What makes an RPG successful?

[Midnight_v]

Manipulation sounds like a key one, trick the pre teens and RPG fans (Read:Neckbeards), into thinking your game delivering on their ideal and limited boring fantasies.

http://www.therpgsite.com/showthread.ph ... d5&t=23138

There are neckbeards still vouching for 1/2e. I think presentation is the most important issue here.

Holy fucking shit! My mind exploded! I'm off the internet for today thanks to you, I'm gonna go eat some bathsalts, then... a puppy. I hope some of those people get punched in the head till they die. I apologize to anyone I've ever implied was a grognard, I ... I seriously had no fucking idea.

[Taishan]

Holy fucking shit! My mind exploded! I'm off the internet for today thanks to you, I'm gonna go eat some bathsalts, then... a puppy. I hope some of those people get punched in the head till they die. I apologize to anyone I've ever implied was a grognard, I ... I seriously had no fucking idea.

I don't thinking laughing at handicapped people is a nice thing to do, but I couldn't help but laugh at some of those people in that thread. Benoist especially. I think I lost braincells when I read "That's a bullshit argument based on the idea that the rules are the game and the game the rules."

[Duke Flauros]

I don't thinking laughing at handicapped people is a nice thing to do, but I couldn't help but laugh at some of those people in that thread. Benoist especially. I think I lost braincells when I read "That's a bullshit argument based on the idea that the rules are the game and the game the rules."

See? 2nd edition was such an effective product that you still have people engaging in pointless philosophical onanism years after most people have moved on to newer editions.

If you play a cleric and you memorize the specific sequence of buffs just so you can cast them on yourself and not the fighter, to be better than the fighter at fighting just because you can, and feel like it, you're a shit player. You could have memorized a buttload of other, more useful, spells for the party, or cast them on the fighter to assist him in his tasks, but you deliberately went out of your way to shit on another player's playground instead.

It means you're a shit player. Full stop.

A player that deliberately gets out of his way to play outside of the function of the class to take a dump on another player's niche is a shit player. Full stop.

The cleric is meant to assist other player characters, to encourage them, boost them, heal them, take conditions off their back and act as a secondary line of defense in the process. If you do not understand this, and don't understand that you are in fact a LOT more efficient for the group as whole doing this, rather than taking a dump on the fighter's playground, you are a shit player.

It's okay to not like the Cleric's schtick and want to play a more frontline, active character. But then, roll yourself a fighter, for God's sakes.

It's not Objective because it does not involve all the Objective variables of any given "problem" in an actual game play situation. When you start isolating a case by saying that this spell or that potion is not available, that you make complete abstraction of the terrain and features in the game, the way people interact at the game table and each play their characters differently, with different likes and dislikes, wants and needs, you are failing at actually portraying a situation with any valuable analysis attached to it. It's setting up a very narrow situation just to confirm your bias. Which is, by definition, not Objective.

If I'm getting the gist of this right from TBP, once you are at high levels, you should switch from playing D&D to what amounts to d20 Exalted.

Which is, of course, BS.

That melee fighters that can't fly have difficulty with flying creatures is a point worth considering. But this consideration should be in the realm of DM game planning or party strategy, not necessarily in class design.

Better is completely subjective, and varies from table to table. In fact, I would posit "guidelines over detailed rules for everything" is better game design, because it allows players to customize the game they want to play it, which leads to a better gaming experience for more people other than just those people who like RAW.

[Taishan]

I'm don't normally recommend RPGA events/Living Campaign games to anyone as they are usually poorly written, but those posters should really experience a game where the GM wasn't desperately trying to keep the players playing his game by fellating the rules as much as their home GMs do. In fact, having a GM who hasn't bathed and is currently digesting a burrito as big as your head, AND having to deal with your fighter watch everyone else have fun is about as close to an existential crisis as a neckbeard can have, I think.

[Kaelik]

My favorite thing ever about that forum.

Actual Play is always capitalized, because it is the god they worship. Also, just like any time anyone has ever used the word actual, it's just a No True Scotsman, and some types of play that don't count as actual are:

1) Following the rules
2) Using CR
3) not being a healbot Cleric
4) Playing 3e at all.

[fectin]

Ceasar Slaad is a sane and rational person, and you have cherry picked his post out of context. That is a disservice to one of the few people in that thread with the attention span to read more than three words in a row.

You've also cherry-picked Benoist's comments, only you've made him much more coherent than he actually was (anyone who doubts it, go see for yourself).

The truly amazing part was the guy who was literally and deliberately trolling (Aos, he explicitly admitted "I am trolling") was more on point than most of the posts.

[ModelCitizen]

The first and most important thing to realize about the modern gaming scene is that people are no longer willing to spend 4+ hours for a single game session.

There are just too many things competing for our attention now. The Internet. Video games. Girls who actually play video games. The people who are willing to play a game that takes 4+ hours is now a severely dwindling market.

Ok, suppose you did want to make D&D: Adderall Edition. (As in D&D for 21st century digital boys who can't go for more than 2 hours without getting distracted by their stupid phones, not D&D for adderall abusers which would be the opposite.) Assume you need to support roughly as much player freedom as 3e or 90's splatsplosion AD&D, and about 3e level of MTP vs rules authority. What would you do?

[Zinegata]

What would you say is needed for a decent campaign system? Like, how much would the characters/board/whatever have to carry over from the previous game?

Frank has already covered the basic issue - which is that your character progress simply does not carry over from session to session in Arkham Horror. And that the problem in the current system is that it simply can't handle more powerful starting PCs - they'd simply steamroller over the opposition very rapidly.

However, I wouldn't say that the system itself prevents this from being possible. The real issue is that the game simply doesn't come with more powerful monsters or challenges for "Level 2" characters as opposed to "Level 1" characters. You just have one basic set of monsters / challenge cards. If these monsters and challenges would actually scale (or if more powerful ones are introduced in later sessions) then the system could actually work.

Unfortunately, the only attempt to make an Arkham campaign system doesn't really attempt this. Instead, it just adds a bunch of houserules to make each session harder but without any character progression at all. For instance, the "First Episode" in the Arkham Campaign tends to be a normal session, while the "Second Episode" adds funky rules like "remove all magic weapons" from the deck without giving the players any additional advantages. It's really more of a masochist run than anything else.

The original campaign rules for Descent also sadly blows. Here you at least get to "save" your character progress from session to session. But the fact that you simply "respawn" every time you die with no real consequences (other than inch the "Evil wins!" track forward) tends to make the whole thing feel like an MMO rather than a traditional RPG.

[Zinegata]

Ok, suppose you did want to make D&D: Adderall Edition. (As in D&D for 21st century digital boys who can't go for more than 2 hours without getting distracted by their stupid phones, not D&D for adderall abusers which would be the opposite.) Assume you need to support roughly as much player freedom as 3e or 90's splatsplosion AD&D, and about 3e level of MTP vs rules authority. What would you do?

The thing about "player freedom / splatplosion" is that a lot of it actually involves what modern design would consider as "solitaire play". It's really a sort of mini-game where you're trying to create a character using different building blocks available in various splatbooks to make your perfect/ideal character.

Your only interaction with other players - if there is any at all - is either to consult them on required party roles ("We have no Cleric? Who will do the healing then?") and to consult the DM on campaign-specific issues ("I want to play a Cleric, but what is the Church like in this world?")

So for the character creation portion, I'd actually make it revolve around an online application. It could have several options on how to make a character - it could involve the traditional stat crunching / feat selection (wikified so that you can review a whole chain of feats). Or it could be an actual mini-game like a "Choose Your Own Adventure" that pops out a character depending on how you answer a survey questionnaire and play through a "Prologue" quest. (The latter, I think, is more ideal for first-time players)

By letting the computer do all of the number-crunching for everyone, you take out the effort necessary to do the math (and arguing with the DM on whether you can take Feat A or Feat B). The DM now doesn't have to review each player's character sheets one by one to make sure they didn't do something terribly wrong - the computer already did that for him. And for prickly DMs who want to exclude some material from the game (i.e. He's running a no-Cleric game), there should be a DM option to ban some materials; which is then cascaded to the online character creation module for everyone else.

As for the rules part... I'd say there should be massive consolidation on the kind of rolls that you do as that's really the root of a lot of argument. There shouldn't be seperate skills for "Jump", "Run", and every other type of athletic activity. You should instead consolidate and let one general type of roll serve for a wide variety of purposes. Arkham Horror for instance only has like 8 types of challenges for everything.

[OgreBattle]

The original campaign rules for Descent also sadly blows. Here you at least get to "save" your character progress from session to session. But the fact that you simply "respawn" every time you die with no real consequences (other than inch the "Evil wins!" track forward) tends to make the whole thing feel like an MMO rather than a traditional RPG.

How about Mordheim's campaign system? It's based on each player being an adventuring company though, so death and mutilation is more common.

[Zinegata]

The original campaign rules for Descent also sadly blows. Here you at least get to "save" your character progress from session to session. But the fact that you simply "respawn" every time you die with no real consequences (other than inch the "Evil wins!" track forward) tends to make the whole thing feel like an MMO rather than a traditional RPG.

How about Mordheim's campaign system? It's based on each player being an adventuring company though, so death and mutilation is more common.

I haven't tried that one; only the original one that came with the first expansion.

[Username17]

The original campaign rules for Descent also sadly blows. Here you at least get to "save" your character progress from session to session. But the fact that you simply "respawn" every time you die with no real consequences (other than inch the "Evil wins!" track forward) tends to make the whole thing feel like an MMO rather than a traditional RPG.

How about Mordheim's campaign system? It's based on each player being an adventuring company though, so death and mutilation is more common.

Mordheim, and its close cousin Necromunda has the problem where winners keep winning and losers keep losing. After a battle, the warband that did better gets more money and more chances to find rare items and even more XP. The warband that did worse gets less of the good stuff and more mutilation. There's a catch-up mechanic in which going against massively tougher warbands gives you glory and bonus XPs, but it doesn't give you enough of those things to catch you up.

Ceasar Slaad is a sane and rational person, and you have cherry picked his post out of context.

I know he's you're RL friend and all, but not really, no. Caesar Slaad made his position abundantly clear in the very first page of that clusterfail:

The fighter should be really good at fighting and shit AND it should rely on the wizard.

He solidly threw himself behind the position that Fighters shouldn't get any nice things and that it was perfectly acceptable for them to merely get bigger bonuses to hitting things with sticks. That somehow it was an acceptable, even desirable scenario for the "Fighter" to have essentially nothing to contribute outside of making damage numbers appear in combat.

That he comes back and confirms that is exactly what he meant when he affirms that Fighters shouldn't fly or anything on the grounds that D&D should not look like Exalted at high level is merely a confirmation of what he said at the beginning of the thread. He goes the full neckbeard: Fighters getting anything that matters at high level is badwrong.

You seriously need to have an intervention with him in Real Life. Real Life Friends don't let Friends perpetuate the myth that dumb melee fighters are acceptable high level characters.

Edit: Remember that the actual context of that quote you're claiming is out of context was that I took him to task for saying that high level encounters shouldn't be handlable with the abilities of high level fighters, and he doubled down:

Well, take a look around. Obviously I'm not alone. And I am much more a "kewl powers" game than the older school crowd here. But I do differ with the philosophy that every challenge in the game must be directly handled by an entry on your character sheet.

I'm of the school that many challenges must be solved by either or both teamwork and/or interacting with the game world, not by giving the fighter weaboo fightan magic. This goes especially for epic level gaming; IMC, if you need to take out a demigod, you need allies, artifacts, blessings and like.

Got that? If you have a high level encounter, and you're a fighter, fuck you! He explicitly says that Fighters need to fellate the casters and have DM pity artifacts fall on them before they can even begin to consider taking out an actual level appropriate opponent at the high end. This isn't out of context, this is the context. Your friend is so full of shit that we don't dare poke him for fear of him bursting and covering us with shit. That Benoist is even more full of shit than that is true, but does not save your friend from any special condemnation.

-Username17

[Zinegata]

Pffft. Interventions are for really major things like "Rescue friend from psychotic girlfriend" or "Get friend on proper medication". Getting them to renounce silly D&D beliefs are very low on the priority list .

[Username17]

However, I wouldn't say that the system itself prevents this from being possible. The real issue is that the game simply doesn't come with more powerful monsters or challenges for "Level 2" characters as opposed to "Level 1" characters. You just have one basic set of monsters / challenge cards. If these monsters and challenges would actually scale (or if more powerful ones are introduced in later sessions) then the system could actually work.

I actually don't think this is true. The overall challenge of the game is to take out the ancient one, and the difficulties there are incredibly stark. Azathoth is a pretty hands-off kinda dude, but Atlach Nacha will rip your fucking face off. The game can ramp up in difficulty tremendously with the inclusion of more difficult Ancient Ones and Heralds. The fact that your best street sweeper character will be able to rip the toughest monster in the cup from stem to stern is nice, but because of character specialization the street monsters are still getting in the way of the team.

The primary issue is that being able to start the game with Healing Stones, Elder Signs, and a pile of clue books basically lets you solve the game in the first couple of turns no matter what the enemies do. That your combat monster begins the game all beefed up is certainly useful, but he still starts in some actual place and the monsters you want to dispose of may be far away from him. The fact that the team as a whole shows up having already dumpster dived the item decks for all the stuff they need to win the game fast and easy is the real painful part.

You need a campaign system that doesn't encourage players to enter a holding pattern where they have the ancient one mostly contained and then they spend an extra six turns circle jerking the stores to get all the awesome shit.

Or it could be an actual mini-game like a "Choose Your Own Adventure" that pops out a character depending on how you answer a survey questionnaire and play through a "Prologue" quest. (The latter, I think, is more ideal for first-time players)

I was initially really happy with Ultima VI, where it gave you a series of "What would you do?" questions and then you popped out as the avatar. I was bitterly disappointed when I realized that the virtues were just stat assignments and were even ranked such that one virtue was worth 3 stat points and another was worth zero.

-Username17

[ishy]

Well, take a look around. Obviously I'm not alone. And I am much more a "kewl powers" game than the older school crowd here. But I do differ with the philosophy that every challenge in the game must be directly handled by an entry on your character sheet.

I'm of the school that many challenges must be solved by either or both teamwork and/or interacting with the game world, not by giving the fighter weaboo fightan magic. This goes especially for epic level gaming; IMC, if you need to take out a demigod, you need allies, artifacts, blessings and like.

Got that? If you have a high level encounter, and you're a fighter, fuck you! He explicitly says that Fighters need to fellate the casters and have DM pity artifacts fall on them before they can even begin to consider taking out an actual level appropriate opponent at the high end.

-Username17

I haven't followed the thread much, but are you sure he is only talking about fighters?
To me it looks like you could have a fun game if some challenges requires that you have allies, artifacts etc to take out certain enemies.

So to give an example, if you wanted to take out a god, as a wizard you have to make sure that the other gods like you, and wont team up afterwards to smite your ass.
Though that should of course be the case no matter what class you play and only for a tiny amount of special enemies.

[Prak]

Manipulation sounds like a key one, trick the pre teens and RPG fans (Read:Neckbeards), into thinking your game delivering on their ideal and limited boring fantasies.

http://www.therpgsite.com/showthread.ph ... d5&t=23138

There are neckbeards still vouching for 1/2e. I think presentation is the most important issue here.

Holy fucking shit! My mind exploded! I'm off the internet for today thanks to you, I'm gonna go eat some bathsalts, then... a puppy. I hope some of those people get punched in the head till they die. I apologize to anyone I've ever implied was a grognard, I ... I seriously had no fucking idea.

yeah, all I can say is, damn, dude... just, damn.

[MGuy]

http://www.therpgsite.com/showthread.ph ... d5&t=23138

There are neckbeards still vouching for 1/2e. I think presentation is the most important issue here.

Holy fucking shit! My mind exploded! I'm off the internet for today thanks to you, I'm gonna go eat some bathsalts, then... a puppy. I hope some of those people get punched in the head till they die. I apologize to anyone I've ever implied was a grognard, I ... I seriously had no fucking idea.

yeah, all I can say is, damn, dude... just, damn.

I'm willing to bet you didn't get to the part where Rum Cove was saying that only fighters can open doors. Or when I pointed out to Marley that she had been arguing for pages with people she basically agreed with.

[Zinegata]

The primary issue is that being able to start the game with Healing Stones, Elder Signs, and a pile of clue books basically lets you solve the game in the first couple of turns no matter what the enemies do.

That's why I said challenges should also scale. The masochist run employs various tricks to make sealing the GoO harder (i.e. Elder Signs are out of the deck), so a beefed up GoO could probably have some additional special abilities like "When this GoO is asleep, all Elder Signs are not usable"; on top of beefier monsters.

I was initially really happy with Ultima VI, where it gave you a series of "What would you do?" questions and then you popped out as the avatar. I was bitterly disappointed when I realized that the virtues were just stat assignments and were even ranked such that one virtue was worth 3 stat points and another was worth zero.

-Username17

Obviously, it should be one that's not made of fail or else it shouldn't be done at all .

[Username17]

OK, back of the envelope:

• Dangerous weapons and giant machines get you harassed by the police. Each item has a number of stars on it. If the current "State of Emergency" is less than the number of stars on the item, then carrying it around brings heat from the cops. This represents the fact that until giant monsters start smashing buildings downtown, the lunatic running around with an assault rifle really is the police's biggest problem (as far as they know). This also means that moving into the next scenario, since the State of Emergency starts at zero, you're going to voluntarily not start the next game with the high powered weapons in your hand.
• Items can be stored in a couple of places between missions, and events are drawn for those places before you can get your stuff out of them. So you need a place to put the big guns, but you also want to keep stuff in a couple of places so that a fire or robbery doesn't leave you with no carry-over equipment at all. Also, as the state of emergency ramps up, you may end up going to the caches multiple times for increasingly illegal items.
• The caches are used even in the first scenario of a campaign, because any of your equipment that is dealt out to you at the start of game one which has stars starts in a cache of your choice rather than on your person.
• Allies all have a pre-defined "cache" that they go to (their "home") as it were, and when you go to pick them up there is a chance that they can't or won't come with you this time (or that they have been kidnapped and can't come with you until you go rescue them).
• "Clues" are a new type of thing that helps you in the current mission, but is automatically discarded at the end of the adventure. Some characters can start each new mission with a clue, but that would be an ability of some kind.

And that I think is the core campaign progress rules for SRHorror 2 - which would probably be Asymmetric Threat skinned anyhow.

-Username17

[FatR]

Holy fucking shit! My mind exploded! I'm off the internet for today thanks to you, I'm gonna go eat some bathsalts, then... a puppy. I hope some of those people get punched in the head till they die. I apologize to anyone I've ever implied was a grognard, I ... I seriously had no fucking idea.

What I find particularly funny is wankery like "if you pull off this complicated plan that assumes that the enemy reacts they way you want it to react, a fighter can totally take on high-level encounters" and that they do not undertand that if you cannot just take an enemy attack head-on, when said enemy comes knocking and must extensively stack circumstances in your favor to have a shot, then you are already in "Qing army vs European troops". And you're not in place of the Europeans there.

[Desdan_Mervolam]

The first and most important thing to realize about the modern gaming scene is that people are no longer willing to spend 4+ hours for a single game session.

This is not true, not true at all. In my experience, groups get annoyed if they can't spend more than 4 hours on a session.

The problem you mention totally exists, it just doesn't manifest the way you say it does. Instead of making gaming sessions shorter, instead it makes gaming sessions less frequent

[Zinegata]

OK, back of the envelope:

There's also the new "organization" thing they added in one of the later expansions, which makes all of the investigators part of a specific group (i.e. Miskatonic university or The Mob).

For a campaign it could probably serve as the safety deposit box of the group as they go from GoO to GoO as well; and they can get additional benefits from the organization as they complete sidequests (which also makes the somewhat pointless sidqquests like Deputy of Arkham more relevant).

Albeit I will note that expansion was pretty borked balance-wise. Picking the Mob as your starting organization (which gives everyone free money and healing) makes the game a pushover in the base setup.

[Zinegata]

This is not true, not true at all.

You should really look past your own circle of friends and go to a big convention full of strangers. Or better yet help organize one of the big RPG / boardgame conventions, be a helpful booth bunny who's trying to promote RPGs / Boardgames to newbies, and realize how the vast majority of people you meet will have an actual visceral and physical rejection of the mere idea that they should spend 4 hours playing one game.

[OgreBattle]

physiologically, an RPG session should follow the pacing of a porno movie. Few are 4 hours long

[erik]

I dunno. I hate spending 4 hours playing some games, and enjoy playing other games for far longer.

If I am playing a TTRPG with friends I expect to spend 4 hours and am generally disappointed if we don't have more time than that.

I wouldn't consider convention play to be the same creature as at-home play. At conventions there's always a time crunch. To fit games into time slots they almost always have 4 hour limits. Convention games are more like samplers. RPGA games try and chop up their modules to fit 4 hour slots so that they can be played at conventions, but that doesn't mean that 3-4 hours is the ideal TTRPG duration.