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Author Topic:   MMORGs and role playing discussion.
cavediver
Member (Idle past 3643 days)
Posts: 4129
From: UK
Joined: 06-16-2005


Message 121 of 198 (526352)
09-26-2009 8:11 PM
Reply to: Message 120 by Larni
09-26-2009 8:10 PM


Re: something for the nerds
Player1: I search Player3 and take his stuff
Priceless - oh to be eleven again and discovering D&D for the first time (1980)

This message is a reply to:
 Message 120 by Larni, posted 09-26-2009 8:10 PM Larni has replied

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Granny Magda
Member
Posts: 2462
From: UK
Joined: 11-12-2007
Member Rating: 4.0


Message 122 of 198 (526353)
09-26-2009 8:12 PM
Reply to: Message 114 by onifre
09-26-2009 7:49 PM


Re: something for the nerds
It's depends how long you want the game to run. Sometimes it's fun to run a short game for a couple of sessions. Other times you can run a long-term campaign, with many consecutive (or concurrent) story arcs. Mine has been running for a couple of years now. It ends when the characters are too powerful to challenge or when people jsut feel like trying something else.
There is no winner/loser, but there are missions for the characters to complete and these might be successful or fail hideously. The referee (Game/Dungeon Master/Storyteller) plays the antagonists, but the GM isn't aiming to wipe out the player characters as much as challenge them. Ideally the opposition should be beaten by juuuust a thin margin. It can be good if the party get handed their asses once in a while though. It keeps them keen, stops them getting complacent.
As your character achieves goals within the game, they gain experience points or some mechanism like that. Either you can spend the points on new abilities or you advance in level as you go. In fact, you're probably pretty familiar with this aspect of gaming if you've ever played computer games much. The character advancement in those is often based on tabletop gaming.
The only real aim is to have fun, mess around with your mates and generally act like big kids for a while. I have heard tell of serious games where people strive to achieve pathos and wear serious faces, but frankly, every game I've ever played in has degenerated into a giggling goof around at some point.
Mutate and Survive

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Larni
Member (Idle past 164 days)
Posts: 4000
From: Liverpool
Joined: 09-16-2005


Message 123 of 198 (526354)
09-26-2009 8:17 PM
Reply to: Message 121 by cavediver
09-26-2009 8:11 PM


Re: something for the nerds
Yeah, that's D&D to the core: I always remember one of my pals saying in a lull of the game play:
"Lets just find something and kill it."
He had a wall of death on his bed room wall of what he had killed and how many chars he had who died (a lot).
Good times...

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Granny Magda
Member
Posts: 2462
From: UK
Joined: 11-12-2007
Member Rating: 4.0


Message 124 of 198 (526355)
09-26-2009 8:17 PM
Reply to: Message 119 by Larni
09-26-2009 8:07 PM


Re: What Characters do you play?
I find it hard to talk about realism whilst pretending to be a gnome.
House mods are just good for making the game work the way that suits your group. One of the good things about gaming this way is that you can just use want you like and bin the rest.
Mutate and Survive

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Larni
Member (Idle past 164 days)
Posts: 4000
From: Liverpool
Joined: 09-16-2005


Message 125 of 198 (526357)
09-26-2009 8:25 PM
Reply to: Message 124 by Granny Magda
09-26-2009 8:17 PM


Re: What Characters do you play?
LOL!
I always remember a cartoon in Dragon where on ogre was tied up and being shot at with arrows. After several direct hits (with arrows sticking out of its head and face) a wizards standing to one side says "It's still got 13 hit points left; keep shooting".
Nowa days I like to run my games like action films. In the past I would be a real hard arse about verisimilatude, keeping track of encumberance and food supplies and what have you.
These days I'm more focused on players having mad skillz and pulling crazy stuntz.
Shallow is as shallow does .

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Rahvin
Member
Posts: 4032
Joined: 07-01-2005
Member Rating: 9.2


Message 126 of 198 (526374)
09-26-2009 11:36 PM
Reply to: Message 125 by Larni
09-26-2009 8:25 PM


Re: What Characters do you play?
The best roleplay session I ever had with my friends was when we didn't have any dice, and I just used the story and the character's attributes as a gauge to carry the story forward.
Rules are a means to an end, not something that should be stressed over.

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Son Goku
Inactive Member


Message 127 of 198 (526386)
09-27-2009 2:53 AM
Reply to: Message 104 by Larni
09-26-2009 7:16 PM


Re: something for the nerds
Think of the genres that you can have in novels (well, apart from chick lit) and you can pretty well find a role plating game to deal with it.
This is obviously the greatest flaw in modern RPGs. We've all been Fangar the level 13 wizard, heir to seat Garnak. However secretely we all want to role play as Cassandra, a down on her luck marketing excutive who takes a much needed vacation with unexpected romantic consequences.
May I ask, what do people who are interested in pen and paper RPGs think of computer RPGs? I've played the latter a lot, loved Deus Ex, Elder Scrolls (especially the newest one), e.t.c. However I've never played the former.

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cavediver
Member (Idle past 3643 days)
Posts: 4129
From: UK
Joined: 06-16-2005


Message 128 of 198 (526393)
09-27-2009 4:20 AM
Reply to: Message 126 by Rahvin
09-26-2009 11:36 PM


Re: What Characters do you play?
The best roleplay session I ever had with my friends was when we didn't have any dice
Yep, we used to "free-form" quite regularly. I was sceptical at first, but soon found that we just didn't miss the dice and character sheets. As with all good RPG, it's down to having a great ref.
I used to be crap at anything more challenging than hack & slash: I'd get a story idea and then run the game on rails, as I didn't have the confidence to let the players screw everything up. Then I learnt to relax, and just enjoy roleplaying whatever stupid scenario developed, even when it was a million miles from what I had intended. That's a major difference between character advancement games, such as D&D, where players can derive enjoyment just from building experience, and story-driven games such as CoC, Traveller, and most free-form, where the story is everything...

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cavediver
Member (Idle past 3643 days)
Posts: 4129
From: UK
Joined: 06-16-2005


Message 129 of 198 (526394)
09-27-2009 4:34 AM
Reply to: Message 127 by Son Goku
09-27-2009 2:53 AM


Re: something for the nerds
what do people who are interested in pen and paper RPGs think of computer RPGs?
They can be good fun. I loved all of BG, BGII, ToB. But it is still playing a computer game... There is no comparison to real RPG. I think Granny said it best a few posts up:
The only real aim is to have fun, mess around with your mates and generally act like big kids for a while.
RPG is about interaction with other people, whether it is goofing around, RPing a bunch of misfit superheroes (we drove our ref mad with this one - we refused to take it seriously much to his dismay, but after the second session he had to conceed that three hours of non-stop hysterics was not a bad way of spending an evening - my power was to "grow big" FFS - we discovered that there is literally no limit to the number of possible nob and underpants jokes) or taking ourselves very seriously, as actors, in
Granny writes:
serious games where people strive to achieve pathos and wear serious faces
RPG is about face-to-face social interaction before anything else, and computer games are the antithesis of this. And it's the guys that spend every spare second zoned into their PS3s and XBoxes that call the RPGers geeks
Edited by cavediver, : No reason given.

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Larni
Member (Idle past 164 days)
Posts: 4000
From: Liverpool
Joined: 09-16-2005


Message 130 of 198 (526402)
09-27-2009 6:03 AM
Reply to: Message 127 by Son Goku
09-27-2009 2:53 AM


Re: something for the nerds
I love CRPGs.
But it ain't role playing in a real sense. I feel they are more about building up your character or party and less about the interactions.
Not always true as some can be pretty involving (Torment for example) but it's hard to get emotionally involved in something like Oblivion.

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Rrhain
Member
Posts: 6351
From: San Diego, CA, USA
Joined: 05-03-2003


Message 131 of 198 (526403)
09-27-2009 6:17 AM
Reply to: Message 126 by Rahvin
09-26-2009 11:36 PM


Rahvin writes:
quote:
The best roleplay session I ever had with my friends was when we didn't have any dice, and I just used the story and the character's attributes as a gauge to carry the story forward.
This is one of the characteristics of the Castle Falkenstein method: You don't have to play with any dice ever. You have a set of traits (engineering, gun, gambling, diplomacy, etc.) of which you are "Great" at one, "Good" at four, and "Poor" at one. Everything else you are "Average" at.
Any time you have a challenge, you compare your ranking against it to see if you succeed. A "Great" gunner should always outperform a merely "Good" one. If you want to play superhero type stuff, there are "Exceptional" and "Extraordinary" levels above "Great."
Now, CF does include a system of randomness in the use of cards, but you don't have to use them at all if you don't want to. And while CF does allow you to try and train things up (though it requires the loss of something else...to get an "Exceptional," something else must be "Poor"), you can play without anybody's abilities ever changing.
My group played a Darrian Traveller campaign using this system, no cards. We had no up-training until we discovered an Ancient site and that always throws wrenches into the works.

Rrhain

Thank you for your submission to Science. Your paper was reviewed by a jury of seventh graders so that they could look for balance and to allow them to make up their own minds. We are sorry to say that they found your paper "bogus," specifically describing the section on the laboratory work "boring." We regret that we will be unable to publish your work at this time.

Minds are like parachutes. Just because you've lost yours doesn't mean you can use mine.

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Rrhain
Member
Posts: 6351
From: San Diego, CA, USA
Joined: 05-03-2003


Message 132 of 198 (526406)
09-27-2009 6:48 AM
Reply to: Message 92 by Larni
09-26-2009 12:46 PM


Larni asks:
quote:
So, when you role play do you tend to stick to a character type of do you play differing classes or archetypes?
I tend to gravitate more toward spell-casters. Classic D&D, I tended toward illusionists over straight M-Us.
Of late, I've branched out. My RuneQuest character was Humakti (though a formidable fighter, he did become a powerful RunePriest as well as a RuneLord) who had to do things differently: When he got his spirit item, he didn't choose a sword. Instead, he bound it to a sleeve of iron chainmail (named "Soulwork").
When D&D 3 came out, I played a Bard, Coyote. At creation, I specifically chose "Blindfight" as a Feat. When we finally got to the end of the campaign (over a year later), we were faced with a medusa and that Feat finally came in handy. It was chosen so long ago that our DM had forgotten Coyote had it and got frustrated that his big bad wasn't as big or bad as he wanted it to be.
For D&D 3.5, I played a Monk. She was my first Lawful Good character.
For Traveller, I have played a primitive who was a priest of the crocodile god who was snatched by intergalactic pirates and later escaped. There were another couple of campaigns where I played an engineer/computer scientist and a medic/psychic (he would teleport into disabled ships, stabilize the injured, and teleport them out.) And, as mentioned, our one-off games is my actor.
Our Cthulhu game had me playing a jock (crew). He only lost 1 sanity point during the campaign, though it was a somewhat brief stint.
Our GURPS Infinite Worlds campaign had me playing essentially a secret agent/superspy (DEX, guns, tactics, savoir faire, sex appeal, driving). He managed to get a Tech 11 blaster rifle that he never went anywhere without if he could possibly help it.
The current D&D 4e campaign has me as a Cleric.

Rrhain

Thank you for your submission to Science. Your paper was reviewed by a jury of seventh graders so that they could look for balance and to allow them to make up their own minds. We are sorry to say that they found your paper "bogus," specifically describing the section on the laboratory work "boring." We regret that we will be unable to publish your work at this time.

Minds are like parachutes. Just because you've lost yours doesn't mean you can use mine.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 92 by Larni, posted 09-26-2009 12:46 PM Larni has not replied

  
Rrhain
Member
Posts: 6351
From: San Diego, CA, USA
Joined: 05-03-2003


Message 133 of 198 (526407)
09-27-2009 7:08 AM


A couple of gaming cartoons, in case y'all haven't heard of them already:
First, Order of the Stick. The first couple hundred strips were more about poking fun at gaming in and of itself but as it went on, it developed an actual plot and storyline and now it's more about the campaign than the meta-level commentary (though that still comes up).
(http://www.giantitp.com/comics/images/oots0007.gif)
Second, Knights of the Dinner Table. This is generally an actual comic book (though it started with strips in Dragon), but they have web strips, too. This is a strip about gamers and the Munchkin behaviour that tends to crop up.
Edited by Rrhain, : Don't know why the image isn't showing here. It's strip #7.

Rrhain

Thank you for your submission to Science. Your paper was reviewed by a jury of seventh graders so that they could look for balance and to allow them to make up their own minds. We are sorry to say that they found your paper "bogus," specifically describing the section on the laboratory work "boring." We regret that we will be unable to publish your work at this time.

Minds are like parachutes. Just because you've lost yours doesn't mean you can use mine.

Replies to this message:
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Larni
Member (Idle past 164 days)
Posts: 4000
From: Liverpool
Joined: 09-16-2005


Message 134 of 198 (526409)
09-27-2009 7:29 AM
Reply to: Message 133 by Rrhain
09-27-2009 7:08 AM


!!
I have the d20 Munchkin rule set; very funny indead, a bit like Hackmaster with d20 rules.
I've never played Traveller; its's Sci Fi, right?

This message is a reply to:
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cavediver
Member (Idle past 3643 days)
Posts: 4129
From: UK
Joined: 06-16-2005


Message 135 of 198 (526410)
09-27-2009 7:57 AM
Reply to: Message 134 by Larni
09-27-2009 7:29 AM


I've never played Traveller; its's Sci Fi, right?
Yep - in the mid-80s we had a year long Traveller compaign that had a great AD&D crossover segment!! Nothing like taking down dragons with an FGMP-15 (Fusion Gun - Man Portable)

This message is a reply to:
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