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

[EnemyStand]

Especially Call of Cthulhu. Any edition will work but you get best results from 1-3...

"I ATTACK THE ELDER THING."

Keeper: * laughs in Deep Speech* Roll new characters.

 

[anti SJW]

I hate FFG Star Wars. Played it with my group for awhile. Not for me. Rules don't have basic things like how wide is a blast radius of a grenade or thermal detonator.
You literally have to come up with some epic story for EVERY SINGLE DIE ROLL.

One session we were in a fishing contest. We had to get the bigger fish. We were rolling to reel it in for 3 hours of real time. The whole session. It was a contest of rolls, if I beat the fish, it got closer. If the fish beat me, it would swim farther away. I had to come up with a story for reeling in the fish, rolling for it for 3 hours straight. The other players had to keep rolling for keeping the boat steady, ect..

I need less abstract systems.

 

[Ghostse]

Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master does that with plot elements and clues. You have the important details written down, and place them whereever the players look. You have to keep it a secret though as it can lose the magic of the game if the players find out.

Only two problems there is first its bad player training. Its good to have some sections of the story where especially trivial hooks and information are handed out the party the first place they look - the party should never be at a loss for something to do, and you shouldn't send the party down false leads unless the false leads are either A) quickly resolved or B) end up giving the party more progress on the main quest. (e.g. You are running a game where time matters, and they are trying to locate passage to an off limits area. You have the party do a Street Wise check, and the results are the party gets waylaided by a few scammers and eventually finds the right smuggler; lose two days of time, and 50g to the scammers. OR the party is led by a scammer to a dark alley where someone attempts to mug them - the last guy standing surrenders, he's got a cousin who can get them into the forbidden zone if the party lets him go)
But sometimes there does need to be a specific hook or activation for things, and when players are used to their first instinct always being the right one, they get confused, angry, and feel like they are seriously fucking up when that doesn't happen every time.

Second is that it is fine for a one shot/megadungeon, but it discourages deep world building. Things keep changing and you need to keep notes of all these shifts. And to me always made me as DM or player feel disconnected when the world keeps shifting to acomodate whatever is happening right then, with little regard for what happened before or will happen in the future.

I hate FFG Star Wars. Played it with my group for awhile. Not for me. Rules don't have basic things like how wide is a blast radius of a grenade or thermal detonator.
You literally have to come up with some epic story for EVERY SINGLE DIE ROLL.

One session we were in a fishing contest. We had to get the bigger fish. We were rolling to reel it in for 3 hours of real time. The whole session. It was a contest of rolls, if I beat the fish, it got closer. If the fish beat me, it would swim farther away. I had to come up with a story for reeling in the fish, rolling for it for 3 hours straight. The other players had to keep rolling for keeping the boat steady, ect..

I need less abstract systems.

I agree with you, I don't like abstract/narrative systems. I will admit I judge people who like them a bit because of my negative experiences with players showing up to D&D and shitting up a session because its not a narrative game, and negative experiences playing them where either the GM didn't do a good job running a game or there were one or two players who just wanted the entire group make a story where their self insert is superawesome all the time not tell a good story.
But I know they can work out, some groups are functional, and different strokes and all that.

But TBF that fish session sounds like a DM problem and not a system issue. If you/the party weren't having fun playing Bass Master, the DM should have made that shit go quicker. OTOH if everyone is having a good time, that's the whole point. I'll run a bass master campaign if the players are interesting and I can tell a good fishing tourney story.

 

[Mega Black]

I know "theatre majors" are the favoured target here, but I never had much issue with them. In the group I'm in, by far the worst guy is a self appointed HEMA expert

I have always, ALWAYS, found history fags and HEMA nerds to be the worst. They want to flaunt vague historical knowledge (that is usually wrong and just comes from Game of Thrones anyway) at the absolute expense of anyone having any kind of fun at the table. It's the smug elitism I can't stand, especially when you're so selective about the realism you want to enforce.

God help you if a fag like that ever gets to be DM. The Local Lord with his hundred men at arms coming to lynch your party of freak adventurers for not following a retards interpretation of feudal law sounds like a bad joke, until you sit down and play a game with one of these losers.

 

[Corn Flakes]

This is common in skill based games. Savage Worlds included. You don't end the campaign being able to take a cannon shot to the face. Instead you get better at dodging shots, using cover, etc. A street punk with a knife can still end you if he stabs you.

I think it's why Savage Worlds plays a good horror game despite being a system that emulates action movies. A single zombie can still ruin your day if it bites you. So even high level players can find themselves in danger if they're careless.

That's what HP in D&D is supposed to measure: one's competence at avoiding damage. But the numbers get really fucking bloated really quickly and players start feeling invincible.

What my GM does (and I've been using it while planning out my own campaign lately) is that anything that should feasibly take you out outright requires a save instead of a damage roll. Your plate armor and shield won't do jack against the full-sized siege ballista pointed at your face, so if that thing fires you either pass a Dex save to dodge the bolt or you drop to 0 HP, no questions asked. If you fail a check and fall off a rampart 60 feet off the ground, either get rolling a new character or hope the rest of the party makes it through the encounter and has a 500GP diamond to spare. And if you decided to attack the king while there are 60 archers aiming at you, you're just dead. Don't be an idiot.

It's not full AD&D "the only roll that matters is save vs. death", but it does keep us from doing too much stupid shit. We had a new guy join last year and he learned real quick, too.

I hate FFG Star Wars. Played it with my group for awhile. Not for me. Rules don't have basic things like how wide is a blast radius of a grenade or thermal detonator.
You literally have to come up with some epic story for EVERY SINGLE DIE ROLL.

One session we were in a fishing contest. We had to get the bigger fish. We were rolling to reel it in for 3 hours of real time. The whole session. It was a contest of rolls, if I beat the fish, it got closer. If the fish beat me, it would swim farther away. I had to come up with a story for reeling in the fish, rolling for it for 3 hours straight. The other players had to keep rolling for keeping the boat steady, ect..

I need less abstract systems.

My problem with trying to go with more granular and less abstracted systems is that you always pay for it in slowness. Unless you're making your system so deadly a combat/contest/conflict is done within one or two turns (which brings with it its own issues with playstyle variety), a very granular system feels like it takes forever to run.

On the other hand, you really look like you've got a bit of a GM problem there. I don't know if he played too much Ultimate Fishing Simulator or what, but unless you've got an actual narrative going on (think that jousting movie from the early 2000s) just do a handful of rolls and declare a winner. It's like a beginner GM we were coaching a while back: he had an idea that was actually pretty interesting narratively, in that the villain offered to duel the party's paladin one-on-one. Unfortunately, it's just a damage race (and at level 12 it took forever to whittle down all that HP), and the rest of the party couldn't do much but watch. Some things just don't translate well to "epic stories" and need to be either avoided or solved quickly.

We reused the duel idea later, but instead of straight combat it was a sequence of contested attack rolls. Whoever won the last roll-off had advantage on the next, to model them pushing the advantage. Whoever gets three victories over the other wins. The whole thing is done in three minutes, narrative descriptions of the back-and-forth included, without having to do barely any bookkeeping.

 

[anti SJW]

But TBF that fish session sounds like a DM problem and not a system issue. If you/the party weren't having fun playing Bass Master, the DM should have made that shit go quicker. OTOH if everyone is having a good time, that's the whole point. I'll run a bass master campaign if the players are interesting and I can tell a good fishing tourney story.

That's the thing, I think the other players loved it. They seemed love interpreting the dice and coming up with a story, even though we were all literally doing the same action for like 3 hours straight.

 

[Snekposter]

The opinion so far is that this shit is amazing. Running over weird creatures with an APC while blasting heavy metal, robbing the PX and the liquor store, getting orders from officers and running out to do it.

Minus the orders, isn't that just payday weekend in the military? And how long did they argue over hitting the PX or the liquor store first? All about priorities.

Also, all your game is missing is Animal Mother, then it would be *chef's kiss*.

you either pass a Dex save

OH COME ON. NOT THOSE THINGS AGAIN!

 

[Afinepickle]

D&D is ridiculously abstracted. Most people don't pay attention to it, but it distills 6 seconds of chaotic back-and-forth in melee into a single d20 roll for every character involved. Doing literally anything else requires a special rule, class feature or feat.

That attack roll could be a single well-executed and precise attack with a saber after studying the enemy's patterns for a few seconds. Or it could be a wild and furious sequence of strikes with a greatsword. Or a devastating counter after deflecting a blow with your shield. Or a sequence of probing attacks with a shortsword and parrying dagger. Meanwhile, you missing could be because the opponent dodged, blocked or parried, or you outright missed, or you hit and your weapon skipped off their armor, or you hit and only clipped their clothes/hair, or you hit the other guy square-on and they just didn't feel it. And even if you hit, subtracting from the enemy's HP could be a flesh wound, a hit that leaves them slightly winded, a near miss/parry/block that rattles them, an effortful evasion that leaves them tired, or anything that would eventually reduce the enemy's ability to avoid crippling damage (read: the hit that takes them to 0 HP).

That is a lot of shit that needs to be filled in by descriptions and imagination. It's not a simulationalist system, it's not meant to be a simulationist system, and it actively resents you if you try to turn it into a simulation. Anyone who wants something with 1-second turns, where every maneuver is accounted for, go play fucking GURPS.

This. SO MUCH THIS.

In my view one of the markers of a great DM is how good they are at taking the abstract that is the rolls and numbers and weaving it together into a coherent narrative that both accurately and engagingly reflects the flow of combat and it's something I always pay special mind towards in the games I run.

The concept of Mechanics as Metaphor is a concept that I think a lot of newer DMs, and quite a few longtime DMs, have a bit of difficulty wrapping their heads around but with a little imagination and a willingness to just 'go with it' goes a long way in getting good at developing your flavor.

 

[EnemyStand]

All right, I have to vent. My players in Shadowrun just CANNOT stop getting arrested by Knight Errant apparently.

So the runners consisting of the Boss (Technomancer), Copperhead (Street Samurai who is property of the PCC), and Lady Elara (freakishly short Elf face, played by a dude who shockingly is doing okay with a female character) get hired by a fancy troll Johnson to recover some stolen property from his employer. The target is an old CD, the rest is acceptable losses. The techno does some hacking and beats the face's info broker to finding a lead: there's a potential buyer. It's some ganger ork who got lucky and hit it big as a goblin rock musician. The good news is he's an idiot and likes to hire his ganger buddies to work security at his events despite his handlers telling him not to, so the party kidnaps one of his ganger buddies and blackmail the info on the head of security out of him, then pay for his silence. They hash out a plan: hit the concert after doing some pointless fuckery with the security protocols (I pointed out they weren't the automated protocols but apparently The Boss figured there wouldn't be actual security who would notices the protocols are fucked up). They had some more time before the operation went down, so they decided to find out more about Mr. Johnson. I approved. What I assumed they'd do is interview patrons and bartenders at the club where they got the job, but instead they opted to back trace the suit he was wearing (not a terrible idea, but it was a higher risk operation). The Face put his knowledge skills to good use and learned it was a previous Vashon Island design that used contrasting colors to create a pleasing effect (don't ask me how, we were off the rails again and I was improvising). They go to Mortimer's, a local boutique that carries the line and is owned by Mortimer of London, a megacorp that specializes in high-end fashion. The plan was to have the face distract the clerks while The Boss hacked up the list of clients who purchased troll-size versions of the suit from the runner's van. Unfortunately, The Boss tripped the alarms, not realizing an exclusive boutique would have much tighter security than what he was used to. The spider hurt the techno badly to the point where jacking out of the link lock nearly killed him, and Copperhead wasn't warned to leave soon enough to escape the KE patrol car. Elara got away scot free due to acing her social rolls but Copperhead got shipped back to the PCC and...well, unregistered technomancers getting arrested doesn't usually end well for them. The issue was the techno didn't jack out fast enough or warn Copperhead, thinking he had time before the Pawns showed up. Copperhead surrendered, which usually isn't a terrible idea...except he had the Wanted disadvantage and a fried technomancer in the back of the van which was registered to a fake name.

I know they're new to this system and world, but my hackers are way too overconfident it seems...

 

[Ghostse]

when you're so selective about the realism you want to enforce.

God help you if a fag like that ever gets to be DM. The Local Lord with his hundred men at arms coming to lynch your party of freak adventurers for not following a retards interpretation of feudal law sounds like a bad joke, until you sit down and play a game with one of these losers.

\

Yup.

I usually just find unrepentant HEMA & Theater majors to be two sides of the same coin: they just want the parts of reality that help them out and to ignore the parts that don't.

I think the only uniquely negative point for a HEMA sperg is due to the nature of the beast (i.e. needing to do math and read rules) not many Theater Majors are munchkins while I think every single time I've dealt with a beligerently Historical Accuracy person they were at best a Min-Maxer and usually tended towards Munchkinery - and their attempts at historical accuracy were only trying to argue why the should be allowed to munchkin two powers together, or their armor should protect them more, or the enemy's armor should protect them less. They never seem to really argue about how the monsters should be exploding their kidneys for some reason.

OTOH, I've just found the average non-munchkin history sperg gets on with it once you listen, say "That's a solid point, but this a game and not everything is realistic or you'd just cook to death - no save - when you're in dragon fire. That doesn't happen because that's not very fun", vs Theater Majors who never ever shut the fuck up about how the system doesn't let their character's backstory override the rules, or how the campagin should pivot to focus on their relationship or to let them play out a scenario with lots of references to the latest episode of GoT or The Office or w/e.

That's the thing, I think the other players loved it. They seemed love interpreting the dice and coming up with a story, even though we were all literally doing the same action for like 3 hours straight.

That might be a party problem then.
If I was a player in the minority of not enjoying a situation where everyone else was having fun, I'd just ask the DM if I could just summarize my part of it, do some rolls, and sit back while everyone else goes to town. I mean if that happens a lot I'd need to reconsider being in the group, but if its a one time thing I'd just check out or ask if I could do something else.

 

[Ghostse]

My problem with trying to go with more granular and less abstracted systems is that you always pay for it in slowness. Unless you're making your system so deadly a combat/contest/conflict is done within one or two turns (which brings with it its own issues with playstyle variety), a very granular system feels like it takes forever to run.

the villain offered to duel the party's paladin one-on-one. Unfortunately, it's just a damage race (and at level 12 it took forever to whittle down all that HP), and the rest of the party couldn't do much but watch. Some things just don't translate well to "epic stories" and need to be either avoided or solved quickly.

I love - LOVE - the concept of how rolling initiative each round plays out, where high Init characters get a higher averaged out chances to control the turn order, and monsters go individually on the turn order.
In reality, it brings the game to a crawl and fucks up everyone's ability to plan. People forget, get confused, etc. Same initiative, group monsters in the same groups (or even better, just side-based initiative) makes turns happen more quickly.
So yeah, sometimes you need to exchange better modelling for better play.

I had something similar happen in my GM days, where there was an arm-wrestling tourament. I was at least smart enough to put a cap on the number of rolls.

I'm working on a card-based system for overland or dungeon exploration that removes the need to roll for random encounters, and turns any unneeded random encounters into a couple of rolls with damage applied. It encourages ranger skills (i.e. training in nature reduces the number of unhelpful cards, reducing the length of a trip) but makes it so in theory the trip out doesn't eat an entire session.

 

[Judge Dredd]

Second is that it is fine for a one shot/megadungeon, but it discourages deep world building. Things keep changing and you need to keep notes of all these shifts.

I think it's the opposite. You can put all this deep lore into the game via world building and NPCs, but it's for nothing if the players don't do the specific thing to get that information.

If the PCs are looking for the rogue Ghostse who is hiding out at the den of villainy known as kiwi farms. It makes more sense as a DM to have the NPC either know the guy, know of the guy, or know someone who would know the guy. I can reference my list of plot critical info and wing it appropriately.

The bad habits you mention only come about if the players find out about it and then leans on that knowledge as a shortcut.

 

[40 Year Old Boomer]

I hate FFG Star Wars. Played it with my group for awhile. Not for me. Rules don't have basic things like how wide is a blast radius of a grenade or thermal detonator.
You literally have to come up with some epic story for EVERY SINGLE DIE ROLL.

One session we were in a fishing contest. We had to get the bigger fish. We were rolling to reel it in for 3 hours of real time. The whole session. It was a contest of rolls, if I beat the fish, it got closer. If the fish beat me, it would swim farther away. I had to come up with a story for reeling in the fish, rolling for it for 3 hours straight. The other players had to keep rolling for keeping the boat steady, ect..

I need less abstract systems.

Sounds like you had an incredibly autistic DM. The Genesys system works best when you dump all starting points into attributes and a few tree abilities and then play the game like you're in a B-rated action comedy flick. 3 hours reeling in a fish? Fuck that, you pass the rod to your buddy and tell him to hold it tight while you ninja-flip onto the line and slide down it to deliver a kamen-rider kick to that fucking fish, beat it up, then drag it onto the boat. Even if you fail, you still win because drowning is preferable to rolling for three hours to reel in a fish.

 

[Adamska]

But TBF that fish session sounds like a DM problem and not a system issue. If you/the party weren't having fun playing Bass Master, the DM should have made that shit go quicker. OTOH if everyone is having a good time, that's the whole point. I'll run a bass master campaign if the players are interesting and I can tell a good fishing tourney story.

Oh no, it's also somewhat mechanical a well as the GM being a complete fucking simpleton. One of the biggest flaws for Edge of Empire/Age of Rebellion is that you can quite easily find yourself in situations where you can't buy a success. I'm talking I once spent an hour fuming because I could not get successes since I'd get an even number of failures, so I'd have a fuckload of advantages but COULD NOT FUCKING PULL THROUGH.

It was like 8 advantage at one point and I still could not just fucking succeed since my failures kept fucking eating them. The fucked part is I still wouldn't fail fully either, because they cancelled out the successes, so I had no resolving dice at all to work with. Genuinely hair pulling level frustration in that respect. It's to the point where I'm tempted to make a house rule where if you consistently roll advantages or disadvantages but the successes and failures do not appear, convert them to a success or failure to force the action to resolve. Mainly because it happened more than once to me.

Though yeah the DM was a fucking idiot for forcing all those rolls and clearly having you lose progress rather than just "you lose the fish". Clearly did not try to speed it up, and did not try to arbitrate. Clearly did not give a single goddamn shit that the party was getting done; I'd have just walked by the end of the first hour tbh. Massive stupidity on that dude's part for sure.

 

[Mega Black]

Though yeah the DM was a fucking idiot for forcing all those rolls and clearly having you lose progress rather than just "you lose the fish".

At some point as a DM I think you need to just kind of cut losses. No single activity should take 3 hours, in my opinion. Even if you're dealing with the most retarded party ever, or constantly gaining and losing ground, there's a moment where you just have to decide that things have lasted long enough and let your players continue.

 

[Ghostse]

Oh no, it's also somewhat mechanical a well as the GM being a complete fucking simpleton. One of the biggest flaws for Edge of Empire/Age of Rebellion is that you can quite easily find yourself in situations where you can't buy a success. I'm talking I once spent an hour fuming because I could not get successes since I'd get an even number of failures, so I'd have a fuckload of advantages but COULD NOT FUCKING PULL THROUGH.

It was like 8 advantage at one point and I still could not just fucking succeed since my failures kept fucking eating them. The fucked part is I still wouldn't fail fully either, because they cancelled out the successes, so I had no resolving dice at all to work with. Genuinely hair pulling level frustration in that respect. It's to the point where I'm tempted to make a house rule where if you consistently roll advantages or disadvantages but the successes and failures do not appear, convert them to a success or failure to force the action to resolve. Mainly because it happened more than once to me.

Though yeah the DM was a fucking idiot for forcing all those rolls and clearly having you lose progress rather than just "you lose the fish". Clearly did not try to speed it up, and did not try to arbitrate. Clearly did not give a single goddamn shit that the party was getting done; I'd have just walked by the end of the first hour tbh. Massive stupidity on that dude's part for sure.

Sounds like you had an incredibly autistic DM. The Genesys system works best when you dump all starting points into attributes and a few tree abilities and then play the game like you're in a B-rated action comedy flick. 3 hours reeling in a fish? Fuck that, you pass the rod to your buddy and tell him to hold it tight while you ninja-flip onto the line and slide down it to deliver a kamen-rider kick to that fucking fish, beat it up, then drag it onto the boat. Even if you fail, you still win because drowning is preferable to rolling for three hours to reel in a fish.

Sounds like everyone except antiSJW was having fun, probably becasue they got to do more than work the reel.

And @Adamska I get its not all DM, he was running the system as advertised, but at some point its more a DM issue because they should have just said "Ok, fuck it, this has gone on long enough - one final roll for all the marbles so we can move on."

 

[Mr. Manchester]

On the topic of DMs letting things drag on too long, I think the biggest reason it happens is because they don't have anything else prepared and aren't willing to improvise something more interesting than the fishing adventure @anti SJW got to experience. Instead they'll sit around with their dick in their hand and have the party roll dice for a while. Might not be the case with that particular DM but I've seen it happen often enough where I know it's a thing.

Thing is letting the clock run out when the players are engaged isn't a problem. Sometimes I'm happy to end up with extra material in my notebook if they get into a weird discussion with each other about game events. This is usually some NPC they capture and want to poke at for an inordinate amount of time, but if everyone's involved I don't mind it because it often hatches some ridiculous scheme. If it gets boring or someone is bored with it I just tell them "You learn this from the orc, its a bunch of pointless back and forth and takes an hour. What are you doing now?".

 

[anti SJW]

The GM is normally a great GM. I know for the adventure we had to see if we got the fish or not. There was some other details I left out. It was a very big fish, and we did'nt have the right equipment to go after it. That may have been a factor. But to have us roll the same thing for almost 3 hours of real time was wrong IMO.

 

[40 Year Old Boomer]

I want to hear about the cosmologies in the games y'all run/play in. Do you use "the great wheel" or something else? I've never delved enough into the cosmology of other systems beyond OWoD or D&D and I'm working on a basic write up of the setting I'm using since the outer planes are more conceptual and are based around a specific deity or mini-pantheon rather than outright alignments, and the players are going to need to know this sort of stuff if they ever decide to try plane-shifting.

 

[Ghostse]

The GM is normally a great GM. I know for the adventure we had to see if we got the fish or not. There was some other details I left out. It was a very big fish, and we did'nt have the right equipment to go after it. That may have been a factor. But to have us roll the same thing for almost 3 hours of real time was wrong IMO.

You aren't wrong. Again, if you're just working the reel that sounds like a great time to trade out or have some deckhand take over. Hindsight is 20/20 of course.

I want to hear about the cosmologies in the games y'all run/play in. Do you use "the great wheel" or something else? I've never delved enough into the cosmology of other systems beyond OWoD or D&D and I'm working on a basic write up of the setting I'm using since the outer planes are more conceptual and are based around a specific deity or mini-pantheon rather than outright alignments, and the players are going to need to know this sort of stuff if they ever decide to try plane-shifting.

My go-to cosmology is
- the Sun God is holding back the eldritch horrors at the edge of the cosmos.
- Living creatures have an eternal spirit and ephemeral soul (AKA life energy or whatever you want to call it). If the soul gets separated from the spirit you have a ghost. If you have particularly powerful ghost (or necromancy was involved) the ghost might trap the spirit. Particularly strong or trained spirits might be able to interact with a left behind soul. In either case, only the spirit goes to the netherworld, where the dead get sent into an ageless bureaucracy - unless you are particularly cool dude, in which case your god will send someone to legislate you through the red tape and take you right to your afterlife. (usually theres some more shit about the spirit staying with the body for a few days in most cases, making for cheaper resurrection if you're quick about it)
- You get an afterlife based on your god. Unless you are selected as an agent by your God (or reincarnation in some settings), no one ever returns from the afterlife.
- Usually some shit with primordials, and them being complete assbags.
Using that frame work I'll tweak the pantheon & other details to the setting or story or what I think sounds interesting.

I've wanted to do something in a sort of Bronze Age type world where you have near countless minor deities, one for your people and possibly another for yoru city, and a few major ones, but haven't gotten anything that feels right.

I've been working on a Aztec/Maya sort of pantheon where humanity is straight up cattle & entertainment for the gods, but I'd need to find a group I could put in a fairly grimdark world and not immediately go full edgelord (and would want to go there).