The Difficulty in RPGs thread

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Kaelik
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Post by Kaelik »

K wrote:The first quote is about broken stories that suddenly end with no resolution. Those are deeply unsatisfying.
The first quote is about how you fundamentally reject any resolution that you didn't decide was the correct resolution beforehand.
K wrote:The next two are about sandboxing, not about the first quote, and part of a context that specifically mentions that it's an OK way to play that way.
Your criticism of "sandboxing" by which you mean, you the DM refusing to incorporate character preferences and decisions into your planning as punishment for people not adhering to your rules, is exactly the same as your criticism of stories you planned not turning out exactly the way you wanted.

Both are about how you think good stories are stories written by K with no real input from players, who might fuck things up by having their character decide that avenging his father might not accomplish anything, and it is better to go make a life of his own. And then other players will decide their characters still want to kill the bad guy who they know is bad, not out of revenge (or even out of revenge for their friend).

We get that you, K, believe that other people having input into stories makes them worse.

But the solution is to go write a book and stop playing D&D, not to criticize roleplaying stories that are actually cooperative storytelling just because you don't want your high art polluted by players opinions.
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Kaelik
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Post by Kaelik »

K wrote:If you've asked to have your character randomly taken away from you, then you don't care about that character from a storytelling perspective. You've expressed a clear preference for stories that don't require your character to be alive.
Insisting that their be a possibility of death does not equate to not caring about the storytelling.

The problem is K, that you believe that all your stories must involve someone remaining alive. That is completely wrong. Stories can absolutely deal with different people dying, even main people, even PCs.

Which is why all those single author fictions also have that.
DSMatticus wrote:Kaelik gonna kaelik. Whatcha gonna do?
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Post by K »

Kaelik wrote:
K wrote:The first quote is about broken stories that suddenly end with no resolution. Those are deeply unsatisfying.
The first quote is about how you fundamentally reject any resolution that you didn't decide was the correct resolution beforehand.
K wrote:The next two are about sandboxing, not about the first quote, and part of a context that specifically mentions that it's an OK way to play that way.
Your criticism of "sandboxing" by which you mean, you the DM refusing to incorporate character preferences and decisions into your planning as punishment for people not adhering to your rules, is exactly the same as your criticism of stories you planned not turning out exactly the way you wanted.

Both are about how you think good stories are stories written by K with no real input from players, who might fuck things up by having their character decide that avenging his father might not accomplish anything, and it is better to go make a life of his own. And then other players will decide their characters still want to kill the bad guy who they know is bad, not out of revenge (or even out of revenge for their friend).

We get that you, K, believe that other people having input into stories makes them worse.

But the solution is to go write a book and stop playing D&D, not to criticize roleplaying stories that are actually cooperative storytelling just because you don't want your high art polluted by players opinions.
"Killing a stranger because a guy we knew hated him" is never going to be a good story. Stopping an adventure in the middle because it suddenly doesn't make sense any more is never going to make a table full of happy players. Dying in some random encounter and forcing everyone to accommodate the plot rewrites to include your new character is not going to be pleasant for anyone.

It just isn't. That's just the way the world works.

When your input into the game leads to other people having a shitty time, it's the my job as DM to put a stop that shit. If you make a rapist character, I'm going to tell you to fuck off an make a new one. If you want to do a story arc about your character, then I'm going to make your character immortal for those sessions so that your stupid desire for perma-death doesn't ruin everyone's fun. If you demand that I increase the difficulty of the game so that other players start dying even though they really don't want that, I'm going to tell you find a new game

Grow the fuck up. It's a game for everyone at the table and your desire to ruin other people's fun is not cool.
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Post by K »

Kaelik wrote:
Which is why all those single author fictions also have that.
If you've written an RPG adventure like single-author fiction, you fucking failed because a lot of the conventions of single-author fiction don't work in an RPG. (And I just loooooove how your highest insult is to accuse me of single-author fiction and then you demand single-author fiction).

RPG adventures have to be written to allow for player agency and to keep all of the players' interest. The player has no agency if their character is dead. If the character was the quest hook, the adventure fails if the player is dead.

No one wants to play the adventure to get back your father's katana after your samurai dies. Why can't you understand that?
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Post by MGuy »

K wrote:
MGuy wrote: A: Character driven stories = PCs having background that involves them in the game and making decisions based off of that background. This can literally be as simple as 'motherfuckers killed mah family' and thus the WHOLE story has to be centered around that background to be good enough. If a character does anything not specifically associated with that background then it doesn't count.
Thus...
B: Creating a sandbox where a character decides to go kill some mofos because they want to clear the space out to put their next castle is not a Character Driven because wanting to do that is not in the character's background and thus keeps them from driving the story and plot. In fact any and all decisions that they make based on events that happen to them after they start the game just isn't going to cut it as far as Character Driving goes.

So as K has established only A is any good/fun/right. B is not good because... it's not good enough, whatever.

Any parts I'm missing?
I'm not as judgmental as you, so the whole "good/fun/right" is your assumption.

Both are valid ways to play the game and ways to create stories, but A is for PCs who are going to keep their characters around and B is for people who want perma-death or who retire their characters often.

B is so much easier to design than A. I can improvise B at the table without any work at all and it's appropriate for characters who are temporary because the rest of the players don't have to suffer through broken stories when a character dies or is retired. I mean, if we just spent two sessions tracking down your father's killer, you suddenly deciding to scrap the character and make a dwarven mage before we find the guy is deeply unsatisfying for everyone else at the table.

I'm not going to design really intricate adventures that take into account your backstory if your character won't be there. I'll just make some dungeons and stuff and let you have fun running into random stuff.

That being said, you missed that B creates more shallow stories. I mean, if your whole motivation for your character is "I want a castle," it's going to create stories and plots as interesting as "that time I wanted a hotdog and then bought one" or "that time I had a fight and won." Those stories can have action and drama, but I don't think anyone is going to actually retell that story to anyone because it's so awesome.

And some people want that. Shallow stories are easy on the player as well as the DM and some people like that.
I would say that it is perhaps the people you play with that make you assume that somehow having a sandbox ruins any deep stories from forming but I don't think that is the case as I AM pretty sure that you've gamed with Frank and he seems to feel that that is untrue.

Personally I let my players choose how 'involved' they want to make there character. Hell I've had at least a few prominent PCs in my games start off with no background at all only to invent one as the game progressed. In a lot of media you don't even KNOW a character's backstory until it is revealed later on (as it was in your Saving Private Ryan example) so how is it that you can even believe that sandboxxed characters have to be shallow? What rubric do you use to decide when it is time for a character to die? If you believe that there is a time and a place for a character to cease to function why even play a game with randomized anything and not just get together with people to write out a novel?
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Post by violence in the media »

K wrote: No one wants to play the adventure to get back your father's katana after your samurai dies. Why can't you understand that?
That might be kind of cool. Granted, given the average gamer, it'll only involve like 5 minutes of table discussion about how ironic it is that the party finally found this fucking sword after Jim the samurai died. Maybe someone will use it in his honor, maybe they'll bury it with him, or maybe they'll return it to his clan.

Part of the fun of RPGs, at least for me, is having stories that sometimes DO NOT turn out the way you'd expect them to in typical storytelling mediums. The story where the party got eaten by owlbears halfway through the quest because of some dumbass thing the rogue did is at least marginally more entertaining to hear about than the one where the princesses were saved, vengeance was had, evil was vanquished, and everyone rode off into the sunset as expected.

It's fine to have those stories and they can be enjoyable to play--but insisting that everything has to work out and broadly conform to the template is kind of disappointing. Like, if 1000 groups played through the original Star Wars movie plots, I'd be bummed if some groups didn't have Luke turn traitor and join Vader, others have him get killed at Yavin and Solo makes the shot that blows up the Death Star, have the entire party get captured while on the Death Star, or any of 1000 variations. THOSE games would be a lot more fun to hear about than the ones that happened pretty much according to script.
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Post by K »

violence in the media wrote:The story where the party got eaten by owlbears halfway through the quest because of some dumbass thing the rogue did is at least marginally more entertaining to hear about than the one where the princesses were saved, vengeance was had, evil was vanquished, and everyone rode off into the sunset as expected.
It may be fun to hear about, but it's not fun to play. People put away their books, and probably cut the night short and go home because they feel shitty. Maybe they don't make a character for the next campaign or they ask to play a different game.

Maybe it's a funny story to tell months or years later, but at the time it's deeply unpleasant.

Failed quests are like that too. The samurai getting killed means that the players stop the quest to find his father's sword in the middle. Maybe they then go clear some area for their castle or tie up some other loose end, but no one wants the Katana because it's a dumb weapon and going to all that work to give it to his family who can't protect it sounds dumb. Usually the players end the night early and play some Smash Bros or something to give the DM time to come up with a new hook for the next session and for the samurai to write up a new character, but everyone is pretty bummed about it.

It's not a magic trick to figure out what makes people happy. Getting people to emotionally invest in things and then destroying those things is a recipe for bad times.
Last edited by K on Wed Apr 17, 2013 5:57 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Lago PARANOIA »

K wrote:It may be fun to hear about, but it's not fun to play. People put away their books, and probably cut the night short and go home because they feel shitty. Maybe they don't make a character for the next campaign or they ask to play a different game.
It's not fun to play at that instant but it's fun in aggregate.

If I played a game in which I always got my way and things turned out exactly the way I wanted it and I was assured that this was always going to be the case, I'd get bored of it pretty quickly. I'm sure that it applies to a bunch of people.

The thing is though that if you ask people at discrete instances whether they want to botch a treasure roll or have their army lose a crucial battle you're going to get a lot more 'I don't wannas!' then 'Yes! For the greater good!' The end result is that you get something pretty indistinguishable than a game in which everything went your way all of the time.

Some wit made fun of me awhile back where I supposedly said that you can't enjoy a blowjob unless you get punched in the face. I won't go that far, but I will claim that you can't enjoy a blowjob unless you go significant amounts of time without having a blowjob. While I think that someone who gets ten blowjobs a month is going to have more net fun than someone who just gets two, I'm skeptical as to whether they have less fun than someone who gets thirty.
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.

In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
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Post by hogarth »

K wrote: No one wants to play the adventure to get back your father's katana after your samurai dies.
I would argue that that's a pretty lame idea for a group adventure ("let's all do that one thing that only one person gives a shit about") even if you don't have perma-death.
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Post by K »

Lago PARANOIA wrote: If I played a game in which I always got my way and things turned out exactly the way I wanted it and I was assured that this was always going to be the case, I'd get bored of it pretty quickly. I'm sure that it applies to a bunch of people.
That's why you lie.

You tell people that the game is super-dangerous and then never kill them. You make their successes seem like the results of their creativity and skill and not because their the odds are heavily stacked in their favor. You let them fail at small things so that the big "successes" feel better.

RPGs are not based on fair challenges or objective difficulties. People win almost all of the time, and that's why TPK stories are so rare as to be notable.
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Post by Mistborn »

K wrote:
Lago PARANOIA wrote: If I played a game in which I always got my way and things turned out exactly the way I wanted it and I was assured that this was always going to be the case, I'd get bored of it pretty quickly. I'm sure that it applies to a bunch of people.
That's why you lie.

You tell people that the game is super-dangerous and then never kill them. You make their successes seem like the results of their creativity and skill and not because their the odds are heavily stacked in their favor. You let them fail at small things so that the big "successes" feel better.
Wait did you just explicitly advocate lying to your players? What the actuall fuck. I know I've been not so subtely implying that team basketweave is full of lying assholes but don't just come out and admit it.
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Post by K »

Lord Mistborn wrote:
Wait did you just explicitly advocate lying to your players? What the actuall fuck. I know I've been not so subtely implying that team basketweave is full of lying assholes but don't just come out and admit it.
If I gave you a fair challenge, I'd kill your character every session.

Every. Damned. Session.
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Post by Foxwarrior »

violence in the media wrote:The story where the party got eaten by owlbears halfway through the quest because of some dumbass thing the rogue did
If this story is real, please tell it.
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Post by Foxwarrior »

K wrote:
Lord Mistborn wrote:
Wait did you just explicitly advocate lying to your players? What the actuall fuck. I know I've been not so subtely implying that team basketweave is full of lying assholes but don't just come out and admit it.
If I gave you a fair challenge, I'd kill your character every session.

Every. Damned. Session.
Objective challenges are better when they're not too fair.
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Post by RobbyPants »

K wrote:
Lago PARANOIA wrote: If I played a game in which I always got my way and things turned out exactly the way I wanted it and I was assured that this was always going to be the case, I'd get bored of it pretty quickly. I'm sure that it applies to a bunch of people.
That's why you lie.

You tell people that the game is super-dangerous and then never kill them. You make their successes seem like the results of their creativity and skill and not because their the odds are heavily stacked in their favor. You let them fail at small things so that the big "successes" feel better.
That sounds like a super fun game.

The last time I played in a game and realized I couldn't die, I completely lost interest. Whether or not the DM lied, it became obvious when my HP fell below the minimum damage of the monster, then it started missing, and hit me once for less than the minimum.

It's not fun and it doesn't work.


Edit:
Nevermind. I misread your post and responded to something different.
Last edited by RobbyPants on Wed Apr 17, 2013 7:46 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by MGuy »

Lord Mistborn wrote:
K wrote:
Lago PARANOIA wrote: If I played a game in which I always got my way and things turned out exactly the way I wanted it and I was assured that this was always going to be the case, I'd get bored of it pretty quickly. I'm sure that it applies to a bunch of people.
That's why you lie.

You tell people that the game is super-dangerous and then never kill them. You make their successes seem like the results of their creativity and skill and not because their the odds are heavily stacked in their favor. You let them fail at small things so that the big "successes" feel better.
Wait did you just explicitly advocate lying to your players? What the actuall fuck. I know I've been not so subtely implying that team basketweave is full of lying assholes but don't just come out and admit it.
He's not wrong. I do it all the time to my players except that I just don't fudge dice. I constantly low ball encounters at the opening levels until I believe the players are able to stand on their own. Adfter that things tend to work out well. When players get to a level where they can handle themselves I can take the training wheels off. From there I can act like I'm trying to super hard core kill them when really I'm just handing them level and situation appropriate challenges.
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Post by Wrathzog »

Foxwarrior wrote:Objective challenges are better when they're not too fair.
I don't understand what this is supposed to mean.
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Post by Foxwarrior »

Wrathzog wrote:
Foxwarrior wrote:Objective challenges are better when they're not too fair.
I don't understand what this is supposed to mean.
If a fair challenge is one with about 50/50 (naively) predicted odds, an objective challenge is just one for which naive predictions can be made (as opposed to subjective challenges, for which only informed predictions make any sense). Since K's hypothetical situation, in which K proves that he's totally better at D&D than Lord Mistborn through the use of fair fights, involves a TPK every session, it's too hard and should not be so fair, but that doesn't mean the fights should stop being objective challenges.
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Post by Mistborn »

K wrote:If I gave you a fair challenge, I'd kill your character every session.

Every. Damned. Session.
u mad bro
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Post by Roog »

Lord Mistborn wrote:Wait did you just explicitly advocate lying to your players? What the actuall fuck. I know I've been not so subtely implying that team basketweave is full of lying assholes but don't just come out and admit it.
There is nothing wrong with lying to the other players - as long as it's a accepted part of the social contract.
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Post by Chamomile »

K wrote:Ripley has an entire movie worth of backstory, the first Alien film, even before it's established that she's the expert on xenos who has to be bribed to go on this mission because of her expertise snd this come up later.
While Ripley does indeed have an entire movie that she was previously in, precisely none of that movie is actually necessary to watching Aliens. For real, I saw Aliens before Alien and I understood it just fine (although it helps that I know what xenomorphs look like and thus understood why Ridley freaked out at the cat). Aliens does have a whole other movie, but that's actually kind of incidental. The sum total of Ridley's backstory is having had a previous run-in with the Alien, details unimportant, and "previously encountered xenomorph" is not actually anymore of an involved backstory than "is a colonial marine who thinks he's seen everything, but hasn't" or "is a completely unprepared officer who's done this exactly once before" or "works for Weyland-Yutani, is accidentally responsible for xenomorph attack on colony."
I've watched Saving Private Ryan like five times and I can't tell you what the translator's backstory is other than he is a translator. The other guys have a backstory that consists entirely of a home town and nothing more
As opposed to captain guy, who has the one scene where he admits he's a school teacher after pretending to be a mysterious man with no past for a while.

Also, every game I have ever run has had most if not all PCs with less fleshed out backstories than the major NPCs. Typically I'll explicitly ask for PC backstories to try and integrate into the plot, and invariably I get nothing except from the guys who were making backstories already. And it's weird that you're pretending to be unaware of this problem since you helped write mechanics to solve it.
Affecting plot points means making decisions that affect how the story plays out.
I guess I should probably go inform one of my players that his character is actually an NPC, then? It is extremely common for groups to end up with a party leader like Ripley who makes basically all the decisions on her own, and it's not uncommon for that leader to be someone who is actually completely unqualified to actually lead (also like Ripley).

Also, Bishop's decision to wait for Ripley instead of taking off with Hicks is pretty damn significant. As is his decision to go and establish the uplink with the communicator. As is Hicks' decision to switch sides from Burke to Ripley. And none of these things are actually the things that make Hicks or Bishop good models for PCs (because Bishop actually isn't a good model for a PC), but they do fit your crazy and bizarre definition of what a PC is.

Your definition for who counts as a PC or an NPC do not line up at all with how PCs or NPCs actually function separately from one another in play. You can make a strong case that Bishop and the lieutenant aren't PCs because they're out of the action for basically the whole game, but you can't claim that Hudson isn't a PC because he doesn't have things that most actual PCs also do not have.
Last edited by Chamomile on Wed Apr 17, 2013 9:14 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by ishy »

K wrote:No one wants to play the adventure to get back your father's katana after your samurai dies. Why can't you understand that?
No one wants to play that adventure when the samurai is still alive either. They'll do it, to humour a friend though.
But running that adventure for a couple of sessions, means your 4 other players are suffering through shallow stories;running through random dungeons doing random stuff.
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Post by phlapjackage »

Chamomile wrote:"works for Weyland-Yutani, is directly accidentally responsible for xenomorph attack on colony."
Fixed that for you. I still hate the actor to this day because of that character. Rat-fuck-son-of-a-bitch. Guess that means he's a good actor?

Along the lines of character death, one of the best times I had was when my long-running character died at a (named) NPC's hands, and the GM was stunned. "That...wasn't supposed to happen." he mumbled. Made for a great story anyway, and it gave me great fodder for the next character. What does my BS anecdotal evidence show? Not much, except that I believe that there are only good or bad stories based on individual disposition combined with the group dynamics.
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Post by Chamomile »

When Burke says sending the colonists to investigate was a bad call, I believe him. His lack of remorse is still damning and it's obvious he doesn't care that the colonists all died, but I don't think he intended it either.
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Post by Fuchs »

K wrote:
Lord Mistborn wrote:
Wait did you just explicitly advocate lying to your players? What the actuall fuck. I know I've been not so subtely implying that team basketweave is full of lying assholes but don't just come out and admit it.
If I gave you a fair challenge, I'd kill your character every session.

Every. Damned. Session.
Lord Mistborn doesn't understand that. We have a clusterfuck of threads who prove that LM can' understand that if a GM Plays for keeps the only reason the party survives and adventure is if the GM is inept compared to the players.
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