Pen and Paper RPGs

[Rastan]

I would think making a digital game like this would take a lot of thought and more importantly effort. I would think you could create a large amount of props, characters, backgrounds, and other visual type items. Then take that and have sort of a lobby game create kind of system where users who chose to run the show could take time prepare a game pull props backgrounds and such into sort of a queue box and put their prepared game up for people to join. Then through text or maybe microphone the creator could run out his little scenario.

Characters could be made for whatever ruleset was being used( this part as has been pointed out is probably the difficult part to get right. I would think a few static rules to keep things flowing and consistent between players would have to be in place tho.) and then played through that universal set of rules through any number of stories that were user created.

Then all the rewards could be given and the GM could be rated up or down based on what the players thought of his little game. Eventually the really good GM's would be very noticeable.

It occurs to me that this would be hard to keep people from cheating it up awarding way too much etc. Maybe the GM's would have to be interviewed and chosen? I dunno, interesting design issue there.

I would think that type of deal would get some play if done right. Then if you wanted I'm sure there would be plenty of ways to monetize if that was needed to keep the site going after that.

[Callan S.]

I like fewer rules, because to me, it is about the experience, and not about "winning". I don't want to get bogged down in endless dice rolls or checking rule tables. But then, all of the GMs I played with typically erred on the side of the player, and worked on the idea of "assumed actions" (i.e. it was assumed you could climb a ladder, break a vase, etc.) so no rolls were needed for that. There was never an issue where I had to question whether or not I trusted the GM.

Putting aside the idea of winning, if you are to any degree determining how the story turns out, even if your only doing so by 1%, then it is not 100% about just experiencing things. If your determining the story to any degree, your authoring it (co-authoring, unless your 100% determining the story, then your the only author)

You can't trust someone else to author for you. You can't say 'Jeeves, write a story about a cat that saves a fireman from a tree' and trust him to do so, because no matter how good at it he is, he's the one who authored that story, not you. The only way you can author your part of a developing story in table top is to do it directly yourself, not through a proxy.

But if for a particular game it's 100% about the experience, fair enough, I concede your point entirely.

[Jackolantern]

But you are authoring your part of the game through proxy. RPGs are not like board games, and should not be IMHO. The story is the GM's, and you are in his world. Talking about "trusting the GM" with "your part of the story" seems to go against the whole idea of table-top RPGs to me. You are just a piece in the world created by the GM, and all you can control is what your avatar's body tries to do, not how the world reacts to him or his level of success. Maybe we just approach table-top RPGs from very different perspectives.

[Callan S.]

Well, I'm not sure about perspectives but instead practicalities. You mention 'But you are authoring your part of the game'. If you own a part of the game, then this is exactly the 1% of authoring I'm talking about (or whatever percentage it happens to be).

I mean like say you've decided your character wants to shoot the rope someones gunna be slow hanged by (you know, the choking to death way rather than neck snap way). Hey, but it's the GM's world and he says the character is such a clutz he shoots himself in the foot, let alone hit a thin little rope at a distance!

Okay! But you still authored that the character wanted to save the guy! You wrote this, not through a proxy or anything. You didn't go 'Uh GM, can you play my character out in a sort of compassionate way' and then the GM acts as proxy and decides your character would try to shoot the rope. You just decided it directly.

Unless your saying that if you wanted him to save the guy, you say it and the GM goes 'nuh uh, my world, your character doesn't want to save him' then what the GM says goes? I'm thinking not.

Otherwise in practical terms I don't understand how you can say you have a piece of the game and yet the GM controls the world in it's entirity?

If your just controlling what the character wants to try and do, that's still a part of the world your controling, as much as the character is part of that world. A teeny, tiny part perhaps, but still a part. Perhaps less than 1% that I mentioned, but it's still control. So even if it's 99.9% about the experience, it's still not 100% about the experience. Your just at one extreme but not absolute end of the authorship spectrum I'm talking about.

You don't trust the GM with determining what your character wants to try and do. Your just deciding it.

And hey, since you do control a part directly and not through proxy, you might want to try games where you control even more directly - if only to try them out. It's just more control, not something entirely different.

[Jackolantern]

If your GM would ever tell you that your character actually didn't want to do something, you are playing with a poor GM and should change. For something that your character could fail, a simple roll with reasonable odds for a reasonable action determined by the GM should work instead of him just saying you failed. I have never had the pleasure of playing with a GM like that. But what I don't like is having huge tables of rules, and having to reference paragraphs of text in the handbook that govern the rules for trying to shoot a rope ("trying to shoot a rope is on page 682, shooting a cube shaped object is on page 724, a circular object is on page 756..."). It is pretty common-sense based: Trying to shoot a rope from any distance is difficult, so it is going to start as a difficult roll. If your character has some kind of sharpshooting ability, or very high dexterity or related attribute, the difficulty is going to go down. Or if the setting of the game revolves around sharp-shooters than common sense would dictate that this would not be too far outside of what your character would normally be able to do, and the difficulty would go down.

That is how the White Wolf games worked, which are mostly what I played after growing bored with D&D. Their rules were a minimalist common-sense approach to RPG rules, and they worked great to keep the action and story moving swiftly and fairly with minimal disruption.

I just hate power-rule games lol.

[Callan S.]

Your sort of going past my point, in talking about adjudicating shooting a rope. My point is you decide what your character wants to do directly, with no proxy. The actual rule is: as a player you control what your character wants. And as it's a rule and as much as your character will is part of the game world, you control part of the game world directly. Further, having more control than that doesn't have to involve pages and pages of rules look ups. It can be quite sleek, actually.

I know that there often is a problem in roleplay that a group of people who are into 'play to win' and a bunch of people out to 'make a story' play in the same group...and it doesn't work out. But that's not because of power rules, it's because everyones at cross purposes. It's like one guy wants to paint an apple, and the other guy wants to eat it - when you obviously can't have both (though you can do them one after the other).

[Jackolantern]

The original point was about many rules vs. few rules. I am not actually sure where it became about your character's will.

I think it is about perspective, actually, like you said. I don't understand the mentality of playing a table-top RPG "to win". The few times we had these types of players wander into our group, we typically had to not tell them about the next play session because they would whine, complain, cite the rulebook to the GM, and do other things that annoyed our group. The majority of the group just played for a social outlet and some fun. The GMs were pretty forgiving, the rules were loose and it was a blast for everyone. Most of us were of the mindset that if you were out for a rigid, structured gaming experience that you could win, then play a video game. Not that that is the best mindframe, or the only way to play, but that is my perspective on table-top RPG gaming (which I haven't done in probably 10 years now).

[Bane_Star]

I thought the point which lead this spin off was the 'players trust the GM with his/the dice's decisions' vs ' the GM does things on a whim, players never truly know what will happen next'

[Jackolantern]

This is an old thread. Please do not revive threads which are months out of date. If you would like to start a new discussion about old threads, please start a new thread and link to the old one. This prevents people from missing the old dates and directly responding to posts made months ago.