Tabletop Roleplaying Games (D&D, Pathfinder, CoC, ETC.)

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Judge Dredd said:
DM question. How do you make a road trip/hike interesting?
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I would say you should also spare no words for descriptions of the area they are hiking along, and mix it up to discrete zones along the way. You can have a lot of variety even in a single biome, maybe one part is along a canyon or ravine, another is swampy, maybe they have to cross a raging river. Give a strong visual to every area, maybe have a prepared image to help visualize it. Maybe some place is incredibly colorful with varied flowers and tons of pollinators are all over the place, it is an encounter yeah, but not a hostile one, just something neat to see.
 
Judge Dredd said:
DM question. How do you make a road trip/hike interesting?
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This is a massive wad of depends. Usually I try to not make the road trips interesting because that's not the campaign for the next 2 years and by the time they get where they were going no one remembers why.

In your case, it sounds like the trip is the game.
If the game expects a vehicle, jsut have them go through a "mad max" type waste land, where there are other vehicles around that are abandoned but potentially repairable. Watch lets plays of The Long Drive for inspiration.


I also wrote a series of posts about using cards to simulate a trip/search
Ghostse

Post in thread 'Tabletop Roleplaying Games (D&D, Pathfinder, CoC, ETC.)'

Judge Dredd said:
What's the proper way to run a hex crawl, especially over repeated areas, without it turning into a tedious, pointless slog? And how do you handle transport options inside dungeons?


I can kind of make it work with roads. I ask where they're going, if they're sticking to a marked path. Roll random encounter, say they follow the road without issue, done. And sometimes I ignore the random encounter roll.

The problem I struggle with is anything beyond that. A common thing I see is "If the party searches this hex, they find X". The problem is, X can be anything from a hermits hut to a...
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Ghostse

Post in thread 'Tabletop Roleplaying Games (D&D, Pathfinder, CoC, ETC.)'

BlazikenLover said:
@Ghostse would you mind elaborating on how you use the deck of cards to search for things in an area? I often struggle when players want to search a room or area for things of interest and a method like that could help me.
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So again I don't have this down to an exact science but...

Lets for argument you have a 1d20 search table. I would just take 20 cards, assign them to each result of the search and shuffle the deck and just draw off the cards and interpret the results as if they had been rolled. This just means instead simply 5% chance of finding the thing they are looking...
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Ghostse

Post in thread 'Tabletop Roleplaying Games (D&D, Pathfinder, CoC, ETC.)'

BlazikenLover said:
I don't get the part about them taking longer, do you just add more encounter cards if they do stuff other than searching or is it more of a byproduct of adding more cards as they progress through the quest?
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Depends on how much of a "game" you want to make the search and how important to the session

For a specific example this was a megadungeon and I added in a "Oregon Trail" aspect to get them to balance survival skills & rations with combat skills and weapons so there would be well-rounded characters instead of just combat autists.
So except for the initial 3-card deck where...
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Ghostse

Post in thread 'Tabletop Roleplaying Games (D&D, Pathfinder, CoC, ETC.)'

Tri-TachyonRepresentative said:
Brotherman that is a fine idea, I'm saving this and tweaking it when I get the chance to. So never.
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Since people seem to like my primordial sludge of a concept I'll bloviate a bit more:

The base idea coalesced around concepts from this article:
Author talks about Stranger Things and the Stranger Things 5e cash grab, but only tangentially so keep reading. He talks about those things more in generality and there's some gold in there as he describes a sort of D&D themed Cube.

I've had thoughts about doing a...
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Ghostse said:
In your case, it sounds like the trip is the game.
If the game expects a vehicle, jsut have them go through a "mad max" type waste land, where there are other vehicles around that are abandoned but potentially repairable. Watch lets plays of The Long Drive for inspiration.
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I've mentioned this before, but I had a CoC campaign with a lot of vehicular combat (the lead party were bootleggers and still occasionally had a straight non-eldritch bootlegging campaign). We'd resolve vehicular combat in Car Wars, since that was another game we all played.

So if you have a road trip game that's going to involve shooting at each other and doing maneuvers in cars, you can always graft on mechanics from another game and play it as a boardgame. Car Wars worked for me but you can always just borrow from any game with actual mechanics for it.
 
Judge Dredd said:
DM question. How do you make a road trip/hike interesting?
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I bullshit with a some random one-off locations they can find and encounters that I have on hand if the journey's long enough. I also tend to like to go into the sorts of wildlife and vistas they can find.

My players are rather fond of working with the wild animals as a whole a lot and none of them are druids, which is amusing.
p1138 said:
Sex dungeons and if you've seen anything from modern women's romance and booktok, they're into monster fucking which includes literal dragons.
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The Forge and Sorcerer: the RPG continues to prove itself as being as lethal as crack was to ghettos, and HRT to autistic people. Combine that with fanfics and you got this crap.
 
Adamska said:
I bullshit with a some random one-off locations they can find and encounters that I have on hand if the journey's long enough.
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These random encounters are really great for filling in a hexcrawl map without overpopulating the world with interesting things, players can sense when you've done that and will zero in on the one hex that doesn't have two dungeons, a town with 1000 years of history, a wizard's tower, and a monster's lair.
 
Wilson The Ball said:
Tips on playing a Bozo in Cyberpunk Red without becoming a Jared Leto Joker?
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Shoot for Robin Williams with Death to Smoochy with a mix of positive nihilism where you just take the world's absurdity and make jokes about it as you laugh Pagliacci. Throw in some pratfalls and a bit of vaudeville and it works out pretty well.
 
CoC trip report from a few weeks back because I forgot the write up:

Scenario was the Haunting
...as I was introducing the system to newbies and practising it myself. Two PCs versus Corbitt.

Couple of great highlights: the D&D murderhobo expat pulled a blade on orderlies and mental hospital director when being shown the door. Proceeded to get his ass handed to him and But For the Grace of God and the GM managed to escape but basically became wanted felons in the process. It was wonderful teaching that CoC isn't some absurd power fantasy like D&D where after X level you become essentially a capricious Greek god amongst men and can just do whatever you want without really any meaningful consequences. It was a good learning moment and really reinforced that fact that investigators are mundane people ultimately and they should treat encounters like you would more or less in real life.

It was really cool seeing PCs actually pay attention to clues, understand about researching things, and start treating the adventure as an actual investigation. They hit the house early and then retreated to gather more info which was just A+ to me.

Second highlight was right at the end when they're running up against Corbitt who had used the knife to down one of the PCs, an ex-cowboy. The second PC grabs his dropped pistol, runs over and applies basic first aid and hands him his pistol. The cowboy who's on the ground, bleeding, knife in leg, aims at Corbitt, rolls an extreme success and blows the fucker's head off. If they hadn't dealt with him that turn it would have been curtains I think.

Cinema.

CoC is just something else in terms of quality. Combat feels so fluid and actually rewards improvisation and quick thinking. Since the majority of things boil down to comparing Regular > Hard > Extreme successes, everything just goes moves forward and doesn't drag. And because of the grounded nature of the setting, it helps rein in some of the baser instincts of PCs because oddly enough, randomly assaulting and murdering people in a setting where A) you are just as likely to have that happen to you in turn and/or B) where police exist and are actually dangerous if provoked, results in people actually roleplaying properly and not just being ridiculous assholes all the time every time.

It really feels to me like all the aspects of TTRPGs that I enjoy in one package. The high lethality just is the cherry on top.

Only issue is that because the RPing is so much stronger and systems more abstracted, people coming from D&D might find themselves struggling when there's no grid to move around on during encounters and it isn't as autistic with I CAST BLORGINS FIERY BLORN AT LEVEL 3 WHICH CAUSES THIS AND THEN I DO THAT AND BEACUSE OF THIS I GET THAT... AND FOR MY SECOND ACTION...

But this means it lends itself really well to online play as long as you don't struggle with (as another user put it) Doing a 5 Person Seance With Aunt Tabitha.
 
Brain Problems said:
It was really cool seeing PCs actually pay attention to clues, understand about researching things, and start treating the adventure as an actual investigation.
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My favorite CoC I ran involved exactly this. They sometimes wiped out other gangs. (But specifically the ones the cops hated.) They hated Communists (the lead was a White Russian who was on the wrong side of the Revolution but still had guns). They had investigative experience (a couple ethical ex-cops who realized eldritch horrors were a menace). They had academic experience, like a few barely sane level individuals who realized the eldritch horrors presented an existential threat to the existence of the human race.

But at least in the early part, before the car fighters all got killed, it was great to meld learning, fighting, learn to die by fighting and sacrificing yourself to defend humanity, or just die hopelessly and the entire world dies anyway.

CoC was so awesomely awful.

You could do the best you possibly could do, but then the world ends anyway.
 
Brain Problems said:
It really feels to me like all the aspects of TTRPGs that I enjoy in one package. The high lethality just is the cherry on top.
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You would really like Traveller then, because it has all those qualities combined with robust economic gameplay that really lends itself towards the "rational PC" roleplay. Combined with the fact that character creation spits out an experienced person with years of employment.
 
LovisXVI said:
You would really like Traveller then, because it has all those qualities combined with robust economic gameplay that really lends itself towards the "rational PC" roleplay. Combined with the fact that character creation spits out an experienced person with years of employment.
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I really recommend the Traveller character generation. You actually choose your life before showing up in the game and have benefits or penalties for it. The life you had before becoming a character in an RPG means you have abilities (and possibly penalties) for your prior life.

Your character is not just some thing thrown at you by an RNG.
 
Ghostse said:
Or a corpse.
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Ironman character creation hasn't been a thing since the first edition. Since at least MegaTraveller, it has just resulted in something bad happening if you fail the survival check with death as an optional rule. Mongoose 1st and 2nd (which are the versions most people would pick up these days) have unique mishaps per career. Though you could still die in character creation if you kept going until you die of old age as a result of aging rolls.
 
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