Scampir

Scampir

@Scampir

Be the Choster you wanna read

  • He/Him + They/Them

One Canuck built the #ttrpg tag and the #mecha tag. And that was me.

Cohost Cultural Institution: @Making-up-Mech-Pilots
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Scampir
@Scampir
Partheniad
@Partheniad
Jama
@Jama

I looked up the Bonus Modifier types for both 3.5 and Pathfinder and got mad again. There were more than I thought.

Jama
@Jama

I do like games where I can bribe my players to make their lives worse. Numenera letting me grant xp to make an Intrusion and Forged in the Dark games having the Devil's Bargain for a bonus dice really speak to me.

Partheniad
@Partheniad

Having lived through Pathfinder this hit me in the fucking face as I remember having to fucking learn like... which bonus modifier's stack and which don't.
Dodge bonuses always stack but enhancement bonuses only use the highest etc etc.

shudders

but as for the second part, this is where Doom/Advantage was born from for Heroes by Hearthlight? I like FitD a lot but something that can get to me is that I like being able to just make moves outside consequences. But in Forged in the Dark games you usually only hit a player when they roll under a 6 and then they can resist and...

I want to be able to take swings. But I want players to be rewarded for it so instead I decided to let them spend Advantage to get extra dice. Its a nice little bonus. and then that becomes Doom I can spend to make moves- which when spent becomes advantage. It's still a player driven economy but as the GM i can now hold onto Doom for when I want.

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in reply to @Jama's post:

Clouder
@Clouder

It's so miserable.

I played in a "core rulebook only" Pathfinder 1e game one time. By the time the GM got so overwhelmed with the game and stopped it, I was building little note card tents breaking down the exact modifiers and types my spellcaster was providing through buffs. It was dumb.

My own breaking moment with it was trying to run the Iron Gods adventure path. The boss of book two was three or four templates combined into a monster that had a half-dozen combat feats. By the time I crunched the numbers on all possible permutations of attacks it could perform, I had filled half-a-page of engineering bond paper with lines of attack bonuses. Just its attack bonuses, nothing else in its rules.

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Jama
@Jama

From a friend who really likes PF and crunchy games in general, they went "Well you don't have to worry about them, since they don't stack! Except for Dodge and Untyped I think... and the GM is the only one who worries about Circumstance bonuses"

The fact I have to track the bonus TYPE, and there are over a dozen of them, not counting things like Base Attack Bonus and Armor Bonus... Noooooope, no, I'm solid.

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Clouder
@Clouder

Not just track and stack, but chase! If you play APs or other published content, the expectation is you're going to actively chase these bonuses down. And if you don't, you leave yourself at a disadvantage when facing "balanced" encounters.

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in reply to @Jama's post:

Twinkee
@Twinkee

It's obnoxious even when you have a computer doing all the math.

When I played the Pathfinder crpgs, unless I knew exactly what was coming, every time I entered an area or finished a long rest, I'd have to cast 8 or 12 buffs on my entire party. People made macros, just to cast those spells everytime. It was ridiculous.

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in reply to @Partheniad's post:

Jama
@Jama

Numenera is even more explicit. You can do a free GM Intrusion on any roll on a d20 that comes up 1, or you can straight up ask a player "Hey, if I get to do some shit here, you get an XP and another player of your choice gets an XP. Deal?" It's so fun because you can deploy it reactively to a scene or to complicate things to keep the players on their toes and maybe offset some of their momentum. It's a ton of fun.

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Partheniad
@Partheniad

Yeah, its the "if a player agrees" thing that always trips me up. Usually in TTRPGs its a collaborative medium where you try to work together to build the story- but when the game lets the players just shut down the GM by saying no. Well, I get it, from the player's side it feels cool and powerful. As the GM it means I run into a brick wall and have to go in a different way.

I think this is why I still love PbtA so much because on a roll, the player says what they want to achieve and I set stakes. If they fail then I get to make a move against them for failure. Which as the GM is your usual way of building momentum.

FitD works pretty much the same way but with more visible levers for players to know just how bad the outcome will be. But when they fail and you throw out a consequence they get to just go, no that doesn't happen. Which can make it hard to just... do things? It took my awhile to wrap my head around whenever I throw out consequences I need to consider both its intended effect and what a reduced effect will look like.

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