Crit Fail Ate my Character: Let’s Talk Tabletop!

I think the most disturbing part of FATAL was on an earlier page, “special thanks to my parents who helped with playtesting”

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I really like storygames, my problem with them has always been the storygamers, if that makes any sense? Like, the people who insist that EVERYTHING EVER has to be remade into a super-rules-lite system, and call everyone who doesn’t agree a grognard

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Yeah, I don’t mean to come off like that :x. It’s just like, man I used to play the friggin HERO System, where it takes upwards of 2 hours to build your extremely specific powers and equipment from a catalog of point-buy properties.

It’s nice to play FATE variants where a lot of stuff just gets folded into the fiction. “Oh, it says here you’re a vampire, so clearly transforming into a cloud of mist is a valid way for you to break into a locked mansion.”

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I find that my problem is more with how Apocalypse World and FATE are used sort of as neo-d20 and neo-GURPS. Admittedly, I also find a lot of storygames end up written with rigid rules, just around who can talk rather than what can happen.

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You poor dumb bastard, how are you even still sane? I can’t recall as I have only heard of it through myths and legends, don’t you have to use the quadratic formula to get your base stats?

Oh jesus

No more explanation needed, friend. :fearful:

I know someone who swears by HERO and I trust him not one whit.

As @LaminatedMoth said, don’t be afraid to be new. I’d also say don’t be afraid to “shop around” (if you happen to have the population that supports a choice of gaming groups/venues) because there are people who play the same game very, very differently. An example of what I mean could be a kind of spectrum of seriousness. On one end there is what some call “beer and pretzels” style gaming - very relaxed, often on the farcical side of things, progressing through more serious tones and styles (e.g. less out of character chatter, less joking around with off topic stuff etc), right the way through to a very hard core, in character only, players vs the DM style grinds. This is just one axis for your RP considerations, systems (e.g. D&D vs 13th Age vs Pathfinder etc), settings (40k, bronze age, Rippers/Steampunk, Shadowrun/Cyberpunk), and all sorts of other choices are out there. But I guess my take away point is that the right people can make most settings/systems fun.

duuuuuude, me and a group had a good run of Exalted and right when we got to the climax of the story, the DM fucked off on us. :pensive: I’ve also done a quick Firefly test with a group but it’s always hard to find people who want to have the commitment to play. I have the James Bond RPG that i want to try but have no clue on finding people even remotely interested in it.

Depends on whether you’re playing in real life or online, and what your local situation is. Problem is that most people are gonna want to play D&D cause that’s what they’ve heard of, or you’re taking a chance with local groups of strangers.

Online things are better, thanks to various virtual tabletop programs like Roll20. You can put together a group of people to play anything.

But then you run into the problem of who’s gonna be the gamemaster (or playing GMless games, which unfortunately are less compatible with most virtual tabletops) and you probably don’t want to be gamemaster your first time because 1) it’s a learned skill and 2) you’ll probably be gamemaster forever if you’re any good.

Strike! is, in my opinion, a pretty good introductory system in that it has both lightweight elements (the basic task resolution) and mediumweight elements (the tactical combat system) but unfortunately it doesn’t have much of the stuff a game like D&D or a World of Darkness game would have in terms of ready-to-go things to throw at players.

Everyone starts somewhere so don’t be too worried about not knowing anything. I’d check to see if there are any places near you that do something like D&D adventurers league (some games like Pathfinder and Shadowrun have their own equivalents if you’re more interested in those) since that’s a pretty good place to start. They’ll have premade characters you can use if you don’t feel like making your own and the current edition of D&D is probably the easiest edition to learn.

If you don’t have anywhere with something like that going on then you’ll either need to look online or start your own. I can’t give too much advice on looking online but I can say that starting your own can be a blast if you’ve got enough friends willing to join in.

I was going to make a tabletop games thread–glad someone did!

Has anyone here played Blades in the Dark yet? I think the best way I can describe it is that its about playing as a gang of criminals (thieves, assassins, smugglers, players’ choice) in a city that’s basically Dishonored meets The Lies of Locke Lamora and it’s awesome. It does a great job of letting the players feel like they’re playing out rad as hell heists without too much pre-planning, and has cool progression mechanics where the players don’t just level up their characters individually, but also as a team, and get access to new hideouts and team abilities.

I mention it because the final release version of the game just released like yesterday and I’m excited to start playing it again. It’s a good example of a tabletop RPG that focuses on being about one kind of story, then builds everything around that.

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I haven’t played Blades in the Dark, but the Friends at the Table podcast did a mini-season of it to build up to Season 3, and it seemed really neat. The system was very good at having everything go horribly wrong in ways that were interesting and dramatic.The “fail forward” system is based on exposing yourself to increasingly precarious circumstances in a kind of risk/reward deal.

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I was waiting to try it out as soon as it had a finalized release. Knowing it’s done with early-access, I’ll buy it soon. I do have to give my players time as I just introduced them to Dungeon World and they’re not keen on switching stories and systems often. Nonetheless, I loved Marielda and it’s my favorite season of Friends at the Table (or part-season?)

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I really love tabletops. I have OCD and they can often be a good way to take the more entertaining and silly intrusive thoughts I get and turn them into something fun. My imagination is often very wild as such and I love adding a bit of that wild card elements to games. More in the “Figures out how to do something in an awesome way” and not the “I’m yelling random words.” But I don’t really get to play tabletops too often. I really should pick up something like some Edge of the Empire books and try to run some with folks.

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Yeah, Blades in the Dark tries pretty hard to incentivize risky play–it’s most fun when players are doing daring stunts and taking big risks to get the biggest score.

In the last campaign I ran, the players ended up letting the ghost of someone they thought would be a better ally possess the leader of a powerful gang (who, as it turns out, is the one who murdered the person who became that ghost in the first place) and then ended up having to deal with the consequences of having created an insane vampire with a far-reaching gang at her disposal. We’re going to pick up a couple of years after that when we start back up again. I’m sure everything has gone fine.

Gonna run Paranoia XP at a meetup soon. Using the Stealth Train adventure, probably one of the best constructed farces I’ve ever seen in anything. Feel like an Evil Genius.

I just remembered, when I introduced my newest batch of noobs to D&D, we started out with a few sessions of Everyone is John and Lasers and Feelings, both which are tabletop games with rules that fit on a page! It was a good way for everyone to get into roleplaying and get to know each other, so maybe try that to get your feet wet?

man, my fave part of rpgs is character creation. i just open a character creator and pump em out. anybody else have a kinda esoteric joy in the game?

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Sometimes at night, I wake up in cold sweat. It haunts me. I cannot escape the madness. I have read things that no man or woman should be exposed to.