Pen and Paper RPGs

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AEmer
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Re: Pen and Paper RPGs

Post by AEmer »

Jaedar wrote:How does that work if you're playing irl? passing notes or just assume people won't use the OOC knowledge against you?
It doesn't.

It's important for us to maintain a level of simplicity. Therefore everybody generally knows everything that's going on...characters are assumed to share the information with eachother whenever they can. Generally, peaking on eachothers sheets is allowed, but we self govern and attempt to limit it.

I'm terrible at roleplaying characters I roll at these sessions. I'm a good roleplayer, or at least I've been told as much, and I partake in an annual festival for freeform roleplaying, where you're generally only limited by the setting and the game master, and there are no rules to speak of. Some of those experiences can be magnificent, and under those circumstances, people are usually able to seamlessly seperate OOC knowledge and IC knowledge.

That can't be expected from my campaign players. We play when we have time, and sometimes people miss one or several sessions, so these details can't be remembered and distinguished. It's, overall, not too serious of a game.

So in this situation, I simply discussed it with the GM out of session. Then when he didn't do anything with the hook I had given him, I figured it was pointless, and I tossed it. He may actually have prepared to eventually use it, but either way, it meant we stayed on good terms with the city guard, who actually came by on the subsequent visit.

Currently, I make it a point to always have several bottle of lamp oil on me, to insure I can get rid of any evidence that may make us look like villains, since cutting the head off of a dead body is a little bit grisly.

I suppose that, if we were a more serious group of roleplayers, we'd use cell phones for texting, and generally the DM would sow more information that would be limited to single characters, and giving more strict jobs to our characters. That would make any and all tomfoolery a single person would perpetrate much easier to do, without giving too much away

I have no doubt that some of the other players would consider doing similar things to what I did, but we're disincentiviced because our DM runs things in a particular way.

He is remarkably creative, and an excellent improv actor (and actor, in general), though, so whatever he lacks in structure and planning, he more than makes up for in sheer ensuing hillarity to our various gimmicks and ideas.
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Jonas
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Re: Pen and Paper RPGs

Post by Jonas »

We actually had a little information problem when we played Vampire, because the setting or at least the campaign we started kind of encourages a lot of scheming and mistrust, and that meant the game master kept having to grab one or two players and pull them outside. Meanwhile, because we're playing with just one game master, the rest of the party are reduced to idle RP or talking about school.

That's something we've done in all our games, but usually it doesn't come up enough to be tedious.
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AEmer
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Re: Pen and Paper RPGs

Post by AEmer »

It strikes me that a well prepared GM could, in this day and age of smartphones, set up a wifi messaging service and send prepared messages out through his laptop to peoples smartphones.

Generally our GM uses a laptop for the game materials anyway.

What I really want is a digital playset - something like the microsoft surface. I really enjoy positioning as a part of play. It's really easy to visualize whats going on and it encourages things that seem more authentic. Something that combines digital surfaces and hand crafted or painted miniatures would be best.

It's entirely unnecessary, but things like these get people more into the game. Make them more actively participate, which speeds things up.

With a digital gameboard, people could set up little privacy screens, which would alleviate the secretkeeping thing nicely.
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Re: Pen and Paper RPGs

Post by Jonas »

AEmer wrote:It strikes me that a well prepared GM could, in this day and age of smartphones, set up a wifi messaging service and send prepared messages out through his laptop to peoples smartphones.
I just imagined something like the intro to DXHR, with Bob Page messaging Lucius DeBeers while they're in a conference call with the other Illuminati. If you're running a game which would benefit from a slightly paranoid conspiracy feel, having players check their phones constantly, and maybe even sending the odd decoy message out to keep people on their toes, could be exactly what the doctor ordered.
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Re: Pen and Paper RPGs

Post by AEmer »

That's really bloody brilliant. It would fit very well with a cyberpunk aesthetic: Whenever you're checking your phone, your character is too. It has room for both ooc and in character messages, and various forms of cross communication.

Huh. And it would allow for really interesting cyber-aesthetics too. Hacking terminals and you get to read the materials yourself on your phone.
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Re: Pen and Paper RPGs

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We used to do it with notes passed to the GM. Sometimes I'd pass notes that just said 'look at this like it's clever and interesting, then nod, look at me and say "ok, you can do that"..', because I generally played shifty horrible bastards, no matter what the rest of the party was comprised of.

...Playing with paladins was often entertaining. One session ended up being entirely comprised of an in-party trial because two of us decided our native guide was a traitor and made the decision to covertly murder him during an orc attack. When I fumbled the covert assassination (fuck you, natural 1), we decided to overtly murder him during the orc attack, since ok: we'd be spotted, but at least everyone else would be too busy fighting orcs to stop us.

As it turns out, he wasn't a traitor. BUT HE COULD'VE BEEN: WOULD YOU BE ABLE TO TAKE SUCH STEPS IN FUTURE, MR PALADIN? HUH? HUH? YOU NEED US, TO DO THE THINGS YOU CANNOT.

We got off with a caution.


Regarding RPG systems, while I've mostly done various incarnations of AD&D and V:TM (and Wraith...fucking hell, that was...fun), with a little bit of palladium's crazy universally applicable system (everything from ninjas to superheroes to barbarians, via ninja turtles coz why not eh?), I've always wanted to try Games' Workshop's inquisitor system, only without the ludicrously expensive models.

Just because it pretty much caters exclusively to shifty horrible bastards.
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Re: Pen and Paper RPGs

Post by EER »

DDL wrote:covertly murder him during an orc attack
Excuse my P&PRPG n00bness, but how would this work? Do you give a note to the DM saying "We'd like to kill this guy covertly", the DM says in public "your suggestion is okay, you can roll", you roll, the DM says "our native guide has suddenly fallen ill with a severe case of decapitation"?
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Re: Pen and Paper RPGs

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Suppose it depends how you run your group, how flexible you are about the rule system, and how obsessive you are about rolling your own dice. We kinda tacitly accepted that if you wanted to do sneaky stuff then either the GM would be rolling for you, under the guise of "hell, he's rolling shit all the time, for god knows what reason", or you'd roll yourself, but the GM would obfuscate what you're rolling for.

So in this case, yeah, we passed a note, the GM raised his eyebrows and nodded (as he does for every note handed to him, regardless of content, coz he's good like that), and then when we were handling combat he just pointed to me and said "ok, now you roll your attack" (going for the assumption that anyone not in the know would assume this is a general 'I attack the enemy' attack) and assumed that stabbing an unsuspecting someone in the back with an orc weapon is a single unopposed attack roll. Which I fumbled.

Allowing him to then gleefully describe the scene, since it went from sneaky and underhanded to "obvious and comical".

If it'd worked, all the rest of the party would know is that the guide turned up with an orc sword in his back after the attack.

So yeah, it's generally a case-by-case basis thing, and it depends a lot on your GM.
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Re: Pen and Paper RPGs

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I ran a D&D 3.5 game for about half a year with an evil party, comprised entirely of characters like DDL's. It was pretty fucking hard, especially as their party leader was chaotic evil. It was remarkably difficult to predict even roughly what the assholes were going to do next, and it was even harder to make them give a shit about anything that happened during the game because they all played characters with zero empathy for other human beings - everybody was just looking out for number one.
DDL wrote:"hell, he's rolling shit all the time, for god knows what reason"
My first DM liked to roll stuff, look at the result, raise his eyebrows, and chuckle to himself, sometimes with a little "oooh that's bad" or "wow, that's gonna be interesting." He was a bastard that way. He was also less amusingly a bastard in that he kept killing off the players so we never had time to get to know each other's characters and form inter-party friendships.

Your GM sounds pretty great btw.
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Re: Pen and Paper RPGs

Post by AEmer »

...My last character was murdered by the partys wizard. I'd been horribly wounded, and was bleeding to death, then he created a massive blizzard which happened to do friendly fire to me.

While I was quite annoyed, I think there was some degree of approval of the act from the other players, since, while fun, the character tended to take a lot of time during his turns. He was a dual-wielding ranger that could easily end up with 6 attack rolls during a single turn.

Current character is designed as a counter to that concept; his turns are quite brief, and all of his attack involve other players in some fashion.

I've found that when a few characters try to play as cooperatively as possible, rather than trying to murder as much as possible, has greatly improved the playing experience. Which...when you think about it...is pretty darn obvious would happen. It's a social experience, after all.
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Re: Pen and Paper RPGs

Post by EER »

Sounds pretty interesting :)
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Re: Pen and Paper RPGs

Post by Jonas »

I'd like to play a proper game of 4E at some point, my brief encounter with it over the Internet didn't leave me with a very favourable impression of it.

I guess what I liked about LEF was... its straightforwardness. There was a comparatively large amount of math you had to do during a fight, but once you had the hang of it, it worked really well. Sorry, this got a bit long, bear with me or ignore the rest of the post if you don't have a passion for RPG systems.

For example your Attack was made up of several components: the attack bonus of the weapon itself (say, +3 for a solid staff), your Strength, your Technique (your skill with this particular weapon type), and any extra bonuses such as from being on a horse. You would roll 2d6 and add the results to your Attack value, and if it surpassed the Defence of your enemy, you would further add the weapon's Damage, and the result minus the enemy's Defence would be the amount of damage you dealt. Characters could do a "full defence" which cost them their turn but allowed them to roll 2d6 to add to their Defence score, which could really save your ass in a pinch. This all probably sounds complicated, but in practice your Attack value (strength plus technique plus weapon attack bonus) was written down on your character sheet for easy reference, so all you had to do was add the dice roll and subtract the enemy's Defence.

Magic was also on the complicated side, but only to a degree that fostered some great skin-of-your-teeth moments. First of all the talent for magic was something you had to be born with, so if you didn't spend (a fairly high amount of) character points to buy it at character creation, you'd never be able to use magic. You'd then have a Magic score and a Mind score, both similar to Strength (the main scores were Strength, Dexterity, Health, Mind, Magic, and - purely for roleplaying purposes - Appearance). You'd make Magic checks to cast spells: just 2d6 plus your Magic compared to a pre-defined difficulty for each spell, but there was always the risk of fumbling if you roll snake eyes, and the consequences of fumbling a magic check were often very severe. If you made it, you would spend Psyche to cast the spell, and the price always included a dice roll so there was a little randomness there. Your Psyche would be 30 plus your Mind score plus twice your Magic score. You could boost spells to make them more powerful at the cost of more Psyche, and hilariously you could spend more Psyche than you had, with detrimental effects on your mental wellbeing. Going under 0 in Psyche would knock you unconscious, but I once cast a really really powerful fire spell that saved all our asses but put me at less then -20 Psyche, so I permanently lost 2 points in my Mind score.

One of the great things about LEF was its level-up system. So... skills went from 0 to 20, and they would be all sorts of weird roleplaying shit like Sailing, Religion, History, Bestiology, Cooking, Trade, Etiquette and so on in addition to skills of obvious usefulness such as Climbing, Sneaking, Tracking, Smithing, Swimming, and Riding. There were also a number of languages that all had separate Speech and Writing scores. Skill checks were always 2d6, and rolling the same number on both dice would level up your skill depending on what their current level was. I don't remember the exact scale, but I believe it was... from 1 to 4, double-3 and up would be a level-up. From 5 to 7, double-4 and up. From 8 to 12, double-5 or double-6, and above 12 it would only level up with a double-6. So of course the more checks you made, the faster you'd progress, meaning just like in a Bethesda game you'd tend to get good at the skills you use a lot. This, by the way, went for weapon technique and main scores as well, except with Strength, Dexterity, and Health, you needed to level up three times to get one point more, representing that these traits are harder to improve.

Of course there was always the threat of a double-1, which would be a fumble, the effects of which were left at the DMs discretion. Fumbling a mundane task would generally not have very negative results, but as mentioned, fumbling a Magic check was often fairly catastrophic (there was a table of adverse effects to be consulted, and I recall it including the risk of opening a dimensional tear through which a flying creature of shadow could burst to pick you up and tickle you to death or somesuch). On the other hand, rolling double-6 would always be a success no matter how hard the task (for this reason, there was a special difficulty for stupid ideas like "I try to flap my arms to fly!" called Impossible that didn't allow a dice roll). Also, rolling double-5 on an attack would be a critical hit on the torso, and double-6 was a critical hit on the head, which would be immediately fatal to anyone not wearing a helmet.

On a personal note, my character who somehow survived the campaign for - I think - a year and a half despite everybody else losing many characters each over the period, became a werewolf half-way through, and I've had a powerful affection for lycanthropy ever since. In LEF, brilliantly, lycanthropy was a skill as well as a disease, and you would make skill checks every night to prevent yourself from shifting. In doing so, you would improve your skill as per the above described system, gradually getting better at controlling yourself. In the end, I hit level 20 (the skill cap) and got to stop rolling every night. After that point, I only had to roll whenever it was a full moon out or if I was trying to shift deliberately, for example to completely ruin somebody's day with my incredible werewolf powers. For your comparison, my puny mage had a Strength of 7, a Dexterity of 6, and a Health score of 10, which was considered a fairly average build and above-average constitution. As a werewolf, my Strength was 27, my Dexterity was 17, and my Health was 19. I can't stress enough how ridiculous that is. I also had a Sneak skill of 16 (up from 4), a Jump skill of 15 (up from 4), and a Tracking skill of 14 (up from 11, for some reason my character was a pretty good tracker, don't remember how that came to pass).

I also quickly acquired a very nice Technique with Daggers/Unarmed, which was what my claws and teeth counted as. Also I just got my old character sheet out to find these things, and it seems my character spoke 6 different languages and could read and write in 2 of them. He was much smarter than I will ever be. He also had 1 point in Glassblowing, and I really wish I could remember how the hell that happened (runner-up for weirdest skill on my character sheet: 1 point in zoo keeping - I had a pet tiger until it drowned).

Man... good times. I'm all nostalgic now.

tl;dr: I was a werewolf wizard with a pet tiger.
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Re: Pen and Paper RPGs

Post by AEmer »

I actually really like LEF, from the way you describe it.

Levelling up can be fun in a very nerdy sort of way, and LEF's system seems much more undirected...and with my current group, it would be very hard to manage, since it would cost you experience if you weren't there, and you would inevitably get more experience from fewer people being present...

But incorporating levelling into something you only undertake during the playsessions? That's magnificent. I love it. It's the best thing ever.

I also like that there are more random effects, and that those effects are wilder.

I want to try out LEF at some point. If my current GM persists in his current trend of only being able to play every other week, I'll see if I can't convince my group to play a bit of LEF, see how they like it.

I would also love to know if anybody knows of a mix of roleplaying and wargaming systems. Something like erfworld in game form would be excellent to read about.
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Re: Pen and Paper RPGs

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Another good thing about LEF is that it's in Danish, so it has a very... I dunno. Old-fashioned and civilised tone to it? Mages are always referred to as "Koglere" for example, makes the whole thing feel really old.

I think you'll only need one book to play it (and only the DM really needs it, the players don't have to have it), but I'm not sure how much setting information it contains so your DM may have to improvise a suitable setting yourself. A low fantasy semi-industrial setting with Danish place names would probably work best.
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Re: Pen and Paper RPGs

Post by kdawg88 »

I dabbled in GURPS Cyberpunk a couple years back with some friends...it was pretty good but it was very time consuming and we never really got together again. I do think however that this is the best type of role-playing because it requires the most imagination. Computer role-playing games increasingly require less imagination and make-believe because they generate the setting and characters for you, and as such have increasingly less to do with role-playing, other than choosing character attributes (which is really an insignificant part of RP IMO).
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