TTRPGs & D&D

TheSameIdiot said:
Somehow missed this until Jake quoted it. While many of my upcoming games are traditional fantasy campaigns, I yearn to do more experimental stuff like this. That sounds awesome.
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Honestly this is why I'm aiming to do shorter campaigns for a while. Stuff that's like 5-10 session engagements. Have fun with new systems, play in some other genres. Draw Steel is on my radar for fantasy stuff, but Tales from the Loop/Things from the Flood, Masks, the Alien RPG, Night's Black Agents, Cyberpunk... even some Call of Cthulhu or Delta Green would be nice. Gimme all the things.
 
TheSameIdiot said:
Somehow missed this until Jake quoted it. While many of my upcoming games are traditional fantasy campaigns, I yearn to do more experimental stuff like this. That sounds awesome.
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This is one of those "I REALLY need to think / plan" and also "you REALLY need a group that vibes right" type concepts but I think it'd be one of those things the group talks about for years. I prefer long, epic campaigns with lots of fighting and swashbuckling, but the idea of "how does that one horrible summer impact you in high school" and maybe even "and for those of you who survive, what does adulthood look like?" fascinates me. I also might be one of six people who watched the Tales from the Loop show and thought it was the most beautiful fuckin' thing I ever saw, so that's where my mind is at.

I swear I think the reason I haven't dived into Draw Steel or Daggerheart or Dragonbane yet is I would like to mess with another story genre instead of another fantasy replacement. I have a fantasy game engine that works for me, but how do I run kids facing a cosmic horror or a crew running a space hauler? (I've got the Expanse 2.0 RPG coming soon and I feel like playing a crew of Belters could be a fuckin' hoot.)
 
JakeEkiss said:
Absolutely. At least for me, one of my least favorite conversations to happen at any ttrpg session is when folks start arguing over whether the mechanical bonuses of a "longsword" are "realistic" vs the bonuses of a "broadsword" or whatever. I also like that you can swap kits regularly which allows for a lot of personalization, especially when some kits have overlapping equipment (sniper/arcane archer, pugilist/martial artist, swasbuckler/battlemind, etc.). Feels very much like picking a kit based on the sort of action scene you want to have today, and that's awesome.
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I love the IDEA of how all the different weapons work and what they do. But yes, trying to differentiate them ALL in game mechanic terms is exhausting and futile. Do you know what the actual difference between a D&D longsword and a real life broadsword is? Hand protection. Which means nothing in D&D.

I do like the idea of being able to specialize in certain weapons, but I'm not sure that has enough utility to be an idea worth preserving.
 
TheSameIdiot said:
My other table is heading in this direction. We had a 4.5-hour session last week, and we didn't accomplish anything. We took up an adventure hook and decided to complete another side quest while we were in the area. Turns out the quest area is far as fuck from our home base. Between shopping, random encounters, and getting lost in the woods, we didn't even start either quest. I think we're close to the starting area. Not sure OSR/traditional hex crawls are for me.

More than four hours without plot progress makes me want to pay less attention. I dissociate, though I know that isn't helping, either.

I'm next on our group's DM list. I have a feeling it's going to be a while.

Somehow missed this until Jake quoted it. While many of my upcoming games are traditional fantasy campaigns, I yearn to do more experimental stuff like this. That sounds awesome.
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What's funny is in life I tend to just take what roles are available. If someone else wants to drive, or be the speaker, please do it. But usually I am the one that gets put in the role. But worth it than that is when someone does want to drive, but then they're not good at driving, and then I feel like I need to drive because otherwise nothing's going to.

Happens a lot in co op games. MMO. Tabletop. I want to be the rogue but I always end up being a tank because I'm better at it than most and I just don't trust anyone else after a couple failures.

One cool thing with our group, at least for me, is I feel everybody likes driving in shifts, and that lets me be a little more relaxed as a player and play a little differently than if I was just dragging the group through the airport and constantly taking headcounts.

It's nice having that intangible trust and faith.

Oh yeah, I wrote all this to say I understand the dissociating.
 
Damien said:
I do like the idea of being able to specialize in certain weapons, but I'm not sure that has enough utility to be an idea worth preserving.
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I think hyper granular weapon stuff is good for a game that is much more purposefully bult around that. Like if you made a game where the setting and rules were all about dueling, or stabbing folks in a fairly realistic and grounded world, awesome. And I feel like it would, hopefully, cut down on that argumentation. Once you throw wizards in there it starts to feel like wasted effort, going against the grain.

And to be fair, I think I'd totally be able to get into a realistic dueling game, I just don't think most fantasy ttrpgs are that.
 
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JakeEkiss said:
I think hyper granular weapon stuff is good for a game that is much more purposefully bult around that. Like if you made a game where the setting and rules were all about dueling, or stabbing folks in a fairly realistic and grounded world, awesome. And I feel like it would, hopefully, cut down on that argumentation. Once you throw wizards in there it starts to feel like wasted effort, going against the grain.

And to be fair, I think I'd totally be able to get into a realistic dueling game, I just don't think most fantasy ttrpgs are that.
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I used to be the fool that hunted through every RPG looking for systems I could transplant into D&D to make D&D a bit more realistic. It just never worked. There's lots of d20 games from the 3E/3.5 generation with dueling or more advanced weapons/combat rules. But they always feel ad hoc. They don't ever seem like they'd work very well. And the few times I tried to use that kind of stuff, I found it was distinctly not fun.

In fact, I think I'd probably argue that ALL TTRPGs are too much of an abstraction to accurately simulate something like real fighting. I've never seen it done well in anything I'd call significantly deeper than what D&D already does. Sure, you can do stuff like Dex to hit and Str to hurt, which has been an argument since the 2E days. And you can do like.. armour as DR rather than armour as a 'to miss me entirely' bonus. But basically any TTRPG system is going to come down to some sort of 'how lucky are my dice and how high is my 'to hit you' stat?'

Even to argue with my own above statement a bit; while I've always liked being able to specialize in specific weapon in D&D, it also makes almost no sense within the abstraction that my character can be god-tier with a longsword, but only like.. okay with a greatsword or shortsword. You -do- specialize in real life, but also tons of the relevant skills are transferable. If you're god-tier with a longsword, you're probably also -basically- god-tier with a shortsword. But in D&D that's a whole separate thing.

So the more I thought about it, the more I realized that maybe Draw Steel is on to something with just being like 'here's a kit.. just flavour text it, homie.'
 
I think my favorite part of running any TTRPG is how "this is an aspect of reality I'm weirdly philosophical about" comes up. I accidentally gave our chronomancer wizard an existential crisis last night about whether she's the original version of herself or not from constantly using an ability to alter time and fate.
Fighter: Are you saying there might be consequences to using Chronal Shift all the time?
Me: Casually branching the timeline a few times a day when you don't like what happened? Naaaaah no way that has an impact on reality
Wizard: *stares into camera hands covering her mouth eyes popping out of her head*
 
Damien said:
See, that's why I like being a fighter. No moral quandries about dealing with forces beyond the ken of mortal man. I cut a guy. I ask myself 'should I have cut that guy?' Answer is almost always 'yes, I should have cut that guy.'
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I have two characters I want to play in like a multi-year, long-form, story-driven campaign that I know I'll never get to play, and one is Just a Guy With a Sword, and the other is Wizard With Intent to Break Reality.

I had a theory I was talking about the other day about how I feel like the two main player types are I'm just a [adjective] guy" vs. "I have planned every detail of my costume and am a hyper-stylized peacock" and both are valid but I swear I've spent 48 years just looking for a looooooong game to play some guy with a sword.
 
docsilence said:
I think my favorite part of running any TTRPG is how "this is an aspect of reality I'm weirdly philosophical about" comes up. I accidentally gave our chronomancer wizard an existential crisis last night about whether she's the original version of herself or not from constantly using an ability to alter time and fate.
Fighter: Are you saying there might be consequences to using Chronal Shift all the time?
Me: Casually branching the timeline a few times a day when you don't like what happened? Naaaaah no way that has an impact on reality
Wizard: *stares into camera hands covering her mouth eyes popping out of her head*
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Another one I like is "hey, where do these monsters I've been summoning actually come from?" and then you can justify weird things like monsters disappearing mid battle or appearing randomly. Whoops, a summon spell just ended/began *somewhere*.
 
JakeEkiss said:
Another one I like is "hey, where do these monsters I've been summoning actually come from?" and then you can justify weird things like monsters disappearing mid battle or appearing randomly. Whoops, a summon spell just ended/began *somewhere*.
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I have so much fun with that. Some summoning spells are hilarious. Summon a fiend and have to try to strike a bargain with him mid-fight. Summon a dryad and you find out you interrupted her happy time with a woodman. Summoning is like the matrix - if you die when summoned to you die in real life? (although for the more sensitive, conjure beasts can summon the spirits of those wolves or whatever so nobody has to feel bad about killing dogs.)
 
docsilence said:
I have so much fun with that. Some summoning spells are hilarious. Summon a fiend and have to try to strike a bargain with him mid-fight. Summon a dryad and you find out you interrupted her happy time with a woodman. Summoning is like the matrix - if you die when summoned to you die in real life? (although for the more sensitive, conjure beasts can summon the spirits of those wolves or whatever so nobody has to feel bad about killing dogs.)
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I did this in a campaign and one player was not having it because Summons should just be Final Fantasy Paint the Target and Fire.
 
I genuinely love making summons parts of the story, but they do add a bit of chaos. Even MCDM is releasing a summoner class for Draw Steel and openly labeling it FOR ADVANCED PLAYERS.
 
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