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Post by henryhankovitch on May 28, 2013 18:22:57 GMT -8
GOOD NEEEEWWWS!
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Post by henryhankovitch on May 25, 2013 6:53:48 GMT -8
I have nothing but sympathy for the CADave/Stu conundrum. Almost any attempt to bring romance or sex into my games, in the smallest way, causes me to drop completely into third-person narrative mode. (Like an NPC Rogue Trader, engaging in negotiations with the party at a fancy event, making a dance with the female Arch-Militant the last of his demands.)
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Post by henryhankovitch on May 24, 2013 18:55:59 GMT -8
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Post by henryhankovitch on May 16, 2013 15:08:29 GMT -8
I ran a Delta Green campaign for a while, and recently one of my players did a one-shot that could lead to more DG games with the same characters. The team consists of FBI guy, NSA guy, Border Patrol guy....and my irrepressibly, psychopathically cheerful PC from the National Endowment for the Arts. Looking forward to playing her again. I would say that your campaign sounds like you're doing it wrong, except clearly you're doing it right. Wacky wizard hijinks may not be "canon" Lovecraftian horror, but fuck canonicity.
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Post by henryhankovitch on May 15, 2013 15:29:23 GMT -8
At this point, I imagine the Scorpion shugenja as basically being shitfaced all day long. She's got nothing to do but sit in her room, paint pictures, and drink. Hairdo crooked, mask askew, hiccuping and setting the wall on fire.
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Post by henryhankovitch on Feb 20, 2013 17:42:18 GMT -8
I actually noticed a shift from the first one or two episodes of the L5R podcast, where both Stu and the players seemed a little dry in their roleplaying. Whereas in the last few episodes, everyone seems to have a much stronger sense of their characters, which comes across in their speech patterns as much as their actions. The game has a much more "in-character" feel, despite not using crappy accents.
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Post by henryhankovitch on Feb 14, 2013 15:29:35 GMT -8
I don't begrudge Happy Jack's any good reviews; but it is kind of unfortunate how itunes' review scheme works. If you're a fan of a show, you're apparently obliged to give it 5 stars or nothing at all, as is demonstrated by the fact that every podcast on itunes apparently has a 4-5 star rating. Which, you know, defeats the point of having a star-rating system.
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Post by henryhankovitch on Feb 5, 2013 15:25:14 GMT -8
This leads me to wonder... have you guys done a show topic yet about whether or not a character's stats ARE the character? Are you a combination of your SAT scores and your max bench-press weight?
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Post by henryhankovitch on Feb 4, 2013 17:44:37 GMT -8
Mainly I think that in a lot of instances, the solution to the issue is often more contrived and silly than just providing an NPC to handle the problem. Particularly when the problem is a core part of the game's mechanics (healing in D&D, repairing ships in sci-fi, etc), rather than a more niche specialization.
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Post by henryhankovitch on Feb 4, 2013 17:28:57 GMT -8
I think the hosts were way too hostile to the idea of support NPCs in general--i.e., the healbot. Yes, DMPCs are always bad, always. But there is just as much space for NPCs to be mercs, hirelings, temporary support, manual labor, etc, as there is for NPCs to be merchants, informants, or busty barmaids.
This is especially apparent if you look beyond the dungeon-crawl genre. For instance, look at sci-fi games like Rogue Trader or Star Trek. (Assuming there's a Star Trek RPG worth playing; I wouldn't know.) In either of those instances, the PCs are going to be crewmen--command officers, most likely--on a ship with thousands of people. Tens of thousands, in the case of Rogue Trader. And while many of these NPCs will be faceless deck-swabbers and brass-polishers, it's simply unthinkable that the PCs are the only personnel around who could patch a wound, fix an engine, or drive the damn ship.
It really isn't any different in Shadowrun, or D&D, or most other game settings. There are always people out there with the skills you need; and if a certain skill-set would be life-or-death to the PCs, it's a bit contrived to make them play without it. They'll hire that wandering healer, that second-story man, or that local guide.
That being said, it remains important to keep the NPCs from intruding on PC territory as much as possible. So here are some suggestions:
Most important, of course, is to keep the NPCs from driving the plot. They can deliver information, but they shouldn't deliver solutions. It should be "hey, I happen to read goblin runes, here's what that sign says," not "oh, I happen to know the secret entrance to the goblin lair." Their personal background should really be kept minimal, and they should never, ever take a proactive role in the plot. Unless they're secretly the villains or something. They should always be in the background, able to lend a hand, but not given a starring role.
In general, whenever I give the party access to an NPC, I always make it less competent or powerful than a PC would be in the same role. Lower levels, or a less effective class/build, or just someone with some significant character disadvantages. Instead of a powerful holy warrior, the hireling healer might be a lowly priest with no combat training, or a vow of pacifism. He might even be a coward who runs from danger rather than take extreme risks on the party's behalf. There's a reason these people aren't leading adventurer parties of their own, after all.
And of course, a support NPC should usually have a cost to them. They'll want a share of the treasure, they'll object to being used as a gear mule (unless that's what they were hired for), they may have family or employers that they need to keep in contact with. And of course they'll always have a strong sense of self-interest--they're not going to take point. Both mechanically and story-wise, you want to keep the party from seeing support NPCs as "free power."
As an example: in Rogue Trader, every ship must have at least one Navigator. This is ripped straight out of the Dune universe: they're purpose-bred individuals with psychic powers who are needed to travel faster than light. One of the PCs can be the Navigator, but if nobody wants to play it, you really can't have a ship without an NPC in the role.
Because the Navigator's abilities have a strong mechanical role in the gameplay--deciding how long it takes to get places, how many bad things happen to you, and so on--I actually built a Navigator NPC rather than just handling Warp travel by plot fiat. He had class levels, but he didn't level up--and I also didn't give him Fate Points, which are very important for re-rolling failed checks. Additionally, I also made him an extremely disgusting character who didn't like to come out of his lavish quarters; so the party neither wanted, nor was encouraged to ask him to go down to the planet adventuring with them. He was a colorful character--and the PCs cursed his name every time the ship went off-course--but he always remained a background character.
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Post by henryhankovitch on Jan 25, 2013 19:07:28 GMT -8
Ingestis!
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Post by henryhankovitch on Jan 21, 2013 16:34:50 GMT -8
I recognize that it shouldn't be done enough to be tedious, but rolling for the chance of pratfalls can add to the game through comic relief rather than drama. When the bard hits on the tavern wench, we really want an excuse to see him get slapped in the face. And who doesn't want to watch a halfling fall out of a tree, hitting the ground with a sound like an amoral, thieving, out-of-tune sack of potatoes?
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Post by henryhankovitch on Jan 10, 2013 15:41:44 GMT -8
I've never been to Gencon, but I've been to PAX several times. And the bit of advice I would add--especially for people who are going to the con with at least a few friends--is to leave the con area to eat.
Every year at PAX, I've seen long lines snaking out of the Subway and the Taco del Mar in the convention center, and a mob standing around the Cheesecake Factory across the street. And yet the waterfront, and Pike Place Market, and dozens of eating establishments, are just a few blocks away. Everything from little taco stands, to fancy-ass expensive places, to bucket-and-roll-of-paper-towels seafood, to brewpubs. I don't know that it's cheaper to do it. It's probably not more time-efficient to do it. But it's absolutely a better experience than standing in a line with a bunch of sweaty neckbeards (because hell, you have the rest of the con for doing that), then standing hunched in a corner or sitting on the floor somewhere chowing down on a goddamn Cold Cut Combo. I'm not even being snobby about it--it's not about "oh, you have to eat the local non-chain restaurants because herp derp." It's just about taking an hour out of your long-ass convention day to sit down and have a relaxing meal with your friends.
Now, all that being said, I have no idea what the convention area is like for Gencon; and I'm well aware that Indiana's weather in August is nowhere nearly so great as Seattle's weather in August. Maybe taking fifteen minutes to walk three to five blocks is more of an obstacle back in the blighted Midwest.
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Post by henryhankovitch on Jan 8, 2013 16:06:26 GMT -8
I'd be interested in hearing the crew discuss settings. Not world-building, necessarily, though I expect some conversation about it will be inevitable. More along the lines of what settings people like, what they look for, and how they choose a setting, as opposed to a game system.
I got heavily burned out on D&D/Pathfinder after running a game for about a year and a half, with a large and sometimes dysfunctional group. After three years or so, I find myself willing to consider the idea of running Pathfinder again. The thing is, I'm not very excited by the common D&D settings--Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk, Eberron, whatever Pathfinder's default setting is, and so on. And the thought of building my own generic kitchen-sink world has no appeal at all. If anything I'd probably make it a fantasy version of some real-world time period--mythical Greece/Near East with the D&D classes and monsters, for instance.
This is where I bring up Warhammer 40,000. Frankly, it's a silly and often dumb-as-rocks setting with a bunch of elements blatantly ripped off from other fiction--Dune, for instance. Never mind the space orks and space elves. And yet, having played and GMed Rogue Trader for almost three years now, I find the setting very agreeable for roleplaying.
It's a setting that has been developed almost entirely around the needs of wargaming: a universe in which everyone is at war with everyone else, forever. The result--unlike the Big Two Space Opera settings, Star Trek and Star Wars--is a setting which has lots of built-in conflicts, but no easy or plot-mandated resolutions to any of these conflicts. The Nazis and the Commies and the Huns and Mongols are all still out there; no dumbass farmboy is going to kill Space Hitler and save the universe. So as a GM, you don't have to bother with a contrived explanation as to why Space Hitler is still a going concern. (Or more realistically, why your players are still working for Space Hitler.)
Additionally, it's big. Ludicrously big. It's a setting in which you can make an exception to pretty much any rule you want--it just happens to be on that one planet, over there, that nobody has bothered to turn into radioactive glass yet. No omnibenevolent, monolithic Federation, no Puck-God from the Puck-God Collective waiting to rewrite anything that doesn't meet canonical approval. Female Space Marines? Suck it, fanboy--they did it over on Omicron Gynophix, because I said so. Just because YOU never heard of them...
I think the succinct way to put it is, the most troublesome parts of 40k are the easist to change or ignore. As opposed to settings like Trek and Star Wars, where the obnoxious bits are at the very core of the fiction, and when you change them you get something completely different. Like Firefly.
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Post by henryhankovitch on Dec 30, 2012 14:16:45 GMT -8
Regardless of their actual beliefs, from the players' POV it's probably best to keep them entirely in the dark about what the Scorpion are really like. Let them as PCs draw their own conclusions about the guy in the Japanese Darth Vader mask.
"All you've ever been taught about the Scorpion is that they wear masks, and never ever trust them. Because Scorpions always lie. And then they get you killed"
"But isn't that dishonorable and shit? I thought they were still samurai?"
"Yeah. And still, the Emperor doesn't say shit about it. Weird, huh?"
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