Chebucto Regional Softball Club

Does anyone else reflexively recoil from videos with that kind of thumbnail? This could be the best game in the world and that kind of stupid face and hyperbolic text sends it right to my brain's spam folder.

Never played the original, but I don't feel a need for remakes.

> They argued that if the NPCs had been bandits they would just attack on sight. Video game mindset is real. I remember one of the first games I tried to run, when I was a young teenager. I described how there was a big rat in the first room of the ruins. The player was like "it's just there? Looking at me? Ok i shoo it away and check the doors..." I was like, oh. Right. Duh. Normal people don't just kill every creature they see.

I have had players get confused when NPCs don't want to drop everything and help them. Like, the NPC is just living life. They're not going to risk their safety and livelihood because you asked nicely a few minutes after meeting them. One player had her mind blown when she learned NPCs can lie. She'd sort of pissed off this one faction with mild misbehavior. She gets pissy with one guy and demands he tell her where the macguffin is. He lies. She says okay, goes to that place. Gets in some trouble, and has no macguffin. She's looking at me like "where is it?". After several increasingly overt hints I just tell her "maybe he lied to you, because you broke into his house, pissed off his friends, and demanded he help you. Maybe he just lied to you". "But... He said the thing is here"

Personally, I find "5% of the time the outcome is astoundingly good, and 5% of the time it's shockingly bad" kind of unsatisfying. Jarring, even. Picture playing darts and every 20 throws, missed the dart board completely, no matter how good you are at darts. I haven't played pf2e but I think degree of success is a much more reasonable system. I also prefer games that aren't flat probability. When you only roll one die, every outcome (on the die) is equally likely. But I think a lot of people playing DND don't really care about rules, consistency, verisimilitude, or much anything beyond "lololol and then Kevin crit his stealth check so we said the goblin king didn't see him at all as he stole the throne the goblin was sitting on!!!". Which is fine, I guess.

I think "cultural values" are a better mechanism for that. Like america teaches that capitalism and individualism are good values. Anyone raised here gets a lot of that, but it's not an innate property of being from Ohio

One of the frustrating things about humans and mass communication is the "for me it's Tuesday" effect. For someone, this is the first time they've encountered "maybe orcs being innately evil isn't a good idea". They want to explore it and go through their feelings and blah blah blah. It's a day that might change their life. For someone else, it's Tuesday. We've had this conversation a thousand times before. It's old hat. It's hard to be patient to faceless newcomer #3742 when you've already done this conversation so many times. They feel stupid and slow because they blend in with all the other people who brought this up. They're bringing up points they feel are fresh and clever but have been discussed and settled already. But they're a person seeing it for the first time. Somehow. It feels like "are you stupid? We just went over this", but that's an illusion. It's new to them . (This doesn't account for bad faith actors, who are trash and should go away)

Some stuff like mysteries you need to be ready to tell the players they got it right, even if their idea is a little crazy. Players are famously bad at noticing details and remembering plot. But if you do some subtle shifting instead of going in with a fixed, canonical, right answer then it can be fun. I did a one shot the other day that was about people being murdered. We found out they were being done in by golems, but the solution we came up with (do the golem creation ritual with the opposite elements) wasn't what the GM had in mind. But they decided that our idea was good, so they went with it, and we all felt very smart.

On the one hand, it's fun to fuck with players. "So you enter the room? Cross the threshold of your own free will? Ok who's wearing metal?" when none of that matters, but you write it down anyway. On the other, sometimes I've had to be like "ok guys seriously there's no traps here. Put away the ten foot pole and chickens let's just move along"

> That means that a goblin with a dagger is a real threat, especially if he has friends, because you might be able to hit his buddies with a 4 on the die, but he could definitely work together with his friends to get a crit on you. And if he has a dagger with runes on it, or poison, or something like that, your day just got really bad. That sounds interesting, that weak monsters can work together to be mechanically threatening. I've heard about PF2e having more teamwork, but I'm not familiar enough with the system to comment on it. I have noticed that D&D tends to be very much "everyone does their thing on their turn, and then spaces out until they get attacked or are up again". I like how Fate lets anyone "create an advantage", so your party face that can't throw a punch can use their "Bravado" skill (or whatever) to distract the enemy, so someone can use that to land a big hit. I imagine PF2e has stuff like that

> My character has grown in power, why is the rat from the beginning still able to down me? I read an article online somewhere about bounded accuracy, and it brought a question like that as a litmus test for if you like the idea. Should a novice archer, no matter how lucky they are, be able to shoot the ominous black knight? For a scratch? Or a lucky hit in the throat? D&D 3e says no. You can only hit them on a natural 20. I think PF2e also says no in the same way. D&D 5e tried to say yes, the archer should be able to hit the knight. The knight's armor is probably ~22, and the archer is rolling at +5, so there's decent odds. But he certainly won't be able to kill him, because HP is what scales up with power. Other systems are more deadly. Personally, I don't like the "these goblins can't even touch me anymore" mode that much. I prefer less superhero heroics, where a goblin with a knife can be a real threat

Ehh, not really. In D&D 3e-like games, a low level goblin that attacks at +4 can barely hit a mid level character with AC 30. You could have a thousand goblins, and they'd only hit on natural 20 (and for regular, non-crit damage).

How often do pathfinder games do the thing like "The soldiers in the first area attack at +4, but these basically identical soldiers two plot beats later attack at +12, because you're higher level and I want the math to be challenging"? Because I've always disliked that in games. That's more of a video game trope, but I've seen it leak into tabletop games before. I liked the idea of bounded accuracy, and how a goblin is always a goblin. You don't need to make mega-goblins to fight the higher level party, because even the little ones can still hit and wear you down.

I haven't really played PF2e, but from reading it I don't really love that it does the "numbers go way up" thing. I did 3e and I didn't like the "I rolled a 4, but I have a +47 on my check" thing. I'm told PF2e has a "without level bonus" mode, but I don't know if anyone plays it.

The world of darkness games can run like this. If you play new vampires, there's going to be a whole political landscape that is at best neutral to you. Same with Mage. The other types probably also, but I don't know them as well. It does have a paradoxical element in that your character will be a big fish as far as the mundane world is considered. A freshly statted vampire or mage is far more powerful than a mundane person. It does have paths for players to become big fish, too

> Then again you did say they physically stopped the player so maybe they’re not the only person whose lines are a bit blurred. I communicated poorly! _In-game_ they stopped the player _character_ by saying their characters physically took the instruments away. We were playing remotely, so no one was physically interacting.

I'd never heard of "Bleed" until one player got very in-real-life upset about their character having a moderately bad time. The rest of us were like "this is some great drama and storytelling! And good job {upset-player} roleplaying!", but then they were like actually mad at us. Kind of unsettling. Not a good experience. Their character was a musician and had been cursed, in a recent session, so if they played music then unknown bad things to the tune of a demonic incursion would happen. The other players didn't like this, and the bleed player didn't really believe it. They'd tried to play a song anyway, and when I described how the lights in the room became _thin_ they physically stopped the player from continuing, and put their instruments in their locked chest. The bleed-player didn't like this. They secretly went and broke into the chest to get their stuff back. The other players were then mad, in-character, that this had happened. Like, they put the group at risk by fucking with their curse, and also **broke into their personal belongings**. It was good drama. Good interpersonal conflict. Big argument and juicy scene. Both sides had good points. Except the bleed-player was actually, genuinely, real-life, upset about all of this. We had to pause the game. To me it just felt messy and, I don't know, like poor emotional regulation. You can feel a thing but why are you lashing out at the other players? Maybe that's not a typical usage of bleed, but that's what they said was happening.

Do you remember your first character death? Was it memorable? I usually GM, and NPC deaths don't hit as hard. I don't even remember my first. I lost a warlock in a D&D 5e game, but we were high level so raise dead was just right there. Not very impactful. Last night, I had a player's first character death ever in a game I've been running. It's sort of Shadowrun + World of Darkness, using Fate for the rules. The player had learned a kind of magic I stole from Unknown Armies: If you take big risks now, you can do more powerful magic later. Blindly crossing a busy street might be a mild charge, but russian roulette would be a major charge. The players were trying to investigate a warehouse for plot reasons. This player ends up by himself in the basement while the ground level is on fire (for player reasons). He finds an armed goon, a guy dressed like a doctor, and several unconscious people wired up to a machine. The player goes, "I'm going to russian roulette for a charge." I go, "Are you sure? It's all or nothing. No take backs. You get a major charge, or you die. You'd roll 1d6, and on a 6 you lose." They go, "Hmm okay." The player tries to threaten the goon, but the dice don't favor them. Now they're in a slightly worse position, mechanically. The player goes, "I'm going to roulette" _and just rolls the die_. No more discussion. It came up 6. The rest of us are like, "Wait, what? You just..? Right then? That's so... anti-climactic." I wasn't sure what to do. I hadn't expected them to so casually go for the big score! I thought it'd come up in a big climax scene, not a fully escapable conflict with an unarmed goon! We talked a little about ways forward that keep the character but don't cheapen the mechanic, but the player was like, "No, I rolled the dice on it and lost. His brains are all over the floor now." The player had to go sit on their own for a little while. They're thinking of rejoining as an NPC they'd worked with, but said they absolutely do not want to use magic again. This is one I'm going to remember for a while.

I'd want to do some research before making a serious answer, but firing from the hip, not in order: - DND 5e. It's the big one. Even if you don't like it, it's popular. If you're going to learn about a hobby you should learn what's popular in it. - a white wolf game like Vampire. This was also pretty popular. It's got dice pools, no levels and classes, and themes that are more than "get treasure" - a pbta game. They're popular now and typically have a very different feel from DND. I'm not sure which one to pick but there are many. - one of those one page games, where you have like two stats. I don't like them but it's a good exercise to show what's possible. - some other indie game with an unusual mechanic, like drawing tarot cards instead of dice, or using a Jenga tower.