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feral philosopher bug

I don't seem to be able to stop making things and putting them on the internet

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fiction

The Dragon Racer (webnovel)

Heaven Can Wait (novel)

Smashwords

Itch

Fanfic (Ao3)

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music
Bandcamp

Soundcloud

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podcast

(about Japanese RPGs)

Youtube

Libsyn & RSS

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streams

Twitch

Youtube (archives)

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#all my made-up mech pilots

(h/t: @Making-up-Mech-Pilots / @Scampir)

#Denis Urban, fictional sports pundit


amaranth-witch
@amaranth-witch

Hi cohost! Sleep is eluding me so you get a roulette spin of the “ramble on a subject for a little bit while in bed” wheel to help me relax my brain towards nap time, or at least try to. Apologies for weird typos or non sequiturs, I’ll come back and fix those after sleep.

(I won’t come back and fix those after sleep, I know my vocabulary and I don’t believe sleepy me is going to have any gamer moments that need addressing)

Today’s roulette result is “RPG hot take” and so I have found one! Are you ready?

“I think games should encourage occasional encounters and setpieces outside the comfort level of the player characters. I don’t mean “easier” fights either, which is a pacing tool I’ve seen recommended. I mean games should encourage DMs to deliberately and judiciously pit the players against opposition more capable than they are, and I think if a game is so tightly balanced that any deviation away from evenly-matched breaks the game, that’s bad, actually, and the designer should be ashamed.”

Slightly less dramatic but no less honest, I think that if a game is built on strict competition bands, where players challenging outside their “tier” is impossible, that game had better have either an incredibly robust selection of opposition within each tier, equivalently strong creation tools, or an appropriately generic framework to abstract challenge.

One of the things that D&D 4 was incorrectly accused of, D&D 5 and Skyrim and elder scrolls online are accurately accused of, and many DM’s I have played with engage in consciously or un- is the “treadmill effect”, also known to me as the Kamen Rider Kabuto effect, where the actual challenge of a campaign enters at a static plateau and remains at that approximate level, barely fluctuating at all, until the campaign climax. Character power increases are met with equivalent opposition upgrades, the tools players need to combat new enemy types are never far away from their reach, and tensions remain fairly constant outside of perhaps scripted scenes and initial encounters. This is bad. The players having a 65% chance to defeat each enemy without losing more than 14% of their resources, every time, as a standard, is walking on a treadmill commenting on how nice the gym is this time of year.

“Why do you call it Kabuto effect, isn’t that one of the highest regarded rider seasons, isn’t kabuto a good rider” listen I chose my association very carefully: kabuto is a season with immaculate choreography, brilliant effects, amazing kinetic interactions, deeply moving character moments, actors who gave excellent performances, top tier suit, power and monster design, and a story as flat as a level-checking competition in the middle of slabsville, Nebraska. I don’t believe that every character has to have a “thematically complete arc”, though that’s a different rant, but the narrative tension of Kabuto outside of those character interactions distills to a very Skyrim “if you haven’t fucked up your stats, monsters should always die in 3 hits” approach. Souji Tendo believes he was chosen by heaven, he’s sincere about it, and the entire show is the world backing him up on that belief.

Souji Tendo will never know the thrill of a license level 2 lancer team deploying against a Tier 2 Spec Ops squad led by an enemy lancer built using player rules.


eatthepen
@eatthepen

this absolutely also goes for video game rpgs, especially japanese-style ones. Well-chosen spike encounters are so important (and extremely difficult to do)


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in reply to @amaranth-witch's post:

I think there's a common fear and problem with this: That being the fact that players don't take the possibility into account, and thus they don't really prepare for it, and when many games explicitly kill off player characters due to bad rolls or whatever, doing a setpiece like this is discouraged.

Of course, if the game doesn't explicitly kill players on a purely mechanical interaction with their character's status...

Elsewhere in my manifesto are things like “ultimately the interrelationships of the players with each other are more important than the interrelationships of the players with the game or the game elements with each other, even if those relationships are mediated through the game, and so expectations like (character mortality) benefit from discussion over assumption, and can be revisited over time” so I’m definitely already on the same page as you here.

That said, while I think it should not be malicious in any flavor (even the mild flavor of “I want to kill player X’s guy, let’s see them wriggle out of that, I bet it’ll be great”) I do think that the idea of the sacrosanct player character isn’t a great universal foundation and that a lot of really good and meaningful story can come out of the fact that sometimes, stories just end, and we aren’t guaranteed our dramatics.

It’s a very interesting balance to manage, really, and a part of the real art to this whole hobby.

Yeah, there's no right answer to this. However, I think, personally, the problem with death mechanics (oh boy do I have a lot to say about them personally) is that many designers (especially trad designers) don't even think about them as mechanics, necessarily.

Because like, taking out the veil of fiction, the actual, physical, tableside reaction to 99% of character deaths is "Oh well" or "Goddamnit". Because a funny thing I've noticed is that there is actually nothing provided on the side of "when a character dies" in many games.

You're just expected to make a new character who gets tacked onto the party because... That's what D&D has done for 50 years! This entirely ignores the fact that this often leads into super played out and boring situations, including the character with no real goals that align with the party, the character whose only goal is what the party is already doing, or simply a lost twin of the previous character because they couldn't be assed to make a new character.

So rather than them being like ideologically bad or whatever, I just find the execution on the thing to be sorely lacking. And that's why I don't usually even write rules on character death, because it happens when it happens in the fiction, you don't need rules for it, necessarily.

Without even getting into the full player-style enemy, I have come to like the players facing multiple veterans enemies due to them having structure and additional traits which combined with some templates/etc can definitely help give the feeling of players facing enemies of similar power level. Especially as they are tougher without getting the full-on double activation of an Elite which is still a thing I have troubles wrapping my head around whenever I allow myself to think metanarratively about it every so slightly even if I know from a purely gameplay perspective it exist because PC and NPCs don't use the same rules.

Especially if those enemies are coming in fresh and players are at the last battle of a grueling mission.

Perhaps doublemoreso if one of the enemies has the commander subtype which can add another structure and more action economy fun times.

I'm definitelly looking back fondly at that escort battle against the Spec Ops enemies in the last battle of Dustgrave's first mission.

But what I this is definitely you're right: it make it all the more satisfying when players felt like they had to work for their victory and is why I'm more than a little proud that as GM, whenever there was a battle with a turn limit my players only ever managed to heke out their victories on the very last turn where it was still possible to when I was running that module.

Which tbh is the other thing I've like about lancer is how the concept of sitrep when handled well can REALLY shake things up.

It took me a hot minute to figure out why I did the same like - “come on this is objectively so good, it’s not bad tv, look at all the care that goes into it, you love all of the individual bits and scenes and fights, why don’t you…. Ohhhhhhhhhh”