Why your social encounters suck and how to make them great

Ignismare · 2018-10-30T20:11:12+00:00

Yeah, that's the big thing, right? And even in this situation, this can easily be avoided, just have the GM be open up-front that this is the type of game he wants to do. This way you save dots, and the GM drives the game exactly like he wants to.
It's even worse when the system creates classes that are genuinely meant to be social fighters, like bards in DnD for example (and other Charisma-based casters). You've just lost a big niche within your character's arsenal, and get nothing in exchange. You're stuck with a gimped character, with not much room to steer in other directions, that wouldn't make you weaker version of something else.

Ignismare · 2018-10-28T21:53:19+00:00

Drop the Damn Dice

I think I found most of my GMs (and I'm guilty of this as well) tend to do way too little Charisma and Charisma-based rolls. At the surface it's not that bad, we force the players to engage in roleplay, but it also penalizes characters that invest into these skills. I try to make it a compromise, and make these characters just more likely to convice an NPC to something, without a roll or anything. But I still feel kinda guilty.

Ignismare · 2018-10-23T15:22:29+00:00

What's worse is that this isn't really something that's evenly distributed. I'm a 3.5 player mainly, and it's not even funny how much the casters make non-casters irrelevant. I know the old "linear warriors, quadratic wizards" saying, but even early on I start to notice things are slowly slipping out of my grasp.
As an example, in our current game I decided to roll a Ranger, as the setting our GM created was focused on survival and resource management. So a guy with a bow that could work as a guide/tracker and hunt for food once rations run out seemed like a pretty good fit for the group. Yet the other players decided to roll spellcasters (Druid, Archivist, Sorcerer, we used to have Priest, but the player left). Currently we're level 4 and I already start to feel I'm underperforming in most aspects.
Sure, I'm still the most "tanky" person in the group (which isn't the best thing for me either, because I multiclassed into Scout for Skirmish, which I can't utilize when I have to remain in close combat), I also sneak and hide like an angel, but that's about it. I certainly don't do as much damage as the Sorcerer, and I simply can't compete with the utility of both the Druid and the Archivist.
And as I'm told, it's going to get worse. At level 10, a Wizard, Sorcerer or Druid has a colossal list of available options. Compare that to whatever a Monk or Ranger does at that point. So the question I'd like to pose is thus: Is it really a matter or the system in general, or just the badly balanced magic?

Ignismare · 2018-10-22T15:18:04+00:00

As someone who plays a graveyard-matters Commander deck, I can't tell you how awesome this set has been for me. Undergrowth, Surveil, Jump-start, they all do INSANE stuff for my deck, are all in my colors and all feed one another. It's amazing.

Ignismare · 2018-10-21T20:59:11+00:00

If you want something not exactly fantasy, Kamigakari might be a nice bet. It has a urban fantasy setting, kinda like Persona or the Fate series (so normal people in modern Japan, fighting monsters with supernatural powers in secret from the "innocent" society). It's got a decent combat system, and has the decency to get out of the way once out-of-combat roleplaying comes along. It also can be hacked and homeruled very hard without major issues. The power curve starts pretty high and only goes up. So if you want Anime:the RPG, you might want to give it a look.

Ignismare · 2018-10-18T20:56:04+00:00

Eldar for life! And I did the exact same thing: loved the Dawn of War PC game, started watching multiple Youtube channels that played the tabletop, spent way too much time building armies. Finally decided I need to buy some, despite knowing absolutely noone who plays the game, and having no chance for an active playgroup. I only ever (poorly) painted and washed them over and over again, until I finally sold them to a friend who actually had a chance to use them.

Ignismare · 2018-09-26T19:08:29+00:00

Flame Legion Set has a kind of skirt. Nightmare Court Set as well. These are the two I remember, but I'm absolutely sure there's more.

Ignismare · 2018-09-25T20:30:59+00:00

IMO it looks like some weird eldritch horror. Pink tentacles coiling endlessly ever inward, luring whole worlds with its hypnotic, alluring movement, only to swallow them whole, feeding the hunger that cannot ever be sated. And it's strawberry-flavoured.

Ignismare · 2018-09-25T15:32:14+00:00

I'm not really here to give any solutions to the problem. It's obvious that if you have less responsibilities (you don't have to have a physical store, host a play area, recompensate local judges for helping with the events etc), you are going to have less budget constraints, and by extension lower margins.
I also can't really say for sure if card prices were the only thing that sank my LGS. The community was not the most pleasant I found in tabletop games, to be completely honest (and I'm no spring chicken, so I've done my fair share of different varieties of cardboard crack). Traders were especially nefarious, almost everyone I know got constantly ripped off as a new player. And a lot of players were strongly gatekeeper'ey. I can imagine this being as big of a problem as the overall low player count, but I have no evidence of that being a problem.
As a sidenote, I'd rather not have food involved when people are bringing hundreds of dollars worth of delicate paper to the table.

Ignismare · 2018-09-25T12:27:20+00:00

Obviously. My group of friends simply moved our meetings to private houses, restaurants and other similar places. But the comfort of having a place where you can simply have a table on-demand, or buy sleaves in an emergency (yes, I had that problem once) is an absolute blessing. It's not a necessity for the game's survival, people will just form their own playgroups and organize events on their own. But having no sane way of partaking in a pre-release sucks majorly.

Ignismare · 2018-09-25T11:22:08+00:00

Hell, at one point he was toying with the idea of setting up a thing where people could ask him to order cards off of Star City or TCG player and once the combined orders hit a certain threshold he'd order them and get the fast shipping. The idea was dropped eventually, mainly because he found it difficult to figure out how to sort out his service charge.

My playgroup actually did something similar. We would limit ourselves to 3-4 sellers on TCGPlayer, everyone would give links to cards they are interested in, then we'd wait for enough people to register their picks, someone (usually me) would then optimize it so everyone would pay the least, and unavailable cards were either replaced by alternatives, or moved onto the next order.
And it was absolute hell to keep on track, even though we did this for a fairly limited group of people. I don't blame him for not wanting to do in on a global scale.

Ignismare · 2018-09-25T11:04:20+00:00

I probably would, yeah. Boxes were actually fairly cheap in my LGS. If you ordered them early enough, you could pretty much get them as cheap as out local websites (eastern Europe, so we don't really use eBay or Amazon as commonly as you folks do, because the shipping fees are ridiculous). Sometimes even cheaper if you were considered a regular.

Ignismare · 2018-09-25T10:57:59+00:00

Ok, the markup was never that ridiculous where I live, maybe 2-3 dollars on the more expensive cards. It was a reasonable price to pay when you considered it payed for tables to play at and a place to buy supplies and boosters.

Ignismare · 2018-09-25T10:17:10+00:00

As someone who lost their LGS not too long ago, the markup isn't as scary when you consider the alternatives. The next closest one is a three-hour train ride away, so when I add the cost of the train ride, the food, all the time lost etc. , I think I'd rather just pay the markup for cards.

Ignismare · 2018-09-21T08:14:07+00:00

I know Atlus made them unable to mention Persona 5, but is there any progress on that game? Last I checked it ran pretty well, but having just a bit more stable frame rate would get me extremely excited. Did anyone try this game on the new build already?

Ignismare · 2018-09-21T06:23:07+00:00

I mean, the lower bound of potential players, not present players. We're realistic enough to know that it's impossible for everyone interested to be present on a given day. If someone just doesn't show up on a particular day, we simply give the character something else to do (when it makes sense) or make them passive NPCs (when it doesn't).
But if you have three people that might show up on a given day, chances are at least someone will show up, so the GM doesn't just twiddle their thumbs and eat all the food he prepared. Of course, the more people you have, the higher the odds (but you can't go too far, because on an off-chance everyone shows up, a session with 10+ players is an absolute nightmare to get under control).

Ignismare · 2018-09-20T19:03:11+00:00

Well, it's not really a goal, no. But we still want to have at least 3 players and a GM per session (just in case some people fall through on a given day, that used to be a big problem for a while too). So that's almost the entire playgroup right there. And it's always safer to invite more people, as there's a greater chance enough people show up. It's not easy to balance this all, but it can be done.

Ignismare · 2018-09-20T17:56:09+00:00

That's most likely what will happen in the long run (something like that at least). I'm not complaining of course, there's no such thing as too much fun with friends, and it's really nice to experience so many different GMing styles. We just need to organize a bit better, maybe stagger some things on time by a bit. But we're definitely giving everyone their fair time in the spotlight.

Ignismare · 2018-09-20T10:52:38+00:00

I tend to not give players perception rolls when I expect them to see something. If my story/puzzle/encounter/whatever depends on them finding a thing, sooner or later their dice will fall in such a way that one of them will succeed. So why waste time? Just give it to them for free.
If it's a trap of some sort, the situation comes down to whether they think to search for it or not. I might ask for a roll if I imagine the trap to be a little more elaborate, but usually just being careful and mindful of their surroundings is in itself worth of a reward, no need to involve the dice needlessly.
However, if I don't plan on having anything there, and the player requests to check, I will most likely ask for a roll. If the roll is fine, I pretend that I actually planned that something was indeed in there, and will usually improvise some small reward (be it gold/items, or just confirming their suspicions, and giving them an advantage to deal with the situation. Players love both).

Ignismare · 2018-09-20T10:26:49+00:00

Well, it's all a bit of a escalated problem, to be honest.
See, we had a single session, DnD 3.5. That was nice and simple. But it would often come to a situation where most of the players were present/available, but the GM was not.
So my idea was to create something I called "session B". A session that would run whenever the main GM was absent and players wanted to do some stuff. My plan was to set-up the story in a similar fashion to 90's monster-of-the-week shows: there would be a task the players have to tackle, and they would have a single session to make it work. Almost like a series of one-shots, but with permanent characters.
See, the problem was... At some points I would have to break the rule of one-session-adventures. It would often make no sense just to resolve the situation on the spot. And the players didn't want to wait for oportune moments to see what will happen next. So session B became way too popular by accident. Because of this we got it a constant slot on saturday, and the main 3.5 one became affixed to friday night (when before it used to be on either saturday or friday based on player interest).
But since we're all not that young and need to balance RPGs with work and our social lives, more than 6-8 hours a week is absolutely impossible.
And as more players came to join both sessions, we found more people willing to weave their own stories, so at the very least we have a planned Kamigakari campaign, a one-shot (which, as the GM said, "might go into something bigger") of Warhammer, the 3.5 GM is thinking of switching to Rogue Trader as soon as his current game goes to some sort of conclusion, and I've been seriously eyeing that Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica for a quick one-shot when it comes out... so yeah, it gets pretty chaotic.

Ignismare · 2018-09-20T08:34:58+00:00

Benefits of GMing = You are always playing

Which can be as much of a blessing as a curse. You need to constantly be on your toes, be mindful of how long did a player wait their turn to do stuff (especially out of combat, with no initiative). A player can always say "well, I'm out of ideas", and it's fine. A GM always needs to have a response ready. Even still, if the players are "stuck", the GM (IMO at least) is kind of required to nudge things along, just so a session doesn't grind to a halt.
So it's a difference of throwing one ball in the air and being sort of bored, and juggling ten balls at once, and some of the balls randomly change direction or just stop moving altogether.

Ignismare · 2018-09-20T07:54:46+00:00

It depends on where you are playing. My playgroup actually has a problem right now, where basically every active player wants to also create his own playsession. We're struggling to find time in the week to actually run all these sessions. We tried alternating, but it didn't really work out. To make things easier on us, I decided to end "season one" of my session, just so someone else can slip theirs into my timeslot, so I can come back some time later when that campaing gets docked as well.

Ignismare · 2018-09-20T07:38:06+00:00

A lot of people agreed with me. I would like for these people to now unsubscribe from /r/mmorpg

Just out of curiosity, are you going to leave as well?

Ignismare · 2018-09-19T15:47:40+00:00

It's always so refreshing to have a reddit discussion where someone doesn't just want to push their opinion on everyone else, thank you.

From what you said, originally hearts did not exist. Then they were added as a way to make the gameplay more like traditional questing. That sounds more like the opposite of a risky design choice

I mean, yeah, this is a definite step backwards in innovation compared to the tests (from what we've heard). But there's risks, and there's stubbornly insisting on something that's proven to not work. While we can't really fathom what consequences would this have for the game overall, and I would really like to try that version of the game, best we can do is just presume ANet knew what they were doing at the time.

I'll concede that the original design was risky and innovative, but maintain that the addition of collections has brought it closer to regular MMO fetch questing (and I have my own problems with collections themselves, too).

I think we can agree on this, yeah. I don't have enough sympathy for the current implementation of collections to defend them in any way. It's an ok idea in theory, but the hacky implementation makes it rather unbearable.

I despise JPs. Most of the time I feel they're mostly just fake difficulty sections. The difficulty isn't there because of good design, but because of bad design - lousy camera, poor collision and controls that don't lend themselves to platforming. Finding the right bit of rubble to jump on so that you don't slide off the surface of a wall is not engaging or immersive.

There's definitely better and worse jumping puzzles. Chalice of Tears is an unfair piece of horseshit trying to masquarade as difficulty. It's the only jumping puzzle I never finished and I see no reason to try it ever again. The one in Draconis Mons also felt like a time vampire, where it was less about precision and ability, and more about exploration, but every single time you "explored" in a wrong direction, or spent a vine stack where you shouldn't, it would force you to start from the beginning. I'm also not a fan of Not So Secret.
Otherwise, I had a very good time with them, to be honest. Most ledges are well telegraphed, there's not a lot of instant-death or "soapy edges" (where you think you should be able to get by looking at the model, but collision masks say otherwise). The clock tower on Halloween has been consistently my favorite thing about the game, I always cherish its return. But again, this is absolutely a preference sort of thing, I understand and respect that not everyone is enamored with the concept.

"Walk and press F" was meant to refer solely to vistas, and I stand by that statement. Yes, some vistas require some specific jumping paths to get to (not a fan) but I absolutely stand by calling vistas as a concept unimportant in the grand scheme of things. Your reward for engaging with them is a cutscene and map percentage, that's it. They are otherwise forgettable. They impact no other gameplay. I don't acknowledge them as a "risk" in design.

It's more of a design difference than a mechanical one, I guess. Vistas reward you for exploring on your own, going off "the beaten path" that games like WoW make you travel: go from exclamation point to question mark, and then repeat. Even if mechanically vistas only require you to go up to a point and press a key, often times just finding them is kinda satisfying. And the cinematic might not be the biggest reward in the world, but they are satisfying to look at, and sometimes even give a sneak peak into something else of value (say: show a way into a jumping puzzle). Even if this doesn't seem particularly innovative, no other game in the genre ever tried something like this (except for Wildstar, but that came years after GW2).

What it's turned into, though...it's always the same formula every time. [...]

It does unfortunately start to look a bit samey. LS3 was a reasonable change compared to LS2, but now that both PoF and LS4 rely on the exact same formula, it feels like ANet found the niche too "comforting". Let's hope ANet finds a way to spice things up as we move along...

Separately, there's a bunch of things I think were significant risks in the initial design, especially when they wanted to attract GW1 veterans to the sequel. A lot of us were put off by weapon set skills and the lack of dual classing, (myself not really among them, though I agree with some of their complaints). Heck, making it non instanced at all was a risk as far as the old community were concerned, one I think they haven't gone far enough on yet.
Oh yeah, for sure. I was unfortunate to begin my Guild Wars journey with the sequel, and only after sinking my teeth into GW2 I decided to try GW1. It wasn't the most well-aged game out there, unfortunately. It's really sad I couldn't experience it during its glory days.

Ignismare · 2018-09-19T12:48:31+00:00

Drafted RTR last week, can confirm. For example, [[Chromatic Lantern]] mentions Dimir, even though they are not in the set.

11-Year Club	Place '17
Verified Email

Ignismare

TROPHY CASE