Annoying Game Questions You Want Answered

[Avoraciopoctules]

What if the product is free? I was planning to put it on itch.io, and I do not intend to make any money off this. I suppose a limited liability company might still help if I get sued, and I have heard some horror stories about commissioned artists from fellow freeware devs...

[deaddmwalking]

What if the product is free? I was planning to put it on itch.io, and I do not intend to make any money off this. I suppose a limited liability company might still help if I get sued, and I have heard some horror stories about commissioned artists from fellow freeware devs...

Even if the product is free, you could be sued for, say, copyright infringement. Having a legal entity that can't go to jail and doesn't have assets that can be seized will let you sleep easier. Going to jail is highly unlikely, but a lawsuit of breach of contract seems entirely possible - if you commission something that is not up to standard, someone can demand to be paid for the work they did.

Where you could get in trouble would be where you hire someone to perform a work, they provide you a work that is stolen and you release it for free. The owner of that work claims that their sales were impacted because of your free distribution, so even though you didn't make any money, you're liable for the 'lost sales'. While you might be able to counter sue the contractor, you'd be better off if you didn't have to worry about wage garnishment for the rest of your life.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

My friend's gotten into Blades in the Dark lately, and it's been interesting enough for me to keep playing because I'm actually having fun playing a terrorist. One aspect I find particularly interesting is the advancement - specifically that each class has different ways of gaining experience, but the entire group collectively gains experience for doing group-relevant shit. I get experience for blowing shit up for the IRA Skovlan Restoration Front, while my partner gets experience for making the bomb that I planted and making distractions while I do it. Meanwhile, our group gets experience for doing a sneaking mission.

I enjoy the incentive to act out my class the way it's intended, but I'm curious as to what other people think the kind of advancement where there are minor ways for each PC to gain experience, but everyone generally moves along the same track. I can see this causing trouble in long-running campaigns, and I've definitely done shit I wouldn't have normally thought of PURELY to get XP out of it. It was incredibly amusing at the time, but I'm not sure if that was a design goal or not. I've only played a handful of sessions thus far, so I don't really have a solid opinion on the mechanic yet. It seems potentially abusable, but a lot of experience systems that aren't "you level up when the GM says so" can be like that.

[angelfromanotherpin]

I enjoy the incentive to act out my class the way it's intended, but I'm curious as to what other people think the kind of advancement where there are minor ways for each PC to gain experience, but everyone generally moves along the same track.

XP differentials are generically ungood, but sometimes tolerable. In general, I think that sort of thing is better when it pays a non-advancement currency, like Edge or Fate Points or whatever.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

I'd hate to go off on a tangent immediately, but could someone give me a quick rundown on Edge? I've never played Shadowrun, so while I can grok the concept I'd appreciate a more thorough explanation. I can look on like, wikis and shit, but I know a sizable portion of the posters here have been into Shadowrun since I was a tyke and could probably stun me with overwhelming amounts of knowledge. It seems like a pretty cool mechanic, from the little I've seen of it.

[Foxwarrior]

In the Shadowrun 20th Anniversary Corebook for 4th edition, Edge is described on pages 74 and 75. It's a consumable resource you use to roll more dice, reroll dice, avoid death, and such.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Would you say 4th edition does it the best, or does it stay mostly the same across all Shadowrun?

[phlapjackage]

SR 1-3, they don't have Edge, they have karma pools, iirc a similar mechanic but not exactly. SR4 and 5 Edge are pretty close and in SR6 apparently they really changed Edge to be more like the D&D5 ad/disad mechanic, with reports that it's all kinds of terrible. I think SR4 does Edge "the best", although there are still things I would houserule about it (an example was the problem of Edge during summoning/binding: do Spirits use their Edge to resist? If not it's fairly easy to Edge the summoning/binding in downtime to get powerful spirits, if they do resist with Edge then the test can be really, really difficult)

[Dogbert]

Edge will always have a place as a pioneer in proto metagame currency, but I'm definitely sticking with mg currency's evolved forms (fate points, Hero Points, etc). I never cared for stressing out preciously hoarding scarce tokens that you only got once every blue moon for sucking MC right, and didn't even guarantee success upon use.

Hell, I even prefer Advantage/Disadvantage over old Edge/Force Points, at least its vague writing can be interpreted in a way that lets you have constant "best out of two" for having your character do what you were going to do anyway all the time.

[Foxwarrior]

Oh yeah, edge refresh isn't nailed down in the core rules... but if you decide that edge refreshes after each mission, an Edgelord is a viable character.

[Whipstitch]

SR 1-3, they don't have Edge, they have karma pools, iirc a similar mechanic but not exactly. SR4 and 5 Edge are pretty close and in SR6 apparently they really changed Edge to be more like the D&D5 ad/disad mechanic, with reports that it's all kinds of terrible. I think SR4 does Edge "the best", although there are still things I would houserule about it (an example was the problem of Edge during summoning/binding: do Spirits use their Edge to resist? If not it's fairly easy to Edge the summoning/binding in downtime to get powerful spirits, if they do resist with Edge then the test can be really, really difficult)

Yeah, Edge is a solid mechanic that can rather easily have undesirable effects if you let it interact with subsystems that offer long term benefits in exchange for unlikely dice results. Using Edge to kill your nemesis super hard or to narrowly survive a streak of bad dice rolls is totally sweet and leads to high fives all around. Using it to bust Force caps and bind spirits that could solo the entire rest of the team combined far less desirable.

[phlapjackage]

Using it to bust Force caps and bind spirits that could solo the entire rest of the team combined far less desirable.

Yeah exactly - another sorta exploit was to cast sustained spells at low force but Edge them for high results and little drain. I'm thinking of a houserule that Edge can't be used on any tests involving the Magic att, it would help bring magicrun back in line.

[Iduno]

Using it to bust Force caps and bind spirits that could solo the entire rest of the team combined far less desirable.

Yeah exactly - another sorta exploit was to cast sustained spells at low force but Edge them for high results and little drain. I'm thinking of a houserule that Edge can't be used on any tests involving the Magic att, it would help bring magicrun back in line.

And, because resistance tests don't use the magic attribute, edge would be allowed to resist (a few times before an edge refresh) magic attacks/summoning attempts when reasonable?

[phlapjackage]

And, because resistance tests don't use the magic attribute, edge would be allowed to resist (a few times before an edge refresh) magic attacks/summoning attempts when reasonable?

For things that have Edge, that's what I was thinking. I was also considering not letting spirits have Edge, slightly for meta-game reasons and slightly because I've thought of having Edge be a sort of in-game thing, and for <reasons> it doesn't play well with Magic, and since spirits are creatures of Magic...no Edge for them.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Edge sounds like a fairly neat metagame mechanic. Is it actually possible to have a luck-based character? If you had more easy and transparent ways for PCs to regain it, would that alleviate some of its problems, or would that just make everything explode in a shower of gore and nanocircuits?

[Blade]

Edge is problematic because its refresh mechanism is unclear and because its impact vary wildly depending on how many important dice rolls you have in your game.

If you only have three important dice rolls in your game, you can edge them all and be guaranteed to succeed. If you have hundred of them (for example if you have many combat scenes), the impact of Edge lessens.

[Iduno]

Edge is problematic because its refresh mechanism is unclear and because its impact vary wildly depending on how many important dice rolls you have in your game.

If you only have three important dice rolls in your game, you can edge them all and be guaranteed to succeed. If you have hundred of them (for example if you have many combat scenes), the impact of Edge lessens.

You can fix that somewhat by tying edge refreshing to a semi-rare event that will come up every so many rolls on average, so games that have more rolls also have more edge refresh, and games with too few rolls almost never refresh edge. My best guess for that semi-rare event would be a critical success to something that doesn't have an effect otherwise (like initiative or addiction tests), but you'd have to also be careful that it isn't something the players can force to happen like 6th edition edge, or something that is significantly more/less likely for more/less skilled characters.



Edit: Today I learned that Joe Biden is a fact-checker for Catalyst Game Labs.

[Whipstitch]

You can also just give out a small standard amount of Edge for free to every character instead of including it as a basic chargen option. Doing so has a couple of effects that I feel are largely positive:

1. It puts everyone on an equal playing field so that Edge Guy isn't so over or underpowered based on the whims of the campaign schedule. People who consistently use up all their Edge before the next refresh are likely to be cashing in on a larger amount of opportunities but when you only have 2 or 3 points the effect they have on the campaign compared to more conservative players isn't so pronounced.

2. High Edge attributes can allow players to randomly do well at shit they are ostensibly bad at while low Edge pools are most effective when they are used to reroll any of your dice that resulted in a miss on a test you are already good at. So when players are restricted to low Edge totals that means that most of the monstrous results you'll see will at least be tied to their character's theme. That's handy because I've found that generally people are cool with the team sniper using a point of Edge to make a near impossible shot but are often annoyed by Lucky Guy builds that randomly pull off shit that would be mathematically impossible for them to replicate if they weren't using Edge.

[phlapjackage]

I've had some experience with SR1-2, but it was decades ago so I don't remember a lot of the finer details. But I kinda liked how karma pools worked - something like for every 10 karma earned, the player gets 1 die in the karma pool, which worked alot like Edge. So as characters got more experienced, their "luck" got better too. I think there was even a team karma pool thing that, on the surface, seems like a cool idea.

A problem with this I can think of is that characters can get huge karma pools if they're really experienced (or is that even a problem? powerful characters are powerful...). Maybe after some breakpoint number of karma, it could be every 20 points or something

[Stahlseele]

Humans got one every 10 points, Trolls, Dorfs, Elves and Orks only got one every 20 points.
And there was, at least in SR3, a flaw you could take which halved that progression again.
So for human characters it meant giving up their one inherent advantage over the others for some more points in character generation.
And it generally meant free points for anybody who did not plan on having a character be played for a long time and to develop the character.

[Username17]

I literally have never met anyone who actually gave metahumans reduced Karma Pool filling in SR3. That's just such an easy houserule for such an obvious problem for character advancement and long-term balance.

In any case, Karma pools worked pretty well... for a while. For the first few adventures, characters have Karma pools between 1 and 3 and then it works a lot like SR4 Edge. At higher Karma Pools, players can get rerolls and repeated rerolls for even trivial tests and the game gets dumb. Karma pools of 30+ aren't even hard to get for characters who've been being played for a few years.

-Username17

[Whipstitch]

Karma pool was genuinely destructive. The MUDs of the day were an exaggerated example of how hilariously bad it could get because longtime players were bouncing from GM to GM and required firm house ruling to be brought into line due to the bonkers progression speed you could achieve.

[OgreBattle]

Blades in the Dark was inspired by Apocalypse World but is not part of the Apocalypse game line. It is substantially different and, in my opinion, substantially better. I joined a weekly game of Blades in the Dark a few months ago, then started my own weekly game, and have over a dozen sessions now as both player and GM. I was skeptical about it at first, but I was pleasantly surprised at how well it holds together.

any house rules applied?

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Here's something I can't recall having seen around here: What do you think about the game appointing one of the players as the caller/leader/middleman of the PCs and having that person tell the GM what the party is actually doing? Is that just a good practice or should it explicitly be part of the rules? Does it speed up play? Marginalize players? Is it just fucking pointless and that's why nobody does it anymore?

[deaddmwalking]

Here's something I can't recall having seen around here: What do you think about the game appointing one of the players as the caller/leader/middleman of the PCs and having that person tell the GM what the party is actually doing? Is that just a good practice or should it explicitly be part of the rules? Does it speed up play? Marginalize players? Is it just fucking pointless and that's why nobody does it anymore?

If you're a player and you say 'I'm doing x' and the 'leader' says 'we're all doing y', how do you resolve it?

The easiest way is to let everyone declare their actions individually so nobody is marginalized. Unless the thing the players are doing is ITSELF tedious, the fact that players are engaged figuring out how they're contributing to an event is worthwhile. In the game we played yesterday, we knew a warband of gnolls was on the march and there were several small villages that were in danger. Letting people talk back and forth about what they WANTED to do before agreeing on what we ACTUALLY did was part of the fun. Finding out that digging a defensive ditch would have been too time consuming might be seen as a waste of table time, but it also helps inform us of how we can handle future problems. In this case other than making sure the villagers were warned, armed, and had a look-out posted, we didn't do much else because we wanted to warn others and find a place to engage the warband. It was chaotic with everyone making suggestions, but it wasn't a waste of time.