Pen and Paper!

[Saskwach]

Here's what I would do in this situation:
"Hey, I just failed this skill check. That leads to something boring. Fuck that, let's say this other thing that's far more interesting happens instead!"

That's probably because my time GMing and my experience with less-traditional games has made me very pushy when it comes to fun.

-- Alex

Here I am, about to debate "fun", but anywho.
I disagree. I think death should be a meaningful and omnipresent threat that the DM should not obfuscate. I could go on about this at length but the basic premise is that it's hard for characters to be heroic when everything is pre-ordained by GoDM to be "interesting" at worse. But then what would I know, I play WFRP.

 

[meatloaf231]

PnP RPGs will always trump anything a video game can throw at them, mainly because of the sheer freedom of play. I mean, playing a PnP RPG for the first time was astounding. I was so used to being shoved along by the plot that having no limits on my playing was mind-boggling. The best part is, the GM can just make things up to compensate for a party set on doing something completely irrelevant to the plot.

Heck, my group didn't figure out we were on a tangent until a few sessions after we talked to an injured-looking fellow the GM had just thrown in there for detail's sake. We spoke to him, got off on a mission, and didn't even realize we weren't doing the main campaign until weeks later. His "side-quest" was just that compelling.

That's the power of a good GM.

 

[PedroSteckecilo]

Here's what I would do in this situation:
"Hey, I just failed this skill check. That leads to something boring. Fuck that, let's say this other thing that's far more interesting happens instead!"

That's probably because my time GMing and my experience with less-traditional games has made me very pushy when it comes to fun.

-- Alex

Here I am, about to debate "fun", but anywho.
I disagree. I think death should be a meaningful and omnipresent threat that the DM should not obfuscate. I could go on about this at length but the basic premise is that it's hard for characters to be heroic when everything is pre-ordained by GoDM to be "interesting" at worse. But then what would I know, I play WFRP.

Roll vs. Horrible Death in the Night!

 

[Saskwach]

Here's what I would do in this situation:
"Hey, I just failed this skill check. That leads to something boring. Fuck that, let's say this other thing that's far more interesting happens instead!"

That's probably because my time GMing and my experience with less-traditional games has made me very pushy when it comes to fun.

-- Alex

Here I am, about to debate "fun", but anywho.
I disagree. I think death should be a meaningful and omnipresent threat that the DM should not obfuscate. I could go on about this at length but the basic premise is that it's hard for characters to be heroic when everything is pre-ordained by GoDM to be "interesting" at worse. But then what would I know, I play WFRP.

Roll vs. Horrible Death in the Night!

Hell yes! But then the players ruin it with their pesky Fate points. I try not to complain but I'm sure when they look into my wounded, glistening eyes in those horrible few seconds in which I improvise a calmer fate...well, they see the pain and the fury. And they shudder and weep.
Goddamn I need to start a new WFRP game. That got me in the mood.

 

[Alex_P]

Here I am, about to debate "fun", but anywho.
I disagree. I think death should be a meaningful and omnipresent threat that the DM should not obfuscate. I could go on about this at length but the basic premise is that it's hard for characters to be heroic when everything is pre-ordained by GoDM to be "interesting" at worse. But then what would I know, I play WFRP.

Oh, no, no, "interesting" should most often mean "you get fucked"! That's what heroic stories are made of, after all: sorrow and setbacks!

Simply put, I think the right way to do pretty much any kind of die roll is "Come up with an interesting mostly-good thing that happens if it is a 'success', come up with an interesting mostly-bad thing that happens if it is a 'failure', and then go from there."

Say a player-character is scaling the walls of a pirate fortress and fails a climb check. Falling to your death during what's more or less exposition just sucks. Note how WFRP has Fate points to keep this kind of crap from sucken-ing up the game. (How stupid is it when RPGs try to solve this problem by invalidating the awesomeness of death itself? Resurrection spells: very seldom anything but lame!) My preferred solution is to make something bad but fun happen when you fail that climb check. You fall ignominiously to your death? Yawn. You slip and a loosened peddle and alerts some guards? Awesome!

It's really easy for a GM(*) to get momentarily confused and turn a die roll into "Save vs. The Game Sucks For the Next Hour." Between GMing a bunch and reading/playing games where this process is slightly more explicit, I'm quite used to looking out for that, even when I'm not the GM. I'd rather call it than let the game suck for the next hour, and I generally try to encourage other players to do it to me as well.

(That's not to say that dying like a punk is never appropriate, either. There are some styles and genres where dying like a punk totally fits.)

-- Alex
_________
* - Or an adventure writer -- all but the best 10% seem to do this a lot, sadly.

 

[linchowlewy]

PnP RPGs will always trump anything a video game can throw at them, mainly because of the sheer freedom of play. I mean, playing a PnP RPG for the first time was astounding. I was so used to being shoved along by the plot that having no limits on my playing was mind-boggling. The best part is, the GM can just make things up to compensate for a party set on doing something completely irrelevant to the plot.

Heck, my group didn't figure out we were on a tangent until a few sessions after we talked to an injured-looking fellow the GM had just thrown in there for detail's sake. We spoke to him, got off on a mission, and didn't even realize we weren't doing the main campaign until weeks later. His "side-quest" was just that compelling.

That's the power of a good GM.

i was running a game of paranoia and everyone had died at the end of several weeks of sessions. so after this i decided to ask everyone what they thought their quest was and who they got it from. nobody had the same answer and they were all wrong. so good.

 

[vede]

P&P games are the only RPGs I'm willing to play. Computer games still haven't matched their quality of storytelling or gameplay, and probably won't for a very long time. I'm a GM exclusively, though, because firstly, most people around here usually end up planning out an entire adventure before starting it (mucho badness) or having mindless magic item fetch quests (thanks whoever said that) or making the games all anime-ish (I can't stand anime). And when I GM I have control (mostly) over what happens in the world, and with my GMing style, the game can be just as surprising for me as it can for the players. Seriously, in my current campaign, I really only planned for the whole thing to (probably) culminate in elves building a ship (that's a big thing in my setting; ships are objects of legend, and have never been successfully built yet, attempted, but never succeeded) and sailing into the "Endless Water" in some random direction. Now the elves are at war with the dwarves because some demon decided that the elves didn't need to build a ship because if the humans can sail places (using elven technology) they can spread their inferior race and the world will be a shithole, so she duped the dwarves into hating the elves and tried to dupe the elves into hating the dwarves (they had just recently started being peaceful again, so tensions were easily raised) by sending assassins to both sides in disguise as an agent for the other side, but one of the assassins found out what was going on and started trying to stop it from happening (that's one of the players) and got caught up in the scholar caravan (returning from a trip to the gnomish city to try and get gnomish scholars on board with the elves and their boat-building) and now the players are acting as diplomats between the dwarves (who have already captured the elven city with their military superiority) and the elves, and have agreed upon a one-week ceasefire for the person who tricked the assassins into doing their jobs to prove that she exists and that the elves aren't trying to pull a super-conspiracy on the dwarves. Yeah, totally different from what I expected.

Also, this post is required to become a plug at the GMF. Here. Very few members, no admin, but we're working on that, and we're trying to get as many people as we can to join in to help keep things going and... well, have more people to talk to...

 

[Saskwach]

(That's not to say that dying like a punk is never appropriate, either. There are some styles and genres where dying like a punk totally fits.)

Chief among them WFRP.
If through an entire campaign you've failed to leave at least one player in a pool of his own lifeblood you've failed at Warhammer Fantasy itself. Which isn't to say Fate points aren't cool; they have their own dramatic tension attached (ohgodohgodohgod that was my last one! Now all those nasty sword swings are for reals!).

 

[stompy]

I've played GURPS for about 2 years now... and it's a blast, since the friends I play it with are bat-shit insane, so things are always interesting. Playing with munchkins and point-whores (I'm one myself), and with maybe one decent player, we end up wasting our time raving (I shit you not, we raved for a session), rather than finishing our quest.

P&P games are great, and I don't see them as something to compare to video games. P&P for me is a more social activity, while video games are more of 'alone-time'. Both are fun, but cater to different areas of enjoyment.

Coming up, a few of my friends have invited me for a zombie-apocalypse campaign. It'll be a *****, since I'm used to hero-characters (125-200 points) and the GM is only allowing us 75 point characters... it'll be interesting though, seeing whether our party will survive. Probably not, knowing the GM.

 

[Saskwach]

I'm a GM exclusively, though, because firstly, most people around here usually end up planning out an entire adventure before starting it (mucho badness) or having mindless magic item fetch quests (thanks whoever said that)

Hear, hear. In my first campaigns I thought it was bad that I really didn't know where I was going with certain plot hooks. Then I learned that this left the players the chance to push into the setting however they saw fit - and made it much cooler when everything coalesced into something bigger.
Damn I've got an RPG itch now. Curse you, Escapist.

 

[linchowlewy]

yay a PnP forum. i'm overloaded with joy. incidently i have the coolest d20 ever.

In my opinion planning out a full adventure is a bad thing but you always need a presence that will drive it towards an awesome boss battle (also these are a must and must be solved through logic alone) sadly i can't use that awesome boat idea because i just bought the Runequest books with all the history and i want to make the most of it.

 

[hellthins]

I currently run a DnD 4.0 game with inspiration from Lovecraft(Screw it, it's got more balanced classes. It hasn't been hit by splatbooks like 3.5 has been. And when it does, ha ha, balance. I'll just dump the stupid Dragonborn lore and the retconned Tiefling crap), a Hunters: The Vigil game with inspiration from X-Com, and a Dark Heresy game with inspiration again from Lovecraft and Silent Hill (Replace fog with dust). They're incredibly enjoyable and I'm trying to infuse in each of them a greater meaning. Well, at least for my DnD campaign I'm trying to infuse a sense of the need to stand up against the arrayed forces of evil even if that means sacrifice.

While I love vidja games, Pen and Paper games have always felt better. They're just a lot harder to set up and run. But, to draw from an example from my own players, in video games if you were told by the assistant to a major source of information to 'go away, he's busy', you'd pretty much have to leave.

In Pen and Paper? You ram a damn ambulance through the wall and demand to speak to him now and get an improvised mission involving the Nosferatu clan that wasn't anywhere in the planning.

That and be offered, and accepted the offer, to backstab your team mates from the big bad in exchange for a good position in the coming empire and, while in the end be kicked into the machine feeding the big bad Specter and have the loli wraith/specter you work for get killed, still manage to screw over your friends by letting the big bad shade get free to destroy the city and screw over the heirarchy.

Lot of good memories of Old World of Darkness.

As a side note, I think the best Pen and Paper games are the ones that are not so rigidly defined. Games like WoD, Dork Hearsay, WHFRP, and Hero System give themselves better to improv and making things up as you go along than DnD and its ilk. And while DnD is fun, improv is the soul of pen and paper.

 

[linchowlewy]

is dark heresy any fun? because as i've said i've been trying to get into it. is there any space in dark heresy to play as the other races or does it pretty much limit you to human?

 

[Silver]

As long as no game gives me the oppurtunity to play an impoverished illusionist turned beggar, or a dancer from Ukraine dreaming off a future in broadway, viewing the current zombie apocalypse as a minor obstacle just inches away from loosing his mind entirely, or allows me to avoid combat with a few clever words, then I'm going to keep playing pen and paper games.

Hell, I probably would anyway, it's a lovely social activity, and I love coming up with interesting characters, and settings. Lately I've had a tendencity to work the same world simultaneously as a setting for roleplaying and games I'm working on. Gives some nice perspective. Really neat.

 

[TomWhitbrook]

is dark heresy any fun? because as i've said i've been trying to get into it. is there any space in dark heresy to play as the other races or does it pretty much limit you to human?

It's a great game, I enjoy running it, but you really have to have players who either already 'get' the setting or alternatively explain the world very well beforehand before you jump in. It really isn't tolkeinesque fantasy rpg #951 in terms of accessibility. The system itself is relatively simple, if you like d100 type games.
As for races, really you can be only human, but there are several different sub types of human depending on world of origin such as feral or hive world, with small but significant differences between each one. It's not the sort of game where an ork could team up with a mutie and a space marine and go loot tomb worlds together, but you could reasonably stat up some of the abhumans like ratlings or ogryns for players if you really wanted.

 

[Flangle]

Reading this thread has got me thinking, i really want to try one of these things but i doubt anyone i know would be willing to or anything like that.. is there anything online that may amount to this or am i screwed?

 

[hellthins]

is dark heresy any fun? because as i've said i've been trying to get into it. is there any space in dark heresy to play as the other races or does it pretty much limit you to human?

HERETICAL XENOS LOVING SCUM, THE ONLY RACE OF ANY INTEREST IS HUMANITY

It's fun, but fair warning. It's very, very brutal when it comes to combat. Everyone has really low HP/Wounds, so you're mostly just relying on your toughness and armor to reduce damage.

Also, it has a corruption and insanity meter. When you get enough insanity points (30, 60, and 90) you pick up fun little derangement. When you get enough corruption points (Every 10 points) you get little malignancies that alter how you behave and every 30 points you get mutations (With 90 points being a major mutation).

Major mutations are nasty. My Psyker got a major mutation that cause his body to be studded with eyes, and the next session he got a full body exam. He didn't survive.

 

[Saskwach]

is dark heresy any fun? because as i've said i've been trying to get into it. is there any space in dark heresy to play as the other races or does it pretty much limit you to human?

I can't say how fun it is as I've had little chance to play it but I can regurgitate some things I've heard and know. Firstly, it's the WFRP system...in SPAAAACE! (Shocking, I know.) The biggest difference, though, is the scrapping of the career system as it stands in WFRP (a bummer, but somewhat understandable, I guess, sorta, kinda) for a system that is still about "careers" but if it were called a "class" system ala DnD no one would complain. No multiclassing support - only some very limited and weird progression tables from which which you pick skill upgrades. These are meant to represent a difference between a social assassin and a sniper, for instance, though they both begin under the Assassin career.
There are two limits to adventures - the Inquisition, and the Calixis sector. The book is written exclusively about working for an Inquisitor in the Calixis sector. If this is cool - or you as a DM don't need help with the rest of the setting and whatever rules changes you might need - then go. If not, you're in some trouble. The focus allows the book to go deep rather than thin as spread butter, but if, for example, you wanted to play a game about the Tau you'd be utterly, utterly on your own: the Calixis sector is way on the other side of the galaxy and none of the common Xenos are statted up or made playable with the rules as written. Having said that, it really gets you in the mood for being an Inquisitorial flunky in Calixis. Man do I need to start up a game of this, too.
So no; if you want to be any of the Xenos you've got to figure that out yourself. If you want to be a Space Marine, ditto (though that's somewhat easier: increase the relevant stats, add power armour and you're done). If you want to play as Guardsmen fighting the Nids in the galactic south then half of the book is useless to you except as fodder to reshuffle and rename - and sometimes not even that. The game is best for Inquisitorial play and only as good as the DM for everything else.
Oh, and there's no rules for vehicles or spaceships. In Warhammer Fourty-Frigging-Kay. Major oversight.
(I've heard many of the Xenos will be statted up in an upcoming Monster Manual-esque book but the source I got it from gave a tentative, semi-offical "I can't say, but this is the Calixis sector and the Tau have very slow ships - think about that," to the question of Tau (and by extension to anything else that literally can't turn up there, which thankfully is little else). Podcast source here. Be prepared to listen for a while or skip forward as necessary. [http://accidentalsurvivors.libsyn.com/index.php?post_id=399710] So hang on for a few months and see if that book helps you out.

Question for anyone with the info: what are the core books I need for Mongoose Traveller, and what are the best books from previous editions for fluff/ideas/rules/extras? I'd always been interested and now I hear they're putting the Babylon 5 setting into the Trav system and I'm very psyched. Help a gamer out.

 

[Alex_P]

Reading this thread has got me thinking, i really want to try one of these things but i doubt anyone i know would be willing to or anything like that.. is there anything online that may amount to this or am i screwed?

Some people play games online through various text-chat or voice interfaces.

Several different approaches to the activity:
- Playing a game designed for pen-and-paper/tabletop play using the Internet to communicate.
- More-or-less "freeform" roleplaying using the Internet to communicate.
- Playing games on a special chat server that allows participants to put some of the rules into code (look up "MUSH" or "MUD").
I broke them down this way because each has its own little subculture. I'm sure there are more.

For actually playing a pen-and-paper game online, the biggest difference is whether you want to use virtual miniatures (many pen-and-paper games have combat rules based around moving little tokens or figurines around on some kind of map or grid). If you do, there are specialized applications that provide chat, die-rolling, a map, and usually scriptable character sheets as well. OpenRPG is one of the most well-known. Wizards of the Coast recently wrote software like that especially for playing D&D 4th Edition online; I think you have to pay some kind of small subscription fee for it.

If you don't want virtual minis on a map, all you really need to play is IRC and maybe Skype.

The main purpose of minis and a map is to add tactical complexity to combat scenes. They tend to slow down the resolution of combat scenes significantly as well. I generally don't play pen-and-paper for tactical combat anyway, so these days I prefer to avoid games with minis.

Some people do "play-by-post" gaming instead. That's kinda just like leaving each other messages on a forum. Play tends to be very slow but you pretty much just post whenever instead of having organized sessions -- although some groups impose serious time commitments. Look at the forum games and RP forum for a whiff of what that's like.

Hope that's at least vaguely helpful.

-- Alex

 

[PedroSteckecilo]

Speaking of Pen and Paper, my last session went over like crap. Now I've got my players holed up in a building while an apache circles around it. This is a bad thing because I planned for a car chase but they just stayed in the building the whole time.