The Gaming Den

I’m well aware of what trap options are. I talked about them last week. https://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=57618&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=200 “Finally, I have to say that in the context of trad RPGs I would say that it is at best an exaggeration to say 3.0 cared about math or me...

I didn't define Bob at all. I defined the trap options. We're talking about Alpha Players , not trap options . Your first example was literally what an Alpha Player was. So you clearly know what they are; you're just too busy trying to rewrite history because your attempts to discredit me are going...

While it's partly a social problem, the rules do have a considerable impact, IME. Like - with the same group - we ran into this problem a lot more in 4E than in 3E or PF. That's weird. For me 4E was the least tactical of any TTRPG because of padded sumo. People didn't need to Alpha Player or come u...

No, it's not a "Leeroy Jenkins" Bob, it's average gamer or at worst only slightly less Bob. Accusing Bob of being a problem is just another new intractable excuse that isn't inherent to the issue and doesn't need to be dealt with directly. That's not how you defined Bob originally. You de...

The player that will ALWAYS want to decide Bob's action no matter what cannot be fixed by rules . They have a problem with Bob. That is the Alpha Player problem. I think we agree here. The player that just wants Bob to stop falling into gigantic gaping (yet to Bob mostly invisible) trap actions tha...

There are cooperative board games that solve the alpha gamer problem. For example, Space Alert solves it with a harsh time limit and private information. So I'd hardly call addressing it pointless. It's true that Alpha Gamer can't direct the action during a Space Alert session so much - there simpl...

I think there are a few designable defenses against this, although they're not exactly pretty. You can make each player's resource system complicated and different enough that the quarterbacking player can't really know what the other party members can do. You could make it so the players weren't a...

So let's say I make a decent tactical combat minigame where all the players can nominally do what they want to contribute towards the group's victory. What if one of the players have a very aggressive kind of attitude toward maximizing every action the group takes in this minigame to the point wher...

My point is, if it wasn't for the Psyker, there'd be no spotlight going on in the fight at all. If the lasgun pingers ping away with their lasguns until the enemies are dead, it's not memorable or distinctive. Lol, no. That's an even worse design failure - it's a failure of imagination. If Guardsme...

Except a situational joke isn't a DM, player, or even a rules thing. It's a social group thing. Likewise deciding to bribe ogres with sausage has nothing to do with the spotlight. Instead that's a player decision on which approach to take in an encounter. If there's only one good talker in a group a...

I've played Gloomhaven, and while it's fun it's not the model I'd want for a TTRPG. It is tightly balanced, but that balance depends on: * Actions are strictly constrained (as usual for a board game). * Constant time pressure, like taking a turn to pick up some gold could cause you to lose. * Balan...

But maybe I'm seeing condescension where there isn't any, just because if I said it I'd feel the condescension dripping out of my mouth. The only person being condescending here is you, but you already knew that since you're too busy imagining my condescension out of your own pretty obvious insecur...

Y'all ever played a game where the opposition party's use of dailies and encounters was taken into account when they fight the PC's? No, because again the issue is it adds more moving variables into the equation. Moreover if the NPCs really had any agency, they’d be hunting down the PCs with all th...

Another important aspect of balance is narrative agency. If a psyker character's action outcomes are "enemies all explode into a fine mist" or "nothing happens," then you can set probabilities so that a psyker who attempts to do their thing once a round has the same expected tim...

It doesn’t look balanced at first glance because the positive modifier is +3 while the negative one is -1. Oh my. Funny, because Gloomhaven has those kinds of “imbalanced” bonuses and yet the result is one pf the best-balanced games ever that keeps working despite having no DM to fudge results. And...

WHFR has combat fumble tables where you can injure yourself. At least, 1st edition did. Not sure about the new versions. Warhammer Critical Fumbles: https://wfrp1e.fandom.com/wiki/Critical_Fumbles Injuring yourself is about the worse it can get with the fumble tables, as opposed to magic miscasts w...

It sounds like you're conflating balance and consistency, which I don't think is the most helpful definition for balance. I'd consider balance to be more akin to expected value. That is, a weapon that does 1d4+2 damage has the same expected value (4.5) as one that does 1d8 damage or a spell that do...

The counter point is that people play fighters to kill things with axes, but there is never been a single argument to suggest fighters should miss or do suboptimal damage with their attacks. Thing is the OP was talking about miscasts in Warhammer RPGs, and those tend to have much more explosive eff...

I agree with this approach because if you're aiming to have balanced combat encounter, then you want to know all the resources the PCs will actually have available. You don't have to guessimate how much was stripped away prior to that encounter. This assumes, of course, that you're balancing each e...

Been considering how most video games go with A, an energy or stamina meter as a universal mechanic, which I think Zinegata is mentioning. Not really, my point is everyone refreshes at the same time in most modern games. Not that they have the same resource system. In Monster Hunter for example the...

Really well-balanced games tend to reduce, rather than increase points of randomness. Yeah, but if you want to play a really well-balanced game then TTRPGs are deeply fundamentally never going to give you what you want. TTRPGs aren’t ever going to be as balanced as Euros, but its still a sliding sc...

It doesn't matter that CfNA isn't actually a sublimely accurate wargame the likes of which shall never be seen again, what matters is that the designers did the research because they valued accuracy in the first place. First off, I'm not ignoring the rest of your reply out of a desire to dismiss yo...

Warhammer-derived RPGs typically use the possibility of miscasts as a balancing lever for powerful spells. How viable is this? Is it worth an analysis across multiple systems? Generally speaking, miscasts are a really bad balancing lever because you're adding an additional point of randomness. Real...

So what are yalls preferences for D&D games where different PC's recharge at different times, as a Game Master and as a Player? In general, outside of RPGs games with recharge mechanics have dropped all pretense of hourly or daily timing, in favor of recharging based on the next encounter. I ag...

So while we're almost certainly in a Tabletop Golden Age for board games, and RPG design spaces like RPG.net, EnWorld, Reddit, and such are generally all-in on 5e, OSRs, rules-light games, and their ilk, I'd say the field is pretty barren when it comes to rules-heavy/"traditional" RPGs. H...