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@gorillastraylight
would you like to see the worst looking quadmech ive ever had the un-priveledge of viewing? of course you do!
Gaze upon the Barghest.
I wonder how heavy this thingy is...
I mostly don’t *hate* the Barghest but it does contain one of my least favourite Battletech design elements - a cannon with a comically large bore that makes the barrel seem ludicrously too short. Fuck you Koschei and fuck you Thunder, I should love you but I just can’t get over those goddamn guns.
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what would a ttrpg that prioritizes roleplay and actually functions as such look like? i've played a few that claim to be "rp forward" and every time the mechanics meant to facilitate roleplay ended up impeding it - and meanwhile i've had perfectly rewarding rp experiences in crunchier systems with no mechanical social encounter support at all. is there really a way to build rp into a system that works, or is it just a unicorn idea?
"Proiritising roleplaying" doesn't mean anything – it's a piece of vacuous marketing text targeted at people who've constructed their identity politics upon arguing about the correct way to pretend to be an elf.
The basic problem is that the term "roleplaying" is, itself, not well defined; in practice, it means whatever the person trying to sell you something wants it to mean. Here, for example, by invoking the presence or absence of "mechanical social encounter support" as the distinguishing feature of self-styled "RP forward" systems, you seem to be implicitly defining "roleplaying" to mean "set-piece encounters in which a player character attempts to persuade an NPC to do something for them without resorting to violence". Is this justified? Is playing out the process of hitting each other with sticks not "roleplaying"? Why not?
What most people mean when they toss the term "roleplaying" around in the context of tabletop games is something in the vicinity of "roleplaying is when we do things I'm interested in doing, and not-roleplaying is when we do things I'm not interested in doing". As all game rules are unavoidably opinionated about what player characters ought to spend their time doing – indeed, arguably this is the only thing that rules can meaningfully express opinions about! – the question of "does this system 'prioritise roleplaying'?" is typically reducible to "does this system agree with me about what kind of game I'm playing?". Games are then sorted into "priorities roleplaying" and "does not prioritise roleplaying" based on which side of the answer to that question they fall on for the person doing the sorting.
This is the ultimate root of a lot of this "the best sessions I ever had never touched the rules at all" stuff. For a variety of reasons, many people have genuinely never experienced playing a tabletop RPG whose rules agree with them about what sort of experience of play they ought to be having, and in some cases they can't even imagine what that would look like. If you and the system you're using disagree so badly about what kind of game you're playing that "engaging with the rules" and "engaging with my desired experience of play" are mutually exclusive activities, it's not surprising that ignoring the rules entirely would be your best play.
In this light, your question of "what would a system that really prioritises roleplaying look like?" translates to "what would a system that actually agrees with me about what kind of game I'm playing look like?", and that's not a question I can answer unless you're willing and able to get a lot more rigorous about what you mean when you say "roleplaying".
Here, for example, by invoking the presence or absence of "mechanical social encounter support" as the distinguishing feature of self-styled "RP forward" systems, you seem to be implicitly defining "roleplaying" to mean "set-piece encounters in which a player character attempts to persuade an NPC to do something for them without resorting to violence".
well, no, i was actually thinking about scenarios like navigating a ball/gala type event and exploring the plot through verbal conversation, but i suppose i didn't say that, so fine, egg on my face
i ask this because i've been thinking a lot about why i keep bouncing off games like Blades in the Dark and Monster of the Week, both of which like to bill themselves as "rp forward". there's a lot of tools and toys to play with in terms of social encounters for both of those games, to be applied in heist and monster mystery situations, respectively, so i think we can safely say that we're aware of what the rules want to be doing in this instance, and are broadly in agreement with them.
but in practice, i often forget that i even have those tools, or the conversation regularly grinds to a halt while people review their abilities lists, and it's just.... weirdly exhausting. and i keep thinking that surely there must be a better way, but i'm not a game designer, so fuck me if i know what that better way might look like. hence, asking an expert.
i suppose we do need more precise terminology, because yeah "roleplaying" is technically applicable to any aspect of game engagement you can think of. "navigating social situations" is slightly narrower, but maybe just "having a conversation" is what we're after. and maybe part of the problem is that most people are already halfway proficient at having a conversation? in ways that we're not proficient at the aforementioned hitting each other with sticks. so we can just Do It without needing to abstract parts of the process into dice rolls and hit points, because we can just observe what the other guy says and then decide how our character feels about it and how they want to respond.
so is the answer to this just "roleplay is a fake category, and none of it matters"? surely that can't be it. surely someone must know what they're doing here, and can come up with a framework to gamify Having A Conversation in a functional and satisfying way.
There are a couple of big issues here:
You've settled on defining "roleplaying [mechanics]" as "gamifying having a conversation". What does it mean to gamify having a conversation? In what way, and to what purpose? My previously proposed summary of "[having rules for] set-piece encounters in which a player character attempts to persuade an NPC to do something for them without resorting to violence" is one way of gamifying having a conversation, but you've said that's not what you mean by that; so, what do you mean?
If you're having trouble remembering what the rules for a particular thing are – or even that those rules exist – that's often a good sign that engaging with those rules isn't fostering your desired experience of play; however, it doesn't tell us anything about what that desired experience of play is, other than "not that". (Also, it's worth examining whether this is actually a domain-specific issue; many groups find it necessary to frequently stop and review the rules in many contexts, but this tends to be seen as more tolerable in turn-based frameworks like combat than in contexts that lack such a framework.)
Maybe I'm missing the point, but here's my thing: you're playing a game that is played by talking. Why, then, do you need detailed game mechanics about talking (the thing you're already doing)? Why not just talk, and save the game mechanics for all the stuff that you can't just do for real at the table (e.g. hitting each other with sticks)?
That's definitely a reasonable perspective, though it depends on a very particular notion of What Game Rules Are For.
Suppose, for example, that your tabletop RPG character has occasion to play a game of Texas hold 'em. There are two basic ways this could be played out:
Roll some dice to decide who wins, and based on the outcome of that roll, produce a description of your character having played a game of Texas hold 'em.
Pick up a deck of playing cards and play a round of Texas hold 'em, you in the person of your character and the GM in the person of your NPC opponent, making all relevant decisions in character as your respective roles.
We certainly wouldn't say that the second one less constitutes "roleplaying" than the first. Some in-character activities, however, are less amenable to this sort of step-by-step acting out – at least, not without a lot of special equipment – and one of the functions of detailed frameworks of rules, such as the prototypical "combat system", is to furnish a game-mechanical proxy through which this sort of fine-grained IC decision-making can occur.
(Hell, if you were feeling mischievous, you might even argue that a game with a crunchy combat system is more "RP focused" in this sense than one which simply produces produces a description of your character having had a fight, in the sense that it both obliges and enables you to act out the process of actually making all those nitty-gritty IC choices.)
From this perspective, one might easily conclude that the purpose of RPG rules is to furnish such game-mechanical proxies; by extension, when no proxy is needed because sitting at a table poses no obstacle to acting things out in detail, game mechanics need not enter into it.
That's not the only possible perspective on What Game Rules Are For, though. Take me, for example: from my perspective, game rules are toys. They're made of methods and procedures rather than metal and plastic, but they're toys all the same, and I want to mash their faces together like a kid making their action figures make out. Whether or not a game-mechanical proxy is strictly required in order to play out the activity in question just isn't terribly relevant to me, because that's not why I want the rules to be present in the first place.
This being so, if somebody comes to me asking how best to address or model a particular activity in a framework of rules, I'll assume that they likewise have a reason to want such a framework to be present. I've got nothing against freeform RP, but I'm going to do you the courtesy of assuming that you've already considered and discarded that option and aren't just wasting my time!
I believe that this is brushing right up against (and partially overlapping) the Rules Elide blogpost-and-subsequent-years-long-conversation, which I was chewing on again recently after hearing about the GUNFUCKERS tweet (deleted, reproduced)
I don't think I agree that "rules elide" is universally true, but I do agree that a system can have hard rules; rules that are (theoretically) quick to resolve, aren't particularly interesting to consider, and leave no room for creativity or negotiation. Stuff that you could hand over to a computer to resolve without skipping over any decision points.
Example: Boot Hill. Also relevant: [the blog post about using boot hill for a political intrigue game.](https://www.chocolatehammer.org/?p=5773)
My new experimental stance: hard rules are a short-circuit, a strict A->B; they move cognitive load off themselves and onto the decision points (or conversations) around them, because they present fixed points to let people think about whether to use those hard rules or not. In effect, hard rules will be located right next to (or may be within) whatever your system is "actually about" but themselves will not be it.
There's also the whole issue that you can have 6 people at the same table all playing different games - you could have one player trying to keep their team fiscally solvent, another trying to finish quests, a third playing a dating simulator, the next trying to tame every monster, etc. But a ruleset (and the system that it "wants" to be) still has qualities of its own; the ultra-subjective framework doesn't seem to be giving me any interesting tools to work with.
Perhaps it can be examined by what the players are thinking about between sessions or how they'd summarise the last session they were in?
Within that lens, PF1 is actually about character-building and showing off what it can do...
I'm familiar with the thought exercise, and I've never found it terribly interesting because it's an obvious rhetorical sleight of hand. Neither Dragons & Damsels nor Gunfuckers are "about" convincing dragons to free princesses in any meaningful way. The former is so uninterested in convincing dragons to free princesses that it abstracts it all the way down to a single essentially non-interactive roll of the dice, while the latter simply has no opinion on the matter. There's nothing about Gunfuckers in particular that produced the described outcome; any premise or framing device which took the possibility of fighting the dragon off the table would have sufficed, and claiming otherwise is, at best, giving an essentially unrelated text credit for your GM's labour. It's falling prey to the same mentality that insists that Dungeons & Dragons is "about" all sorts of things on which its text is silent because you saw a podcast where the GM made something up.
(In fact, I'd go so far as to say that a hypothetical tabletop RPG which consists of absurdly hyper-lethal combat rules and nothing else is an objectively badly designed game, because the only thing its text has opinions on is what the game isn't about. I can get experiences of play that aren't about things anywhere!)
gamers aren’t so much a sub culture as they are a group of people that marketers were able to create so they could sell more expensive toys
Which subcultures weren’t invented by marketers though
the yakuza
Hot Spots: Draconis Reach Campaign Log, Entry 1
My playgroup started a campaign using Hot Spots: Draconis Reach on Wednesday and I thought it might be fun to keep track of it here on Tumblr! The post with my list is here, our other players are representing the Draconis Combine, Federated Suns, and another merc crew.
Le Blanc, Federated Suns, 3151
“The job wasn’t exactly glamorous, but working for the Draconis Combine rarely was. The Dracs had been forced to abandon Le Blanc, an arid border world, to the Federated Suns in 3150, and the newly re-opened hiring hall on the planet had promptly become a coordinating point for FedSun-sponsored raids into the Combine. It was a reliable, predictable angle for enterprising lucrewarriors - but we were going to be working the other side of it. Tai-i Rebecca Anderson, the most overworked and frazzled mercenary relations officer I’ve ever seen, was working with the yakuza clans still on-world to destablize merc activity on Le Blanc, maybe even make a go for the FedSun headquarters or the hiring hall if things went well. All she needed was some mercenaries of her own to provide the muscle - and that’s where we came in. The job probably wouldn’t make us popular with the region’s small-time merc crews (and I despise desert planets), but that was a risk I was willing to take. The way I figured it, we’d dust off with a fat influx of sea-bills well before anyone could even think about retaliation. No Guts, No Galaxy, like that kid on the holoshows used to say.”
“Our first two months on the job were spent planning the raid from orbit with Tai-i Anderson (who, for the record, never let on that she was ISB, but definitely was) and the major oyabuns and then being smuggled onto Le Blanc by the yakuza and preparing our positions. Come March, everything was ready for us to make our attack on the city of Port Paix. With some enthusiastic yakuza at our back, all that stood between us and those juicy supply depots was a Lance or so of greenhorn scrubs. And a surprise sandstorm, which forced us to pay our techs for overtime. Did I mention I hate desert planets?”
- Corbin “Blackguard” Beckett, Captain of the Varangian Guard
Battle Report under Break
Rip John Blanche. Some of my earliest memories of warhammer and wargaming in general were his illustrations in the WHFB 6e core book. That Varghulf from the vampire counts section is seared into my brain for good. A genuinely irreplaceable, unique talent
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First game of a Draconis Reach campaign tonight! I’ll try to post a battle report afterwards, very excited to get back into BT Classic!
The List - The Varangian Guard Mercenary Company (3151), Command Reinforced Lance
- Cpt. Corbin Beckett, callsign “Blackguard” (4/4, 1 Edge, No Abilities, Neanderthal NTL-UG)
- Lt. Molly Joensuu, callsign “Whiskey”, (4/5, 2 Edge, Ability: Jumping Jack, Starslayer STY-3C)
- Francis Foley, callsign “Cactus”, (4/5, 1 Edge, Ability: Speed Demon, Ostsol OTL-8M)
- Jun Tau, callsign “Trilobite”, (4/5, 1 Edge, Ability: Assassin, Firefly FFL-5A)
- Unnamed Tank Crew/ “The Jobbers”, (4/5, No Edge or Abilities, Maxim Heavy Hover Transport (Escort))
Paint over done by Detocroix on bsky
Why yes, Trans people ARE Awesome.
Hello bisexual community
Begin killing
I think that dungeon crawling is to TTRPGs what shooters are to video games. It's a structure that has been around since almost the beginning of the medium, that persists because it fundamentally works, and it fits well with the affordances and limitations of the medium. And like shooters, its ubiquity leads to a certain amount of backlash, some of it warranted, and a lot of it less so.
Looking at it from that perspective, people who denigrate dungeons as not being real roleplaying or storytelling feel a lot like the gaming nerds of the mid 2000s, sneering at bros who play Gears of War and Halo, and insisting that they play real games.
Except that those nerds were, at least somewhat, responding to the state of the video games industry as it actually existed. And, notably, they were actually playing the non-shooter games that existed.
By contrast, the dungeons-aren't-roleplay 5e players feel like if those gamer nerds were on their "all shooters are brainless pablum" bullshit now, in a world where some of the most praised narrative games of all time are shooters, and where shooter mechanics have been used to make wildly inventive puzzle games, horror games, speedrunning games, roleplaying games, etc.
And instead of playing any of those amazing shooter games, or even any of the fantastic non-shooter games, they were insisting that real gamers who care about narrative make Halo machinima.
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there are many people who like to walk into a ttrpg having invented a blorbo in their mind and have the ttrpg to give them the tools to realize that blorbo and all the best to them i am so thoroughly not one of those people. give me a playbook that prescribes a very specific narrative role. give me a pregen character i have to play as. give me a dozen big stupid tables to roll up a guy on. give me some god damn lifepaths !
cast me as though in a play and then allow me the tools to make the role my own!
I love games that let me make a blorbo, the most blorbo-friendly in my experience being games like Chronicles of Darkness/Vampire: The Masquerade/anything by White Wolf Publishing really, but the problem with blorbo-based chargen is that some people really play only one kind of blorbo, and the game allows them to make that same blorbo over and over, so you end up with no variety whatsoever. And I know this is easily solved by “play with other people,” but really, when your only choice for TTRPG mates is strangers online, it doesn’t work that way. But on the other hand, playbook/narrative-style games like PbtA can feel too deterministic sometimes. Honestly, the sweet spot is something in between: a life-path-style chargen with a portion of the character being built manually, à la The Witcher
also blorbism tends to result in characters who are partially or wholly disconnected from the setting, making roleplay miserably difficult and stilited
This is very true. This usually happens when someone has a blorbo they've been obsessed with for a while and saw the game as an opportunity to plug them in with no regard for plot or context
y'know this is basically how the player characters react in mw5 clans upon seeing this mech
Eisenfaust by Safe_Flamingo_9215
We are also working on the Very Hunched Back, featuring a double-size AC/40, but right now every time it fires the 'mech does a backflip.
Fucked up that 10 AC/2s weigh more than an entire hunchback. If and of you ever develop a Time Machine it’s imperative that you go yell at the FASA people for their crimes against autocannons
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The state of TTRPGs if it was video games
“Oh I wanna play a Half-life video game; instead of playing Half-life 1, Blue Shift, Opposing Force, Half-life 2, Episode 1, Episode 2, Portal, Portal 2, E:0, or E:02, I’ll just download 10,000 mods for Skyrim until all the draugr are replaced with Combine soldiers.”
dude they have this thing called a rulebook
I watched so many lets plays. None of them installed mario on my computer.
so here we are
It’s also not a hard to find or expensive game. Their official website links you here were you can download the original Cyberpunk 2020 rulebook and many additional resources for about 10 bucks a piece.
But the caveat is that you would need to look up one (1) thing and we all know that’s not possible.
