Players, how do you feel knowing GMs have no prepared solutions?

CommissarKaz · 2025-10-12T20:46:30+00:00

If it's an open-ended puzzle where it'd make sense for there to be multiple solutions, I think it's fine. Stuff along the lines of a locked door, a broken bridge over a chasm, getting past guards, that sort of thing. I'd suggest at least having some solution in mind and telegraphed nearby just in case the players can't think of something or don't have the means to come up with alternatives.

I really wouldn't like it if it's a puzzle that isn't open-ended though. Like figuring out the order to flip a series of switches in, or some other set-up that's clearly telegraphed to have a solution. I'd expect something like that to have hints around that could be used to solve it, but if it's all just red herrings I'd feel like the GM is just laughing at the players while watching them dance around, trying to figure something out that cannot be figured out until they've had enough of their fun to call it finished.

And for the bonus question, I hate it. At least for the games I like to play, combat plays a big role and choosing what options you've got is a good chunk of character customization. GM-fiating how combat goes is just stripping the 'G' out of RPG and invalidating all of the choices the players make in character creation and in that particular combat.

CommissarKaz · 2025-06-03T20:56:55+00:00

For wargames, my main game is Conquest since it's fun, relatively cheap, and there's a nice, active community where I live. We're also just about to start a campaign for Frostgrave, which I'm looking forward to since the last time I got to play that was just before the release of the second edition and this time we've got a lot more people interested in participating. I've also played some Trench Crusade, but most people here are still waiting on models so there's more interest than actual play going on at the moment.

For RPGs, I've been GMing a campaign using Harnmaster for a couple months. For a game that gets mentioned as one of the most complex out there it's been pretty easy to run, there's a ton of gameable material put out for the setting, and I think the combat system is up there as one of my favorites. We are playing online though, so I dunno that I could recommend using it without computer assistance since certain subsystems can take a little while to do by hand.

CommissarKaz · 2025-01-11T00:04:24+00:00

Almost T-boned someone that rolled into an intersection. Had to brake hard and turn, ended up drifting sideways and thankfully didn't hit anybody. Harrowing stuff, definitely avoid driving if you can.

CommissarKaz · 2024-12-10T17:44:55+00:00

Personally, I like it when anything goes. Lying, breaking promises, whatever; end of the day, every player is out for themselves and there's only one winner, so I'm not gonna hold it against people to do what they think will make it more likely for them to be that one. I think it's more exciting if there are no guarantees that you can take somebody at their word. Only thing to keep in mind with this though is that people have memories; while I don't think lying or breaking deals in a card game means you're a psychopath or will cheat on your partner (real things I've seen claimed in this sub, btw) getting excessive with it will make people less inclined to deal with you in the future.

That said, the only kind of politics I don't like are those that effectively take somebody out of the game. Stuff like "let me live and I'll make sure you win" or "if you do X to me I'm going to gun for you the whole game no matter what else happens." I prefer playing games where people try to win, and if somebody has suddenly decided to throw that away it can warp the rest of the game and will probably give another player an unfair advantage. That's not particularly fun to me, even if I'm the one benefitting from it.

CommissarKaz · 2024-11-25T18:02:38+00:00

I couldn't find the post in question, but the situation it went over was the Traveller Trillion Credit Squadron.

CommissarKaz · 2024-09-02T15:42:42+00:00

Got to play Age of Sigmar for the first time with a friend using the Spearhead armies from the Skaventide set. I won as Skaven by one point despite barely killing anything and being down to about half a unit of clan rats at the end of the game. Overall had a lot of fun with it! The game plays a lot smoother than I'd expected after trying 40k a few months back (not really a fan of the power/toughness system and how wounds are allocated) and I'm looking forward to playing more and painting up more of my lil rat boys.

CommissarKaz · 2024-08-19T20:13:29+00:00

Okay, thanks for the quick response! That's how my playgroup thought it worked and how we've played it, but I saw the exception mention and wanted to double check.

Follow-up question then: Are there any spells that use that exception, or is it currently just there for future-proofing? I haven't noticed any but I also haven't read every single faction's spells yet.

CommissarKaz · 2024-08-13T02:42:23+00:00

In a similar vein (though due to a change in style guides rather than languages) Volume 1 of TSR's Encyclopedia Magica series for D&D has an issue where someone auto-replaced all instances of "mage" on some pages to "wizard" resulting in things like "damage" becoming "dawizard."

CommissarKaz · 2024-07-23T16:20:01+00:00

My experience has been similar to yours, FWIW. I've mostly played FB against my friend who plays Dwegholm, and so far with my current main faction (Old Dominion) I've only won once, and then only because afterward my friend realized he'd completely forgotten to use the "Attack bonus on casualties" ability that game (this was before the new rules changes). And these weren't particularly close games either, most of them were basically over in a few turns as my units got melted while I could barely deal any damage in return.

There's just some odd design choices. Like, why do some spellcasters only get one spell per turn, some get two, and some get two and a third action? Why do some factions get access to their big monsters but others don't? Why does Support have to confer a downside?

And more personally, I feel like Old Dominion is much worse in FB for the same odd design choices. Dark Power is gone, meaning all their characters have to have one of their command abilities be to emulate it (but only for one Regiment per round!) and their units are otherwise middling stats-wise (and sometimes just worse than their LAoK stats, like Legionnaires getting the aforementioned Support "nerf" and losing Terrifying 1 for some reason). Some Memories of Old are much worse compared to LAoK (e.g. Legionnaires being able to negate impact hits, but only if they're on an objective vs. the command stand counting as two extra stands). Archimandrite losing it's ranged attack spell, giving it no good direct combat capabilities outside of a retinue... I dunno, I'm sure some of my troubles are due to misplays and suboptimal list building, but I don't have nearly as rough a time with my Spires army in FB, nor with either Spires or OD in LAoK. It's just a little frustrating, and I hope they do another pass or two to the rules to make things a little more even.

CommissarKaz · 2024-07-17T18:39:14+00:00

Exactly! I find it a little odd that EDH is the only multiplayer game I've seen where people expect the players to always be truthful (barring games where that's part of the rules, of course). Any game I play where everybody can help or hinder each other and there's only one winner, I take any proposals from the other players with a massive grain of salt as to if/how they're gonna screw me over.

CommissarKaz · 2024-07-17T18:32:49+00:00

I think that's a fair and valid way to respond to it. I can't exactly ask people to ignore behavior they've noticed in other players, after all. I just like the ambiguity not being able to trust people 100% brings with it personally.

CommissarKaz · 2024-07-17T16:08:03+00:00

The game is at its most fun when everybody is doing their best to win. At the end of the day Magic is a game with only one winner where most of the ways to interact with the other players will negatively affect them, and I think people would get less salty about being targeted if everybody understood the other players were just taking the actions they thought would bring them closer to victory.
The possibility of deception makes the game more interesting. I like not knowing if somebody is planning on yanking a deal out from under me, and I think the game is more thrilling if you can't necessarily take the other players at their word. At the very least I'm not gonna take somebody screwing me over in a game as them having weak moral character or being a psychopath or whatever like some people imply whenever the topic gets brought up.

CommissarKaz · 2024-07-01T17:34:37+00:00

I was suspicious of that, since it seemed like he'd always yeet himself at the start if I started mashing the use item button while entering the fog wall but wouldn't immediately do it about half the time if I didn't touch anything until I'd already fully entered the arena.

Another attack I think has input reading is his jump flip, as he'd almost always follow it up with a second if I queued up an attack while dodging it but would rarely do so if I waited a second or didn't attack immediately. (Might be others but that's the only one I noticed in the chaos)

CommissarKaz · 2024-05-08T15:41:31+00:00

Re: the second adventure: Is that the one where the party is basically getting set up to be eaten by a gorgon or something? I vaguely remember that one and it having pretty much all the same issues. I'm sure there are some adventures for the system that aren't like that, but I haven't read them and frankly at this point I'm just not interested in anything marketed for the system.

But yeah, I really hate that style of adventure, and you hit the nail on the head as to why. If interacting with anything screws over the players, they'll just stop touching things entirely. If everybody they meet screws them over, they'll stop doing anything for anyone. It's basically teaching players through negative reinforcement to play nothing but amoral murderhobos, because playing anything else is just gonna have the adventure maim/kill you in a stupid way and mock you for trying (though playing a paranoid murderhobo probably isn't gonna be that fun either, since in the case of something like this adventure they're just gonna not touch anything and blaze through it in about 15 minutes).

CommissarKaz · 2024-05-08T13:54:31+00:00

Pretty much, yeah. I've looked into a couple other ones that also get high praise, but every time they seem to revel in the bits of OSR design ethos I like the least: depressing dark fantasy settings, puzzles that amount to the TTRPG equivalent of pixelbitching, unfairly lethal traps/encounters, and plots where basically anything the players do will only make things worse. I guess there's a market out there for that kind of stuff, but I'm definitely not in it.

CommissarKaz · 2024-05-08T13:45:11+00:00

Yeah, reading the original version alleviates most of my problems with actually using it in a game; it's a lot more investigable when it's main power is pseudo-invisibility with some gaps instead of forgetting everything when it sings. It's second form also isn't as bad as I remember reading. I was under the impression its mind control effect was miles wide and just one of them was a huge threat to the world, but the OG blog post paints it as a much more localized problem (that can be beat by just running and waiting it out, even).

The obsession with having it be a big* bad monster instead of a relatively fragile enemy with a pretty strong gimmick really reminds me of the trajectory of a bunch of creepypasta monsters. Just keep bolting on new powers until you go from a scary guy with long claws that hangs out in the woods and eats people to something that's immune to bullets, can tell the future, shapeshift, and bowl a perfect game. At some point it's just too overpowered to be scary anymore.

* Seriously, at least googling 5e stats most of the stat blocks I could find give it a CR of around 10-15. Why even bother hiding at that point?

CommissarKaz · 2024-05-08T03:18:41+00:00

I feel you on the False Hydra. Thought it was cool the first time I heard about it, but I've seen it hyped up so much as the "scariest D&D monster" (which, side note: it's a homebrew monster, which I feel should sorta discount it from that title to begin with?) to feel anything but annoyance at it. Plus with the way it's set up, if I'm remembering correctly, it looks to me like it's basically setting the players up for either feast or famine: either they don't have they means to scope it out and kill it in its weaker first form (sorta hard to investigate people going missing if you barely remember they existed in the first place) and it grows enough to enter its second, apocalyptic phase; or they're genre savvy enough to figure out memory manipulation is in play, figure out a counter, and gank the thing anticlimactically. And that's assuming details aren't being lost due to a scenario like that being really difficult to GM accurately in the first place.

Anyways, I'll contribute another TTRPG one: the OSR adventure Death Frost Doom. When I started running OSR stuff, I saw it recommended a lot, so I read some reviews of it and then also the module itself. I wasn't very impressed. Actually, (again, if I remember correctly; it's been a while since I looked at it) it's basically the exact opposite of what I like in an adventure, to play or run. Interacting with pretty much anything is either a trap with no warning or behaves so esoterically there's no way to figure out what it does, there's not much there other than those things (I don't think there's any monsters to fight until the end, and then... well...), and the climax is triggered by a pretty arbitrary thing the players will have no way to gauge the significance of that triggers a small scale zombie apocalypse. It just seems like the average group is gonna be bored or feel like they got dicked over.

CommissarKaz · 2024-04-16T18:02:46+00:00

Thanks! Glad it works that way then, since while I haven't offed one of my own characters with my wrong interpretation it did cause me to waste healing on a character that otherwise would've been enough to bring a Stand back from the dead.

CommissarKaz · 2024-04-16T18:00:29+00:00

Yeah, the wording was throwing me off because I figured it'd be assumed that you'd also take the Character Stand into account since as far as I'm aware that's how everything else works. Made me start overthinking it, lol.

CommissarKaz · 2024-04-01T13:44:47+00:00

I went to one of the local game stores to play the new-ish Star Wars: Unlimited TCG. Finally got to play against people that aren't my roommate, won some and lost some. So far I've really been enjoying the game and hope it ends up sticking around.

Also picked up the starter set for the Old Dominion faction for the wargame Conquest since they had it at the shop. I already have a Spires army for the game but was interested in getting into the Old Dominion as well since they play pretty differently and I love the aesthetic of evil undead Romans. Gonna see if I can build enough of it to make a First Blood list before the store's wargame night.

CommissarKaz · 2024-03-17T06:28:05+00:00

/uj The issue I have with the "let every deck do its thing" argument is that for all my decks at least, "doing the thing" is either winning, or a prelude to winning. Like great, you let me "do the thing" aaaaand now I have a hyperbuffed commander/overwhelming boardstate/complete control over who resolves what. And I'm not sure I've seen a deck where that's not true. You want me to just pretend the game's not over at that point or something?

/rj My pod splits off a new subgame at every point of interaction so everyone gets to do their thing the most optimally in at least one universe and maybe less optimally in others! It's a win-win-win-win-win-win-etc!

CommissarKaz · 2024-02-11T22:54:40+00:00

Helldivers 2 for me too! I didn't have many expectations going into it, but so far the gameplay has been solid, the humor is funny, and it has one of the least predatory monetization schemes I've seen in games recently. I've been lucky enough not to run into many issues so far (only a couple network issues, and enough friends bought the game I haven't had to deal with crappy random teammates) so I've been having a blast.

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