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

[ZMOT]

Another thing I forgot is to try to instill your dungeon with a sense of urgency. Have a steadily ticking clock with escalating bad things.
Maybe its a lava dungeon and the heat is slowly killing the players. Maybe its a sunken ruin that is flooding. Have the big-bad completing a ritual. You probably don't want them constantly under the gun, but make sure they understand that sitting around arguing is wasting valuable time.

isn't that basically what classic dnd did? granted I never played it or even looked into the whole OSR thing, but it feels like I suddenly see that come up all the time now for some reason (first in ICRPG, then in a discussion about 5e dungeon design), to the point I'm curious to actually read it how it works mechanically. coming from boardgames originally pretty much every dungeon crawler or even coop has a timer or resource drain to keep ahead of, so the mechanic isn't anything new really.

Has some stuff that looks interesting and usable, at least. As bad as 5e content is, there's usually at least one or two things that can be salvaged from even the lamest books. Not that I'm going to buy it, I haven't spent a dime on 5e content.

can't wait to read the reviews how bad that shit is and how much of an affront against common sense it's gonna be. like damn, people shit on videogame writers as failed hollywood writers, but it seems if you can't even cut it for videogames you're prime material for writing for WOTC.

https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/46407/roleplaying-games/remixing-avernus-capsule-reviews-adventurers-league-season-9-part-5-doors-and-corners

In a healthy economy someone would have a better product come out and people would chase it. Unfortunately, the market is so bloated with woke "passion projects" by troons and dangerhairs who can't even be assed to design their own system and autists who only play the most well known thing because you can't be TOO nerdy so you get shit companies like WoTC and GW basically having a monopoly with no incentive to improve because they make bank whether they make something people want or not.

maybe I'm to cynical by now but I get to think that's not how it ever worked in reality. to be popular you need the right mainstream appeal while being dumbed down enough you get everyone with an IQ of 80+. as soon as you get in any direction that could be considered "better", you immediately lose that appeal and limit your own demographic. imo a healthy market would be more "lot of options for everyone" filled with people that rather do what they believe is a good product in their mind than being the most popular or lucrative, and sometimes every once in a while that niche suddenly becomes popular before before being driven into the ground. but maybe that's naive too and everyone was always after the big shekels...

 

[EnemyStand]

maybe I'm to cynical by now but I get to think that's not how it ever worked in reality. to be popular you need the right mainstream appeal while being dumbed down enough you get everyone with an IQ of 80+. as soon as you get in any direction that could be considered "better", you immediately lose that appeal and limit your own demographic. imo a healthy market would be more "lot of options for everyone" filled with people that rather do what they believe is a good product in their mind than being the most popular or lucrative, and sometimes every once in a while that niche suddenly becomes popular before before being driven into the ground.

This is more or less what I meant. What most people don't realize is tabletop gaming is still a niche hobby. Making a popular RPG is like being the sexiest man in Bangkok: yeah, good for you but you still only get Bangkok mires. Sure, more options of games are good and we actually have more options than ever before in gaming, but people only want what's popular. D&D has brand recognition, ergo that's the default. The issue is the options made after 2001 are shit products, which brings me to my next point...

but maybe that's naive too and everyone was always after the big shekels...

Well, that's the game, isn't it? Even outside of capitalist societies. People look at the big boys like GW and WotC and think all gaming companies make tons of money. Except GW kept itself afloat by hiring passionate freelancers who worked for practically nothing before becoming the gaming version of a popular OnlyFans thot and WotC started life as a distributor who mostly bought the rights to other games (and they still mostly are). Even then the idiots who just play games and don't take pains to understand the industry don't realize how thin their profit margins are. Producing and binding a book is expensive, hence RPG books going for $60 or more. Designing and casting a miniature costs a bundle too, hence the starter sets for minis games costing $100 on their own before you even buy brushes or paints. So we have people like Anna Krieder shitting out crappy "subversive" lefty games that don't sell because they think they'll become rich off of essentially paypigs. Meanwhile, they get super mad when some random white dude puts together a passion project that explodes because the game is fun. This guy still doesn't make a bundle, but he's still getting paid enough to keep his life afloat, which makes all the lefties who infiltrated the industry seethe and ruin conventions for everyone in revenge. Because if they're not making money off their shitty game no one wants to play, why should ANYONE get to be successful in an industry where people work for slave wages out of passion?

 

[Ghostse]

I hope you guys are ready for the next stage in pandering imagintion!

https://youtube.com/watch?v=5IC0AbjlIJM

"all 16 writes are black and brown"
Well, as CURRENT YEAR has told me, Black and Brown people are too simple & subhuman to be able to appreciate any media that doesn't star people with melanine and are too dumb to really anything that isn't written by another duskie. Women are also too flighty and easily distracted to appreciate anything that isn't written by either a woman or man in a dress who fucking up his body by injecting chemicals.

So in solidarity with these oppressed minorities, I can't buy anything that isn't written by white males.

isn't that basically what classic dnd did? granted I never played it or even looked into the whole OSR thing, but it feels like I suddenly see that come up all the time now for some reason (first in ICRPG, then in a discussion about 5e dungeon design), to the point I'm curious to actually read it how it works mechanically. coming from boardgames originally pretty much every dungeon crawler or even coop has a timer or resource drain to keep ahead of, so the mechanic isn't anything new really.

That's why in my post before that one, I said D&D 3.x/4/5 trying to ungrind a dugeon was nearly impossible unless you respec monsters into glass cannons.

In OSR, there are wandering monsters used judiciously, because fights in most OSR things shouldn't take more than 10-30 minutes as they are quick brutal affairs. (1/2e AD&D, fights are also usually fairly short from a rounds-taken perspective but can take a while depending on what rules are in play because of the layers of crunch.) But mainly in OSR, if the players are waffling around being indecisive, the GM can just say "a pack of goblins lunges at you from the darkness!" and after a quick battle where the Players kill/drive off the goblins (and maybe lose a member or two) and quickly get the hint that if they keep standing around doing nothing, they will die.

3.x/4/5 encounters are longer, more drawn out due to balancing, so if you are using Random Encounters to try to get the party to move along, you'll end up having the opposite effect.
In my 4e campaign the party is in an area where it'd make sense to have random encounters, but because a 4e battle takes a few hours if I did that the campaign would grind down to nothing but Wandering monster battles and a year later when the party got to their destination, they wouldn't remember what they were doing. So you need to find other ways of making the area dangerous and making players stop sitting around endlessly debating and decide.

(Most OSR also more exacting about tracking food/torches as well, which encourages a party to not just spend the whole time in Trap/Passage hunt mode because in addition to the random monsters killing them, they run out of food and water.)

Another way to make a dungeon feel populated without running huge encounters is to group up weak monsters into a shared health pool. Not necessarily the group combat or swarm rules (because those feel really clunky to us). A 50-HP blob of 10 skeletons is much easier on the action economy than 10 individual skeletons that must either be killed one by one or waste a spellcaster's AoE spell. The Fighter getting a crit and destroying five of them with a single 28-damage hit also feels quite satisfying. In order to balance out their damage, make it so only 3 monsters out of a blob can attack a single target at a time since they'd be getting in each other's way all trying to attack at once.

This obviously works better in theater of the mind, of course.

I like the idea of that, but I think I'd probably hew closer to treating them as a 'swarm of medium creatures'. I'd also have think a way to balance AOE.

Only thing I'm less good on is the abstracting, but I think for skeletons/constructs/summons it works - you aren't killing the individual creatures, you are damaging the spell that animates them. And yeah, much better for abstracted 'theater of mind' because if you're moving 10 skeletons on a map, you're moving 10 skeletons and might as well just track HP.

 

[BlazikenLover]

@Ghostse Quote bug:

I was chatting with my GM about how he wanted to run his next campaign without grid combat, and something came up that I feel is relevant to this idea:

Another way to make a dungeon feel populated without running huge encounters is to group up weak monsters into a shared health pool. Not necessarily the group combat or swarm rules (because those feel really clunky to us). A 50-HP blob of 10 skeletons is much easier on the action economy than 10 individual skeletons that must either be killed one by one or waste a spellcaster's AoE spell. The Fighter getting a crit and destroying five of them with a single 28-damage hit also feels quite satisfying. In order to balance out their damage, make it so only 3 monsters out of a blob can attack a single target at a time since they'd be getting in each other's way all trying to attack at once.

This obviously works better in theater of the mind, of course.

I really like this and I recall book of beautiful horrors had statblocks for mobs and hordes, so gonna take another look at that

 

[WhatIsThePunchline]

isn't that basically what classic dnd did? granted I never played it or even looked into the whole OSR thing, but it feels like I suddenly see that come up all the time now for some reason (first in ICRPG, then in a discussion about 5e dungeon design), to the point I'm curious to actually read it how it works mechanically. coming from boardgames originally pretty much every dungeon crawler or even coop has a timer or resource drain to keep ahead of, so the mechanic isn't anything new really.


can't wait to read the reviews how bad that shit is and how much of an affront against common sense it's gonna be. like damn, people shit on videogame writers as failed hollywood writers, but it seems if you can't even cut it for videogames you're prime material for writing for WOTC.

https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/46407/roleplaying-games/remixing-avernus-capsule-reviews-adventurers-league-season-9-part-5-doors-and-corners

maybe I'm to cynical by now but I get to think that's not how it ever worked in reality. to be popular you need the right mainstream appeal while being dumbed down enough you get everyone with an IQ of 80+. as soon as you get in any direction that could be considered "better", you immediately lose that appeal and limit your own demographic. imo a healthy market would be more "lot of options for everyone" filled with people that rather do what they believe is a good product in their mind than being the most popular or lucrative, and sometimes every once in a while that niche suddenly becomes popular before before being driven into the ground. but maybe that's naive too and everyone was always after the big shekels...

Old dnd had a pretty different perspective from modern rpgs. It's really interesting to read (if you're into rpgs). There's the old books of course, but there are also tons of old magazines (white dwarf as an example: started in the 70s and was mostly focused on dnd and roleplaying/tabletop games). Also a lot of the people from that time are still alive, at least for now. There's a shit ton of old stories out there, though they can be difficult to track down and we're going to have a lot less of them in just a decade or two.

To get popular you need mainstream appeal, but to last you need depth. All the franchises getting ruined nowadays, Dnd, Star Wars, Star Trek... had some depth to them. George Lucas is more wellread and insightful than I think anyone gives him credit for being, Rodenberry was a goof but he also thought things trough a lot more than what his crazier ideas would have you believe and Gygax had a... labyrinthine mind and was probably on the spectrum of something. And they all poured a large part of their life into their respective franchises.

 

[Dunsparce]

3.x/4/5 encounters are longer, more drawn out due to balancing, so if you are using Random Encounters to try to get the party to move along, you'll end up having the opposite effect.

In 3.X, at early levels pretty much everything on either side of the battlefield can be one-shot, after a few levels battles get a bit longer, but then when you get to higher levels is becomes like it was in the beginning, only with a greater emphasis on caster ending encounters in one spell(Hence the nickname "Wizard Rocket Tag"). While sometimes turns can take a long while because of the human element, you are doing something very wrong if a battle in 3.5 lasts more than 6-7 rounds even at the mid-level point, since most only last 1-3.

 

[Ghostse]

In 3.X, at early levels pretty much everything on either side of the battlefield can be one-shot, after a few levels battles get a bit longer, but then when you get to higher levels is becomes like it was in the beginning, only with a greater emphasis on caster ending encounters in one spell(Hence the nickname "Wizard Rocket Tag"). While sometimes turns can take a long while because of the human element, you are doing something very wrong if a battle in 3.5 lasts more than 6-7 rounds even at the mid-level point, since most only last 1-3.

D&D 3.x much less than 4/5 is true. Its also a little easier to restat 3.5 monsters into appropriate glass cannons (or more accurately, there are official monsters that are glass cannons, HitDice for 3.x/5 also let you just move to a 'wound' system). The issue for especially 3.5 is after about 5th level your random encounters need to be pretty serious to not just get rocked before combat starts by the wizard's spells. And with all the various casting exploits, wizards don't need to be very cautious with their spells.

In BX, your magic user Wizard needs to meter their spells in a random encounter, as well as being generally less powerful.

 

[Wormy]

Unfortunately, the market is so bloated with woke "passion projects" by troons and dangerhairs who can't even be assed to design their own system and autists who only play the most well known thing because you can't be TOO nerdy so you get shit companies like WoTC and GW basically having a monopoly with no incentive to improve because they make bank whether they make something people want or not.

It's goddamned brilliant from a current form capitalist standpoint, and depressing as fuck from any other.

Mage: The Ascension was right; business and marketing ARE acts of sorcery.

 

[Corn Flakes]

isn't that basically what classic dnd did? granted I never played it or even looked into the whole OSR thing, but it feels like I suddenly see that come up all the time now for some reason (first in ICRPG, then in a discussion about 5e dungeon design), to the point I'm curious to actually read it how it works mechanically. coming from boardgames originally pretty much every dungeon crawler or even coop has a timer or resource drain to keep ahead of, so the mechanic isn't anything new really.

That's what Random Encounters are supposed to do: gradually wear the party's resources down so they can't just take rests between every encounter. Even a short rest should be weighed carefully against the possibility of an enemy patrol stumbling across the party. Or worse, the denizens of the dungeon taking the time to prepare more traps and defensive positions since they now know where the players are.

We had a downright evil situation happen to our party early last campaign: the Warlock insisted we take a short rest so he could recharge, and so we barricaded ourselves in a room we had previously cleared and waited it out. When we stepped out, the goblins we had been fighting had trapped the door, the floor in front of the door, the walls around the door, and then set up a barricade down the hallway with archers behind it pointing at the door. That taught us to be careful about taking rests in the middle of a dungeon.

(Being very familiar with the GM I knew that's exactly what would happen, but I didn't want to ruin his fun by metagaming.)

I like the idea of that, but I think I'd probably hew closer to treating them as a 'swarm of medium creatures'. I'd also have think a way to balance AOE.
(...)
And yeah, much better for abstracted 'theater of mind' because if you're moving 10 skeletons on a map, you're moving 10 skeletons and might as well just track HP.

Even on a grid system, it's less paying attention to individual movement, and more moving the whole crowd of monsters like a squad in Warhammer. It might sound like it would take a long time, but it really doesn't.

D&D 3.x much less than 4/5 is true. Its also a little easier to restat 3.5 monsters into appropriate glass cannons (or more accurately, there are official monsters that are glass cannons, HitDice for 3.x/5 also let you just move to a 'wound' system). The issue for especially 3.5 is after about 5th level your random encounters need to be pretty serious to not just get rocked before combat starts by the wizard's spells. And with all the various casting exploits, wizards don't need to be very cautious with their spells.

In BX, your magic user Wizard needs to meter their spells in a random encounter, as well as being generally less powerful.

I don't know if it was the specific OSR game I read, but I fell in love with the idea of casters declaring they're casting spells at the start of the turn, so they can be interrupted if they take damage while casting. That's such a great balancing element, and it gives the martials the chance to literally bitchslap an uppity wizard before the disintegration ray gets cast. Unfortunately, it does add an extra step to the turn structure, which necessarily slows combat down even further.

 

[EnemyStand]

It's goddamned brilliant from a current form capitalist standpoint, and depressing as fuck from any other.

Mage: The Ascension was right; business and marketing ARE acts of sorcery.

I don't know if I'd call it brilliant when they just kind of lucked into it by virtue of being the first and most recognizable name on the market. It's mostly the stupidity of the consoomers that got them to that point.

 

[xX_rAcE_wAr_420_Xx]

That's what Random Encounters are supposed to do: gradually wear the party's resources down so they can't just take rests between every encounter. Even a short rest should be weighed carefully against the possibility of an enemy patrol stumbling across the party. Or worse, the denizens of the dungeon taking the time to prepare more traps and defensive positions since they now know where the players are.

Early on in a game (like in your example) you have a few of them, but after the party gets in the groove of it then if random encounters are used right they don't come up very often. The threat of them is the main thing, it forces the players to make tricky choices. If you ascribe to old-school grognard thinking it means they need strategy and forethought to win, if you ascribe to newer, pozzed thinking it's so the players have narrative agency and don't lose unless they make mistakes. As usual, both are onto something.

I don't know if I'd call it brilliant when they just kind of lucked into it by virtue of being the first and most recognizable name on the market. It's mostly the stupidity of the consoomers that got them to that point.

If it makes you feel any better, I see people even on normie Reddit talking about playing Pathfinder 2e and it being more enjoyable to build characters in. I don't know how much needs to happen for a titanic brand like D&D to fall, certainly quite a bit, but there's at least a conversation happening.

 

[Wormy]

I don't know if I'd call it brilliant when they just kind of lucked into it by virtue of being the first and most recognizable name on the market. It's mostly the stupidity of the consoomers that got them to that point.

Still takes smarts to play that stupidity to your advantage, even if you stumbled onto it part of the way.

 

[EnemyStand]

If it makes you feel any better, I see people even on normie Reddit talking about playing Pathfinder 2e and it being more enjoyable to build characters in. I don't know how much needs to happen for a titanic brand like D&D to fall, certainly quite a bit, but there's at least a conversation happening.

It doesn't really. I'd prefer the companies not fall and make fun games for gamers again, not bowing and scraping to shrieking ninnies on Roll20 and Twitter. But it's all been infiltrated because we felt bad for the weirdos, so I guess I just need to take the schadenfreude of watching giants stumble.

 

[Ghostse]

Early on in a game (like in your example) you have a few of them, but after the party gets in the groove of it then if random encounters are used right they don't come up very often. The threat of them is the main thing, it forces the players to make tricky choices. If you ascribe to old-school grognard thinking it means they need strategy and forethought to win, if you ascribe to newer, pozzed thinking it's so the players have narrative agency and don't lose unless they make mistakes. As usual, both are onto something.


If it makes you feel any better, I see people even on normie Reddit talking about playing Pathfinder 2e and it being more enjoyable to build characters in. I don't know how much needs to happen for a titanic brand like D&D to fall, certainly quite a bit, but there's at least a conversation happening.

No because PF is also rotten with woke.

Why the fuck are all my choices wokescold faggot "men in dresses are real women" pozzholes, RaHoWa Turner Diaries socialists, or coomers? (And often two or more)

I just want normal people who can have rape and slavery (and the fucking fur trade. Jesus Christ who is so fucking fragile they need a trigger warning for that) in the game as things bad people do and just say 'hey, these things are bad. Good people aren't doing them. But they happen, usually off screen, but we don't need to clutch our pearls and pretend like these weren't pretty common'.

 

[Randall Fragg]

On the topic of dungeons and games being slogs, when I started doing more extensive homebrew there's a sort of fundamental truth I came to that has subtly but dramatically changed how I prep adventures: every encounter* is a tax on the players' resources that they can mitigate by being clever, but they can't afford to pay full price on all of them.
*anything that doesn't have stakes like this is more of a little roleplaying interlude, which are fun, necessary, and should be kept relatively concise.

Now "encounters exist to drain player resources" is pretty obvious, but take every single obstacle in your adventure and consider what the ultimate consequence of it is. Combats deal health damage, and this can be reduced by using abilities and features well. Traps can be evaded, but if they aren't then you take a bunch of damage or get a lasting debuff. So far, we're on a consistent pattern of "if you don't handle obstacles well, on average, you take too much damage and have to flee / die".

What about a social encounter? This is where a lot of GMs mess up, because they prepare a scene as "the party must talk their way past the bouncer", but if the party messes up the social roll suddenly the plot grinds to a halt. Do they just beat the guy up? Come up with an increasingly elaborate series of distractions to allow them additional rolls until one succeeds? Bribe him? Okay, we at least have some other options, some of them are more compelling as drains on the party resources, but this is the kind of situation where a simple scene burns up an hour or more of game time and it's a total surprise to the GM that it went so poorly.

Worst, maybe, are investigation scenes where the party needs to find clues or coax information out of someone. Unlike the bouncer, who you can in theory just blow up and move along, if the party misses a clue then the adventure might just stall. The GM might just find a way to slip them the clue anyway, and sometimes this works fine, but it does raise the question of why you bother to make them roll in the first place. "The party needs to find the secret entrance to the ritual chamber", but everyone botches their rolls to notice it, so now what? What's the cost of failing?

Maybe implement a game mechanic for those kinds of social situations. Call it “clout” or “standing” or whatever. It represents a party’s reputation, and ability to bend the rules of society. They can gain it through adventure, noteworthy deeds, ect. A party could gain Clout by saving a town from a monster. They can then spend it to bypass certain rolls (such as spending some to get past the bouncer in a “DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM” Karen fit). Of course, spending it means that people start getting worn out by your party. And going into the negatives might get you imprisoned, harassed, or run out of town.
The cost of failing for other things (such as finding a secret entrance to the cult base) could be represented by having the enemies become aware of the party and set up ambushes. So, if the party all fails their rolls to find the entrance, eventually one of them blunders into the opening. But only after the cult has set up an ambush right behind it.

 

[Coelacanth]

I'm about to head out to play with a group tonight. Real nervous about it, but I am looking forward to being able to dip my toe into IRL games using a dwarf as my first character.

 

[xX_rAcE_wAr_420_Xx]

I'm about to head out to play with a group tonight. Real nervous about it, but I am looking forward to being able to dip my toe into IRL games using a dwarf as my first character.

Just remember, the worst thing you can do is have fun the wrong way. If you do anything fun, it had better be perfect, otherwise you're ruining the game for other people and should go back to Fortnite. Under no circumstances should you ask questions about the game, ask the GM for more backstory about the world, or - and this is a big one - try to take creative liberties and think outside the box with your actions. You're not allowed to try a fun, inventive plan, you can only hit things with your axe and rob strangers.

 

[Coelacanth]

Just remember, the worst thing you can do is have fun the wrong way. If you do anything fun, it had better be perfect, otherwise you're ruining the game for other people and should go back to Fortnite. Under no circumstances should you ask questions about the game, ask the GM for more backstory about the world, or - and this is a big one - try to take creative liberties and think outside the box with your actions. You're not allowed to try a fun, inventive plan, you can only hit things with your axe and rob strangers.

Instructions unclear. Ended up getting a whole town devoured by several Gelatinous Cubes and being invited to a campaign one of the other guys was running.

Best fun I've had in years.

 

[Creepuscular]

I'm curious to actually read it how it works mechanically.

One clever bit was you got low experience for killing, but 1-to-1 xp for gold.

They didn’t spell it out for you, and I was too young at the time to get it, but the way you’re supposed to “game” this system is pretty obvious: don’t get into fights, steal shit.

 

[Adamska]

You got experience for doing the shit the class was supposed to do from what I remember actually. Thieves got money from gold, Fighters got it from murder, Wizards from casting or some mystical things. I think you got EXP still from other methods, but you got more for doing what your class do.