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Post by henryhankovitch on Nov 18, 2013 20:32:55 GMT -8
Regarding the difference between "chess players" and "RPG players"...it's relevant to point out that the entirety of chess lies within the mechanical rules. There is nothing to the game except rules, strategy, etc. Whereas with RPGs, at some level you are attempting to tell a story or have a dramatic experience that goes beyond the mechanics. So to say that you will only play one RPG system is effectively to say that you are disinterested in any dramatic experiences beyond those that the mechanics of your preferred game allows. Especially in the case of D&D/Pathfinder, whose mechanics are so thoroughly entwined with the storytelling elements of the game that it's a genre unto itself. ("...and so we took the ranger back to town and paid a guy to cast Raise Dead on him. Should have let the rogue check that chest for traps. Don't know where he's going to find another brown bear in the desert, though...")
Someone saying he'd refuse to play any game but chess is pretty weird anyway, no matter how good at chess he is.
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Post by henryhankovitch on Nov 18, 2013 20:13:17 GMT -8
Well, quite the ending. Looking forward to the next AP you guys do, whether it's a follow-up L5R game or something else.
The reveal about Renjiro definitely was a surprise to me. It's likely RPGs have conditioned me to this sort of thing, but I had kept thinking that the matter of the corrupted sword and the dishonored ancestor would be involved. It's actually refreshing to be reminded about how comparatively humble problems can blow up into epic conflicts.
Regarding Renjiro's unmarried status... speaking as someone with no intensive knowledge of Rokugan, it strikes me as something dishonorable--and not particularly bright--but not at all close to justifying Junichiro's actions. Yes, Renjiro was obligated to his clan to marry and have heirs. And since samurai marriages are going to be political and pragmatic pairings rather than love matches, I don't think anyone in Rokugani society would have viewed Renjiro's marriage as anything but filial obligation. Affection is for courtesans and concubines, not wives.
That being said, a daimyo lacking natural heirs hardly has an insurmountable problem. At any stage of his life Renjiro could simply have adopted someone as his heir--whether taking in some promising child to be raised in the family, or naming an adult relative his heir by adoption. If he had been infertile, that would have been natural solution. So deposing Renjiro was an overly drastic and public solution to a commonplace, private problem.
It would have been nice to have some sort of epilogue for the characters at the end of the session. Though I suppose we'll find out the eventual fates of the PCs if and when the successor game is played.
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Post by henryhankovitch on Oct 24, 2013 17:53:05 GMT -8
I'm not a furry, but I really don't get the furry hate, even the hate for furry fetishists. Yeah, they do sexual things that I find weird, but honestly, so do gay people. That doesn't mean I need to hate or fear them. So long as they're not engaged in bestiality, pedophilia, or something, I'm fine with them doing what they do. The concept and image of furries are intrinsically creepy. Like clowns. Or kigurumi. And like clowns, they become more creepy up-close. Furry hate is mysterious to furries because they don't feel the same instinctive fight-or-flight reaction that others have toward people in creepy costumes.
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Post by henryhankovitch on Oct 7, 2013 20:16:42 GMT -8
Regarding Call of Cthulhu, and other games in general, I've always held the philosophy of "if you want your game to take place on a boat, start the game on the boat." This has more to do with one-shots or short adventures than campaigns. If Alien was an RPG adventure, you start the adventure with the crew aboard the Nostromo. You don't start it with them meeting in a bar before they ship out, or with them as unemployed space-crew seeing a Weyland-Yutani recruiting ad. All that does is give them a chance to fuck up the adventure, either by wasting time or by actively walking away from it. If you want them to have time to interact before the shit hits the fan, they can have time aboard ship to do that.
This is even more important with horror games, because confining the players with the horror helps build tension. Being stuck in the same city as some terrorists is kind of worrisome. Being stuck in the same high-rise tower as a bunch of terrorists is a good goddamned movie. You're not preventing them from taking a bus ticket out of the adventure because you're a railroading bastard; you're withholding their bus ticket because that amplifies the tension. If you present it as a natural part of the scenario from the beginning--you're on a spaceship in an unknown system, you're on a ship in the middle of the ocean, you're in a research station in the Antarctic--then the physical constraints shouldn't come across as arbitrary or petty.
And when the players DO have the chance to get away, that makes the option all the more dramatic. Get on the helicopter, or go back for the kid? Drive out of town, or hunt down the vampire lair? Shoot the lieutenant, or finish the mission?
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Post by henryhankovitch on Oct 3, 2013 19:09:52 GMT -8
OH MAH GAAAAHH
ISSA NEW EPISODE OH MAH GAAAHH
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Post by henryhankovitch on Sept 24, 2013 7:23:52 GMT -8
1) The main characters are:
A human sorcerer, scion of a middling Roman noble family. He's playing up the decadent and lazy type--the paterfamilias has basically just started handing him assignments "for the good of the family," which he only takes under protest. I.e., "no, your gambling debts will NOT be paid unless you accept this quaestor office in Syria."
Human paladin, cousin to the sorcerer. And by paladin I mean, "Champion of Apollo." I won't use alignment in this campaign, and divine morality is meant to be more aligned with historical Roman attitudes. The player is kind of a combat monkey, so he mainly wants to be awesome and kill big things.
Dwarf fighter, freedman gladiator serving as a mercenary/bodyguard. In this setting, the dwarven kingdoms under the Alps earned Rome's ire when they let Hannibal pass through their tunnels, and a long bloody campaign resulted in their Alpine lands being destroyed, and large numbers of dwarves being carted off as slaves. So while there are traditional dwarves in other places, there are also lots of "Roman" dwarves living as slaves and freedmen. The character has some vague idea about restoring/returning to his ancestral homeland--which would prove rather difficult as those tunnels and cities in the Alps are now occupied by nasty underground things.
There are two additional PCs, one of which is going to be absent for a few more months and the other whose job makes attendance intermittent.
2) Broadly speaking, the overarching plot was to be the Crisis of the Third Century. Not so much that the whole thing is one big plot by one big bad guy; just that there are these few decades where Rome is teetering on the edge of chaos and collapse, and there's a lot to be done if the Romans want to survive. So I'd imagined a number of smaller arcs as the party goes around the Empire discovering/troubleshooting various plots. Some vague examples: a) The independence of Palmyra and the breakaway of the East: the PCs might have to negotiate with Odenaethus and Zenobia, deal with the Parthians, etc. b) Rebellion in Egypt: a faction in Egypt wants to re-establish an elf-blooded Pharaohic dynasty, instead of those damn Roman jerks. They're making deals with this group of underground-dwelling, slave-trading elves in North Africa to establish a new line of Pharaohs.
Eventually the group might advance their fortunes and that of their family to the point where they could influence or dominate Imperial succession. There are plenty of opportunities for a strong faction to take over Rome, after all.
3) So far (and "so far" was just one session) I didn't have much beyond having them sent out as officials to solve jobs. There are possibilities to tie PC ambitions into the plot, but I hadn't come up with anything concrete yet.
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Post by henryhankovitch on Sept 23, 2013 19:03:04 GMT -8
I've been kicking around this concept for a while. A fantasy version of the Roman Empire, using Pathfinder rules. So the Roman pantheon as the deities, dwarves and elves in the hinterlands, hobgoblin auxilia cohorts, that kind of thing. In a lull a while back, I pitched the game and the players went for it. A bit prematurely, as it turns out. I was using the Crisis of the Third Century as a general setting. I figured that would give me lots of opportunities for plotlines--breakaway empires, barbarian invasions, power struggles at the top, all that good stuff. I also wanted to focus more on the Lovecraft-esque creatures from the Pathfinder books; fewer dragons and demons, more qlippoths. I didn't even make it to the second session. I've had troubles going from the top-level concept to game-session plotlines and adventures. It's an issue I often have, but it's exacerbated in D&D, with the focus on structured dungeons and traps and all that. And I can't really draw directly from historical events for the specifics, because so much of what's recorded are invasions and wars that would be handled by entire legions, not so much small bands of adventurers. I have plenty of setting, but I'm short on plot. I suppose my biggest problem is that I haven't come up with a proper Big Bad just yet. Can't work backward from a villain's overarching plans without a villain. Any suggestions?
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Post by henryhankovitch on Sept 20, 2013 19:16:50 GMT -8
Well, there's always the idea that magic is so alien/corrupting that it can become actively harmful to the caster and those around him. In Warhammer 40k, psychic powers come from people channeling the Warp, which is the Space Chaos Hell Dimension. So that guy who can set things on fire with his mind is fun, but less so when he suddenly implodes and opens a rift in space that a giant demon comes crawling out of.
And in Call of Cthulhu, using magic means uncovering the alien, hostile, and unknowable nature of the universe. It chips away at your sanity, both in character and mechanical terms.
In both these settings, magic isn't always rare, but players treat it in a much different fashion than D&D. They're fearful of it, nervous and excited at using it.
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Post by henryhankovitch on Sept 16, 2013 22:53:44 GMT -8
Re: Eclipse Phase... The RPPR shows you mentioned are the Know Evil series of actual plays. They're fantastic, by the way. I wonder if they're mainly responsible for the bump in Eclipse Phase's popularity in the survey. Which ties into the issue of why people like me enjoy AP podcasts. Stu mentioned the teleplay element, which is definitely a strong part of it. It's very dependent on the personalities involved--I lose interest quickly if the players or their characters are flat or dull. Additionally, listening to APs is a way of peeking into someone else's game for a while. You see how the GM handles the table, or the sort of narrative tricks he uses. You also get a sense of how an unfamiliar game plays. Not necessarily the mechanics--because listening to combat rolls is indeed the most boring thing ever--but the general playstyle or tone of the game. Before listening to RPPR, all I knew about Call of Cthulhu was gamer jokes ("oh, that's the game where everyone goes crazy and dies. And if you ever see a book, just burn it right away, lulz"). RPPR actually made me interested in the game, by showing me how it handled actual horror scenarios, rather than the Paranoia-with-san-points game that the Internet portrays it as.
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Post by henryhankovitch on Aug 31, 2013 21:36:58 GMT -8
"The Blue and the Insane?" "Old Ones and Generals"/ "Elder Gods and Generals" "Gettysburg Horror" "The Masks of Ulysses S. Grant-hotep." Nope. "Look Away, Dixie Land."
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Post by henryhankovitch on Aug 30, 2013 18:35:49 GMT -8
Thinking about running a Call of Cthulhu game for this one. Got a Civil War scenario I've been fiddling with...
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Post by henryhankovitch on Aug 3, 2013 8:37:38 GMT -8
Yep, it isn't so much that money is everyone's highest motivator, but that it's usually a motivation that no one else can really question. So a character can use money as a cover for whatever motivation might really be driving him; and a player can use money to justify taking part in something that his character wouldn't necessarily jump at.
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Post by henryhankovitch on Aug 3, 2013 7:48:05 GMT -8
I know you're posting this as a player problem, but I'd like to poke the other side of the sack. Are you putting enough effort--or any effort--to try to tailor adventures to the IC interests of your party? I've had similar situations come up in Rogue Trader and D&D, when the opportunity for adventure is presented to the players and they just say, "ehh, looks dangerous, not our problem, let's go over this way." Some players are really compliant with the metagame suspension of disbelief when it comes to adventure hooks. But they all aren't, not all of the time.
Money is the universal motivator, of course, though a shallow one. It's the sort of thing that either cajoles or disguises character motivations in Firefly. "We don't get paid, my crew don't eat." Whether or not that's the actual PC motivation, it makes for a good dismissal of naysaying. Why are we sticking our necks out? Gotta make money somehow. This assumes, of course, that the payday in front of them is more attractive than a potential payday they could get doing something safer.
So that said, it's usually more effective to tie adventures into some other element of the PCs' history or interests. Some person related to them got hurt or killed--even if it's a relation that didn't exist before this adventure. That old war buddy who shows up in a box, or that letter from Mom saying how she wants you to go bail out your cousin. Or just something that ties into their specific interests: the chance to stick it in the eye of the Stupid Government, to take out the sort of criminals you hate, that kind of thing. Even with a published adventure, there's usually some element you can tweak to make it apply directly to some of the players. Instead of Some Guy stealing Some McGuffin that has information about Some Entity, make the guy, or the mcguffin, or the entity into something that has compelling interest for at least one of the PCs.
Then, when the one PC starts going off about why are we doing this, we could just be flying rubber doggy doodle to Hong Kong instead, that one PC can speak up and say "because my mom needs her medicine, that's why!"
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Post by henryhankovitch on Aug 2, 2013 20:52:26 GMT -8
I'm with Arcona. While there is no purpose made "Call of Duty" role playing game, using D20 modern will be the closest. Everything you say here is ticked by D20 Modern. I guess it's his fault that he didn't write "isn't a giant steaming pile of poo" as one of his requirements? GURPS is probably best for this, but takes some work to learn. Savage Worlds can handle it well, especially with a splatbook like Weird War II or Modern Ops. Hell, I'd play BRP/Delta Green or even a reskinned 40k: Only War, before consigning myself to D20 Modern. There's even an Apocalypse World hack for just this purpose, though I couldn't say how well it works.
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Post by henryhankovitch on Aug 2, 2013 15:57:47 GMT -8
Sent an invitation request. I'm new to Traveller, so if I could have help with chargen before the game I'd appreciate it.
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