I've been talking a bit about how the hobby seems to have settled into the view that not playing games-as-intended is mildly transgressive.
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@Taskerland We played Space Opera and a huge amount of it was "How ship mortgages work, and adjusting your expectations for what you'll get to use"
Which is a bit odd because most of the scenarios are full on Star Trek stuff.
It's like "here is the game about how to buy and finance the Orca from Jaws" and then the scenarios are "the characters are aboard the USS Indianapolis"
@Printdevil I can't cope with the ship mortgage and shares stuff in Traveller. Way too granular to be fun.
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@Printdevil I can't cope with the ship mortgage and shares stuff in Traveller. Way too granular to be fun.
@Taskerland I think that was just a "wages of fear" thing to make you feel you constantly had to do things to earn money.
And was not entertaining.
Worrying about the economics of your oxygen to fuel supplies in a space game appeal to my resource scarcity interests, but "did I get bad % on my berthing fees re-negotiation does not"
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@Printdevil I can't cope with the ship mortgage and shares stuff in Traveller. Way too granular to be fun.
@Taskerland @Printdevil it is a fascinating example of energent gameplay loop like xp for gold + dungeon crawling in medievalowestern boomtown DnD. And just as with DnD loop it is very different than how most people like to play.
Currently we tend to cut out counting and all those tedious but potentially impactful game elements like encumbrance, turns, torches, rations, pounds of donkey food. And mortgage and ship shares.
We focus on different playstyles than players and designers of old.
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@Taskerland I think that was just a "wages of fear" thing to make you feel you constantly had to do things to earn money.
And was not entertaining.
Worrying about the economics of your oxygen to fuel supplies in a space game appeal to my resource scarcity interests, but "did I get bad % on my berthing fees re-negotiation does not"
@Taskerland Oddly I love the scarcity of resources in games, like food/water/air etc, but not items. Which confuses some people because they assume if you care about some granular aspect you should care about them all. So I really don't care about how many arrows you have, but I do vaguely care about lantern oil.
The best way to not worry about torches and lantern oil is of course to never go anywhere made dark by ceilings.
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@Printdevil I can't cope with the ship mortgage and shares stuff in Traveller. Way too granular to be fun.
@Taskerland I'm not a fan of computers at the table but...use a spreadsheet? With enough variables it's just another random number generator.
@Printdevil -
@Taskerland @Printdevil it is a fascinating example of energent gameplay loop like xp for gold + dungeon crawling in medievalowestern boomtown DnD. And just as with DnD loop it is very different than how most people like to play.
Currently we tend to cut out counting and all those tedious but potentially impactful game elements like encumbrance, turns, torches, rations, pounds of donkey food. And mortgage and ship shares.
We focus on different playstyles than players and designers of old.
@vdonnut The torches thing is interesting as it underlies a lot of OSR procedural gameplay. However, nobody makes the "we've run out of torches mid-dungeon" mistake more than once, so you have a vast amount of mechanical scaffolding in support of an event that will happen once per group.
After that, you're just left with a load of mechanics that the players pay to by-pass by hiring a torch-carrier or buying lanterns. Silly really.
Same applies to not paying your oxygen bill.
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@Taskerland I'm not a fan of computers at the table but...use a spreadsheet? With enough variables it's just another random number generator.
@Printdevil@malin I have had a campaign with both primary and secret spreadsheets. They do not generate fun, they're just a maintenance headache. @Printdevil
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@vdonnut The torches thing is interesting as it underlies a lot of OSR procedural gameplay. However, nobody makes the "we've run out of torches mid-dungeon" mistake more than once, so you have a vast amount of mechanical scaffolding in support of an event that will happen once per group.
After that, you're just left with a load of mechanics that the players pay to by-pass by hiring a torch-carrier or buying lanterns. Silly really.
Same applies to not paying your oxygen bill.
I think the torches not being an issue is legitimate in say D&D, but in CoC you can legitimately be quite often in a "lo-bat on phone torch" situation.
One is mechanically boring, the other is a tension amplifier. GM's should know the difference.
The Oxygen bill thing is probably more like hit points, because you imagine things happening to your habitat that are reducing your survival chances, rather than "oops I forget to pay to live"
but again.. a tension amplifier
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@malin I have had a campaign with both primary and secret spreadsheets. They do not generate fun, they're just a maintenance headache. @Printdevil
Skewing this, everyone has a computer at the table in their phone these days, but as Vazh says spreadsheets aren't why any of my players come to the table. The dead ones stopped turning up at all, which after years of reading things like "The Ghost Club" is just churlish because I assumed they'd still manifest.
A pivot though is, in modern games/future games all the players have computers so that would be handling all that for them anyway - so still shouldn't be needed?
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@Taskerland @Printdevil it is a fascinating example of energent gameplay loop like xp for gold + dungeon crawling in medievalowestern boomtown DnD. And just as with DnD loop it is very different than how most people like to play.
Currently we tend to cut out counting and all those tedious but potentially impactful game elements like encumbrance, turns, torches, rations, pounds of donkey food. And mortgage and ship shares.
We focus on different playstyles than players and designers of old.
Is that "we" as in our little tribe on masto though, looking at people actually playing games it still looks very.. "the room is 10x10, you have six arrows, and can move eight feet, roll for initiative" to me
In a weird faux american accent.
That might just be teenagers though, I have no access to other RPG voyeurism
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Skewing this, everyone has a computer at the table in their phone these days, but as Vazh says spreadsheets aren't why any of my players come to the table. The dead ones stopped turning up at all, which after years of reading things like "The Ghost Club" is just churlish because I assumed they'd still manifest.
A pivot though is, in modern games/future games all the players have computers so that would be handling all that for them anyway - so still shouldn't be needed?
Another quick aside, in Sci-Fi (or modern games) how do you handle prepared material which is obviously going to be on a phone or monitor.
the Blade Runner RPG did this quite well by printing some hand outs on acetates. Which I think for some reason made them seem quite..slick and futuristic. Despite my association with transparency printing actually being over head projectors in the early nineties before digital projectors took over.
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@malin I have had a campaign with both primary and secret spreadsheets. They do not generate fun, they're just a maintenance headache. @Printdevil
@Taskerland @malin I think the space for gameplay fun that comes from big numbers and attrition and encumberance and shit like this is settled by video games where the computer can do the tedious mechanical stuff so the rest of the game can flow and keep pace while math is outsourced
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@malin I have had a campaign with both primary and secret spreadsheets. They do not generate fun, they're just a maintenance headache. @Printdevil
@Taskerland Take the blue pill and roll +Bureaucracy for money. Or click here for the red pill and download our app for a fully-immersive techno-exploitation experience!
@Printdevil -
@Taskerland @malin I think the space for gameplay fun that comes from big numbers and attrition and encumberance and shit like this is settled by video games where the computer can do the tedious mechanical stuff so the rest of the game can flow and keep pace while math is outsourced
Oddly a lot of games seem to solve the issue (if it is one) with computer game approach of paper doll diagrams and a fixed number of items per location.
Shiver does that, and I think it's really clanky.
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@Taskerland @malin I think the space for gameplay fun that comes from big numbers and attrition and encumberance and shit like this is settled by video games where the computer can do the tedious mechanical stuff so the rest of the game can flow and keep pace while math is outsourced
@vdonnut D&D 3/ Pathfinder already did this. I once joined a table as the only person without a tablet and had to hard-crunch level gain and loss.
This is the only real horror in RPGs. Never again.
@Taskerland @Printdevil -
@vdonnut D&D 3/ Pathfinder already did this. I once joined a table as the only person without a tablet and had to hard-crunch level gain and loss.
This is the only real horror in RPGs. Never again.
@Taskerland @PrintdevilLegitimate use of fire at the gaming table.
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Skewing this, everyone has a computer at the table in their phone these days, but as Vazh says spreadsheets aren't why any of my players come to the table. The dead ones stopped turning up at all, which after years of reading things like "The Ghost Club" is just churlish because I assumed they'd still manifest.
A pivot though is, in modern games/future games all the players have computers so that would be handling all that for them anyway - so still shouldn't be needed?
@Printdevil I ended up with a database of characters out of necessity. Everyone at the table can pick up multiple characters, and I know enough travellers that people join for weeks then have to go home.
Add that to the constant death, and you end up with a database and the question of whether you manage it or the computer.
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Is that "we" as in our little tribe on masto though, looking at people actually playing games it still looks very.. "the room is 10x10, you have six arrows, and can move eight feet, roll for initiative" to me
In a weird faux american accent.
That might just be teenagers though, I have no access to other RPG voyeurism
@Printdevil I mean, DnD 5e still does a lot of this stuff and it leaks outward but when you take a look at what designers, actual players, showrunners, and even youtubers develop is either totally moving away from it or, in case of OSRish circles, try to come up with procedures and processes and rules that would bring the same notion of play with minimised burden.
The whole "procedures not mechanics" movement was all about "how to keep the torches without counting torches"
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@Printdevil I ended up with a database of characters out of necessity. Everyone at the table can pick up multiple characters, and I know enough travellers that people join for weeks then have to go home.
Add that to the constant death, and you end up with a database and the question of whether you manage it or the computer.
*Use of fire at the gaming table intensifies*
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@Taskerland Take the blue pill and roll +Bureaucracy for money. Or click here for the red pill and download our app for a fully-immersive techno-exploitation experience!
@Printdevil@malin @Taskerland @Printdevil red pill also causes diarrhea
