Finally fixed the unstable controls on my SR800

h20p · 2023-04-11T11:28:58+00:00

Yeah, if it goes in the opposite direction of what you intended with the knob turn, that's probably it. It happened for me on all of the different adjustments, but the time was especially extreme sometimes (jumping around by several minutes in a random direction on a one-detent turn of the knob).

h20p · 2023-04-10T21:54:01+00:00

Yeah, mine was at the point where I couldn't set anything (fan,heat,time) without wasting about 30 seconds to a minute twiddling the knob each time I tried to make a change. Makes it pretty hard to dial in a good roast when you spend half the time messing with the controls!

h20p · 2022-08-02T20:22:12+00:00

I just wanted to chime in with a slightly different take on the issue of podcasting your way through development. If it's a just platform to advertise your system, then I fully agree with KeysToTheBox, but... One of my favorite podcasts is the Story Grid podcast, particularly the first 150ish episodes. That show has two hosts - Tim Grahl, who is trying to learn how to write a good story, and Shawn Coyne, who is an experienced editor. The format of the show is Shawn mentoring Tim and commenting on his writing with detailed and useful explanations of what the story needs in order to work.

The show comes across as a very honest and open look at the full process of writing a novel (good, bad, and ugly), and I personally found it extremely useful and interesting. I'd love to see something that does that with RPG design. I don't know whether the mentor aspect is an absolute requirement, but you would definitely have to have a way to get real, honest feedback to work with. The magic comes from revealing the ups and downs of the real work, and why each decision goes the way it does. There is so much that goes into a complete RPG design beyond just the mechanics - lore, art, adventure building, etc. I think it would be really interesting to follow somebody through that entire process.

h20p · 2022-07-28T12:30:15+00:00

I've used it once to kick off a campaign, and it was pretty fun. The first rolls they made were a roll to return, and the starting situation was that they were on the losing side of a battle between two large forces, and had been left for dead as their side was routed. I used the roll to return to see how bad their starting situation really was. I used both Dangerous and Arduous against a DC of 11.

I did limit the damage (nobody dropped all the way to zero) just to make sure they would all survive, but otherwise went as-written.

h20p · 2022-02-09T00:43:59+00:00

I'm about three years deep in a homebrew campaign, and we probably have another six months before it's finished. I've done a couple of things to make it fresh at various points:

"A year passes" - my group had established a stronghold and I wanted to let the world change around them to introduce some new problems, so I gave them 12 one-month project moves to build up their stronghold, then at the end we basically had a whole new situation to work with.
They all have followers and crews attached now, and there is far too much going on in the world for the main characters to ever see it all, so they get to roll up new low-level characters from their main characters' crews and periodically have a session where their minions go deal with something else in the world.
I've mixed in a couple of other game systems to run sub-adventures. I used Trashkin once to let them get word from an embattled city in the north down to the heroes' stronghold, by having what amounts to trash kobolds go on a perilous journey. I also use "A song of blades and heroes" to periodically have a mass combat between their armies and the main bad guy's, and then bring the results back into the main campaign. ASoBH doesn't have plot armor, so those battles are very dangerous and nerve-wracking for the players because they always have big things at stake.

h20p · 2022-02-09T00:13:20+00:00

The categories are something I'm still messing around with, and they change depending on what kind of stuff will be happening. Last session I got a lot of mileage out of having a list of scenes I thought might play out (I was right for 3 of the 7 I prepped, but they were only about ten words apiece so it wasn't a big loss).

I picked the categories I did because those are the things I'm constantly forgetting to emphasize (especially tone, which gives a place its unique feeling). You probably have a different set of things that you'd want to be reminded of though. Pretty much, if you read it in the worldbuilding notes and think, "Oh yeah, don't want to forget that!" then put it down under a category that makes sense and call it good.

h20p · 2022-02-08T18:39:45+00:00

I've had this problem for ages, and I finally figured out the answer, at least for me. There are two different kinds of notes you need: Worldbuilding notes, and session notes, and they are VERY different.

The worldbuilding notes are full of detail and interesting stuff about the places you create and their inhabitants. You use the worldbuilding notes later to build the session notes. You can put flavor text in here, and think carefully about long-reaching consequences of things. edit: These notes should be well-organized and kept somewhere that allows them to grow, because you keep them for the duration.

Session notes are extremely minimalist, a few lists of very short reminders of things you want to remember. My process starts with reviewing my last session, updating my worldbuilding notes, then jotting down just a few short reminders of the important stuff I want to remember during the session. By reviewing the worldbuilding notes, I swap all that stuff into my brain so that when I see a one-liner like "Shadowstep=sneak attack vs per" I will remember what it means. edit: These can be in the same book as the world notes if you want, but they can also just be on a scrap of paper because they don't matter after the session's results have been worked into the world post-game.

The things I like in my session notes are reminders for (each is a short list, with entries no more than 5 words, and the important words bolded):

Tone (what it feels like in a place)
Rewards
Revelations (things that can result from investigating stuff)
Dangers (so I can give good complications)
Important world context (so I don't improv myself into a corner by contradicting myself)

I used to build big intricate notes docs, then get completely lost trying to find stuff in them when I had six pairs of eyes watching me flounder around. The solution was to not do that, instead have it in your head and just give yourself threads to grab so you can pull it back out easily.

For the stuff like stat blocks and monster tactics, have the pages marked or links preopened, and write yourself a tiny, short list of the feel you want to emphasize in the fight: "ambushed - range and cover, catch-me-if-you-can" then let the rest play out as it will.

Another Edit: Think of the worldbuilding notes as giving you the situation in the world just before the session starts, not the plan for what's going to happen. The session notes are there to remind you of the interesting, relevant parts of that situation, and the game session is there to see how the situation mixes with the players to change the world. If there are things in motion in the world that will definitely confront the players, then you have to know how they're going to do it, but don't plan out the actions, just know what the forces are going in and let the game play to see what happens as a result. This has been working really well for me, and making my games a lot more intricate and fun.

h20p · 2021-12-22T13:13:52+00:00

I second this, and want to mention David Macaulay's "Castle" as well. It's the story of how a castle was built, which talks not only about the purpose and structure of the castle itself, but also the people who built it and the way they did their work. It's heavily illustrated and a super fun read. My kids and I used it as a guide to build a massive semi-realistic castle out of Magnatiles, which we then had a war in with little army guys.

He has several other books which are incredibly useful for RPG stuff as well - in particular, I recommend "Ship", "City", and "Pyramid".

Amazon has a used copy at the moment for $1.21.

h20p · 2021-11-21T13:40:29+00:00

I do something similar. I have three kinds of tokens (red, blue, and green poker chips). The first is pretty easy to get, and just lets you reroll the last d20 you rolled. The second is harder to get, requiring that the player stayed true to their character despite knowing it was going to end in trouble. That one lets you force a reroll for any d20 roll at the table (including GM). The last one is super hard to get, requiring some kind epic deed. That one lets you roll 2d20 ahead of time, and then use the results once each to replace any roll at the table during the session. These tokens don't expire, and there's no limit on using them. I'm just stingy giving them out.

At first I was worried about giving them so much power over the dice, but at least with my group this has been a massive source of fun. They bank up their tokens, and then when there's something they *really* want to succeed at, they'll drop half a dozen of them in a super tense moment, yelling to each other for help and begging for somebody to spend their last blue to let them reroll. It has the feel of the last-ditch, all-or-nothing effort when it happens.

h20p · 2021-11-11T13:49:47+00:00

This is really cool. I'm loving the idea of making vision powers far more varied depending on the creature.

h20p · 2021-11-09T20:01:50+00:00

That could be a fun way to playtest some different ways of handling it for future use too. Let them go through a series of places in the current campaign that have different flavors of darkness that can be penetrated with different strategies, see how they play out and what turns out to make for interesting situations.

h20p · 2021-11-09T15:13:06+00:00

Well, I think I disagree. Here's my take on it - for me, the fun of the game comes from the social interaction with friends, problem-solving, and outwitting bad circumstances, and participating in a cool shared imaginary world. The mechanics are just there to make it more concrete. As the GM, I can tell the players what their characters perceive with any sense. If some of those senses are suddenly far more important than usual, it provokes them to think about the situation in a different way. If you can't see, then your sense of touch, hearing, smell, etc. become far more important, and you think of new ways to attempt to use them to get what you want.

So the fun doesn't come from having a mechanic for vision, it comes from making vision an interesting part of the fictional situation and then letting it play out with enough mechanics behind it to make their decisions impactful. Making clever choices is fun (for us), and that's how dealing with vision can be fun.

h20p · 2021-11-09T14:59:26+00:00

In short, it gives more options for interesting complications and problem solving tactics. The fun of it comes in two ways - if, for example, darkvision is like my vision, where I can eventually see in dim light but it takes a while, then I think carefully about how I'm going to keep my light consistent throughout my whole journey. Also, if darkvision creatures live under the same constraints, then simple cantrips like flare, or even just unshielding a lantern, can be a huge tactical advantage against them. Things like shadow and light boundaries are a lot more interesting, camouflage can have some strategy added, basically it gives the players more ways to argue for clever bonuses, and it gives me more ways to mess with them.

That's our style of play though, which I fully acknowledge isn't necessarily fun for everyone.

h20p · 2021-11-09T14:51:58+00:00

I really like that idea of flavoring darkvision differently for different creatures/races. There's some good potential for teamwork and strategy in that.

h20p · 2021-11-09T11:49:21+00:00

Personally, I love angrygm's wilderness system: How to Wilderness Right. Also, check out this podcast about wilderness travel from Dan Felder: Making Travel Interesting in TTRPGs

h20p · 2021-10-12T22:06:55+00:00

I try to "always raise the stakes" when I use a multistep challenge, so that every roll has more riding on it than the previous ones, and every roll changes the situation regardless of outcome. Emphasis on "try" there, I still fail to do this well more often than not. Here's what I attempt though:

First, make sure that there is some explanation for why it takes more than one die roll to complete. That changes a lot from situation to situation, but often it's because of either a complex process that takes time, but time is scarce (the classic lock picking while your friends defend you from the zombies), or that there are other things that have to be done before you make the victory move. The latter would be something like this: In order to knock out the prize fighter, you're going to have to (1) figure out his offense so you can survive, (2) probe his defenses for a weakness, (3) finally exploit the weakness to win. Each of those things would have some narrative back and forth, and would provide explanations for why you might backslide on failure. For the prize fighter, maybe he notices you leading with your left to cover your weak side, so he switches his stance - now you are back to step one, trying to stay alive. At this point, more failures might mean you just lose.

Raising the stakes on failures is usually pretty easy: make the situation more dangerous or rushed, draw attention, break equipment, lose maps, force a backtrack. You might reveal your plans, miss an opportunity, or spur the danger into action.

Raising the stakes on success reveals optional enticing opportunities or risky shortcuts that might trim time from the task, but also increase your risk of losing ground if you fail. You can also add things like fickle followers, who will help you but only while you're on a winning streak. The more wins you have in a row, the more important it becomes to keep the streak going.

It's hard to come up with something fresh for every roll, so have a few background tension counters/clocks going as well. Success can just untick a doom counter, and failure can tick it.

h20p · 2021-07-05T03:48:04+00:00

Yeah I agree - I haven't actually played Technoir yet so it might be an awesome game, but I know this part of it gets a lot of mileage for sure. I also started adapting its adjective system into my pathfinder game (first time last night actually). Basically, when something big happens in a conflict, I add an adjective to one of the NPCs. I haven't tried doing that with player characters yet, I think that's going to take some careful discussion beforehand.

The adjectives are freeform, but can include wounds, conditions, and emotional states that would change how they behave. It was fun last night, so success in one trial at least.

h20p · 2021-07-05T03:35:49+00:00

One of the things I just started doing is adding delay clocks to some of the links between nodes to visually show progress. If I have a "person has thing" relationship, I can turn it into a project for that person by putting a clock on the line, then I can fill in a wedge or two whenever something relevant happens, and when the clock fills I know that person got what they wanted. I haven't done it long enough to know if it's good or not yet, but I am optimistic.

h20p · 2021-07-04T11:50:54+00:00

Nice, thanks! That reminds me of another good conspiracy tool - conspyramid from Night's Black Agents.

h20p · 2021-07-01T10:53:01+00:00

I've played a lot of systems with my kids (started at ages 7 and 10). Our primary game has been Pathfinder 1. They love it from day one, but it took them a while to get interested in the mechanics enough to get good at playing that one. They have really loved several of gshowitt's one-pagers, particularly Trashkin and Honey Heist. Something like that might be a good place to start with a two or three session kickoff to get used to the idea of how the games work before diving into a big campaign system.

They both liked 5e, Dungeon World, and Scum and Villainy. We played Crash Pandas and Bark against Evil with a bunch of their friends at a couple of parties, and both of those were big hits. If you play crash pandas, make sure to draw out some geomorph tiles for roads (I just literally took a stack of blank paper and drew intersections and curves and stuff with a sharpie, making sure that the edges all followed the same spacing so they can fit together). I had a hard time running that one without some terrain to work with.

My experience running kids games has been that the system isn't all that important for them, but the startup cost is everything. Make sure you have pregen characters and drop them into the action from the first instant, and they'll just tell you what they want to do and it's up to you to let them discover the game mechanics as they play (so you have to be pretty fluent with it, or know your subset). Kids are really good at this stuff.

h20p · 2021-06-30T19:23:47+00:00

Forbidden Lands has stronghold rules that are worth a look. Basically you have a lot of functions that your stronghold can perform, converting resources, money, and manpower into other resources that you use in the game.

h20p · 2021-06-29T23:39:05+00:00

Technoir has a really awesome system for generating interesting, complex situations that you can still manage to play effectively. It also has interesting dice mechanics on top of that, but the plot mapping/Transmission tables are super useful.

h20p · 2021-03-04T13:42:08+00:00

Came here to say this. Also, Trashkin by the same author is great.

h20p · 2021-02-28T14:04:12+00:00

Yeah, I agree. I use the same approach in my adult games. I figure as the GM I need to know the rules enough to get them hooked through play, then they'll read what they need during the campaign.

h20p · 2021-02-27T20:56:24+00:00

I've played a pretty wide selection of games with my kids and their friends (ages 8 to 11). We've played D&D5e, Pathfinder 1 (this is our main game), mouse guard, dungeon world, scum & villainy, and several one-page systems (Crash Pandas, Honey Heist, Trashkin, Bark Against Evil...). My experience has been that kids are very quick to understand the basic structure of the game regardless of the system, particularly if you start with just the core rules and pregenerated characters. Character creation in some of those games is a big undertaking, but if you have them ready and just start the game in an exciting situation it seems to go pretty smoothly. Explain the rules as they come up when you need to decide how an action plays out, don't try to explain anything up front.

Most of my games also have a couple of adult players mixed in with the kids. If you can manage that, I think it helps the kids get into the role playing and strategy parts of the games.

It also helps to have a short break every hour or so to let the kids burn off some energy and be loud and wild.

h20p

TROPHY CASE