A Thread For Random RPG Musings

[Ninja-Bear]

@Duke Bushido, I actually wavered between most and many. I’ll even go with many. I think the issue I have with Min-Maxers is that in wargamming they ignore the spirit of the game just to win. And with that complain about suboptimal builds as being dumb. Let me say too that I can appreciate an efficient design in Hero System especially trying to fit a character concept to points.  I do agree to that having a sub-optimal character doesn’t equate to Roleplaying. 

[assault]

Building viable builds is stunningly easy in Hero. Building suboptimal builds requires effort.

So yes, the latter is dumb.

[Duke Bushido]

On 12/14/2023 at 8:48 PM, Rich McGee said:

 six seconds can be a little too much time pressure  

 

 

 

You remind me of a wonderful session back about '88 or so that ended wonderfully and awfully at that same time, but it was ultimately a good thing:

 

When I took over as GM for my original Champiins group, one of the many things I inhereted was one of those little cheesy sand timers found packed in with various ouzzle games since time immemorial.  It was allegedly a sixty-second timer, but repeated testing (across a couple of _decades_)  had proven it to be a sixty-two sexond timer....  Yeah, not important, unless you were the guy who was waiting for your turn, in which case it was the thing you complained about most.   

 

Anyway, Jim (my predecessor) had a policy:  if you weren't ready when your turn came (everyone got a few seconds, of course, but if you werent ready after a quick "uuhhhhh....," then the timer hit the table, and you had until it ran out to complete and execute your actions.  (Newbies had exemption, of,course, for the first couple of hours of game time.)

 

The fact is (and it could have been simply the threat of it) no one ever actually needed all sixty-two seconds unless we were playing Starfleet Battles (not sure why we were all of so tediously cagey for that game).  But when the timer was put into play, whoever's turn was up suddenly became the poster child for efficiency: whatever wasn't done when the last of the sand flowed out of the top didn't get done.

 

 

And that policy had an inconsiderate corollary that bit us in the butt in the most amusing way....

 

One night, we had one player-  I don't know what her deal was: she was falling in and out of attention, constantly distracting herself with some internal thing--  I had asked after about an hour if she felt okay; if ahe wanted a break; if she would prefer her character moving onto a side-plot to be resolved later so ahe could bow out and go home--

 

It was confusing to me, because she was actually a few minutes earlier that usual, claiming she had blown off a party to come to the game.  Well, she wenr to the party, had some fun, ended up stuck talking to some creepy dude for fifteen minutes, got 'that vibe,' and left in an attempt to bail on him.  Instead, he walked her all the way to my place, said his good-byes, then beat feet back the way he came.

 

 

She kept insisting ahe was fine, and I figueed she was probably just shaking the creepy vibe off, so we kept playing.

 

We had never had to use the timer more than three or four times in any game, and frankly, it was a pretty rare game that saw it in use at all.  That night, it was used more than a dozen times, almost all of them on that same player (who was now distracted in-game; it was the only way to resolve all of this!).

 

And after waffling for a bit, the timer came out for the final time that session.  Her character had been hiding behind a column in a darkened maintenance room ( for what it's worth, we were playing Daredevils), pistol drawn (she was supposed to be covering another character as he advanced towars the villain, but had gotten distracted, etc.  Two other players were making the attempt, and were nearly,out of ammo.  Distraction Player was the only one who the villain had not yet been made aware of.

 

The timer came out, she hesitated, waffled, studied the map, asked questions that demonstrated she had lost focus about four rounds prior to now....

 

I put the timer on the table _again_.....

 

And it didn't help much.  I think it was half empty before she really registered its presence (in spite of the traditional "oh no!  It's the timer!" drama from the usual suspects).  As it got more and more empty, she just choked.

 

Then the timer did, too.

 

There was a tint bit of sand that had somehow managed to get lodged in the neck, and it just hung there.  Hoots and howls from around the table, but my Player remained... Off....

 

She turned to another player and started with "oh my God; I don't know what to do!  Do I shoot this guy?  Do I run away?  No matter what, he is going to see me, and my character isn't going to survive getting shot with his tommy gun--"

 

Helpfully, he suggested considering her motives, which degenerated into a group recap of the last four sessions-  the villain did this; the villain did that....  He framed your fiance and got him arrested, then stole his research;  

 

On and on.  "Guys...."  I started.  "She's out of time...."

 

"Oh, no!" This from my rules lawyer brother.  "She's out of time when the timer runs out!"  Everyone suddenly remembered the timer and burst out laughing again.

 

"I know it's stuck, but-"

 

"Nope!"  Quipped my brother John.  "It's in Flashback mode!"  More laughter, considering the recap underway.

 

"Yeah!" Agreed the Rules Lawyer.  "You know how it works-  every movie there's a pivotal moment where someone has like a twenty minute flashback and then we snap back to the moment and like, two seconds have gone by!  The Timer rule says (and it didn't, really; it was just an accepted interpretation, and this is how I learnes to be careful about letting that happen again) 'when the sand runs out,' which it hasn't--"

 

Distracted Player said "Okay, you're right- villain did this and this and this and this and this and it affected you this way and you that way and you this way, and it did this, this, and this to me, and he has always been this and that and the other to my fiance and his father-  this is it!

 

 

"Okay, Duke: I step out from behind the column and say "you will leave me and the French family (her fiance was Dr. Conrad French, scientist extrordinaire) alone!'  Then I shoot a couple of times to scare him back so the others can take him down."

 

Then she rolled a pretty sweet critical and he dropped, dead at her feet.

 

Howls from around the table.

 

Then she (the player) got incredibly sick on my floor, and we all freaked for a moment, and John and I loaded her into his car and we took her to the ER.

 

 

Turns out her vibe was right, and leaving was the best thing for her.  Someone had roofied her.  The only thing that saved her was her health (she was on swim team scholarship), and creepy guy not using enough to black her out, and the fact that she left.

 

We couldn't talk her in to preasing charges, but her coach did.  Creepy dude was caught with enough on him to knock out choir.

 

Sorry-  that last bit was to be left out, but in anticipation of the discussion about her 'shouldnt have shown up' or 'bad player' or whatever,  and I wanted to defend hee showing up: I suspect she felt safer in the company of her wierd friends than she would have in an empty dorm room.

 

 

We would learn later that another girl at the party had not been so fortunate.

 

[Doc Democracy]

18 hours ago, Dr.Device said:

[1] Take Emily. She has autokinesis, which means, logically as I envision her, she effectively has prehensile hair. So I pay for the extra limb, despite the fact that she keeps her hair shoulder length and it never, in the years of playing, came up except for her lowering her sunglasses to glare at someone while her hands were full.

 

To be honest, I would not make you pay for that.  The game is about paying for utility and getting colour for free.  We often remove that colour in the interests of balance and fairness to the detriment of gameplay.

 

"I want prehensile hair"

"What can it do?"

"Lower my glasses, comb itself and maybe point in a direction"

"Cool, write it on the character sheet, no points.  If you want to do more useful stuff in game, the first time is a power stunt, after that it costs"

42 minutes ago, Duke Bushido said:

You remind me of a wonderful session back about '88 or so that ended wonderfully and awfully at that same time, but it was ultimately a good thing:

 

Strap in!  Duke is gonna type a STORY!!!  😁

Edited December 16, 2023 by Doc Democracy

[Rich McGee]

9 hours ago, Ninja-Bear said:

@Duke Bushido, I actually wavered between most and many. I’ll even go with many. I think the issue I have with Min-Maxers is that in wargamming they ignore the spirit of the game just to win. And with that complain about suboptimal builds as being dumb. Let me say too that I can appreciate an efficient design in Hero System especially trying to fit a character concept to points.  I do agree to that having a sub-optimal character doesn’t equate to Roleplaying. 

That's spot on for me.  There's a sweet spot for efficiency that's very different from one person to the next, and going to either extreme doesn't automatically make for a better or worse roleplaying experience.  Extreme builds are kind of a red flag, but you can't rely on them entirely, you have to see how the player handles the PC at the table.

 

1 hour ago, Duke Bushido said:

...unless we were playing Starfleet Battles (not sure why we were all of so tediously cagey for that game).

I can hazard a guess.  Every community of SFB I ever played in had at least one person (and usually several) who took forever filling out the energy allocation form if you didn't use a timer of some kind.  I forget what tourney play limited it at but I think we usually capped it at two minutes per ship you were controlling, which was plenty for most people.  Whoever volunteered to run the impulse chart got an extra minute or two because they had less time to think about next turn while the current one progressed.

 

1 hour ago, Duke Bushido said:

for what it's worth, we were playing Daredevils

I loved that game back in the day, and that is easily the best actual play story I've ever read about it.   The gameplay stuff, that is, not the IRL drugging and planned sexual assault.  Glad she avoided that and pressed charges against him.  Between her testimony and the other less fortunate victim and the physical evidence when arrested he probably wound up off the street for at least a while, even if this was back in the 80s when Daredevils was new.

 

I've had few similar but much less dire experiences with players who were having bad reactions to new meds.  Never had to take anyone to the hospital for that, though.  We did have to go to the ER for a broken ankle when a player slipped on an icy sidewalk though.  

Edited December 16, 2023 by Rich McGee

[Cygnia]

[Ninja-Bear]

7 hours ago, assault said:

Building viable builds is stunningly easy in Hero. Building suboptimal builds requires effort.

So yes, the latter is dumb.

Dude let me introduce you to my stable of suboptimal characters! 😂 I have taken 17 CON on a Fantasy Character cause I noticed all the book examples had 18 CON. Trust me building Suboptimal is not hard to do.

[Old Man]

9 minutes ago, Ninja-Bear said:

Dude let me introduce you to my stable of suboptimal characters! 😂 I have taken 17 CON on a Fantasy Character cause I noticed all the book examples had 18 CON. Trust me building Suboptimal is not hard to do.

 

Yeah I had my share of suboptimal builds when I was first learning the system.  Almost forty years later I cringe thinking how bad they were.

[Duke Bushido]

7 hours ago, Rich McGee said:

Every community of SFB I ever played in had at least one person (and usually several) who took forever filling out the energy allocation form 

 

Yep; pretty much nailed it.  Though there were a lot of players who would make their move, then _carefully watch_ as their opponent(s) made their moves, _then have to study the board_ for fifteen minutes....

 

Ugh.

 

 

You know what changed!  You watched it change!  You made half if the changes!  Now play!

 

 

 

7 hours ago, Rich McGee said:

 

I loved that game back in the day, and that is easily the best actual play story I've ever read about it.   

 

I can date the story, actually:  I had ordered the game from an add in the back of White Wolf (remember when that qas an actual gaming magazine and not a catalogue? Ha!) And had recieved it about three months earlier.  This campaign was our inaugural run with Daredevils.

 

7 hours ago, Rich McGee said:

Never had to take anyone to the hospital for that, though. 

 

I borrowed the term "roofie" for the telling.  I honestly don't know if rohypnol was a thing then, but there were plenty of street drugs and home-brewed concoctions floating around for that specific purpose, even back then.

 

As to getting him off the streets, etc...

 

I wish I could say it was true.  Date rape wasn't taken seriously as a "real crime" back then.  He served a few months foe possession, but not much else.

 

 

[Rich McGee]

15 hours ago, Duke Bushido said:

I can date the story, actually:  I had ordered the game from an add in the back of White Wolf (remember when that qas an actual gaming magazine and not a catalogue? Ha!) And had recieved it about three months earlier.  This campaign was our inaugural run with Daredevils.

?  Did you mean White Dwarf there?  White Wolf might have had ads for FGU stuff in it, but even when it became InPhobia later on in its run it was still a gaming (and the odd media review) mag, even if it was much more of a company house organ as time went by.  The early days were much more varied in terms of content - IIRC the first issue I bought had a Battletech article alongside some D&D golem variants.  Those were the days.

 

Both mags were at their best in the early days IMO, but even at the end White Wolf never came close to being the disappointment modern White Dwarf has become.  Really quite a sad fate for one of the big gaming magazines of the 70s and 80s, arguably worse than going out of print with an intact legacy.

15 hours ago, Duke Bushido said:

I wish I could say it was true.  Date rape wasn't taken seriously as a "real crime" back then.  He served a few months foe possession, but not much else.

Grrr.  Bloody 80s.  At least one can hope that he had a very, very unpleasant time behind bars.

Edited December 17, 2023 by Rich McGee

[Duke Bushido]

Yes; I meant White Dwarf: the one that became nothing more than glamour shots of the Warhammer 40k minis.

 

Don't know how I screwed that up.  I have never even heard of a White Wolf magazine....

 

 

 

[Rich McGee]

12 hours ago, Duke Bushido said:

Don't know how I screwed that up.  I have never even heard of a White Wolf magazine....

It was (unsurprisingly, perhaps) published by White Wolf, aka the Vampire the Masquerade folks, and ran from 1986 to 1995.  Originally a fairly general-coverage gaming and review magazine with a rare insert board game or other oddity, became somewhat more focused as a house organ in the last five years of its existence after the merger with Lion Rampant, aka the original Ars Magica folks.  The Wieck brothers actually started self-publishing it while they were still in high school which might technically make it a zine at first, although it was always 8x11 format and took off fast enough that distributors were carrying it within the first few issues - the first one I saw in store was #6 IIRC. 

 

Really quite solid work, although it got kind of artsy and experimental once the name shifted in WW: Inphobia in its last year.  The mag deservedly won the Origins "Best Pro Adventure Gaming Mag" award in both 1991 and 1992, although it fell victim to White Wolf (the company) having major financial issues just three years later.

 

Trivia:  Both the company and the magazine are named as an homage to Moorcock (Elric sometimes being the White Wolf of Melnibone) who the Wiecks were big fans of.  The brothers gaming careers actually started in 1986 with them writing the Villains & Vigilantes module Secret of the Swamp - which I don't recall anywhere near as fondly as the bulk of their work.

[Cygnia]

[Ninja-Bear]

I ran across an interesting video by Needy Overanalyer on creating custom Mechs. He first shows how to break the game then goes into how to nerf designs to fit in with the fluff and also suggestions of when to add them in to the game. The main reason is to make the game enjoyable. I find this relevant to Hero system in that there are so game breaking Powers or builds out there. That can be fun for its own sake. However making a character that fits in should be the goal. So I think min-maxing a little to make character to be in concept (or playable) is fine if it’s done with restraint. 
 

Basically Nerdy talks about making custom Mechs in the spirit of the game and that’s what I think is applicable to Hero System.

Edited December 21, 2023 by Ninja-Bear

[Cygnia]

I may need to play this concept...

[Rich McGee]

1 hour ago, Cygnia said:

I may need to play this concept...

That's pretty good.  I'm reminded of an old D&D character who took up adventuring because she was trying to track down a brass dragon who'd married her while polymorphed, then gotten bored and abandoned her.  Never did catch up with the oathbreaking deadbeat, but he had to keep ditching identities and flying off in the middle of the night to stay ahead of her so he couldn't settle down for another equally-rotten "prank" or long con.  Made for an interesting side story, anyway.

[tkdguy]

On 11/29/2021 at 5:09 PM, tkdguy said:

What color is your battle mat? If you use one for everything, find a paint color that closely matches the mat and paint all your bases that color. The paint doesn't have to match the battle mat exactly, as the difference probably won't be too noticeable if the colors are very close.

 

I put this one to the test. I recently painted a couple of Reaper Bones miniatures and painted their bases with parchment-colored craft paint. The bases were undercoated with different colors. The wizard's base has a gray undercoat, while the dwarf's base has a brown undercoat. The other two miniatures have clear bases that were included for comparison. The battle mat is made from paper with one-inch grids and laminated with clear wrapping paper. The wizard's base comes closer to the mat than the dwarf's base and has a cooler tone from the gray undercoat.

[Ragitsu]

Spoiler

 

 

 

Me be a very happy chappy.

[assault]

Nobody would want to play a game where everyone were human fighters, would they?

 

But that would be the ideal way to play Swords and Sorcery in 5e D&D.

 

I might need to read more Clark Ashton Smith.

 

The pain, the pain.

[Doc Democracy]

I reckon I could buy into a human fighter game.  I think you would need to consider how you provide for the things D&D tends to expect from an adventuring party, not least healing.

 

I reckon with specialisms in various areas, it would be an interesting game because the players would need to make themselves distinctive.  A scout, a medic, an archer, a scholar, a scavenger, a heavy weapons specialist, or any other style.

 

I actually think it could be fun.

 

Doc

[Rich McGee]

5 hours ago, assault said:

Nobody would want to play a game where everyone were human fighters, would they?

 

Yes, they would.  I've been in two different campaigns over the years that did that, and several other semi-historical ones where your options were effectively fighter, thief, or magic-free priests or "scholars" that were magic-user stand-ins.  Pre-WotC D&D was pretty bad at it, but that didn't stop people from trying, especially in the days of 2nd ed AD&D when they were releasing not only slews of "kit" books that were de facto subclasses but also historical setting books like A Mighty Fortress.  Post-TSR the d20 system made it much easier to differentiate human fighters from one another, although once it came out a lot of people shifted from D&D to d20 Modern/Future for "all mundanes" gameplay.

[Ninja-Bear]

I think I have a working distinction between Optimizers and Power Gamers. Both can Min-Maxers but that in itself isn’t very telling. The distinction is an Optimizer optimizes so as to play a concept however he is willing to not use a legal build if said build is found to be Over powered or in a Hero game not really fun. A Power gamer will stand on the ground, well that’s a legal build therefore I should be able to take it even though that can really mess with game play. 

[Doc Democracy]

My definition is that the optimiser is looking for things to be more fun for everyone, including the GM.  The power gamer is willing to sacrifice everyone else's fun to maximise their own.

 

Doc

[Ragitsu]

Remember: if you can make a Human Fighter interesting, you can make anything interesting. That is not a slight against that particular Race-Class combination, by the way; plenty of famous fictional characters that could be classified as such do exist, but, in D&D (especially prominent in contemporary D&D) there is this notion that you must get crazy with your character in order for it to have personality and/or appeal.

 

 

Edited December 26, 2023 by Ragitsu

[Ragitsu]

tkdguy, when it comes to painting miniatures, do you consider yourself more of a Rembrandt or a Picasso?