I read a post today about someone wanting to play an OSR game and then cooling on it quite rapidly because the GM presented them with a river to cross and they couldn't work out how to do it.
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@Printdevil Yes. It's moving from board-games and MMORPGs into TTRPGs and expecting there to be a button on your character sheet that you can press.
@Taskerland @Printdevil Seeing this post in isolation I thought you were complaining about a different thing I also complain about: players whose main experience is on roll20 and similar who have trouble grasping "look at skill on sheet, roll the dice, compare the numbers" as distinct from "click skill on sheet, click 'standard difficulty', read off 'success'".
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@Taskerland @Printdevil Seeing this post in isolation I thought you were complaining about a different thing I also complain about: players whose main experience is on roll20 and similar who have trouble grasping "look at skill on sheet, roll the dice, compare the numbers" as distinct from "click skill on sheet, click 'standard difficulty', read off 'success'".
Is that a problem with people you actually know, or just random humans who are learning RPGs
It just seems to come out of such a different culture from my experience.
My experience is of course watching "The Eight Diagram Pole Fighter" by the Shaw Brothers. Which has the best gaming plan in it ever.
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@Taskerland @Printdevil Seeing this post in isolation I thought you were complaining about a different thing I also complain about: players whose main experience is on roll20 and similar who have trouble grasping "look at skill on sheet, roll the dice, compare the numbers" as distinct from "click skill on sheet, click 'standard difficulty', read off 'success'".
@RogerBW @Printdevil I'm reminded of when I started drifting back towards the hobby, I decided to run Mines of Phandelver and I was *horrified* by how bad an introductory adventure it was.
The first encounter has a load of Goblins attacking you, forcing you into mass-combat as your first encounter with the rules.
If I were to write an introductory adventure for a broad audience, I would start with the fundamentals of engaging with a fictional world.
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@RogerBW @Printdevil I'm reminded of when I started drifting back towards the hobby, I decided to run Mines of Phandelver and I was *horrified* by how bad an introductory adventure it was.
The first encounter has a load of Goblins attacking you, forcing you into mass-combat as your first encounter with the rules.
If I were to write an introductory adventure for a broad audience, I would start with the fundamentals of engaging with a fictional world.
"Light preparatory alchemy, some spadework, and a sabbat"
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It's like people who are incredibly resistant to not only talking in character but even somewhat abstracted communication with NPCs in the 'I explain to him that...' form.
These are skills that are basic and fundamental to the hobby and I think a lot of game design over the last 15 years has been trying to build scaffold allowing you to bypass the basic skills and conceptual elements of the hobby.
The idea that you can be in the hobby long-enough to be involved in playtesting scenarios for a magazine and have an entire group of characters drown themselves in a river because there's no 'pass river' skill is really worrying.
Those people probably have 150k followers on YouTube.
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The idea that you can be in the hobby long-enough to be involved in playtesting scenarios for a magazine and have an entire group of characters drown themselves in a river because there's no 'pass river' skill is really worrying.
Those people probably have 150k followers on YouTube.
@Taskerland i do think it really boils down to "did they have fun drowning in the river, tho"
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@Taskerland i do think it really boils down to "did they have fun drowning in the river, tho"
@vortiwife That is how I tend to run my Call of Cthulhu characters but the post I stumbled upon and the playtesters reports suggest that fun was not had.
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@vortiwife That is how I tend to run my Call of Cthulhu characters but the post I stumbled upon and the playtesters reports suggest that fun was not had.
@Taskerland WEAK (ON THEIR PART)
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@Taskerland WEAK (ON THEIR PART)
@vortiwife It's bad GMing too... I'm not sure why the GM didn't just say something when they started Virginia Wolfe-ing themselves but 'If something isn't clear, ask questions' is a really basic skill and it's sad that people aren't acquiring it.
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Is that a problem with people you actually know, or just random humans who are learning RPGs
It just seems to come out of such a different culture from my experience.
My experience is of course watching "The Eight Diagram Pole Fighter" by the Shaw Brothers. Which has the best gaming plan in it ever.
@Printdevil @Taskerland I actually met it running open signup games online. (And that was _after_ it had been filtered by people who were prepared to use a straight videoconference system rather than actual roll20 or one of its clones.)
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I read a post today about someone wanting to play an OSR game and then cooling on it quite rapidly because the GM presented them with a river to cross and they couldn't work out how to do it.
Players moaning about misty-stepping and athletics rolls.
Reminiscent of Chris Bissette writing an adventure for an MCDM magazine and editor reporting that it caused a series of TPKs because 5e players just walked into the river because there wasn't a 'pass river' skill.
@Taskerland there's a lot of obvious things to be said about the dangers of dragon game's rigid, procedural aspects being forced upon people who don't choose them consciously, just don't know any better but I think it'd be worth investigating how much of this is reinforced and solidified by bad, self-taught GMing of people who just bought a D&D manual and maybe read some dungeon-oriented blogs and just ran with their assumptions borne of having played Baldur's Gate back in the day.
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@Taskerland there's a lot of obvious things to be said about the dangers of dragon game's rigid, procedural aspects being forced upon people who don't choose them consciously, just don't know any better but I think it'd be worth investigating how much of this is reinforced and solidified by bad, self-taught GMing of people who just bought a D&D manual and maybe read some dungeon-oriented blogs and just ran with their assumptions borne of having played Baldur's Gate back in the day.
@lichtenstein I think WotC has always been desperate to bring first MMORPG people and then boardgame people into the hobby and they have adapted the game to fit their preference for unambiguous, interpretation-free procedural play and as a result, fundamental skills have not been introduced.
I also think there's been an awful lot of newbs playing with newbs and learning from newbs and so you now have players only encountering basic skills and concepts months and years after entering hobby.
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The idea that you can be in the hobby long-enough to be involved in playtesting scenarios for a magazine and have an entire group of characters drown themselves in a river because there's no 'pass river' skill is really worrying.
Those people probably have 150k followers on YouTube.
@Taskerland "We tried to cross but our beards became waterlogged and we sank"
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@Printdevil @Taskerland I actually met it running open signup games online. (And that was _after_ it had been filtered by people who were prepared to use a straight videoconference system rather than actual roll20 or one of its clones.)
Did you brand everyone with a scarlet letter?
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@Taskerland "We tried to cross but our beards became waterlogged and we sank"
@Printdevil But imagine how those failed stand-up comedians would emote as they marched into the water? A true golden age for the hobby.
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@Taskerland I'm not only not at home to this, I'm camped out against it with a sign.
@Printdevil @Taskerland I hate this shit about VTTs with passion. Digital interface prompts not only ignorance of mechanics (which is not necessarily a bad thing) AND relegates fiction into binary world of computer.
It is the thing that let's me play and it pollutes the culture xd
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@RogerBW @Printdevil I'm reminded of when I started drifting back towards the hobby, I decided to run Mines of Phandelver and I was *horrified* by how bad an introductory adventure it was.
The first encounter has a load of Goblins attacking you, forcing you into mass-combat as your first encounter with the rules.
If I were to write an introductory adventure for a broad audience, I would start with the fundamentals of engaging with a fictional world.
@Taskerland @RogerBW @Printdevil Given a few bad dice rolls, it’s very possible that that first encounter will end in a TPK. When I’m running something for people who haven’t played before I give them a chance to make a skill roll for something like shooting a bottle off a wall or arm-wrestling their friend, where they can fail and learn about pushing a roll or facing a non lethal consequence.
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@Printdevil But imagine how those failed stand-up comedians would emote as they marched into the water? A true golden age for the hobby.
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@Taskerland @RogerBW @Printdevil Given a few bad dice rolls, it’s very possible that that first encounter will end in a TPK. When I’m running something for people who haven’t played before I give them a chance to make a skill roll for something like shooting a bottle off a wall or arm-wrestling their friend, where they can fail and learn about pushing a roll or facing a non lethal consequence.
@satsuma This wasn't about understanding the mechanics though... this was about understanding that it's a fictional world and it's okay to go 'Is there anything that we might be able to use to fashion a raft?' Understanding how to push dice is a skill that should come after the basic processes of engaging with a fictional world. @RogerBW @Printdevil
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@Taskerland @RogerBW @Printdevil Given a few bad dice rolls, it’s very possible that that first encounter will end in a TPK. When I’m running something for people who haven’t played before I give them a chance to make a skill roll for something like shooting a bottle off a wall or arm-wrestling their friend, where they can fail and learn about pushing a roll or facing a non lethal consequence.
@satsuma @Taskerland @Printdevil I dimly recall the sample adventure in the Games Workshop RQ2 did this. There's something up on that cliff, make a climbing roll, There's lunch on the hoof, make a Bow roll. That kind of thing.
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