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@kaijusrpgbrainstorm
perfectly normal sign.
"But doesn't having a notion of 'balanced' combat inherently imply that all combat encounters are expected to be fair and winnable" well, no – it implies only that the GM has the ability to know whether a given combat encounter is fair and winnable.
There's a story that's been going around for decades about a Dungeons & Dragons party who encountered a large room full of treasure while exploring a dungeon. Immediately suspicious, they asked their GM a series of detailed questions about the room, but no obvious dangers were identified. Satisfied, they moved into the room – and were immediately set upon and eaten by the dragon that had been sitting atop the pile of treasure the whole time, which the GM hadn't mentioned because the players never specifically asked about the presence of living creatures within the room.
While this is obviously an extreme and ridiculous case, it illustrates an important point: as GM, you're the group's eyes and ears. If you don't describe something, the player characters literally can't see it – that dragon was effectively invisible from their perspective. The trick is that active malice isn't the only way to invisible-dragon your players; a group can also find themselves invisible-dragoned because the GM simply failed to provide sufficient information for the risk in question to be identified. This can happen through neglect, but it can also happen because the GM themself was unaware that the risk was present.
Now, hold on, you might be saying: the GM "plays" the entire world. How is it possible for the GM not to know that a risk is present? Well, that brings us back around to the subject of combat balance.
A game in which "balanced" combat is a meaningful thing to discuss is typically going to be one in which both the players and the GM are actually making strategic, tactical, and/or logistical decisions, rather than merely producing a description of their characters making such decisions. Without a good handle on the interplay of these decisions, it's completely possible for the GM to be wrong about the level of risk the scenario they've constructed entails.
That's actually pretty critical, because even if you don't care about the game being fair and winnable (and that's a perfectly valid stance), your players are still depending on you to be their eyes and ears, and to give them enough information to make good decisions about whether the fight in front of them is one they can win. A game where not every fight is expected to be winnable necessarily needs to be a game where the players have the opportunity to walk away.
No matter how objective you try to be, your own sense of the answer to that question is inevitably going to colour how you communicate about it. You being wrong about the level of risk at hand inherently increases the chance that your players will make bad choices. The party eating a TPK because they made a stupid decision is one thing; the party eating a TPK because they made a decision that looked reasonable from their perspective based on your unwitting miscommunication of the level of risk involved is quite another!
Sure, once the dice hit the table I'm probably going to realise that I fucked up, and I can adjust things on the fly to bring the level of risk that's actually present in line with the level of risk I communicated – but that's extra work I don't need with everything else that's on my plate. And that's a best-case scenario; if I'm running the game for a hardcore let-the-dice-fall-where-they-may group (and such groups tend to have a pretty significant overlap with groups that are cool with not every fight being winnable), I may not be able to adjust the fight's parameters on the fly without violating the social contract of the table.
Basically, whenever I see an OSR game with tactically crunchy combat brag about how its author never even thinks about "balance", what that's telling me is that running this game is going to create a whole lot of extra work for me as a GM. This is not a selling point.
“In character, what’s your character’s sexuality?”
Sorcerer: Out of your league.
Bard: The bit.
Warlock: Toxic yuri.
Bloodhunter: Married to the job.
I CAST FUCK YOU
The real tabletop RPG party dynamic:
Fucker who makes you wonder exactly what's wrong with them
Fucker who you know exactly what's wrong with them
Fucker who seems pretty on the level, then halfway through the campaign you find out what's wrong with them
Fucker whose deal is actually kind of tame, but their inability to be normal about it is what's wrong with them
Fucker whose unshakable conviction that there's nothing wrong with them is what's wrong with them
Fucker who's just happy to be included, and that's what's wrong with them
Happy Halloween to all the little wyrmlings!! I’m in university now so there’s been a loooong wait for the next comic, but here it is!
Patreon | Redbubble | Webtoon
kill them with kindness? wrong, eldritch blast
Resist Chaos!
If as a novice game designer you understand nothing else, please understand that writing for a rules-light system doesn't mean you don't need to know basic statistics. I've seen multiple Apocalypse Engine titles whose authors are clearly under the impression that every possible sum of 2d6 is equally probable. I've encountered at least one that included sum-of-2d6 based lookup tables with twelve entries.
wait is every sum not equally probable isn’t that the whole point of dice <-doesn’t understand statistics but is now confused
Here's a simple visual illustration.
There are 36 possible ways two rolls of a six-sider can come up:
(1,1) (1, 2) (1, 3) (1, 4) (1, 5) (1, 6) (2,1) (2, 2) (2, 3) (2, 4) (2, 5) (2, 6) (3,1) (3, 2) (3, 3) (3, 4) (3, 5) (3, 6) (4,1) (4, 2) (4, 3) (4, 4) (4, 5) (4, 6) (5,1) (5, 2) (5, 3) (5, 4) (5, 5) (5, 6) (6,1) (6, 2) (6, 3) (6, 4) (6, 5) (6, 6)
Assuming that you're using fairly balanced d6s, all 36 of these results are equally probable. (You'll have to take my word for this part – proving that the distinct compounds of equally probable events are also equally probable is beyond the scope of this post!)
Now here's the illustrative part.
Above, the pairs are sorted by whatever the first die rolled: all of the pairs that begin with a 1 are in the first row, all of the pairs that begin with a 2 are in the second row, and so forth.
What happens if we sort them by their sums instead?
(1, 1) = 2 (1, 2) (2, 1) = 3 (1, 3) (2, 2) (3, 1) = 4 (1, 4) (2, 3) (3, 2) (4, 1) = 5 (1, 5) (2, 4) (3, 3) (4, 2) (5, 1) = 6 (1, 6) (2, 5) (3, 4) (4, 3) (5, 2) (6, 1) = 7 (2, 6) (3, 5) (4, 4) (5, 3) (6, 2) = 8 (3, 6) (4, 5) (5, 4) (6, 3) = 9 (4, 6) (5, 5) (6, 4) = 10 (5, 6) (6, 5) = 11 (6, 6) = 12
See what's happening there? When sorted by their sums, those 36 equally probable results end up in eleven distinct buckets, and some of those buckets have more results in them than others.
To put it another way, you're six times as likely to roll a 7 as you are to roll a 2 because there are six times as many ways to roll a 7 than there are to roll a 2.
This V-shaped distribution holds true for all sums of two identical dice, with the peak at exactly (number of sides + 1).
(This is the central statistical trick behind the Apocalypse Engine, incidentally. Rolling flat nothing feels like it ought to be risky, but in fact you'll get a 7+ about three times in five, with 7 itself being particularly common. Under these conditions, rolling exactly 7 feels like you just barely made it, but it was in fact the single most likely outcome!)
TTRPGs for Trans Rights in Florida
y'all there is an absolutely bonkers deal going on at itch.io right now
You can get over 500 rpgs for only *five dollars* right now. That's right, over $2000 worth of games for only five fucking dollars. It's insane. It's unreal. It's totally worth more than any dollar amount you're going to throw at it. And it's all going towards charities that work with trans folx on the ground: specifically Zebra Youth and Transinclusive Group. If you donate more than $10 you get a special bonus - the creators of Action Fiction will send you a PDF copy of the 5E supplement "Monsters of Murka: Chromatic Gamut." Go check it out now!!! Offer lasts until April 6!
Here's the link, figured I'd drop it here since it took me so long to find it. Click
What's your favourite ttrpg?
D&D
Pathfinder
Monster of the Week
Call of Cthulhu
Blades in the Dark
Vampire: the Masquerade
Something else and I'll tell you in the tags or messages (PLEASE)
I just want to see (and I think you spelled Cthulhu wrong)
Aeon Trinity
Fiasco
Adventure! (Aka Aeon Continuum: Adventure!)
Buffy the Vampire Slayer: the Roleplaying Game
New Year, New Character 2: Day 31
The Last One? The Last One.
And my last one for this year, Day 31: Malcolm Basco, Troubled Spellcaster, Monster of the Week Picking up some "arcane tomes" as props for a halloween party seemed a good idea at the time. Unfortunately for Malcom, those tomes turned out to contain at least one genuine article. Reading through it out of idle curiosity, something escaped from the pages within and reached into his mind. Then he started receiving visions of the future, maddening, incomplete, clear enough to push him to act on them. This lead him to Aimee, and then to Ms. Blake. The magic helps in fighting back against the dark, but the scars - both from receiving his "gift" and the traumas he has encountered since, bring out his worst impulses. Playbook: The Spooky
Look: Man, pained eyes, neat clothes
Charm =0
Cool -1
Sharp +1
Tough +1
Weird +2
Moves
Premonitions
The Big Whammy
Jinx
Gear
9mm pistol
The Dark Side
Guilt
Lust
Self-destruction
History
The Expert – They taught you to control your powers, to the extent you can control them at all.
The Monstrous – They saw you use your powers for selfish or vindictive reasons. Ask them who the victim was, and then tell them what you did.
New Year, New Character 2: Day 30
Aimee Sanderson, "Good" Slasher, Monster of the Week Aimiee Sanderson was a typical student, noteworthy to her fellow students only for the occasional bouts of intensity, until she became the final victim of a knife wielding undead serial killer. By sheer fortune, she was bleeding out when emergency services arrived and the killer was finally stopped. Unfortunately for her, she died. Three times, in fact. There on the ground, again in the ambulance, and a third time in the ER. Each time she was, by some miracle, resuscitated and was eventually declared to be in stable condition. The damage, however, had been done. In those moments between life and death something had latched on Aimee's suppressed anger. That something let her be brought back from the brink. It also drives her to stalk and kill; she has, in practice, become a Slasher herself. The catch? Her drive to kill is focused on other supernatural beings, particularly others of her kind. This brought her into the paths of both Ms. Blake and Malcolm, for different reasons. For now, Ms. Blake gives Aimee's rage direction, and Aimee is counting on Malcolm to finish her off if she crosses the line and starts killing indiscriminately. Playbook: The Monstrous
Look: Woman, unnerving aura, street clothes
Charm -2
Cool -2
Sharp =0
Tough =0
Weird +3
Monstrous Halfbreed
Slasher – Died (Technically) at the blade of another Slasher, has a “misplaced” instinct to hunt and kill other Slashers and supernatural creatures.
Curses
Pure Drive - Anger
Natural Attacks
Claws (Extra, +1 harm)
Playbook Moves
Unholy Strength
Unquenchable Vitality
Gear
Big Knife
History
The Expert – You lost control one time, and almost killed them. Ask them how they stopped you.
The Spooky – They tried to slay you, but you proved you're on side of good. Ask them what convinced them.
New Year, New Character 2: day 29
Final Sprint: Monster of the Week For the last few days of January, we are back on Urban Fantasy/Horror with Monster of the Week, a Powered-by-the-Apocalypse game of modern monster hunters. Unlike Buffy, this time we have no default model for the party, and no support for the melodramatic side of things; MotW is almost laser focused on the investigating, hunting and fighting of things that go bump in the night. Building characters for MotW is pretty simple, since it's mostly picking a specified number of options off a list. The most complex part is the character history, since that involves asking questions of the other PCs about interactions before the "series" began. Normally, I leave this sort of thing out of these right ups, but in the case I've included the questions as examples, and left the answers blank. So, here's character one of a trio of Hunters. Day 29: Michelle Blake, Occult Expert, Monster of the Week Michelle Blake was a teaching assistant at the local university when she first encountered the supernatural; specifically, a demon summoned to kill the professor she assisted by a rival. Being a quick study helped avoid being collateral damage. Soon afterwards, she found herself in possession of a growing collection of tomes and artefacts. Never wanting to experience the blind terror she associates with that first encounter, she is somewhat obsessive about being suitably prepared when confronting the forces of darkness. Luckily, she has encountered two allies, though neither are as reliable as she might like. Aimee, who may not technically be alive anymore, may be an unstoppable force of violence, but that means she's an unstoppable force of violence with anger issues. And Malcolm can do great things with magic, when he isn't chasing his worst impulses.
Playbook: The Expert
Look: Woman, experienced face, outdoor clothes
Charm +1
Cool -1
Sharp +2
Tough +1
Weird =0
Playbook Moves:
I've Read About This Sort of Thing
The Woman With the Plan
Haven
Protection Spells
Infirmary
Oubliette
Gear
Mallet & Wooden Stakes
Silver Sword
Magnum
History
The Monstrous – They know about some of your dark secrets, but have agreed to keep quiet about them. Tell them what they know.
The Spooky – You saved their life in a tight spot. Tell them what happened.