Chebucto Regional Softball Club

Counter-hot-take: Rip the charisma stat and its skills out of the game. It's half-baked as it is. The cha classes can be moved to int or wis.

I always encourage my players to paraphrase if they're trying to be more than they are in real life. It's totally fine to be like "I tell him with a lot of big words that he's a doodyhead"

> He knows that the only important clue in the room is the pen, but the players do not. Their actions will thus deal with the entirety of the room rather than the metagame thinking that would lead them to the pen. One might decide to check out the broken bookshelf, another might want to check the desk drawers. If they eventually look at the pen and discover its relevance, they will feel that much more of a sense of accomplishment. This is kind of bad advice if you want the players to engage with the pen. I mean, if it doesn't matter then whatever. But if it's the only thing that matters in the room, spending 10 minutes farting around on other dead ends isn't really a win. Players are already bad at finding clues. On the other hand, for things that you don't want them to immediately focus on, it makes sense to camouflage them with other descriptions. Like, "The dining room is large enough for a raucous party, but it's silent aside from you all. The stone floor is cracked and uneven- what was once beautiful marble is shattered in places, and stained with what might be blood in others. The dining room table itself is massive- large enough to seat thirty people on a side - and looks to be made of a thick, deeply brown, wood, and seems to be in solid condition. Strangely, it's still set as if for the party. Plates and silverware rest on top of it, as well as a few bottles of wine. {Noble Background Player} you even recognize one bottle as a particularly expensive vintage. The seats, however, are mostly knocked askew or broken. Three are intact, pushed away from the table." Of course, the table was a giant mimic and the wine bottle was there to trick the player into getting stuck to it. Fun was had by all.

Yeah, I think there's a big difference between "I thought they were going to investigate the smith, but they're really suspicious of the wizard now and want to check her out first" and "they decided to forget about the whole civil war for the throne thing and open a BBQ joint for the local goblins" Nowadays I'd probably just explicitly be like "Hey, so, when we started this game we agreed on a certain tone and direction. Specifically, it was going to be about a power struggle for the throne. Running a restaurant business in D&D sounds wild, but that is really a different kind of story and a different game. If you want to do that, let's talk about it. Otherwise, I'm asking you to stay more on theme." Though I say that and my best game had plenty of "beach episodes". One time literally, after they saved some sahaugin from being subjugated by a siren.

I ran a game in near future New York and used Google maps and street view for guidance. Worked well. None of the other players lived here, so I think the visuals helped them.

I had one really good game of Vampire. Lasted a couple years. We still talk about it sometimes, and its best scenes. Like how one PC saved an NPC by jumping out a 10th story window with her. Or the time they had a huge in character fight because the job they'd tried to do went sideways. But I've also had a couple really bad games. There was one where they just didn't read and retain anything from the books. One of the players on like session 4 was like "wait. How do I get more blood? Do I like... Bite people?". My friend what do you think was happening in the other scenes when people were hunting for blood? They also didn't retain anything about the different factions, so they didn't really understand anyone's motivation. It was bad. Still feel bad about it.

> When I play an RPG (or RPG-like game), I want to know upfront: is this a storytelling kind of game, or a problem-solving kind of game? The rulesets that try to blend both often feel like they pick up the worst of both worlds, demanding players switch between two very different sorts of minds or risk spoiling the whole affair. This is an interesting point I'd thought about before but never articulated. I think it was part of why I didn't gel with one of my old DND groups. They'd sometimes be faffing around doing "funny" stuff, but I mostly was sticking to the "use your resources wisely or perish" mode of DND.

Probably a support character. I'd expect they are good at emotional and physical first aid, morale boosts, and diplomacy. They probably aren't good at physically fighting, but they'd be good at stopping fights non-violently.

I think I'd need to see more examples to understand this better. If I'm a thoughtful (d6) wizard and I want to carefully open this portal, what do I roll? What if I'm trying to do so but the building is on fire? It really does seem a lot like Fate Accelerated. You've both got four actions (though they theirs are more general purpose. create an advantage, overcome, attack. defend). Their approaches are (by default) careful, clever, flashy, forceful, quick, sneaky.

It sounds a lot like Fate Accelerated, except more complicated. I'm not sure I understand the dice sizes. Looks like some types just are weaker?

I don't know PBTA well but I believe so. Basically, every scene and character can have 'aspects', which are things that are true about them. They're free form. Sometimes they're just there, like if you're in a bar it might have "Bubbling with drunk banter" or "Loud Pop Punk Soundtrack". Aspects can then affect what makes sense in the scene. "Loud Pop Punk" can make it easier to move without being heard, but harder to make a speech because no one can hear you, for example. You can also explicitly create aspects. Turn off the jukebox and the aspect might change to "Weirdly Quiet Bar" or whatever. In a fight, you can use the "create an advantage" move. That's for stuff that isn't about taking them out of the conflict right now, but setting things up. Like pushing them off balance, disarming them, screaming "LOOK! A DISTRACTION!" whatever. If the roll comes out if your favor, you can create an aspect that's true and can also be invoked for a numeric bonus on a dice roll. So if you pants the guy you're fighting, he can't run full speed to chase you because his pants are down. You can also invoke that if you want to kick his ass, for a bonus on the dice roll. These are all free form and it's up to the group to decide what it actually means. Most groups probably wouldn't let you invoke "I'm literally on fire!!" as a bonus if you're trying to sneak through a crowd. Typically, as I understand it, you're either trying to take them out of the fight or trying to create advantages for side of the conflict. On a dramatic success on trying to take someone out, you can also create a small advantage.

This is the best approach I've found. Player says, "I make a sales pitch playing on Priscilla's hatred of our common foe, and that's why she should sell us these explosives for cheap" and doesn't have to actually do a sales call. Roll the dice and decide if that means she buys in, makes a counter offer, or what.

Personally I find adding a lot of flavor that has no mechanical impact kind of distracting and tiresome in a different way. Like, sure, it sounds cool you slashed their ankles or whatever, but if it doesn't _do_ anything I need to discard that. I can't, in most systems, then be like "ok he just got stabbed in the leg he's off balance. I can take advantage of that!". It's just noise. Some people have been like "You just don't have any imagination!" but it's not that. It's that the flavor stuff is often actively **not true**, and it's tiresome to hold two separate world states in mind at the same time. One where the fighter just stabbed the guy in the hand and threw sand in his eyes, and the other where he hit for 5 damage and his hand + eyes are _fine_. (Contrast Fate, which explicitly encourages you to be creative about the scene, and lets you mechanically benefit as well.)

I think the "I move and attack" stuff can get boring, especially if it's _slow_. Like, if the players are speedy about it then you're basically playing a board game, and that's fine. I start to lose patience when you get the "can i move here? oh i can only move 30 feet. what about here? oh that will provoke. maybe if i cast misty step? oh i can't cast two leveled spells in a round. Can I hide first? Oh that takes my _action_? Sorry I usually play rogue. Uhhh I guess I just shoot them." mode. I also kind of really want to spend more time in systems where the talky parts have rules, too. D&D tends to be just "wing it' and "DM decides". If you're at the noble's ball and try to make a big speech to convince the duke to flee before your army attacks, there's not really a lot of structure there. It _can_ be fine to just "talk it out, man", but that runs into the problem where my character on paper has CHA 20 but me in real life rocks a solid 10 CHA. Or the other case, where the fighter with 8 CHA has a salesguy for a player, and he punches well above his on-paper skills using his real life personality, where I'm sidelined. Honestly, just removing all the social skills from D&D would normalize the system. But there's also games like Fate, that handle social conflict and sword conflict with the same rules. Stab someone? Roll fight vs whatever they defend with. Stab someone with your _words_? Roll Cruelty vs their Composure. In either case, if your dice come out on top enough then they don't get to go on. I think some peopel who want more RP would hate this, since it gamifies it. But I'd rather have it than the aforementioned "real life sales guy hogs the spotlight" problem.