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

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robobobo said:
Fair is fair, I certainly think if someone's being a turbo autist in a game the group or DM or whatever ought to actually tell them what they're doing wrong and not just give them the boot one day with no heads-up. But if they're bound and determined to be a consistent problem, better off jettisoning them and finding a new player to take the seat.
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It depends on whether they're just being an autist or being malicious. You have to put up with a certain degree of the tism and general weirdness of other sorts in this hobby. If they're trying to spread wokeshit and get other people bounced, they need to face the wall.
 
If someone's a wokist, I would still talk to them and tell them to knock off pestering people with political shit. The magic at that point is that most of them will just flounce away in a huff and never come back, thus also solving the problem. One of my friends was in the opposite scenario, one of the players went insane after Trump's election and spent a chunk of every session ranting about the libtards and how Obama needed to be jailed, etc. Guy was always pretty conservative, but he wasn't picking fights with the other players until then, so they put up with it for a year or so until the GM got fed up after the dude drunk-called him one night to tell him what an asshole he was. Unfortunately it was like a decade-long game, the characters were almost 20th level, there was no real way for a new player to slot into the party, so they just canned the game entirely.
 
I have a pretty strict "No real world politics" rule. I am slightly more lax about it while everyone's setting up, but during game you shouldn't be looking up news or have time to talk about who's fucking up how in washington, you should be playing the game you're there to play. And because its an idealistic fantasy world, Jews don't exist there.

But I'll usually let them say their bit and then clearly shut down that line of discussion and redirect with some kind of "Ok, how's that related to what's happening in game?"/"Ok, cool. What are you doing in combat?"/"That sounds like something you can talk about after session, what are you doing in game?"
I've actually never had to warn anyone twice, so I'm not 100% sure to I'd do for 'strike 2'.

The closest I've come is (lefties) unable to shut up about the retards disrupting the US Senate vote confirming Biden's election. It was before session while I was waiting for some people to sit down at the table. To be clear, I thought the people who had 'occupied' the capitol were retards, but I was trying to untwist panties by pointing out to the melting down lefties that no one thinks democracy is under threat when state capitols get taken over by retards, or when there's a bunch of violent people on the mall outside the capitol. When it became clear I was not going to be able to logic people out of positions they didn't logic their way into, I just said "I guess you're free to feel that way. I don't think we're going to have a productive discussion on this and I really don't care to talk about it. Let me go see what's keeping the others so we can start." and left the table, which seemed to send the right message. When I got back, the munchkin player read off some purple prose from Reddit, while I listened to with no reaction and then said "Ok, cool. Anyway, so the party is..."


Re: Familiars, I usually stick to RAW stuff so tiny spiders etc usually are not on the list of valid familiars.

If I really felt like fucking with someone who did a spider familiar, I'd say "ok you see through your spider's eyes. You see a lot of blurs and colors." and if they were a clever asshole who made a jumping spider "anything beyond about 6 inches away is completely indistinct". This would still let them do the (in my mind) completely valid send it under the door to scout and see there's something waiting for them - just not exactly what.

IF they try to 'listen' "You are aware there are voices, but since spiders don't have ears, you can only sense vibrations - you can't actually make out any words"

And as @Capsaicin Addict points out for one of many reasons I don't run 5e, most other games incur a cost for losing a familiar.
 
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Ghostse said:
I have a pretty strict "No real world politics" rule.
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My group has thankfully managed to completely avoid this issue, since we started out as a friend group of similarly-aligned individuals on the interwebs which slowly morphed into a VTTRPG group when one day one of us said "Hey, you guys wanna start a Pathfinder game?" Two years later, the constant stream of racial invectives is regularly broken up by autistic character build discussion. Strangely enough, aside from a few racial gags (all gold dwarves are greedy hooknosed loan sharks, all gnolls tok like-a de Ugandan Knuckles, etc.) racism is completely absent from the game itself. Whether an NPC is White, red, covered with fur, or seven feet tall with tusks, the party will generally treat with them fairly and equitably. Anyone bringing up RL politics will merely be chastised for cutting into precious elfgame time.
 
Alabama Gamer said:
My group has thankfully managed to completely avoid this issue, since we started out as a friend group of similarly-aligned individuals on the interwebs which slowly morphed into a VTTRPG group when one day one of us said "Hey, you guys wanna start a Pathfinder game?" Two years later, the constant stream of racial invectives is regularly broken up by autistic character build discussion. Strangely enough, aside from a few racial gags (all gold dwarves are greedy hooknosed loan sharks, all gnolls tok like-a de Ugandan Knuckles, etc.) racism is completely absent from the game itself. Whether an NPC is White, red, covered with fur, or seven feet tall with tusks, the party will generally treat with them fairly and equitably. Anyone bringing up RL politics will merely be chastised for cutting into precious elfgame time.
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Yeah, but fantasy racism is always more fun than IRL racism, anyways.
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A snippet from my "GM's Log" about what I think is the funniest moment that took months for the payoff. Cyberpunk RED is pretty fun to run.
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The Ugly One said:
It sounds like this is 5e, where familiars are supposed to have 1 hit point. I kill a lot of familiars. I'm fine with familiars, but there is a pseudo-rule that if you push it too far, it's gonna get squished.
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That was the problem. He liked to keep it out of sight (such as the underside of a table, or behind some drawers), and when it was visible, it wouldn't really attract attention. eg. A house spider in an abandoned house or a dive bar in the slums isn't going to get people to immediately leap up and squish it. On the rare cases that might happen, spiders have +4 stealth so it would have to roll badly to be spotted by passive perception.

Ghostse said:
Re: Familiars, I usually stick to RAW stuff so tiny spiders etc usually are not on the list of valid familiars.
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I remember it being RAW, so I looked it up on 5e.tools.

He was a rogue, so I assume he was an arcane trickster.
Find Familiar does have spider listed as an option.
The size of spider is "Tiny" (the smallest creature size 5e allows)
Tiny is defined as 2 and a half ft or less.

So technically it was raw, and likely why we compromised on it being a tarantula sized spider because it fit the stat block and description.


Ghostse said:
I have a pretty strict "No real world politics" rule.
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I had never really needed that rule, but broke the rule myself by accident due to a few James Bond style one shots. The problem is the real world kept catching up.

I used the WEF (names changed to fit the fiction) as villains back when the WEF was just conspiracy theory, but the one shots were so infrequent that between introducing them as a the villain and them being the focus of an adventure, they had become mainstream. Crazy eco terrorists with outlandish plots? Just Stop Oil happens.
 
Judge Dredd said:
That was the problem. He liked to keep it out of sight (such as the underside of a table, or behind some drawers), and when it was visible, it wouldn't really attract attention. eg. A house spider in an abandoned house or a dive bar in the slums isn't going to get people to immediately leap up and squish it. On the rare cases that might happen, spiders have +4 stealth so it would have to roll badly to be spotted by passive perception.


I remember it being RAW, so I looked it up on 5e.tools.

He was a rogue, so I assume he was an arcane trickster.
Find Familiar does have spider listed as an option.
The size of spider is "Tiny" (the smallest creature size 5e allows)
Tiny is defined as 2 and a half ft or less.

So technically it was raw, and likely why we compromised on it being a tarantula sized spider because it fit the stat block and description.



I had never really needed that rule, but broke the rule myself by accident due to a few James Bond style one shots. The problem is the real world kept catching up.

I used the WEF (names changed to fit the fiction) as villains back when the WEF was just conspiracy theory, but the one shots were so infrequent that between introducing them as a the villain and them being the focus of an adventure, they had become mainstream. Crazy eco terrorists with outlandish plots? Just Stop Oil happens.
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Virus was spreading through the city in a Vampire game I was playing. Then covid hit. Life imitates art.
 
Pendulous Dong said:
What games have you come across that have the nicest or most readable layouts?
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From which side of the screen? I will pimp the fuck out of 4e modules for being easy to run, but 4e character building is bit of a mess and the PHB chapter layout having some.... odd choices.

OSE's layout is pretty nice, but the information is also fairly concise.
 
Pendulous Dong said:
What games have you come across that have the nicest or most readable layouts?
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I'll second Old School Essentials. Nice to look at, easy to read. Though as Ghostse said, the game is very simple so there's not a lot of information to sort.

I've heard Worlds Without Number has great layout, but not read it myself.

Savage Worlds is good, though that might be because I read it a lot so know where to find information. Starfinder has a nice font. Stupid thing to praise a game for, but it fits the theme and is easy to read.


Ghostse said:
I will pimp the fuck out of 4e modules for being easy to run
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A bunch of OSR modules are like that as well. The so called "control panel design" where everything is kept on two page spreads. Some even break down rooms into what you see when you first enter, bullet points for detailed examinations, and bolding so the DM can know what the room is about from a quick skim.
 
Judge Dredd said:
A bunch of OSR modules are like that as well. The so called "control panel design" where everything is kept on two page spreads. Some even break down rooms into what you see when you first enter, bullet points for detailed examinations, and bolding so the DM can know what the room is about from a quick skim.
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The main thing I like about 4e is they have about the right (if a little simplified) context, when needed, to tie the module rooms together. IF you do a quick skim of the module you can really just read-as-you play, which is great when it takes a party 4 months to get the dungeon and you've forgotten some of the finer points from the earlier read through. Some OSE modules, even if they do the 'control panel', have lots of subtle inter-room or dungeon-wide connections, and sometimes called out in odd places, where if you don't give the entire module a very careful study you'll miss it.

The OSE module Winter's Daughter, for example, does a pretty good job of room descriptions, but one of the early rooms references the party may face a monster, no mention of its stats or where to find information about said monster, and the monster isn't covered for several pages until you get to the Wandering Monster table on the map.
As its a fairly short module with nothing super crazy happening, and basic OSR stat blocks make an index card feel too roomy, this isn't terrible but other modules do similar things.
Tomb of the Serpent Kings also had something similar with a global effect that isn't called out until one of the sub-spreads but I forget exactly what it was.

Judge Dredd said:
Starfinder has a nice font. Stupid thing to praise a game for, but it fits the theme and is easy to read.
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Choosing a good font is really an under-rated skill and I wish I could do it.
 
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Ghostse said:
Choosing a good font is really an under-rated skill and I wish I could do it.
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I remember really struggling with the original Mage: The Awakening book. It wasn't just that it was catastrophically unintuitive and the concepts from Ascension were all messed up (what was with the chronic overlap between what spheres could now do), but the font was awful and it had this kind of grey black and gold theme which was just hard to parse. Especially in PDF form. One of the reasons I just couldn't get into it.
 
So after some experience with DnD 5e as a player and getting intrigued by Call of Cthulhu, I decided to start a campaign with some close friends. For the most part, it's going well despite none of the players having any experience with the game, myself included. However, I've been having one particular issue - one of my players has built a character with 100 in Spot Hidden from the get-go. Unsurprisingly, I'm having difficulties finding ways to sidestep this particular issue, mostly because I didn't remember the rule about players not starting with a skill higher than 75 for any given skill. Any GMs have tips on how to mitigate this issue, somehow?
 
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Lei Wulong's Left Leg said:
So after some experience with DnD 5e as a player and getting intrigued by Call of Cthulhu, I decided to start a campaign with some close friends. For the most part, it's going well despite none of the players having any experience with the game, myself included. However, I've been having one particular issue - one of my players has built a character with 100 in Spot Hidden from the get-go. Unsurprisingly, I'm having difficulties finding ways to sidestep this particular issue, mostly because I didn't remember the rule about players not starting with a skill higher than 75 for any given skill. Any GMs have tips on how to mitigate this issue, somehow?
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Have a bunch of hidden shit that isn't even remotely important.
 
Snekposter said:
Yeah, but fantasy racism is always more fun than IRL racism, anyways.
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Somehow, I managed to get banned for fantasy racism. Played an elf and called drow a bunch of disgusting black creatures. Repeatedly. How the hell do you get offended by drow racism, they are one of the worst races in terms of lore and writing.
 
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