everyone at the table. You can always say ‘I’m uncomfortable with where this is going, can we tone it down?’

 Good friends, good players, will listen.

Edit: I would strongly recommend not limiting player alignment or race choices as a GM. Instead talk to your players about the kind of characters they want to make and how those characters would act. Decide amongst yourselves what fits the game you all want to play instead of assuming you know what a player’s character is like better then they do. 

Available on Wordpress.

Disclaimer

[howtofightwrite]

Followup: Hybrid Builds, and Creativity in Storytelling

“…they’d also be less effective as a combatant than a dedicated martial fighter.” What would the point for a wizard, or just a mage, learning to fight then?

So, this is a follow-up to a previous D&D question. Unlike with that question, this time the answers are significantly different depending on whether it’s a build or a narrative choice.

I’ll come back to builds in a second, but it is worth remembering that D&D is a tactical board game. Character build decisions affect the effectiveness of your piece on the table. The class system D&D uses encourages hyperspecialization, because you’re trying to create a character who will be the most effective under specific circumstances you can engineer, rather than a character who will be effective under a broad range of situations.

In short, D&D encourages power gaming. There’s nothing wrong with this in a game. Most combat focused RPGs require this (to one extent or another.) It’s especially true in CRPGs and pre-written campaigns, where your build(s) will be tested against fixed combat scenarios. You’ve either optimized enough to clear the encounter, or you fail.

So, let’s start with the narrative reasons. Having more diverse background gives you more versatility. A character may learn magic to supplement their skillset. For example, you might see a thief, who studied the arcane to help them be a better thief. A monster hunter would certainly benefit from some basic arcane training.

Actually, lets step back even further: On a conceptual level, I’m not wild about fixed class systems for characters. However, there is a lot to be said for characters who bridge between classes. A warrior with a background in stealthy skullduggery has access to options that a “pure,” warrior would lack. They can sneak around effectively, and they could potentially get access to places that their unstealthy counterpart couldn’t. They’d also have a better idea of what someone who was trying to infiltrate would do, and could prepare more effectively.

The problem with all of that is, it doesn’t really reflect how people live. If a character is a soldier or mercenary, they’ll train in that job position. However, that’s not the entirety of who that person is. They (probably) didn’t decide in childhood that they wanted to go to war, and then spent the entirety of their life dedicated to that goal. (Now, you do see this with very select things, like athletes, but they’re more of an exception.) Even if you do hold to the course, you’ll pick up diverse skills and knowledge as you grow up, simply as a consequence of the world you live in. Class based character building doesn’t really reflect that (in most cases.)

Second, even if you’re starting with class based systems to prototype your characters, I do strongly encourage playing around with the idea of stacking a couple classes together to reflect a character’s background. I originally ran across this in Traveler T20 (a D20 version of the Traveler RPG.) That included specific classes for various kinds of military service, and an entire history system, which could see characters starting levels worth of backstory.

So, if you have a character who used to be a mercenary, or got their start as an enforcer for a local gang, but they managed to get out of that life, go to school, and study magic, you’ve got a character with the potential for an interesting skillset.

The inverse is also true, you could see a mercenary or thief who originally studied magic at a school, but parted ways for whatever reason. A magic college dropout as it were. They could still be a somewhat skilled mage, it’s just not what they’re doing now.

It’s also quite possible that your setting simply has arcane warriors who split their training between magic and martial skills. It’s not that they’re a better fighter than someone who only focused on that, or that they’re a better mage than a dedicated wizard, it’s that they have access to both and can use whichever better fits their current situation. These might be elite combatants, strategic experts, magekillers, really whatever their spells allow them to do.

Magic offers a lot of versatility (both in D&D, and out of it), so there are a lot of potential applications for battlefield magic, and having mages who can operate safely near the front lines is a huge advantage.

If you want a diverse collection of mages in your setting, hybrids a very good route towards that. I’d also suggest looking into the idea of having multiple kinds of magic, which aren’t entirely compatible to further differentiate them.

That said, this isn’t necessary, and if your world was built around the idea of highly insular mage lords ruling everything, and jealously guarding their arcane secrets, then hybrids might not be a good fit.

So, for rules, I’m going to stick to D&D. I’m also focusing on the two Third Edition iterations. This is because Fourth really didn’t work for me. I like what I’ve seen of Fifth, but simply haven’t gotten in. I also have passing familiarity with Pathfinder, and a lot of this applies there, though I haven’t looked at Second Edition Pathfinder at all. (Also, on the subject of Pathfinder, there is the Magus base class. This is an arcane casting class that gains armor proficiencies as it levels.)

There’s a number of other games I could talk about, but, it’s not relevant to this discussion, and stuff would get really out of hand. A very short version would be that, some games support hybrid casters better than others. D&D supports it, but it can be very finicky.

Now, why would a Wizard take levels in a non-spellcasting class? Three reasons: Fluff, splash, or PRCs.

Fluff means, “I did it for the roleplaying.” I used to play a Rogue/Sorcerer hybrid back in 3e. Now, if you’re familiar with D&D, you’re probably thinking, “but that’s just a Bard.” While the bard was a better mechanical fit for what I was doing, the idea of adding Sorc levels onto an established Rogue was conceptually interesting to me. (Also, I originally planned to take levels of Dragon Disciple, because I overestimated that class, but the character never got that far, and you could take Dragon Disciple as a Bard anyway.)

Splash is a concept where you take a level in a class for its introductory bonuses. D&D gives new characters a lot of bonuses for taking their first level in a class. This means, a level 1 character is functional, if a bit fragile. One classic example from 3.5 would be taking a level of Duelist on your Wizard. Duelist gives you Martial Weapon proficiency and lets you count your Intelligence modifier as additional Armor Class. Since your INT score should be fairly high, that’s a lot of armor for your mage for the cost of a single level. (There’s a major caveat coming in the next section.)

PRCs are the final major reason for a player to hybrid spec their spellcaster. This no longer exists in current editions of the game. PRCs existed in Third and 3.5 (as well as a lot of the D20 based games that were published by other companies.) Prestige classes are rare or highly specialized advancement routes for characters. These always have a mix of prerequisites before you can start taking them. So, they’re not open to new characters. You don’t start as a Dragon Disciple, or a Shadowdancer, that’s something that you gain access to as you adventure. In rare cases, membership in an organization can unlock access to an associated PRC. I’m specifically thinking of the Harper Scout, Guild Thief, and Purple Dragon Knight, all of which require membership in their associated organizations. If your character isn’t a member of the Harpers, they can’t take Harper Scout.

There are a lot of PRCs that require you to split your build between multiple classes. The Arcane Archer, Arcane Trickster, Eldritch Knight, and Mystic Theurge all require you to split off from a mono-class Wizard or Sorcerer build. The Archer can imbue their spells into their arrows, the Trickster is a Rogue Wizard hybrid that gets sneak attack bonuses for their spells, the Eldritch Knight is exactly what we were talking about last time, a Wizard (or Sorcerer) who continues to study magic, while getting a Fighter’s BAB advancement. The Mystic Theurge requires you have levels as both an Arcane and Divine spellcaster. It advances both at the same time, and can create some really whacky builds, given the character has two separate spell sets to pull from.

Also worth knowing that the Duelist, mentioned above, is a PRC. A level one character can’t start as a Duelist. If you were wanting to splash that onto your wizard, you’d need to wait until level 13, and by that point the INT bonus to your AC would be lackluster. However, it would qualify you for Eldritch Knight at Level 14. So, you’re splashing one PRC to gain access to another. You still gain the benefit of both however, so you’d have the INT AC bonus, and you’d only, effectively, miss out on two levels of Wizard (or Sorcerer). (The first level of Eldritch Knight and the level of Duelist don’t advance your Wizard’s spells per day, but EK resumes that advancement at the second level.)

So, PRCs were Third and 3.5 edition, (Pathfinder copies these from 3.5, while adding a few new ones.) Fourth Edition had the Paragon Paths and Epic Destinies. These were mandatory and would be selected at levels 11 and 21 respectively. In Fifth Edition, most of the work PRCs used to do was baked into subclasses. The subclasses don’t always match up with their original PRCs. PRCs do technically exist for 5e, but they only appear in, an “experimental,” online supplement.

From a game perspective, I’m torn. PRCs heavily warped character building in 3e and had very specific prerequisites. This created situations where you’d sometimes need to plan out your character in exacting detail to get access to the PRC you wanted. On the other hand, a lot of them had some really interesting conceptual elements.

Fourth Edition’s Paragon Paths were the epitome of, “when everyone’s special, no one is.” It did an excellent job of articulating what the level ranges meant in the game. Level 1 characters are fresh faced newbies. Level 10 is a veteran adventurer. (Also, D20 Modern, the Urban Fantasy version of D&D level caps at 10.) Levels 11 to 20 are getting into superhero territory. Levels 21+ are, “epic.” For a frame of reference, apotheosis is a realistic goal for an epic character.

Paragon Paths also solved the problem of players, “missing,” their PRC because they forgot to take a feat, or forgot to check the feat’s prereqs. This is why I said, “exacting detail,” above. While I’m fond of 3.5, it is a very unforgiving character progression system.

So, from a narrative perspective, there’s plenty of reasons a mage might spend some time studying something other than magic. It’s also entirely possible they used to be something other a mage, before they started studying, or gained access to their powers. This can also get flipped, where you have a wizard who left their studies, and is following some other path now.

For game builds, you need to weigh what you’re giving up, and what you get for that. In D&D, most of the time, giving up caster levels is a huge deal. In part, because high level Wizard/Sorcerers spells get really out of hand. However, from an optimization stand, it’s only worth considering if you have a specific goal in mind.

-Starke

This blog is supported through Patreon. If you enjoy our content, please consider becoming a Patron. Every contribution helps keep us online, and writing. If you already are a Patron, thank you.

Followup: Hybrid Builds, and Creativity in Storytelling was originally published on How to Fight Write.

[clonecest-bin-account]

300 followers bingo - Fox & Fives | Fox/Cody | Tabletop RPG AU

(In which the guys play, some bad calls are had, and some character death happens. Thank god it’s just a game)

(This also counts as a modern AU)

That session has ended with yelling and almost a fight, but thankfully they were all able to defuse it before it could actually happen. People who say that tabletop games aren’t intense clearly have never played them, because oh boy.

To be fair to Fox, it all happened because of some pretty shitty rolls: his character had gravely misunderstood the situation and shot Fives’ character down. Things would’ve gone better if only Fives had rolled his death saves well, but that day fate really had it out for all of them.

Fox tried his best to stay in character, but so did the others, so of course words were said, words that weren’t kind at all…

 Fox realizes that the hand that is holding the glass of water he wants to drink is trembling only when he almost misses his mouth. He actually even manages to throw some water on his shirt. Alright, he needs to calm down.

He massages the bridge of his nose, then he walks out of the kitchen, heading towards the living room. There, he finds that most of the people are preparing to leave: it’s everyone besides him and Fives, who owns the place, so it’s not like he’s going to go anywhere.

“I’d love to hang out, but Padmé will kill me if I ditch her this evening too,” Anakin says, followed by a few chuckles from everyone else.

“You’re just flexing that you have a partner, while we don’t,” Rex scolds him. “Take example from Fox: he mentions so little that he and Codes are together that I almost forget about it from time to time.”

At that, more chuckles erupt, this time from Fox too, who relaxes at the jab. It certainly sounded more friendly in nature than what he’s told him during the game, but he supposes that’s just the nature of a tabletop session. If you don’t get a bit heated while playing, are you even playing it correctly? Besides, that was while they were in character, but now they’re just them.

“I mean,” he begins replying then, “if you want to hear me talk about how much me and your brother fuck, I can do that for you.”

Rex makes a gagging noise, accompanied by Anakin slapping his back as he laughs. Once he’s recovered, he blows a raspberry at Fox. “Don’t you ever fucking say that again.”

“Then don’t say dumb stuff,” Fox retorts.

 At least it seems that things are back to normal.

  After the last guy leaves, only Fox and Fives remain.

“Where’s Cody?” Fives asks, since usually he would’ve arrived already to take Fox home.

“Stuck in traffic,” Fox replies, citing what Cody has texted him just a few minutes ago. “Might take some time…”

“Ok…”

Silence falls between them. It’s pretty uneasy.

Thankfully, Fox knows just what to say to make things better: “Need a hand cleaning up?”

“… Yeah, I’d appreciate that.”

 This isn’t anything new; it happens quite often, actually, because Fox, unlike those other animals, would feel guilty about leaving Fives to tend to the house he himself has contributed to trash, so he usually stays behind to help him clean up, sometimes with Cody too if he’s already arrived.

Slowly, the silence becomes more amicable, just like it always was, but there’s still something gnawing at the back of Fox’s mind, something that he needs to say, because he knows how much Fives loves gaming, how much he loves this campaign, how invested he is in it and in his character. “Fives, I’m so sor--”

“Fox, there’s no need to apologize,” Fives interrupts him before he can finish that sentence, though his words certainly don’t fit how heartbroken he looked while they were playing. “You took a big risk and it didn’t pay off. I would’ve done the same.”

That is true: they have a very similar playstyle, and that’s why they get so along during their sessions. What’s the point of playing safe? That’s not fun, that’s not engaging. It’s all pretend after all, so why not taking risks? Well, today has proven that maybe, sometimes, playing safe is better.

“I still feel bad…” Fox mutters. Deep down he knows that it’ll be fine, that they’ll forget about this episode, that, at the end of the day, it’s just a game, but this doesn’t mean that right now, during this exact moment, he doesn’t feel guilty about what he’s done.

Fives shoots him a look, then he sighs. “Yeah, I man, I’m sad about it too, but hey! Story wise, that was a very cool moment, like one of those things you’d see on a tv show or something.”

“Well, that’s true, but…”

“At least I’ll have the chance to show off a new character. I’ve got everything figured out already, from their looks from their backstory.”

 At least he’s taking it with philosophy. Fox can’t really say the same. “You sure?”

Fives walks to him, putting both his hands on Fox’s shoulders. “I’m sure, so stop worrying, okay?” he says. “I was upset at first, of course, but it’s just a game, alright? It’s not like you killed me in real life!”

At those words, a hesitant smile appears on Fox’s lips. “Yeah, I suppose that’s true…”

 Right then, before he can add anything else, his phone rings. He picks it up. “Yes?”

“I’m outside.” Oh, it’s Cody.

Fox can’t help but to smile, truly smile this time. “You’ve finally made it,” he can’t help but to tease him.

Even though he can’t see him, he can hear Cody’s smile in the way he jokingly replies. “I’m still in time to leave you there, if you have to be an asshole about it.”

Fox laughs. “You’d miss me,” he retorts, feeling maybe a bit smug about it - don’t judge.

“… Yeah, you’re right,” Cody admits, in the end. Points for Fox.

“Ok, gimme a minute and I’m out,” Fox says there, and after Cody nods, he ends the call.

 He turns towards Fives.

“Is he here?” Fives asks, referring to Cody.

“Yup,” Fox replies. “I shouldn’t make him wait.”

“You better,” Fives chuckles. He helps Fox gather his things and accompanies him to the door. “See you next week?”

 Fox should kick himself in the head: for some reason he thought that they were going to stop inviting him to play to their weekly tabletop sessions, but of course that wasn’t going to be the case. If they had to throw him out for how this session went, they should’ve thrown everyone out as well, because they’ve all fucked up something during a game. Still, it’s heartening to hear Fives say that, to know that he’s still welcome.

“Yeah, see you…”

 Once he’s out, the heavy sigh that he’s been holding back until now finally finds its way out of his lips. Wow, this session was truly something…

He scans the street, looking for Cody’s car, and once he finds it, he walks towards it, though he can’t help but to roll his eyes when Cody, who notices him back, honks at him. He could’ve avoided doing that…

 “Hello there,” he greets Fox, once he gets inside. Before replying, Fox leans over to kiss his lips; he missed him.

“Hello there yourself,” he replies then.

“So…” Cody begins as he starts the car. He can’t wait to get back home and have Fox all for himself. “How did it go?”

At that, a chuckle escapes Fox lips as he savors spending the entire trip back home annoying Cody about all the stuff that has happened - he knows he’s not actually annoying Cody, and that he loves listening to him, but whatever.

“Boy, let me tell you something…”