Weird or unrealistic gaming... stuff
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This is a thread just for weird stuff that happens as a result of playing RPGs. They can be about mechanics, the very fact these are games in the first place, that players sometimes get busy, unrealistic mechanics, whatever.
So for example I was talking about this with my university roommate. Our party had received a mission to go infiltrate a no-mans-land kind of territory, locate and kill an evil dude then get back to college a large reward. Simple, right?
This being a game, of course the team suffered... some casualties. One character died and his PC was replaced by another. Then a second guy died. A third. Each of them were quickly replaced by folks we just happened to meet on the way there, who we found tied to a tree, etc.
But the party still had a singular goal - the evil dude needed to die, and die he did!
So in the end we went back to the original quest NPC who looked at us and went "uh who the fuck are you people?" since not a single member of the original group was still alive. There just like, four people she had never seen before who popped up and demanded she honors a deal to someone else and pass the gold.
What's your story?
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How easy it is to own property and not be poor.
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Equipment management and/or local economies.
Encumbrance rules exist for a reason: for the ST to rules lawyer a player into not being able to carry all of the things. When we ignore this, the characters SHOULD look like the Junk Lady from Labyrinth. Yet somehow they do not.
Local Economies... some places have a magical ATM for gold. I know some bandits stole all your gold and we gave it back to you... it was only 40 pieces... but now that we have slain the dragon, we're going to sell you some of it's loot, and you will now magically have thousands of gold to pay us!
... semi-related to economies, anyone else remember when 1 gold was a month's wage for a peasant? How many adventurers were killed because they limped back to town with 3hp left and a farmer gets them with a pitchfork and doesn't have to work again for years, because this player had 100 gold on them?
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The almost immediate jump to killing everything in one's path in order to complete a goal. Murderhobo'ing! Its not just accepted, its encouraged to kill everything because it looks different from you and lives under a different set of beliefs or worships a different God.
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@jennkryst said in Weird or unrealistic gaming... stuff:
... semi-related to economies, anyone else remember when 1 gold was a month's wage for a peasant? How many adventurers were killed because they limped back to town with 3hp left and a farmer gets them with a pitchfork and doesn't have to work again for years, because this player had 100 gold on them?
This was actually a large plot point to a campaign I was apart of. One of the bigger NPCs was faking his way through the nobility of the local kingdom. He was actually a fur trapper from a backwoods village that found a very successful but also very dead adventurer on one of his morning trips to check his traps. Took the adventurers coin, sold the majority of his magical items that were too unique to keep for himself and then moved to the neighboring kingdom, claiming ancestry from a long dead line of nobility.
The NPC wasn't even evil, he just wanted to make a better life for himself. The party, when they found out, decided to keep the lie and not expose the dude. Which did end up benefitting later on.
I forgot how much fun that campaign was, but that note did remind me of it.
Also,yes. in game economies are dumb. Both in tabletop and in mushes.
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@carma said in Weird or unrealistic gaming... stuff:
Brigid: "I think that's everyone safe and accounted for. Thank heavens nobody was killed in that meteor storm."
Abelard: "I haven't seen your husband. Is he alright?"
Brigid: "Oh, I completely forgot about him. I'm sure he's fine."We haven't seen your wife in four months, sir, and you've yet to file a missing person's report.
- She's not missing. She's in like -- France. or something. Maybe.
So you have no idea?
- How is this my problem?
Sir, we're gonna need to continue this conversation down at the station...
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@carma The way it was handled in our last game, just a random portal opened up at the start of every game session, anyone who missed last week falls out of it, and anyone who is absent this week falls into it. So... timey-wimey.
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Hit Points. I just can't stop thinking about how weird it is that if you stab a lot of people to death, then you will require more stabbings to be killed than someone who has stabbed fewer people than you.
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Suddenly able to go from novice to doctorate level of a skill, just because you attended a few parties OR because it's been 4 weeks.
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@greenflashlight Also, once you've stabbed a lot of people, you're just a little scratched up after you get stabbed a few times yourself BUT if you let yourself heal up naturally it takes just as long to go from a little scratched up to fine as it took to go from near dead to fine before you did so much stabbing...
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@greenflashlight People trying to abstract HP as not actual health, which... I get, but also why I sorta like the games that abstract it with both Wounds for Actual Health(tm) and Vitality Points as like... 'dodge energy'. But also also hurray games that just have a smoller health track because a body is a body and incredibly fragile.
The inverse of this is where we get to the unrealistic... stuff. This foam nerf sword deals 1 point of bashing damage, takes 15 minutes for the light bruise to stope hurting a teeny bit. Except if I roll 30 successes and you don't soak them all. Now I've somehow decapitated you, because of how damage rolls over.
That's actually a neat mage or changeling weapon. Vorpal Nerf Sword. I'm writing that down.
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I may have mentioned this before, but in the interests of realism, at least 30% of found magic items ought to turn out to be sex toys.
"... you'll find the story doesnât end how you think, and the most important characters arenât who you expect.â - Penny 40 to Derek, The Magicians S04E07 âThe Side Effectâ
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@mietze said in Weird or unrealistic gaming... stuff:
Suddenly able to go from novice to doctorate level of a skill, just because you attended a few parties OR because it's been 4 weeks.
This is why linking 'number of dots/skill ranks' to 'level of knowledge' is kinda dumb. Because at the end of the day, from a WoD perspective... an Int 4/Medicine 2 and an Int 1/Medicine 5 person are rolling the same number of dice, and 3 successes on that roll are 3 successes. But also we're in the 'why games are dumb' thread, so it's fine. It's also why I pretend 'Oh, I always knew this stuff, I just never had reason to show you before today'.
@il-volpe said in Weird or unrealistic gaming... stuff:
I may have mentioned this before, but in the interests of realism, at least 30% of found magic items ought to turn out to be sex toys.
The OGL 3.0 Book of Erotic Fantasy was amazing(ly bad) and came up with item slots for lulz. Like enchanted nipple rings filled up the torso item slot, if memory serves? Gave plenty of options for the sex toy magic items.
... but also obligatory 'every magic item is a sex toy if you are not a coward!'
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I play old-school D&D with the above average items and item rarity from the Black Company campaign setting for 3.5. Encumbrance is a thing, because figuring out how to get the treasure back to civilization is half of the challenge; xp is earned from returning gp to town; and is worth way more than killing monsters, so the smart thing is to get the gold without a single fight; monsters rove in packs and roll reaction, so not every encounter is a fight and fights can be talked out of; the above average items means an upgrade doesn't have to be a magic sword; the item rarity system means that backwater towns have very little adventuring worthy gear available to buy; etc.
And HP is hard-to-hit points for us. When you get to zero, every hit beyond that you roll first not to die instantly, then you roll not to pass out. After combat, the total damage below zero is rolled against to determine what sort of wounds the character has after the fight that need healing or if they die instantly as soon as the adrenaline of the fight wears off.
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Hit Points.
So, tongue in cheek for a moment. Dimension20 addresses this, in-character. As in, its a high school for adventurers, so the kids 'level up' and get higher hit points, harder to kill, etc. But one of the characters has a father figure that's truly just one of the random NPC's. He's like... a level 3 diplomat. 10 hit points. In season 2 the kids leave their usual 'realm' to go do a quest thing, save the world, etc. They can have three 'hirelings' with them. One of the ones chosen is this father figure. First fight? Dude dies in one hit, first round. Full on dead. He gets revivified. Second fight. Dude dies again, one hit. 10 hit points, y'know? And these kids are like 7th level whatevers. So the stuff they routinely go up against is dealing like 13+ hit points of damage in a single shot. So they revivify him again. Same fight? Dead in one hit. Revivify at end of fight.
Cue confused conversation between daughter and father figure as to his apparent inability to handle a fight. And his freaking the fuck out and yelling at her that he's JUST A GUY. He's a normal, average person. That not everyone is as tough and resilient as she and her friends are. He never went to 'adventuring academy', he went to a SCHOOL.
Anyways, I really liked that idea. That adventurers are these kinda.. freaks of nature that somehow manage to get harder and harder to kill the more you throw at them, so society has just sort of evolved to put them in their own little place to learn their weirdo adventuring stuff, and go 'save the world' while the rest of the society just goes about its business.
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Doctor Astronaut Supermodel Pastry Chef Forensic Scientist Barbie.
And her counterpart:
Evil Sex Slave Doctor Astronaut Supermodel Pastry Chef Forensic Scientist Skipper.
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@hedgehog Nobody is a fan of my 'allocate hours of time each week to maintain your stats, or the XP is refunded as the muscle memory starts to fade, or you forget the maths or history or science' system. Which is fair, because it's paperwork, but if we want realism for 'it takes so long to learn a thing', we really ought to include 'it takes time to maintain the thing'.
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