The Gaming Den

So I'll be teaching a tabletop RPG game design class for college students starting January in Thailand as part of Thamassat's game design program. It's mainly focused on video games but tabletop games are seen as foundation skills. Most of the students haven't played tabletop RPG's before as they'r...

In respect to Vornheim, the same author also came out with Maze of Blue Medusa. The adventure has an insane number of rooms (304? I think), but cited as allowing for minimal/no prep from the Dungeon Master due to the way its formatted, so I'm curious if anyone could confirm that to be the case? It ...

Vornheim looks like just a random setting supplement with a gimmick random table. it's KIND of cool that you can generate a 2nd level wizard with 14 int and 3 HP/Lvl with a single roll but I feel like the need to do the cross referencing makes it so that just rolling 3 different kinds of dice is fa...

Some of the main tools that an RPG system can use to facilitate cooperative storytelling, though, are the RNG and associated mathematical structures that together provide a framework for resolving conflicts, prompting the story to go in unexpected directions, and enforcing limitations on an individ...

Sure, Shadowrun 5e... just kidding :mrgreen: .I don't know much about Ptolus. Could you tell me more of it? In my limited experience and offg the top of my head, here are some games that innovated in the organization or interface in some way in the latest decade or so: - Powered by the Apocalypse g...

Most games don't "let people figure that out for themselves" because they're not marked by MTP and freeform actions. Most games use rules to completely define the space of "acceptable action" whereas TTRPGs don't need to do that. That's the big difference in my eyes - we can't t...

FrankTrollman wrote:If your system cannot model what happens if the players do not act, it cannot model the effects of the players' actions. Period.

Uh, wait, yes it does.

Edit: You know what, never mind. I leave it up to you if you wanna scroll up and figure it out.

It was all bullshit, and the marketing campaign was fundamentally fraudulent. Both in the sense that the math for 4th edition was actually a catastrofail and in the sense that the people spreading the meme were lying about who they were and their relationship to the game. :rofl: Okay, for the purpo...

As I see it, you can't really do this on a systematic top-down level with TTRPGs. The variance between human actors is just too big, let alone the variance between groups of human actors. I mean, shit, we're in the hopelessly complex here. Game-systems lead to specific game-instantiation states in ...

Not talking about Shadowrun or Blades in the Dark specifically but... Modern designers pay great attention to "user interface" and "rules creep", which are sadly two aspects that tabletop RPGs still totally ignore to this day. More specifically, many games have come to realize t...

But for the PCs to have any affect on anything, the starting state has to be defined. Because that's just how cause and effect work and what it means for things to affect other things in this or any other context. You aren't allowed to say pish posh to the idea of the battle system generating resul...

I made literally none of these claims you're disputing. I would claim that RPGs need solid math but that that's not sufficient for the RPG to be great. And "solid math" is, of course, relative to the particular use of the math - math fails when it creates outputs which don't match the nar...

Whatever, just forget about those games then. Contrast Shadowrun with Blades in the Dark. Or just analyse it in isolation. The point stands: it's a slow and convoluted ruleset, that does not do what it says on the tin. It's authors "didn't do the math". My humble opinion, of course, after...

First, are you saying a behavioral psychiatrist wouldn't know how to do good math? Or that it doesn't take some understanding of math and human behavior to get the number of cards per hand/in deck/in play right? The point is that math isn't the beginning and the end. Indeed, that Frank thinks that ...

I'm not really understanding how you're disagreeing with me here. We do want our RPGs to be fair so we design them that way. And we're obviously not in the world of freeform narrative because we're doing collaborative narrative so we need some sort of social contract to prevent it from turning into...

As a guy who worked at a gaming store for the entirety of 4e's run, I can confirm that 'the math just works' was an official marketing phrase, parroted both by the reps running D&D encounters and the players who came to buy it. I checked the front and back covers and don't see it for 4E materia...

First of all, the idea that people don't want better math is absurd. 4e D&D sold itself with the idea that "The Math Just Works" and it got the highest pre-orders of any D&D book of any edition period. People obviously wanted what they were selling. The crashing and burning of 4e ...

I think you're reversing the burden. I'm arguing that RPG designers suck at math because most people do and, in response, you're citing Euro Game designers. But instead I'd see Euro Game design being mathematically elegant as something exceptional about Euro Games that's in need of explanation, not...

Zinegata, the Chains of Command example you just gave is wholly unacceptable as an RPG subsystem. Lol. Well, thank you for agreeing with one of my core points that much of what's in wargames is incompatible with RPGs. I'm again not belaboring to change the minds of people who just want to shout tha...

Not really. There's a great deal of bad design among RPG designers but many of the most successful Euro games are designed by people with actual math degrees. The problem instead is a bit harsher: Euro Games strive to model a fair system whereas reality and narratives tend to be fundamentally unfair...

No one (ignoring blatant bad faith actors) disagrees that convincing the fire giants to show up to your side and fight should make a real difference to the fight, and that it should do so in a way that players can predict in advance (the same way that players can predict the result of an attack on ...

Can someone give a reason for this, why the designers of games cannot seem to master or fix what looks like pretty simple to recognize and even correct math problems? Because math doesn't sell games that are premised on story-telling. Themes and ideas are what makes an RPG sell, not the math itself...

But that's exactly it. The players need to be able to progress and change the world. That is why the correct flow chart is this: MC makes up starting inputs (example: "there is an Ogre"). The Players declare their actions and responses (example: "I attack the Ogre with my crossbow&qu...

No. The point is that "MC makes something up" isn't a game at all . It's somebody telling you a story. It doesn't matter if they are in an adversarial or supportive role or some combination thereof, to the extent that the result of an action is just "The MC makes something up" y...

Ok, first of all, Zine, I have a culinary arts degree. I do know what cooking is about. The example of Warg Battle is weird because it's based on Iron Chef, and Iron Chef dishes tend to be weird, because you're given some exotic ingredient, or an ingredient that is not often used in one or another ...