The Gaming Den

Yeah, when one of my friends pitched us on playing, it was expected that we were going to be dying like horror movie extras. Anti-player adventures can be ok depending upon how funny the bullshit deaths are.

We failed I think in that we didn't act like horror movie extras after we each had a death and instead wound up being super extra cautious to have a few of us live to level 3-4.

Our first deaths were:
2 to a pack of wolves
1 to a fire elemental in a fireplace
1 to a soul-stealing trap door (not sad since he was already feebleminded by a brain in a jar, and being feebleminded is a shitty character death where you don't get a new character).
1 to a swarm of insects in the form of a person

And we started being extra cautious beyond drilling holes in walls to peek at what lay in wait and creating traps/kill zones to lure monsters into. Our next deaths were over a year later.

Longes wrote:

malak wrote:The free RPG day adventure 'Better than any Man' is one of the best adventures I've ever ran, and I really like the LotFP suggested approach of placing campaigns in a magical, twisted version of the real world in history (usually Europe, but there's also an adventure set in Nigeria, ...).

A conflict between catholics and protestants in the thirty years war feel just way more interesting to me than a conflict between X-fantasy-god and Y-fantasy-god, and you can put real events such as the Magdeburger Bluthochzeit (Bloody Wedding) into the adventure.

We'll have to disagree here. I thought that "Better than any man" was one of the most annoying anti-player adventures I've ever seen. Especially the epic level evil necromancer who feels the need to subcontract to newbie adventurers, and the final dungeon that's just there to fuck you.

Sure, if you have a party that attacks everything and everyone they meet on sight, players will be thoroughly fucked. But if you have clever players who know their characters adventure in a dangerous world, and carefully explore and take every advantage they can, the adventure is great. It's beautiful and disgusting, and my players loved it.

I was actually at the ENnies this year (I mention every other post or so that I "secretly" own a game company: this year we got nominated for something, no, we didn't win, thanks, we were up against Paizo so it was kind of a foregone conclusion but the award show was a good excuse to get drunk and troll famous game designer people in person) and it was a pleasure watching ZakS go up to receive medal after medal after medal for whatever product he had up, watching his acceptance speeches go from the expected trolling of the SJW outrage brigade to become increasingly drunken, belligerent, and incoherent.

Towards the end, he remembered to thank personally Satan, Prince of Darkness, as a co-author, which I thought was mighty decent of him.

I know I lose so much Den street cred for admitting this, but I actually really like ZakS' style.

I have plans on hacking LotFP to do DOOM. I'll post it up here if anything comes of it.

SO what you are saying is that it takes him longer to devolve into an incoherent mess in person

More seriously, I don't think there's anything in particular wrong with his affected style, it's just that every time his true self shine through even a little bit, it is a horrific monstrosity of seething hate and pretension.

Well honestly with the seething hate half at least I feel like he'd fit right in here.

Schwarzkopf wrote:Well honestly with the seething hate half at least I feel like he'd fit right in here.

I mean, Hitler had seething hate... who you hate and why kind of matters. Since he hates anyone who ever contradicts him on anything ever, ever disagrees with him ever, or ever even implies that he isn't perfect... well, he did show up here, and we saw plenty of first hand experience that he doesn't fit in.

Fair 'nuff. Still, I'd like to have a beer with the guy or something before forming a final opinion.

I feel reasonably confident that he's not as bad as Hitler, at least.

malak wrote: Sure, if you have a party that attacks everything and everyone they meet on sight, players will be thoroughly fucked. But if you have clever players who know their characters adventure in a dangerous world, and carefully explore and take every advantage they can, the adventure is great. It's beautiful and disgusting, and my players loved it.

What are the mechanics in the game to express player cleverness, exploration, advantage taking vs "GM says rocks fall"

OgreBattle wrote:What are the mechanics in the game to express player cleverness, exploration, advantage taking vs "GM says rocks fall"

Mostly skill checks that you have 1/6 chance of succeeding on.

erik wrote:We failed I think in that we didn't act like horror movie extras after we each had a death and instead wound up being super extra cautious to have a few of us live to level 3-4.

That's my main complaint about "deadly" games: if you're planning to play anything longer than a one-off session, everyone starts acting super-cautious and the game slows down to a crawl.

But for a one-off session where mass death doesn't hurt the story, those systems can be kind of fun.

hogarth wrote:

erik wrote:We failed I think in that we didn't act like horror movie extras after we each had a death and instead wound up being super extra cautious to have a few of us live to level 3-4.

That's my main complaint about "deadly" games: if you're planning to play anything longer than a one-off session, everyone starts acting super-cautious and the game slows down to a crawl.

But for a one-off session where mass death doesn't hurt the story, those systems can be kind of fun.

--Tangential--

That was one of my main problems when I was trying to design Nethackd20. I still have a hard time with getting a good balance between quick chargen, because of possible death(like how NetHack rolls), and the ability to have multiple session where players would like to keep their characters and not be super paranoid about every bauble they find.

OgreBattle wrote:

malak wrote: Sure, if you have a party that attacks everything and everyone they meet on sight, players will be thoroughly fucked. But if you have clever players who know their characters adventure in a dangerous world, and carefully explore and take every advantage they can, the adventure is great. It's beautiful and disgusting, and my players loved it.

What are the mechanics in the game to express player cleverness, exploration, advantage taking vs "GM says rocks fall"

We played the adventure, but in another system. The good parts (story, characters, ideas, medieval background, athmosphere) are amazing, the bad parts (the system) can easily be replaced by something that's better suited to whatever group you're running it for.

malak wrote:

OgreBattle wrote:

malak wrote: Sure, if you have a party that attacks everything and everyone they meet on sight, players will be thoroughly fucked. But if you have clever players who know their characters adventure in a dangerous world, and carefully explore and take every advantage they can, the adventure is great. It's beautiful and disgusting, and my players loved it.

What are the mechanics in the game to express player cleverness, exploration, advantage taking vs "GM says rocks fall"

We played the adventure, but in another system. The good parts (story, characters, ideas, medieval background, athmosphere) are amazing, the bad parts (the system) can easily be replaced by something that's better suited to whatever group you're running it for.

Well your mileage apparently varied, but in my single experience attempting to run a LoTP adventure in a not shit system, the adventure also turned out to be shit, because it was bypassed the second PCs got access to third level spells. Almost like it was an adventure written for a shitty anti-player system.

Kaelik wrote: Well your mileage apparently varied, but in my single experience attempting to run a LoTP adventure in a not shit system, the adventure also turned out to be shit, because it was bypassed the second PCs got access to third level spells. Almost like it was an adventure written for a shitty anti-player system.

Which adventure was that?

Forget if I mentioned it here or just on the Big Purple Tardpile, but I'm making a Lamentations hack to do Doom(2016). It's going to be called Lamentations of the Doomguy.