probablyottrpgideas

[probablyottrpgideas]

Monster of the Week is going well

#monster of the week #over the top #Games Mastering for Fun and Profit

[probablyottrpgideas]

In d&d, goblinoids are in this weird place.

They're crafty and cunning, but most lack intelligence (representatively, at least). They're in tune with nature in a weird way, and they're technically fey, but they're almost never portrayed as fey. They're capable of industry and wickedly clever designs but are not masters of craft or artisans.

They are the creatures originally intended for cannon fodder that players of ttrpgs kinda fell in love with. They represented a lot of bad tropes, and so we tried to change them but we were not fully capable of washing away the complicated history on them.

When I run goblins as a society. They aren't lesser. They aren't stupid. They aren't bad. They just haven't been given opportunity as a culture. They're outcast as a race of beings, never welcomed in to communities where they'd learn things and have resources due to how different they are. They also tend to be what happens when you get a very diverse heritage (in a sort of roundabout description way). Elves and orcs and dwarves and gnomes and everything. You get fey pointed ears, you get darker green and brown skin tones, you get this thin figure that's surprisingly durable and hardy, they're short, they're nimble, they're good with they're hands, they can work iron. The list goes on. Heck. Sometimes I give them horns.

I also like to rule that they do the best with what they're given. They can't get access to raw materials, so they scavenge what they can. They get metal from slag dumps and pan out the useful bits. Thier cloth is a mixture of scrap hide and recycled trash. Goblin alchemy is slightly more refined because they can gather most of what they need from nature, but glassware is almost always unavailable and so they are limited in what they can make.

And this whole thing makes goblins frustrated. Why are they the ones left out? Are they just monsters to the rest of the world? They have aspects of every other type of humanoid to them, but they just don't have enough of any one thing to be welcome among the other cultures. But when given the chance to shine, goblins can really show that they're diamonds in the rough. And not really all that rough to begin with. Not rough at all. Just a diamond cut another way.

#In my setting Goblins (and Ratfolk and Kobolds and anything seen by the majority as ''lesser'') #are the ''whatever sure'' races #they'll do things Elves would NEVER #Like maintain sewerage and maintenance systems #meaning they actually have a LOT of power

[probablyottrpgideas]

I think anyone who says that D&D is the most complex TTRPG should be forced to play Exalted

I don't believe in cruel and unusual punishment.

But they could maybe make a Traveller character and revise their opinions.

[probablyottrpgideas]

Samsara card

You are immediately affected by a Reincarnation, rolling randomly on a table of over 100 creatures.

Do you come back as a playable race? Do you come back as a Dragon, or a Solar, or a Pit Fiend?

Do you come back as a Gelatinous Cube?

One of the results is just "Chair".

Additional card to put in the deck of many things you have 20 seconds go

[probablyottrpgideas]

I don’t think I have the chops for D&D or other tabletop RPGs but I could make a good DM’s assistant. I don’t play the game but I sit and listen and then after the session the DM can ask me for ideas.

#D&D is NOT ''one of the most complex systems'' #its barely above the middle #that said #if anyone wants to be my DW (Dungeon Wormtongue) #I'm open to offers

[probablyottrpgideas]

I wish more people used Magic the Gathering's Color Pie instead of D&D's alignment all of the time.

Like, saying a character embodies the selfishness and impulsivenes of Red Black offers more depth than Chaotic Evil

[probablyottrpgideas]

the heroes arrive at their final leg of the journey before facing the demon king and must confront a vision before entering his castle. our protagonist goes first, opening his eyes after passing through the door to find he's back home, and in the other room, his mother is alive again. he spends some time catching up with her, lingers on the idea of staying, and then finally finds the strength to say the things he'd always wished he'd gotten the chance to. he bids her a tearful, final goodbye and exits the dream

inside the castle, the other party members are leaving their dreams. they don't seem as strongly impacted by their experiences, and from their casual conversations, it rapidly becomes clear that the subject of his vision wasn't unique and they ALL went to pay the protagonist's mother a visit

[probablyottrpgideas]

Re: the post about the 'base assumptions' of DnD: 'Playing DnD requires buying into *proceeds to describe an exclusively unhinged murderhobo dungeoncrawl playstyle*' Like. Idk, I hope they find a better group/DM soon I guess? They literally don't have to play that way?? I know my tables don't. DnD campaigns with more emphasis on plot and roleplay, and where the morality of characters' actions can be called into question or given appropriate consequences by the DM are not uncommon at all. It's ok to dislike DnD, or to prefer other systems! But calling a murderhobo playstyle the 'base assumption' of a game which famously allows every table to tailor their campaign to their personal liking just seems highly disingenuous to me.

I hear you, but I also think you are explicitly doing what the original OP calls out as the behaviour they're deconstructing.

Dungeons and Dragons is, in it's core DNA, a combat simulator game that had narrative storytelling elements added to it. All the classes---a core pillar of character design alongside Race and, in 5e, Background!---are built assuming you will engage in combat. Yes, you have other options, but at no point in its design does it produce a result that is incapable of resolving conflict with violence.

That's okay! Violence is a part of conflict resolution; fighting and warfare are part of the world, and as such they are part of the storytelling media that Dungeons and Dragons draws upon in its design.

So while you can play the game in a completely non-violent way, you do so by forgoing a significant part of the games design.

And then, of course, we come to the other point the OP was making; if your core toolbox of resolving narrative conflict always includes doing violence (either physical violence in the case of killing monsters, socio-economic violence through theft, or social violence by destroying reputations or social standing in political intrigue campaigns), you need to be conscious of who is the target of that violence, and how often those tools are you immediate go-to.

The OP was not, I feel, describing anything terribly out-of-pocket with their description of the casual D&D party. The party getting the mission from the king to ensure the Demon Lord is not summoned to the realm who go to the Old Abandoned Temple and killing every CR 2 Cultist with a fire bolt cantrip is not an "unhinged murder-hobo dungeoncrawl" playstyle, it's an average (if mediocre) D&D adventure.

I'm glad you get to play D&D in a way you enjoy, but I feel if you play with a wide variety of groups you will see players engaging in behaviour the OP described more often than not.

And for anyone wanting to play games that dont feature violence as it's go-to conflict resolution mechanic, those games are out there. You don't have to hack D&D to do it. A lot of them are free, or PWYW, and the creators are on Xitter begging you to play them.

#I want you to know Anon that while I disagree with your point #I'm not saying you're wrong or out of line #I've just seen way waaaay too much of what the OP was saying #to think it was in anyway an exceptional or uncommon thing

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Not to "play more games" this discussion, but it's so very helpful to recognise and acknowledge the implicit assumptions of D&D's gameplay arc not simply to address problematic narrative themes within D&D, but also conversely to recognise when you're carrying those assumptions into other games with different assumptions.

One of my biggest complaints last year was how one of my youth groups would treat City of Mist (a methodical, magical modern-day investigation game) as just D&D in a funny hat; the game doesn't do "combat", per se, the rules only really covering quick, one-or-two round altercations between investigators and threats, and yet my players insisted on gearing up their psych doctor and bartender like they were magically-enhanced SWAT officers.

This concept of The Place Where You Can Feel Free to Start Shit is such a thing in pulpy adventure games like D&D, you find players not only ignoring the dodgy political messaging of the Shit you often find yourself Starting, but oftentimes people cannot feel like they're even playing the game at all unless there is Shit to Start.

@txttletale's recent post about media criticism is really good and it actually spoke to me about something I've been thinking about with regards to D&D.

So okay D&D's whole gameplay doesn't actually frame the player characters in the best possible light. That's okay in my opinion, cause I don't think media needs to be morally correct for me to engage with it. When playing D&D I'll just accept some of the premise and then go with it.

But in recent years I've been seeing a lot of takes about trying to reframe D&D's gameplay through a positive lens. "The average D&D party is a found family trying their best to survive outside the status quo, trying their best to help people, etc." and it kind of rings hollow when what the gameplay still revolves around is grave-robbing, killing acceptable classes of people (under this framing "monsters" get replaced with cultists, bandits, and other folks society has deemed acceptable to kill), and often in the service of the status quo.

Like the framing of a lot of D&D adventures is "the poor village inhabited by good normal people surrounded by evil wilderness is under attack and because the power of authority doesn't extend this far into the wilderness they need your help to save them from the bad people," which is like basically forming a posse of vigilantes to enact frontier justice.

So when people try to put a positive spin on that with like "no we're just real scrappy strangers trying to do a good thing to save the world when society rejects us" it makes me go really?

#I tried playing Wanderhome with the other group last year #and it completely imploded #That group IS better at assessing the assumptions of gameplay #But they still really really like to Start Shit

[probablyottrpgideas]

Okay specific things I like about D&D 4e:

Healing surges are just a really good pacing mechanic and makes resource management important. They also scale better than 5e's hit dice, since a single healing surge always heals a proportion of the character's maximum hit points and the number of healing surges a character has stays mostly the same.

Despite the claim that the game is more combat-focused than other editions, it actually has a lot of objective rules-mediated support for non-combat scenes. I'm not even talking about skill challenges, skill challenges kinda sucked until they overhauled them and even then were kind of half-baked, but even without resorting to them the actual mechanics for the skills have plenty of predetermined, objective rules-mediated uses beyond "the DM determines a difficulty and then you try to roll high."

The Fighter is really fun to play.

I absolutely adore the worldbuilding of 4e. The cosmology actually feels mythological and like it has a mythic history. All the different inhabitants of the universe all fit into the cosmic tapestry instead of being a patchwork of unrelated ideas. Also, it introduced the Feywild, the Shadowfell, and the Astral Sea, so hell yeah.

Related to the cosmology, I love how it actually sneakily brought back the old Law vs Chaos conflict, albeit with the extremes being Lawful Good and Chaotic Evil and with Good and Evil as middle steps. It's actually really BECMI in many ways.

Also BECMI, the fact that ascension and immortality are written as the explicit end goals for characters. Hell yeag

[probablyottrpgideas]

I feel really smart about something I said in a conversation elsewhere:

RPGs are kinda like a shared narrative created between the players. But the game itself is also a participant. And the game has opinions about where the story should go.

Sometimes all the players agree that the story should go in a certain direction, but once the rules are engaged the rules themselves say that the story should go in a different direction.

If you always end up overriding the game's idea of where the narrative should go, you're basically ignoring the game's input on the story. The game is no longer a participant.

So, you know, show some respect and let the game itself have a voice.

(and like this doesn't always mean "let's ignore this rule because it's boring." Like, the game probably doesn't think it's boring, because why else would the rule be there. This is more about fudging rules-mediated outcomes for "rule of cool" or because some other outcome would be "better." Nah, let the game take the reins every once in a while.)

[probablyottrpgideas]

#Sarya is all of the first three options #Dhampir Warlock

[probablyottrpgideas]

I am contractually obligated to offer D&D when people want to learn games, but it is always, always with a covert "Play other games" bias

This isn't related to anything recent it's just a thought about a couple things that happened earlier this year that I didn't manage to put into words back when it was relevant.

While I sympathize with the way D&D bloggers start posting stuff like "teehee don't click this link, it will take you to a PDF of the Player's Handbook, DMG, Monster Manual and Scrimblo Brimblo's Guide To Scrunkly, remember not to click this link because it's illegal!!!" every time WotC does something naughty, because there will never be a circumstance under which I don't consider piracy to be based as fuck, I also think pirating D&D material doesn't really do much to really challenge WotC.

The reason WotC feels like it can get away with so many shitty practices is not only because they make a shitload of money selling D&D products, but also because D&D's monolithic brand recognition has engulfed public perception of the entire hobby and as long as they can keep it that way they know D&D is gonna keep being the product most newcomers to the hobby are gonna initially flock to and very rarely branch out from, and that's not gonna change as long as so many people keep playing exclusively D&D stuff even if it's pirated.

So like... Yeah, it's great to get your friends to pirate every D&D material and not give WotC any money, but it'd be even better to use WotC doing something shitty as an opportunity to branch out and maybe consider giving a chance to that one weirdo in the group who keeps offering to run a campaign in a different RPG that everyone keeps saying no to because y'all already learned D&D and it looks like too much work to learn a different system.

[probablyottrpgideas]

Amy Dallen was one of the people Hasbro fired.

It can only be the case, at this stage, that Hasbro wants to try and sell Wizards.

I can't image why else you'd deliberately destroy your own property like this.

[probablyottrpgideas]

ok i absolutely need to know what accents u all have pls reblog and tell me or comment or whatever I must know

#my mother's south australian accent #which in Victoria ends up sounding weirdly RP at times #but still that harsh vic/nsw nasal a

[probablyottrpgideas]

People I trust with handling the D&D IP fairly and capably more than Wizards of the Coast:

Kobold Press

Darrington Press

Mage Hand Press

The press office

Jaime Pressley

An antique cider press

Anyone who can pronounce "prestidigitation"

And to think I wrote for these folks, back in the day. Never again.

[probablyottrpgideas]

Spice up your dungeon traps with warning signage!