Café de Nuit

Gonzoron of the FoS wrote:

Nox wrote:I'm sure that if my group would play once a week I would feel this factors a lot less, but we play once a month and thus it takes forever to make some progress. In my head after all those months we should've reached at least Roots of evil. I have 4 players but we are all 21+ Years old and everyone has his own business to take care IRL. I wish i had a group that could play once a week, but that's quite hard to find.

<grumpy old man voice on>
Once a month! Luxury! My group has played our Ravenloft campaign 27 times in 15 years! I've been planting seeds to eventually run Bleak House since 2002!
<grumpy old man voice off>


If you don't already, just wait until you and your players have kids... You'll look back on these days of monthly games fondly.

Luckily for my rpg life I do not have kids yet .
I don't know, probably i would have dropped D&d if we played twice a year..

Gon, by the time you reach 35 games, you could invite your kids to the table.

alhoon wrote:Gon, by the time you reach 35 games, you could invite your kids to the table.

I've already got them playing Heroquest. But the Feast of Goblyns poster in my office freaks them out, so it may be a while until they move from fantasy dungeon crawls into Ravenloft. But we'll get there... After all, there are so many great parent role models in the place

Nox wrote:
I totally agree with you. I would like not to put major alteration in the plot, but i'm wondering how could I have the player establish a base of operation during the hexad. I could make a short break after we finish Touch of death and let them stay for a while in darkon, or any other domain, to establish this HQ, but since we play so little (as I said, once a month usually, Expecially during summer), I would feel like i'm slowing down things even more.

I've seen one campaign working for the Darkonian government (and thereby, Azalin) monitoring/bringing about the prophecy as a framing device for running the adventures. If you treated every adventure as a separate "mission", you could let them return upon completion, report their findings, have some down time for what they do between adventures (handled in play by post?), and then receive new orders after some time has passed. (Canonically, the Grand Conjunction events occur years apart, spanning 735-740 BC, so this wouldn't necessarily threaten the flow of events.) Having downtime activities might also help to bridge the time game between sessions by keeping them involved when timing allows.

I feel you on the frustrations with D&D. Really, I swore off tabletop altogether for several years because of frustrations that I eventually traced back into assumptions baked into the core dynamics of the game.

I could write a whole 95 theses on this, but here's a short list:
* Why does each player have to invest everything into a single character?
* Why do all invested characters have to have the same power level?
* Why does the narrative flow have to be 100% linear?

And these are just issues with the game. Then there's the meta-game issues:

* Why do we demand the equivalent of an unpaid part-time job from players, nailing them to a commitment no socially/financially healthy person can commit to, so that the only ones who keep this commitment are the ones who are most likely to disrupt the social aspect of the game with antisocial behavior? The game filters out people with healthy priorities almost by design, and then we wonder why D&D has a reputation for being only for social misfits.
* Why are there no official rules for social interaction among players in this supposedly social game?
* Why is planning toward a narrative result seen as "meta-gaming" (i.e. cheating) when so many players see the narrative as the most rewarding part?

I've been trying to create my own system that challenges these, but it's slow going, because I'm insane.

DeepShadow of FoS wrote:
I could write a whole 95 theses on this, but here's a short list:
* Why does each player have to invest everything into a single character?
* Why do all invested characters have to have the same power level?
* Why does the narrative flow have to be 100% linear?
.

Eh?

I'll grant the game as usually played assumes one PC to one player. So do the vast majority of RPGs. But aren't we forgetting henchmen, followers, heirs, and all that, which is indeed described in various editions of the rules? IME, players and DMs collaborate when creating a big cast of NPC helpers. Though some DMs might want to do all the work themselves, or leave these guys as 'blank shields.'

The second is more of a 3e thing. Balance isn't so finicky in older editions. And who says all characters must be the same level? If new PCs start at 1st level (or a couple of below the next lowest level PC in the group, say), then it's easy enough for a significant level spread to develop in a group as some PCs die and others of the original group survive to attain higher levels. Esp. with each class using its own chart. And levels aren't the only form of power. Items, strongholds, followers...


The last bit doesn't seem to have to do with rules.

All that said, if you want a game with mechanics oriented toward social interactions and towards collaboratively building a narrative, there are probably better options than D&D in any edition.

Are you familiar with 'story games'? Might be up your alley.

I'll grant the game as usually played assumes one PC to one player. So do the vast majority of RPGs. But aren't we forgetting henchmen, followers, heirs, and all that, which is indeed described in various editions of the rules?

IME, henchmen, followers and heirs are still just riding the coattails of the original character's legacy. It still means that the player's success is invested in a single character, or a single legacy.

And who says all characters must be the same level? If new PCs start at 1st level (or a couple of below the next lowest level PC in the group, say), then it's easy enough for a significant level spread to develop in a group as some PCs die and others of the original group survive to attain higher levels.

Have you ever players who were perfectly okay playing a character 5 levels lower than everyone else? Because that's rare.

And levels aren't the only form of power. Items, strongholds, followers...

Absolutely. This is exactly why I hate the implicit commitment to equal levels.

ewancummins wrote:All that said, if you want a game with mechanics oriented toward social interactions and towards collaboratively building a narrative, there are probably better options than D&D in any edition.

Exactly.

Are you familiar with 'story games'? Might be up your alley.

As a general concept, I'm very familiar with them. Were there some in particular you would recommend? I'm already a huge fan of Microscope, and have incorporated a lot of its principles into Inkubator.

I've flipped through several storygames, but played none of them. They aren't really my usual style of gaming.

That said, if you want a system recommendation that includes:

social mechanics

troupe style play/more than one PC per player

some collaborative narrative stuff with players and GM


What about Ars Magica? It's not a newfangled 'storygame', but it is a precursor to White Wolf's 'storyteller' system, used later in Vampire and other games.