Tabletop Gaming

 
Hunkered down behind a handful of dice or stack of manuals? Itching to tap, flip, crank, roll, save, or measure? Discuss paper, board, card, and war gaming here.

Most role-playing rule-sets confuse narrative and strategic differences. In an attempt to make the experience of playing a different "type" of character feel different they introduce a multitude of rules to govern the same actions.

Shot in the dark: has anyone ever attempted to play D&D (or any other game system) via a wiki INSTEAD of play-by-post or play-by-email? I'm not interested in comparing play-by-wiki with real-time digital solutions like Fantasy Grounds or Roll20 - I'm focussed on non-real-time comparisons only. There seems to be a healthy number of pros and cons to play-by-wiki vs. play-by-post, and I'm still compiling all the data, but I've seen very few examples of play-by-wiki in the wild - doesn't seem like a popular approach. Trying to understand why.

I would imagine that many of us that have hosted a game have experienced at least once the need and desire to tell a story, only to discover that there's not really many players or participants to tell it to. I have had this problem many times yet decided to damn it all and move forward anyways. Most of the time, this has ended in disaster or at least, very short sessions. At the end of the day it seemed that the adage of "four to a party" was true, that a game couldn't run without that many people.

I had something come up where I was a player at the table considering casting "Darkvision" on a character who had been blinded by a flash of light. I posted my thoughts on the Paizo board (first mistake) and was summarily accused of being illogical and out in left field. I'll re-post my logic here to see what the Greeners think. I should have done that in the first place -- it is just that they already had that topic going.

We often think that it is the job of the GM to do the storytelling in a roleplaying game. Many groups approach the game with this model. The players make a backstory for the characters and the GM provides the plot. This is the normal model that was espoused when we first learned about the "Dungeon Master" and "Game Master." For my RPG project I kept the acronym GM -- but in my usage it means "Game Moderator." "Moderator" has several meanings that improve, expand, and curtail the scope and role of the GM.

"After much reflection on the complexity of the rules: the interaction between various kinds of bonuses, energies, and powers; the immense volume of spell information; and the sheer processing power required to simultaneously track initiatives, spell durations, and a multitude of modifiers. The Univeristy of Woodstock has decided to confer a Bachelors degree on all veteran D&D players who can demonstrate, through live game submissions, that they are able to navigate the game with few errors."

In the age of film, we were comfortable with a lack of control. Shooting a double exposure, for instance, required that you document your shots -- even sketching them out; and then re-load the same film into the camera to shoot the super-imposing image. While you tried to impose some level of control this kind of endeavor was always experimental. Success was always part accident. The artist took some of the credit, but acknowledged that they simply brought elements together in one place and imagined that when the film was developed something else would be revealed.
If we flash-forward to today's age; where so much is pre-processed and post-processed, we find the middle being squeezed. That is the sense that I get when I read modern modules.

 
 

Mystery, and the unsettling sensation of confronting things that are unknown and unexplained, has always been a major part of tabletop roleplay for me as a player. Meeting an adversary whose nature, motivations and capabilities are unknown and alien always increased my enjoyment of whatever game I was playing. And conversely, as a referee, a major part of my enjoyment of the game, almost a fundamental requirement for me to even want to bother being a GM, is to be able to confront my players with unknown and disturbing things that take them out of their comfort zone.

I am trying to put together a quick-start guide for my upcoming RPG project. I want to have some pre-gen characters to help people practice the rule system. I want to highlight how fun some non-combat action sequences can be. To this end I want to see what allure some of the Non-combat characters have. Can you respond with your favourite character, criticisms, ideas, or any other feedback?

So, I mentioned in passing that I want to create my own rules/world. I have some ideas for what I want to incorporate, but I find myself hitting a wall when it comes down to how the game will work. I've only created singular adventures for D&D, Robotech/Macross, L5R, and maybe a couple others, but never anything on this scale. I figured by sharing my thoughts on this, the rest of you could help me see any errors I might be missing or maybe point me in the direction of a company that has this style of adventuring.

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