They came to the house.Player characters. Key distinction.
They know whose home ground they're on.
The Politics of Tabletop RPGs
- Thread starter mesonoxian
- Start date
They know whose home ground they're on.
- Location
- The Great Beyond
- Pronouns
- He/She/They
New idea for a death game manga
- Pronouns
- They/Them
The answer is that this is videogame design being poorly applied to TTRPGs.
In a videogame, the player is expected to exist persistently within a larger world subdivided into areas, usually with one of these being the tutorial area. A hook in area A points the player to check out area B. It seems pretty clear to me that the team responsible for these adventures took a similar mindset of presuming the player character already exists as a generic character who stumbles across the adventure rather than being created for the sake of participating in it.
I don't think this logic holds. This is a very common type of story, and one that has a pretty long pedigree in table top games based on discussions I've seen. The oddity is more that they were laser focused on this one particular setup, not that it existed.
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Also frankly chronlogically it almost feels like the other way around.
That video game RPGs that have the "theme park adventures" element of having to hook you in to random nonsense to fill two hours is them imitating the sort of world where you have a more plotless (or rather not single-plotted) generic 1-20 with some key story beats... and so if at level 6 there's a nifty new little adventure about fighting a Haunted Carnival, you just add it in to fill the space and give the XP needed to keep on going.
In other words, video games seem like they'd be imitating TTRPGs in this case.
Now obviously video games where the levels were entirely random and just, "Oh, this is the fire level, and then it's the ice level" go back older than that... but none of them crafted explanations for why you should be invested in a hypothetical plot. You just went to the ice level.
That video game RPGs that have the "theme park adventures" element of having to hook you in to random nonsense to fill two hours is them imitating the sort of world where you have a more plotless (or rather not single-plotted) generic 1-20 with some key story beats... and so if at level 6 there's a nifty new little adventure about fighting a Haunted Carnival, you just add it in to fill the space and give the XP needed to keep on going.
In other words, video games seem like they'd be imitating TTRPGs in this case.
Now obviously video games where the levels were entirely random and just, "Oh, this is the fire level, and then it's the ice level" go back older than that... but none of them crafted explanations for why you should be invested in a hypothetical plot. You just went to the ice level.
- Location
- London, England
Honestly one of the more fascinating examples of this kind of design that I have come across lately is in the 4e remakes of the Enemy Within campaign for wfrp. I just finished running a group through them, the final book finished like last week, and I was using them as the basis for a quest recently so I've been looking at them in depth.
Anyway, one of the distinguishing features of the 4e version are the "Grognard" boxes, which are sidebars and text sections designed to account for players who have run this adventure before - it is, after all, a good thirty years old or so and quite famous within its niche! And a lot of the advice is really good - there's a whole section for Power Behind the Throne on how to shuffle hooks and culprits and machinations to keep players guessing, because it is specifically a mystery/social investigation focused adventure, for example.
And then there are Grognard boxes which are... not that.
For example, what if the players express a sense of anticipation for Etelka Herzen's treasure and what they are going to buy with the several hundred gold crowns in there? Consider moving it to an alternative location, like say a closet that the goblins have been using as a toilet, and make your players describe how they dig through piles of literally rancid shit to get their gold!
What if, instead of speaking to any NPC or engaging with the adventure in any way, the players bypass the entire place and head directly for the secret tunnel hidden in the cavern system? Consider redirecting that tunnel to have them come out in the castle dungeons where a torture-happy ogre is waiting for them!
At literally no point in the entire five-book series does it say "consider talking to your metagaming players and asking them to please dial it back".
- Pronouns
- She/Her
of course, that advice is entirely in keeping with what a vocal segment of the wfrp fanbase considers to be "The Right Way To Play", as described in this piece by james wallis:
Yes, I sank your fucking barge. You deserved it. It was a piece of crap, you hadn't paid the taxes on it in years, and the bilges stank. The best place for it was the bottom of the Reik. For some godforgotten reason your GM didn't put it there, he was stupid enough to leave it afloat.
That wasn't what ruined your character's life. You did that.
The Enemy Within campaign is, as noted, superb. From your article you don't appear to have played through any part of it, except for the bit in 'Death on the Reik' where the PCs acquire a barge and the incident in 'Carrion Up the Reik' where it gets torched. It gets torched for a specific reason: to get the PCs away from the river and off to Middenheim, where they can take part in the splendid adventure that is 'Power Behind the Throne'. Because if you don't take their barge away from them, they're going to keep pratting around on the river, buying and selling ever-larger cargoes like some demented bunch of early Renaissance Elite players, for their entire sodding lives, boring the pants off their GM and not going through the kind of violent, dreadful existence that is the proper fate of authentic Warhammer FRP characters.
Did you go to Middenheim? Doesn't look like it. Which, when playing a short adventure that was specifically created as a bridge between the end of 'Death on the Reik' and the start of 'Power Behind the Throne', seems a bit dim. For those who don't know, DotR ends with the PCs finding a letter that implies that something fishy is going on in Middenheim, and PBtT begins "So you arrive in Middenheim." Clearly something was needed to fill the gap between the two. Something that would separate the PCs from their fucking barge.
I did at one point think about having the barge captured by big smelly river-pirates, who would tie up and forcibly bugger anyone who tried to take it back off them. This would probably have done the separation job better than simply torching the thing, but I realised it would be tricky to get the Odorous Piratical Sodomy table past Games Workshop's RPG licensing department. So arson it was.
Did you ever work out how the barge caught fire? Or more particularly, which trusted retainer of which major trading family chucked the oil-lamp into the boat's forward hold, and why? Or did you bother to read the paperwork you'd signed the evening before, which guarantees that the person who had hired you to transport some cargo must pay for repairs to any damage that comes to your barge while it's at his dock? Evidently not. For fuck's sake.
You do, however, seem to have got part of the point: you note that Warhammer FRP isn't like D&D, and the monsters don't automatically carry gold and magic items. D&D is about quests for glory and riches; WFRP pretends to be the same, but in fact is about the PCs' day-to-day fight for survival in a universe that hates them. If you don't finish each adventure worse off than when you started it, your GM is doing something wrong. If you find yourself in a WFRP adventure and not knee-deep in shit then duck, because another load is past due. And if you do something really stupid like getting addicted to drugs because they give you combat bonuses -- and I've heard some really idiotic reasons for getting hooked, but that one takes the tab -- then you deserve everything that's coming to you.
In other words, my hat is off to your GM. He's running Warhammer FRP the way I run it, and it sounds like he's doing a good job. From your description, right about now your characters are somewhere towards the end of the second adventure of the Doomstones campaign. Wait till you reach the last one, that 's all I'm saying. You think you've suffered? Wait till you reach 'Heart of Chaos'. Your characters will hate it. You will love it. Because let's be honest, if nothing bad had ever happened to Fat Gregor, he wouldn't be half as fun to play, would he?
Go on. Buy another barge. I'll fucking sink that one too.
That wasn't what ruined your character's life. You did that.
The Enemy Within campaign is, as noted, superb. From your article you don't appear to have played through any part of it, except for the bit in 'Death on the Reik' where the PCs acquire a barge and the incident in 'Carrion Up the Reik' where it gets torched. It gets torched for a specific reason: to get the PCs away from the river and off to Middenheim, where they can take part in the splendid adventure that is 'Power Behind the Throne'. Because if you don't take their barge away from them, they're going to keep pratting around on the river, buying and selling ever-larger cargoes like some demented bunch of early Renaissance Elite players, for their entire sodding lives, boring the pants off their GM and not going through the kind of violent, dreadful existence that is the proper fate of authentic Warhammer FRP characters.
Did you go to Middenheim? Doesn't look like it. Which, when playing a short adventure that was specifically created as a bridge between the end of 'Death on the Reik' and the start of 'Power Behind the Throne', seems a bit dim. For those who don't know, DotR ends with the PCs finding a letter that implies that something fishy is going on in Middenheim, and PBtT begins "So you arrive in Middenheim." Clearly something was needed to fill the gap between the two. Something that would separate the PCs from their fucking barge.
I did at one point think about having the barge captured by big smelly river-pirates, who would tie up and forcibly bugger anyone who tried to take it back off them. This would probably have done the separation job better than simply torching the thing, but I realised it would be tricky to get the Odorous Piratical Sodomy table past Games Workshop's RPG licensing department. So arson it was.
Did you ever work out how the barge caught fire? Or more particularly, which trusted retainer of which major trading family chucked the oil-lamp into the boat's forward hold, and why? Or did you bother to read the paperwork you'd signed the evening before, which guarantees that the person who had hired you to transport some cargo must pay for repairs to any damage that comes to your barge while it's at his dock? Evidently not. For fuck's sake.
You do, however, seem to have got part of the point: you note that Warhammer FRP isn't like D&D, and the monsters don't automatically carry gold and magic items. D&D is about quests for glory and riches; WFRP pretends to be the same, but in fact is about the PCs' day-to-day fight for survival in a universe that hates them. If you don't finish each adventure worse off than when you started it, your GM is doing something wrong. If you find yourself in a WFRP adventure and not knee-deep in shit then duck, because another load is past due. And if you do something really stupid like getting addicted to drugs because they give you combat bonuses -- and I've heard some really idiotic reasons for getting hooked, but that one takes the tab -- then you deserve everything that's coming to you.
In other words, my hat is off to your GM. He's running Warhammer FRP the way I run it, and it sounds like he's doing a good job. From your description, right about now your characters are somewhere towards the end of the second adventure of the Doomstones campaign. Wait till you reach the last one, that 's all I'm saying. You think you've suffered? Wait till you reach 'Heart of Chaos'. Your characters will hate it. You will love it. Because let's be honest, if nothing bad had ever happened to Fat Gregor, he wouldn't be half as fun to play, would he?
Go on. Buy another barge. I'll fucking sink that one too.
Chloe Sullivan
Subdefective
- Location
- 1630 Revello Drive, Sunnydale CA
If it's meant for existing character, then it shouldn't start at level 1, lol.
Seriously, it's "go hunt goblins until you have enough levels to do the real adventure"
deathofrats0808
Don’t think of it as dying; just as leaving early
- Location
- Earth
That's not really a thing Only War is designed to do. A GM can certainly play it that way, but it's about as deadly as WFRP (save that it generally gives fewer Fate Points).
This might be a digression, but a similar manner of play was dominant in Poland as Jesienna Gawęda (Autumn's Tale), named after a series of essays published in the main Polish RPG magazines of the time between 1999-2003 by Ignacy Trzewiczek, a prominent TRPG personality (and the lead editor of one of the magazines). I was too young to experience it first-hand but sources say that it aimed for a similar "doomed PCs fighting for survival" atmosphere. Reasons behind the dour mood were several: the rather bad economic condition of the country, the popularity of The Witcher series, humor and pop-culture references of early WFRP understandably flying over the heads of the local TRPG fans, and the faulty ruleset of the early editions making them seek more narrative-heavy experiences.
Generally, Jessienna Gawęda is regarded as influential but hasn't aged well. The most stereotypical, if seemingly overblown, JG experience was the PCs being railroaded into borderline torture porn without being able to do anything and long stretches of GM just monologuing and being as adversarial as they can possibly get (Trzewiczek translated John Wick's Play Dirty which didn't help his reputation). As evidence, I can link a retrospective review of the essays and a collection of the most infamous paragraphs, two of which I will translate in the spoiler box.
To be fair, the later essays focused more on making PCs face hard moral dilemmas instead of actively screwing them over but people mostly remember the latter part. JG also had a part in creating somewhat popular RPG systems - Neuroshima (probably better known from its spin-off Neuroshima Hex) and Monastyr (which embodied pretty much every negative stereotype of JG while also being an absolute mess in terms of mechanics) before Trzewiczek and his Portal publishing house moved out to enjoy greater success in the board game market.
Lacking a good conclusion, there's a fun fact: Jesienna Gawęda was parodied in the form of Agonia: Ponura Gra Fabularna - based on D4 dice because "stepping on tetrahedral dice with your bare foot hurts the most, which allows you to feel the grim atmosphere of this game even better!".
- Pronouns
- He
There's nothing better to get people to want to keep on hanging out with you than having the enemy you're having them fight be everywhere, be all powerful, be all knowing and having no weak spots! Perhaps his roleplaying funds should be spent on hiring prostitutes to spank as they call him master.
Reveen
Castro-Trudeauist
IMO the problem that I feel crops up in 'hardcore' games is that they stack the deck so high against the players that it becomes a handicap in favour of the baddies. Like it makes sense if it's a game were the PC's are in fact special and the universe in fact hates them specifically. But if the intent is to go for 'realistic' where no one is special then the unfairness and brutality of the universe ought to go both ways. If my character can just die randomly to one bad roll so should the villain.
Madam Carstein
Cheerful Middenlander Demoness
- Location
- Middenland
- Pronouns
- She/Her/Hers
This is very true but I feel like this mindset persisted well after D&D had long become established as its own thing.
Game mechanics were punishing by design in a number of ways and a lot of times, whether a character lived or died was very frequently determined by whether or not they passed a certain check or save at the opportune moment. The idea that someone might actually be attached to their character or at least might get upset at the idea that their character dies because they rolled an 11 when they needed a 12 is well...
I'd imagine Gygax's response would've been something to the effect of "Sucks to be you."
I'd say most if not all Pathfinder classes are pretty objectively terrible if you just throw something together slapdash. The absolutely mind-boggling number of options of varying degrees of quality and balance means that there's a lot of very situational options that might be great if combined with certain builds, items, or classes but are unplayably bad otherwise.
1e has its advantages as a system, but game balance and accessibility to new players are not among them. I would actually honestly argue that 1e Pathfinder by virtue of the sheer amount of work it requires for even low-level play is a hostile system to new players.
Honestly, so many TTRPG horror stories could have been averted with nothing more than some simple communication. Not everyone will be open to changing their behaviour, but making the effort is important.
I feel like a lot of older gaming systems placed an emphasis on IC solutions to OOC problems and didn't really emphasise things like communication, understanding expectations, conflict resolution and de-escalation or just like... basic social interaction.
Chloe Sullivan
Subdefective
- Location
- 1630 Revello Drive, Sunnydale CA
Character building in D&D 3 derivatives (PF1 among others) tends to be really quite hostile to new players, yes. But there are ways other than CharGen for the system to be fundamentally hostile, and honestly, I think Exalted 2e is worse overall.
Parzival
They shall not pass. We shall overcome.
- Location
- Northern Virginia
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I mean, even the the earliest editions of D&D, there were resurrection spells. I do feel like the lethality of early D&D is rather overstated, even if a few of the Gygax modules could tend towards the sadistic.
I mean I think we can all realize by now that Gygax was a bad DM
Parzival
They shall not pass. We shall overcome.
- Location
- Northern Virginia
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Can we all say that? I'm not sure that we can.
Madam Carstein
Cheerful Middenlander Demoness
- Location
- Middenland
- Pronouns
- She/Her/Hers
There were, but as I recall a lot of them were very situational (i.e. needing to have a body available to be resurrected, which might not be present if say, someone's rope snapped and they fell off a cliff to their death), so it's still in many possible to get screwed over by sheer bad luck.
Personally, I think it bears stating often and loudly.
I would argue that this is an attitude held by many modern players but that Gygax's influence is also so hard-coded in various aspects of modern TTRPGs that it can, at times, be hard to disentangle.
Like, most players who aren't grognard asshats reject the more overtly bigoted attitudes that Gygax held and expressed. But that doesn't mean that everyone is aware of exactly how bad and regressive Gygax's beliefs actually were or that they affected aspects of lore and game mechanics that aren't immediately obvious.
For example, I would strongly argue that a lot of problems with the Paladin class often being characterised and roleplayed as a Lawful Stupid religious fanatic asshat and the Drow being basically an entire society of misogynist stereotypes is almost exclusively down to Gygax's influence on the game.
Given that Gygax is viewed as the founder of D&D in some circles even today and his characters (such as Mordenkainen) and other contributions to lore still persist in some form or another, it can be very hard to disentangle things he added to the lore.
I also think think that the dynamic changes a lot after the creator actually dies. Because at that point, that person no longer derives any kind of financial or cultural benefit from their work and well, no longer has any direct ability to actually influence it. I feel very similarly about say, the works of H.P. Lovecraft because Lovecraft was demonstrably possessed of deeply racist and antisemitic attitudes but at this point, he's dead and the work he created has both outlived and outgrown him.
Gygax died back in the 2000's, the system he helped create was from 1977. At this point, I think it's very safe to say that D&D has very much grown beyond him and that it did so even while he was still alive. But it doesn't mean we shouldn't be aware of his toxic influence on the game.
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- Pronouns
- She/Her
I'm going to play Devil's Advocate and say the Drow are based on spiders hence the matarichal thing. Female spiders are typically bigger and eat their mates.
Still I never understood the Drow being dark skinned if they lived underground.
Wouldn't it make more sense to be pale like no Melinen pale.
Troglofauna
Troglofauna are small cave-dwelling animals that have adapted to their dark surroundings. Troglofauna and stygofauna are the two types of subterranean fauna (based on life-history). Both are associated with subterranean environments – troglofauna are associated with caves and spaces above the...
dbpedia.org
Darkvision exists in the drow's setting and can distinguish shades of gray without any light present. The drow are adapting by developing camouflage to look like rocks.
IIRC the modern explanation is the high magic-radiation in the underdark causing it, if they bother to come up with an excuse at all.
- Location
- Somewhere
Dunno how Greyhawk used to explain it, but Faerun had it that the drow were dark skinned from day one, and became subterranean much later. The matriarchal thing was also a later thing, and far less universal among them than Greyhawk, with at least one major nation defying it entirely. They've been underground for about 11400 years, but the elves arrived from Faerie 31400 years ago
Darkvision only exist from 3e on. Before that it was infravision, based on heat. Drow in Drizz't's home city even had a giant heat based city time piece, a pillar that was heated each morning and cooled throughout the "day"
Darkvision only exist from 3e on. Before that it was infravision, based on heat. Drow in Drizz't's home city even had a giant heat based city time piece, a pillar that was heated each morning and cooled throughout the "day"
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The mysoginy came first and the way to justify nextI'm going to play Devil's Advocate and say the Drow are based on spiders hence the matarichal thing. Female spiders are typically bigger and eat their mates.
Still I never understood the Drow being dark skinned if they lived underground.
Wouldn't it make more sense to be pale like no Melinen pale.
Troglofauna
Troglofauna are small cave-dwelling animals that have adapted to their dark surroundings. Troglofauna and stygofauna are the two types of subterranean fauna (based on life-history). Both are associated with subterranean environments – troglofauna are associated with caves and spaces above the...dbpedia.org
Drow exist in FR because of executive mandate, and they were directly pulled from the greyhawk drow.
A lot of authors have pushed back against it, but as it stands, greenwood never intended for gygaxian drow to exist in the setting he created
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