@Ganymede said in Thirtsy Sword Lesbians wins some ENies:
I have no idea what this game is about, but it sounds pretty cool.
I mean, the title says it all, doesn't it?
More seriously, it's a PbtA game about high-adventure PCs where flirting and crushing on your allies and enemies is as central to the mechanics as hitting people with swords. She-Ra is definitely one of the influences it draws from.
Also it has "Nature Witch" and "Spooky Witch" as separate character archetypes which amuses me.
@Tirit said in Artificially Slowing Character Growth:
First personally and in experience I've had I don't think players being at different rates matter much unless it comes to PvP.
I kind of disagree with this, just in that characters in fiction and RP are always defined to significant degrees by their capabilities, and since 99% of interactions are between PCs, capabilities are always going to be experienced in terms of how they relate to other PCs.
That is, if I want to play a character who is "Good At Swords" or "Good At Books," being "Good" is only going to be perceived as "Good" relative to other PCs on the game. If I'm rolling in a baby PC who's supposed to be good at swords but the extant "Good At Books" PCs have racked up enough CP that they're incidentally as good or better at swords than I am, my PC actually sucks shit at swords no matter how they compare to theoretical nameless faceless background NPCs.
Personally, I've come to be a bit less enamored of the whole "character advancement" as an inherent part of RPGs in general. I get that it's baked in deep, but I think that a lot of games (especially MU games where the PCs represent a much broader swathe of the population) you don't need to have every character at the start of a bildungsroman.
I don't want to ignore either the game dev opportunity of "CP for doing what we want people doing" carrot or the "number go up" fun for players, but I do sometimes think that at least some games would work better with "start with enough CP to make the character you want and stay right around there" design philosophy in general.
Is it?
Maybe, maybe not?
There's a difference between the actual impacts of Netflix not seeing the growth it wants and expects and the impacts of Netflix's reactions to the less than expected growth and its results on the user experience.
So even if it is a market overreaction (which seems likely) the fact that Netflix is responding by cutting anticipated shows, cracking down on password sharing, and talking about plans to introduce ads seems like this might be the start of one of those shifts where the company stops trying to build business by attracting more customers and starts trying to extract more revenue from the customers it already has, and that's a shift that can spiral really quickly.
@tinuviel Oh, yeah, a whole other thing--where some of the theoretically-equivalent character options wind up made useless because of the "metagame."
I have come to appreciate, more and more, the way some games will clearly delineate between "game focus" skills and "other." LANCER, for instance--an RPG about giant robot pilots--has PC abilities that relate to giant robots fighting each other on the grid map, and entirely different (extremely loose) character abilities purchased with different resource points for when you aren't in the robot.
@jennkryst said in Is Min/Max a bad thing?:
Obligatorally chiming in because I half-min-max... but it's rarely for combat efficiency or the like. It's almost always done when a game's chargen and xp advancement ratio is different. To explain to the five people on the forum who dont know the concept, and to use the nWoD math... two characters start, one with 1/1/1/1, and the other with 4/0/0/0. Player one needs to spend 27 XP (6 + 9 + 12) to get to 4/1/1/1; player two needs to spend 9 XP (3 + 3 + 3).
And I hate--hate--this because it means that...
So, okay, I want to make a PC who's an unquestioned master of the blade, educated in natural philosophy, and disarmingly erudite, but I don't have the starting character resources. Fair enough! I'll make a character who's an expert at the blade, familiar with natural philosophy, and an apt conversationalist, and work from there.
Except... if I make an unquestioned master of the blade who's about as educated as an especially oblivious rock and with half the charm, I'll be playing the character I actually want to be playing in half the time. Making a less-good version of the character I want to play, rather than a different character who can become the PC I wanted in the first place with time and character resource investment, is the wrong decision and I can prove it mathematically.
Which, generally, is my problem with Min/Max-ing. Not that it's a bad thing to want your PC to be good at the thing they're good at, but I would like to have a character who is a functional human being also, please and thank you. And technically, sure, no one's making me min/max my own PC, but if it's established as an expectation in a given game the options amount to keeping up or falling behind; excuse me if I'm embittered by the fact that making a starting PC with a range of skills to reflect a lived experience in-setting is strictly inferior to rolling up a monosyllabic illiterate who always smells faintly of bad eggs but is really good at shooting.
Although, to be clear, my first snark will always be toward the game system, rather than the players who choose to make the clearly optimal choice.
(Last, perhaps peevishly, I might suggest that if I'm to see familiarity with the game system as a positive good, as the Reddit link suggests, the DM should be running something better than D&D5 oh snap indeed i went there)
@23quarius said in Movie / TV / Streaming Peeves or Whatever:
So while where the "line" is is not clear to me here, it does fall somewhere along the lines of "If what you are doing poses a threat to people other than yourself". If you're the one who stands to get hurt, no, you should not be expected to know how to guarantee your own safety. If you're part of the chain of potentially posing a danger to someone else who is not yourself, you should be expected some minimal training.
The line is between having another pair of eyes on someone else's work and having the work of a professional undone, checked, and redone by an unqualified member of another profession.
You brought up checking the chamber, but what would that have told anyone? That there was a round in the chamber, obviously, but there was supposed to be. The issue is whether the rounds were blanks, dummies, or live rounds, and an actor isn't going to be able to tell the difference there without unloading the weapon, looking at the bullets individually, and putting them back in.
So the idea of having actors check the rounds would mean taking the weapon that was prepared in advance by a professional, and then having it unloaded and reloaded in the middle of an active set by someone in the middle of doing their actual, completely different, job.
This would void the production insurance and get any set that tried it shut down. And it would be right to do so.
So, a few days late to this one, but coming in to drop my $0.02.
Which is, mostly, that a lot of the (well-intentioned) ideas people seem to be having are, kindly, counterproductive.
Relying on actors to do the final checks on firearm safety means taking the final responsibility for set safety from (what should be) a trained professional working in their field of expertise to someone in a completely different field who might be getting some on-set training. And I'm sorry, but that is a terrible idea. Firearms would not be made more safe by having unqualified third parties who have other significant time and attention pressures messing with the dedicated professionals' safety measures on the last step before their use. That's not just unhelpful, it's actively irresponsible, to the tune of "voids the production's insurance" if they would even try. (There's a reason the last people to touch the fireworks are the pyrotechnics experts, not Gene Simmons.)
Actors might need to point guns at other actors. They might need to be seen loading bullets into a gun on-camera. They might need to act the part of someone irresponsibly handling a firearm. They might need to stick the barrel of a gun in their own mouths and pull the trigger. They need to be able to know that when the actual professionals hand them a cold gun, that gun is actually cold, so they can do their jobs because the other people involved did theirs.
From the looks of things, the armorer on Rust never should have had the job. So that is the one place Baldwin might be responsible. Even that I'd put as something of an open question; "Producer" is a notoriously vague role, that can mean anything from "final decision on every point" to "cut a check before the start of production."
So I'm off my meds again, because the doctor I'd been seeing left the practice that's in network, the other doctor doesn't believe adult ADHD is a thing, and the nurse practitioner wants me to go back for more "objective" testing before she'll put me on amphetamines again.
So now I get to go through the whole thing again.
Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
But Quinoa Is Supposed To Be Healthy Sausage Casserole
1 cup quinoa
1 tbsp olive oil
1 lb sausage
1 onion
Sliced mushrooms (optional)
1 egg
Salt to taste
2-3 cups shredded cheddar cheese
Preheat oven to 400F. Boil quinoa with 3 cups of water until fluffy.
Dice onion. Heat olive oil on skillet and sauté over medium heat. Add mushrooms and sausage and cook until brown.
Scramble egg with salt.
Combine cooked quinoa, sausage, mushrooms, onions, egg, and 1-2 cups cheese. Move to baking dish and cover with 1 cup cheese.
Bake for 25 minutes until golden brown.
This Is Killing Me Creamy Chicken Parm
4 tbsp butter
2-3 boneless chicken breasts
1/2 onion
3-5 cloves garlic
1 cup long grain rice
2.5 cups chicken stock
1/2 cup heavy cream
1/4 cup parmesan cheese
salt to taste
1 tsp herbs du provance
Dice onion, garlic, and chicken breasts. Melt butter over low heat in skillet. Add onion and raise heat to sauté. Add garlic and cook until fragrant.
Add chicken until surface is cooked, stirring occasionally.
Add rice, stock, salt, and herbs and bring to boil. Cover and cook until liquid is gone.
Add cream and parmesan, stir until cheese is melted and rice is coated.
@arkandel Legit questions!
In the case of Star Wars games, I think that's actually been something a lot of SW properties have tried to work on. The simplest, usually, has been to either make it explicit that the protagonists of the property are Jedi, or make no one Jedi. A few, like one of the really early Star Wars MMOs (maybe the first?) went by blocking off Jedi as an option except through a long and convoluted process of unlocking the class.
Otherwise, mechanically, the go-to has usually been to try and roughly balance the "mundane" skills with force powers, whether that's in point-buy or level systems. And with SW, none of the force powers we see are that overpowered compared to "dude with gun" or "hotshot pilot."
On top of that, being a Jedi comes bundled up with the whole quasi-monastic obligate good guy thing, unless you want to turn into a strutting vaudevillain (which might not be playable in the system). So that is a choice, there: do you want to move stuff with your mind, or do you want to get to be a seedy gunfighter with a heart of gold?
And then, for all that, I do know people who basically felt pressured into turning their non-force-user PCs into Jedi in MU*s because, essentially, that's where all the good shit was, plot- and RP-wise. Even in the interquel period, you tend to get a lot of Jedi running around, where "remnants of a vanquished order driven to hiding under the relentless threat of pursuit and extermination by all the powers of the galaxy" and "literally anything else" wind up with rough parity.
More generally, though, and also as far as superhero stuff goes: I think that a major part of it, as applies to RP, comes down to using more narrative or freeform than what I called "physics simulator" mechanics upthread. When the whiz-bang powers come with quantifiable mechanics on a sheet, providing options that the wizards get and the warriors don't, you actually are hindering yourself by not getting wizard powers. When the power levels are all narrative, and either you're setting it up by group consensus or "roll Forceful to Overcome Obstacle" or whatever, everyone has the same... I dunno... "meta-narrative(?)" involvement in the outcome, even if in the narrative Thor is slugging it out with the whole CGI army while Natasha is running the goober to the skybeam to shut it down or whatever.
@arkandel Yeah, I'm not super familiar with WoT (just never got into it), so grain of salt as far as all this goes.
The first thing you bring up, well, it doesn't surprise me at all. Players getting around restrictions by trying to find edge cases and loopholes is as old as RPG gaming. The three ways around it are players who are willing to buy in to the spirit of the rules, arbitrators who are willing to shut down attempts to bypass them, or rules that explicitly disallow that sort of shenaniganary. (On a MU*, the first is basically impossible, just because most don't have enough of a screening process to enforce that sort of things.)
The second comes down to the "interesting choices" thing I keep going on about. Why, as a player, would I pick "not-wizard" over "wizard"? How is "not-wizard" something other than "the PCs who are wizards can do whatever you can, but also they are wizards and can get up to wizard shit."
If you want "not-wizard" to be regularly played, you need some good answers to that! Otherwise it gets to be like the oWoD games I mentioned, where even though vampires are supposed to be vastly, vastly outnumbered by the mortals, the assumption is explicitly that PCs are vampires and playing not-a-vampire is a niche option.
Also, yeah, more or less everything that @Pyrephox said. Novels don't need to worry about balance because it's by design that someone is just cooler and hotter and better than everyone else, that's why they get to be the protagonist. Even TTRPGs can be fine focusing on two to six of the specialist snowflakes in the world. When you get to 20+ players, things start to shift.
So asking about WoT specifically (with, again, stressing that I'm not overly familiar with the setting), I might well start by saying something like "you can't buy combat skills if you're a Channeler, maybe there are in-universe ways that someone could have but your PCs didn't." A little harsh, but sometimes you need to be. And/or maybe saying that magic can only be used in a scene with a runner, where the pitchfork mobs present a real threat. Or maybe a more FATE-style narrative system that doesn't bother with the physics simulator aspects. Something where in-universe the wizard can throw up walls of fire while the warrior has a knife, but mechanically they're rolling more or less the same "Overcome Obstacle" dice.
@arkandel said in Balancing wizards and warriors:
The typical issue with this scenario is that in scenes your diplomat and my fireball-bot will both end up socially engaging other PCs, discussing politics, asking for favors, etc - and typically players don't throw dice for these.
However come time for combat guess who's gonna throw the biggest fireball, baby!
I mean, yes, if the social/diplomatic mechanics are completely vestigial and every scene that's run comes down to a slugfest, sure. But if the wizard, the diplomat, and the thief are all getting to do cool stuff in their respective areas of expertise, Beatstick McHardcase deserves to be the best at fight scenes.
@pyrephox said in Balancing wizards and warriors:
This is fair! When I said to the same extent, I was more thinking of 'has something to do that's interesting and effective at each phase' of a given scene. The warrior might be best at smashing heads, but that doesn't mean that she should just have to stand there and do nothing (or make things worse) in an investigative scene. Likewise, your clever wizard might excel in a scene about uncovering a mysterious writing and translating it on the fly, but they shouldn't be so useless in combat that their job is basically 'stay out of the way', either. Even if it's 'realistic', it's not typically very FUN for players to be Sir Not Needed In This Scene.
Oh, absolutely, and I'm not saying PCs should be uninvolved or useless in scenes that focus on someone else's specialties. Just that having them be the best at their specialty in scenes revolving around their specialty is good actually.
So just going to the "interesting choices" thing, if buying "Stab Shit" lets me kill things, and buying "Magic" lets me scry on distant locations and enter the spirit world and talk to the dead and also kill things just as well as Stab Shit, there is no reason to take Stab Shit.
@pyrephox said in Balancing wizards and warriors:
I don't know much about the WoT setting, so I can't speak to it in specific, but when I think about balancing 'wizards' and 'warriors' in a more overarching sense, it comes down to making sure that every character type can contribute in a fun, flavorful, and effective way in a combat situation, and to do so roughly to the same extent as any other character type.
I do agree with the post as a whole, I'd just quibble with this in particular, depending on how things are supposed to work.
In a game like D&D where the mechanics are basically a combat engine interspersed with improv freeform, yeah, I'll agree that everyone needs to be able to contribute meaningfully to combat. But in a system where, say, investigation and diplomacy are given just as much mechanical weight as the murdery bits, there's nothing wrong with having the PC who kills things real good getting to dominate the scene, in the same way Sherlock Perot gets to shine in the locked room murder scenario and Wilhelmina Foppingtin XIV gets to rock in the socialite ball.
@arkandel said in Balancing wizards and warriors:
However outside of that example I'd urge us to consider more common scenarios in current MU*. For example in comic book games are people not choosing to play Robin/Hawkeye as opposed to Superboy/Thor? In Star Wars games are other types of characters than Jedi or Sith popular and successful as archetypes?
My thought is, basically, that the big question of balance is just having an answer to "why would someone not choose this."
Someone clever once defined games as "a series of interesting choices." Generally speaking, "do I take the objectively better option or the objectively worse option" isn't a very interesting choice. And yeah, if being magic is just flat-out better than not being magic, a whole lot of people are going to be magic.
It's not universally true, so you do get people, say, playing mortals in WoD games, because they want to play through the process of learning about the supernatural, or they think it's fun to play someone at a major handicap, or they want to RP being magically enslaved to a hot vampire of their sexual preference (no judgment), or whatever. Even so, most players are going to play supers, so a given mortal in the game is likely to wind up having their best friend, their significant other, and their boss all be supernatural horrors by random chance even if they aren't keyed in to the secret whatnots.
Social consequences for magic, too, are kinda hard to enforce, because no matter how common that sort of prejudice is supposed to be in-setting, most people (reasonably!) don't want their avatars in the setting to be shitheads in that sort of way. The opprobrium of the hypothetical background NPCs isn't really going to be meaningfully felt by the players, unless they're in an actual staffed scene. (Which might be a limiter right there--no magic use except in staffed scenes, PRPs, or the like, where throwing around magic can have appropriate consequences enforced?)
Another thing is that, in terms of RPG mechanics, it might make a difference whether PCs are mechanically balanced even if they aren't narratively balanced. Talking about superheroes specifically, my favorite of the genre (Masks) uses the same mechanical spread the PC whose whole deal is that they're too powerful to feel safe with themselves and the PC who's really good at karate. The goal/scene resolution is equal between the two, even if narratively one of them is using cosmic elemental powers that could level city blocks and the other one is hitting problems with a stick. The Buffy RPG gave the Slayer mechanical superpowers, but gave the Zanders luck and narrative control mechanics to balance things out. This can work really well, but it might require a lot more of the structured TTRPG environment than the more freeform MU* set-up.
Yeah, gonna toss in $0.02 and nerd out a bit as a completely amateur history dabbler.
Because, really importantly, I think it's important to know that the neat and tidy patrilineal primogeniture thing tends to be significantly overstated in terms of "how things were." It's a very simplified sort of set-up for our fantasy fiction. (Which, in fairness, it really has to be simplified if you want to have a game or fictional worlbuilding that doesn't require an undergrad degree to untangle.)
Plenty of places had a king (or equivalent) who was selected in ways other than inheritance. Election or acclaim by the nobility was a popular way in a lot of cases. Rome had a couple stretches were any competent general who came out ahead in a campaign could get his soldiers to name him Imperator and kick off another round of civil wars. More than a few countries, at some point, found they'd run out of kings and just asked someone with a sufficiently royal bloodline to come and rule them please. (This went on until at least the 1860s.)
I mentioned Rome, and I also think it's worth bringing up about them that adoption wasn't just as valid as blood relation, it was (in some ways) even more so. A great man was, obviously, obligated to treat his son as his own, and a natural-born son was obviously entitled to the benefits of that, but a man who'd been chosen as an heir was someone who obviously earned it. That's how a will turned a patrician named Octavius into Gaius Julius Caesar, until he decided to rename himself Augustus.
Nobility, meanwhile, are just rich people. In a society where 90% of the population needs to make their job "food production" or everyone starves (which, between the first and second Agricultural Revolution, is every society everywhere) the distinction comes down to the people who produce food and the people who have people to produce food. Mostly the money/land is heritable to some degree, because people generally want to be able to keep their wealth to the people they know, but it doesn't really have to be, and certainly not by oldest son primogeniture sorts of ways.
Real life nobility tended to get messy. Really messy, with the titles and ownership always disputed and shifting. Less "I own this contiguous area of territory, handed down by my forefathers into my care, to be passed down intact" and more like the portfolio of a major corporation--"I have the three core territories, some holdings on the border that are contested, have my eyes on some acquisitions I'm looking to make, and a couple things I wound up with that are frankly too far away to be worth their while so I'm just hoping to trade them off for something I can use."
@ominous said in Random funny:
@greenflashlight
They're being too clever for their own good. Humans love right angles. We surround ourselves with them even though they're unnatural.
Behold the bane of Dracula!
Response to an older post, but:
This is the vampire conceit behind Peter Watts' Blindsight and Echopraxia. His vampires are a subspicies of humans that evolved a protein deficiency that required predation on other human beings. They developed significant strength, sociopathy, hypersavantism, and the ability to hibernate when prey was scarce to make themselves able to survive as predators of human beings. They also developed, do to a quirk of their optical processing, a glitch where filling the majority of their visual field with intersecting lines triggers a fatal grand mal seizure.
Yes, this makes it impossible for vampires to survive around human settlements, which is why they went extinct.
