Kichae

[email protected] They shape 100% of the storyline. The campaign is the story of their activities in the world.

They don’t shape the world, though, unless they do things to intervene in the current world lines of the people and institutions in it. At the start of the campaign, I scaffold the major political players in the world,and sketch out what their goals are, and how they’re trying to achieve them. I estimate how long it takes them to get to places of import for those goals, and track that in a calendar. I leave hooks for the players to pick up and engage with those things from time to time, but if they’re not interested, those entities just continue on unimpeded.

Meanwhile, everywhere they go, I dig into books of tables to come up with some NPCs with problems that need to be solved, side quests that can be activated, and locations that can be explored. They’re just names on a page until the players pick up the hook, but if they do, then the party does things to encounter and activate new political players who end up on the board. I then do the same thing after the fact, and add them to the calendar.

Their story is 100% theirs. The opportunities to shape the world’s story are there. There’s no “storyline” for me to bend around their gravity.

A lot of the people developing early fantasy RPGs were probably deeply influenced by the American western as a film and TV genre. It was really, really hard to avoid in the 50s and 60s, and it functionally provided the blueprints for other adventure-based genres. The western provided the setting of the frontier, and frontier towns were all too often depicted as being deeply isolated and under siege by the “savage wilderness”.

Because indigenous people were usually framed more like wild animals than people whose living room you just plopped yourself down and started squatting in.

So many of the adventure modules seemed to be built around this idea of the frontier, or the hinterland, or of being on the edge of civilization that they didn’t need to have a theory of settlement patterns. They were explicitly showing us what things looked like where the civilization networks wore thin and broke down.

But they also just sort of acted as one of the blueprints for later modules, and later settings. And when your setting is entirely made up of frontier modules, you end up with a setting where there’s no civilization.

> sorcerers have a superhero origin

This is Oracle erasure.

> In the world they would be hated and feared as the person who started fires as a child or drowned a local cow.

Would they, though? Or would they end up in an upper class that controls world leaders from back rooms while looking like flashy celebrities in public? Because the takeaway from the real world is that racists hate on people they see as less powerful than them, and sorcerers are categorically not that.

Presumably, they expected it to sell 0% more than their projections.

I work in gaming, and I can say with some confidence that, at least at the big publishers, it doesn’t actually work this way. The C-suite, in particular, isn’t talking to developers at all, and aren’t making decisions about products beyond which IPs that they have in their catalogue that they want to put a bunch of money into.

Where the problem is is in the marketing and editorial departments. Most of the big publishers have a department whose job it is is to assess whether unannounced games in development have a viable market, and how to better appeal to that market. The problem is, the people in those deparments don’t use anything but what’s trending right now to determine this, and so you get studios being told that their current game a) should be shoehorned into franchise X or Y, and b) should adopt this mechanic, tone, or aesthetic that doesn’t really fit with the core idea, amd that will be dated by the time the game launches in 2 years.

These are deeply conservative, risk-averse departments, and they gatekeep all of the major development and launch milestones.

It’s polished looking, and it has a lot of plugin support for TTRPG GMs.

As a markdown hater, I primarily use Trilium Notes for organizing my prep and taking session notes. I’ve built a digital GM screen with my players’ key stats that I keep in my main tab, and then each encounter for the session is loaded into tabs before the session starts.

I use Wonderdraft for my world maps, and pull most of my encounter maps from free ‘sample’ maps from map makers on Patreon (which I sketch out on my battle map in dry erase marker). For city/town/village maps, I use watabou’s Medieval Fantasy City Generator.

I pull most of my statblocks off of pf2easy. I also used pf2easy’s spellbook to help me make physical spell cards for my players.

> if it’s being uploaded, then it means the community likes it

That really isn’t how the Internet works at all. Someone uploading something just means that that person likes it. It’s not like they’re uploading based on the collective psychic demands of the rest of the community.

And jerking off is better with some lube. Doesn’t mean this is the place to show off the pics. What you do in the privacy of your own home, or at your own table, actually isn’t especially well correlated to what someone else might be interested in hosting for you.

Believe it or not, you can release written content without professional art. Used to be done all the time. Deciding you want to skip ahead in your progress as a publisher and use tools that have been built off the back of unconsenting contributors doesn’t entitle you to someone’s platform.

I don’t see much value in providing storage and bandwidth for things that people didn’t put enough of themselves into to bother lifting a pencil. There are enough boosters for that sort of thing out there already that they can do the job of supporting them with material resources.

> Speech recognition

Isn’t generative, by standard usage of the term.

>(e.g. “remove background” or tools that let you mask subjects). Yes, all generative AI.

They are not. Not everything leverages a SVM or even a neural network is “generative AI”. That’s a disingenuous conflation of terms and technology.

> All sorts of title/logo generators.

So?

> Upscaling tools.

Are’t “generative” in the context used here.

Generally speaking, sufficiently vague and plastic rules that are able to allow for things like “context” and don’t provide wiggle room for “insufferable bad-faith assholes” are best employed for things like this.

So many family recipes are documented this way, though, so it’s a significant problem when these are handed down.

“I just skip grandma’s chili because she didn’t record it using volume or weight for everything” isn’t a thing people say or do.

Why are you coming across as “trying to be right on the Internet” rather than “engaging with what was said”?

I should mention, too, that Bob was an early playtester, so he also has “chosen fan” energy around this. It’s surprisingly how often people are not aware of how their feelings are easily manipulated by being “seen” by “important people”. Influencers are amazingly easily and cheaply bought.

And I don’t mean this as a slight to Bob. This is normal and natural human behaviour. He likes the game, and that’s legit. But people don’t go to war over things they like. They go to war over how others make them feel valuable.

Bob’s got “new hobby horse” glasses on. He likes the game, and is treating criticism of the company publishing it as an attack on the game itself, which…

He’s been playing 5e for years. He should know better.

Have you seen the discourse around 5.5? The toxic individuals are the ones bringing the culture war shit to the table. Shutting down mention of it ensures that there are only toxic tables.

recursive_recursion said in Roll for combat’s (and others) distributor has gone bankrupt, and is liquidating their stock and keeping the money: > How is this possible???

Because despite the fact that they were operating as if they were selling the books on consignment, they were apparently doing business on credit on paper. It’s dirty dealing. Which I’m sure didn’t stop them from sending unsold books back to the publisher any time it was convenient for them, or failing to pay them in a manner that reflects credit-based purchases.

They set up a system where it was heads they win, tails you lose.

I do all of my prep on my laptop, take notes on my laptop, and have a digital GM screen on my laptop, so I use my laptop at the table. I don’t see why any other players shouldn’t get to do the same.

If they’re getting distracted and are not interested in playing the game, then it’s not the tools that should be removed from the table.