The Wealth of Dragons
Ahdok @ ahdok @ttrpg.network Posts 124Comments 860Joined 2 yr. ago
Ahdok @ ahdok @ttrpg.network
Posts
124
Comments
860
Joined
2 yr. ago
Aw man, imagine using technology to reduce the amount of time people had to spend working, rather than making rich people more money... what a crazy world.
There's a reason I left garlic off the list ;)
Sores, boils, pock marks, blotchiness...
Maglubiyet's curse just makes goblins a little bit "worse" in every conceivable way.
Konsi actually has extremely good skin for a goblin, mostly because she's free of Maglubiyet's curse - but she has difficulty recognizing beauty in herself.
With a little help:
I've always used art-deco designs when working on my gnome inventions in DnD... it's a little wrong for proper steampunk stuff, (no steam engines in DnD) but a mixture of clockwork and art-deco makes for some really great designs.
I legitimately think it'd be cool if the base sending spell had "at higher levels, you can send an extra pair of messages in the conversation for each level above level 3"
The piano is actually there because we needed a ballroom to entertain some NPCs for a political summit. Several of the servants in the mansion were skilled in instrument use, so we made a small area for performers.
The Dragon Skull is in the sand of a fighting/training pit for the party's fighter. She basically took out a red dragon single-handedly during one of our adventures, and it's a replica of that dragon's skull that we couldn't take away as a trophy because the dungeon collapsed.
Alright, I admit it. I don't have a token for that.
No, I'm not lumping dwarves in with "human, elf, half-elf". Elves and Half-elves in many games are visually very similar to humans, sometimes a bit taller sometimes a bit skinnier, but often near indistinguishable apart from the ears. Personally, I'm a big fan of games that make their elves more "weird" so they feel more fantastical - but those are pretty rare. Players who feel uncomfortable self-inserting into races that "don't resemble them" often find that elves and half-elves are close enough to not be a deal-breaker. (This can be seen fairly clearly in the BG3 choices - where elf and half-elf and human all have about the same number of players, but dwarf has significantly fewer players.)
There are plenty of games out there where humans are not "the default" and, yes, I'm largely talking about these. In my initial post I did talk about how this is not so problematic in DnD.
I'm intrigued by your statement "I'll always play a human unless I have a good reason not to, this is because I base my characters about a theme and want the focus to be on that." - Why is it the case for you that you can focus on the story/theme with a human, but not with gnome or an elf or a dwarf? If your theme or stories vary from one human character to another, then race isn't playing into your focus... so wouldn't this also work if your characters were all dwarves?
In my many campaigns of 5e DnD, I've actually now played "gnome wizard" three times. All three were focused around their story and theme, and felt completely different to each other, both in personality, and in the main content of their character and story... The fact that the characters were gnomes wasn't really ever a significant part of their narrative. I don't really understand why this variety or focus would only be possible with humans.
GW2 is indeed a good example of the problem I've been discussing, where the worldbuilding and play experience have a disconnect. It's probably the largest IP where that disconnect is noticeable to regular players.
I have, in fact, played many games where the designers have made humans "bad" or "boring" on purpose to discourage players from that, and even some where they explicitly advertised their games as such - because they want their games to be fantastical. I've played plenty of games where the designers built a bunch of races to populate their universe, and explicitly cut humans out of the game altogether, because they're always viewed as a default if they're included, and they wanted their players to immerse in the worldbuilding they'd made.
I've read fantasy books where the authors have specifically talked about avoiding having "humans" in their setting, because they believe the readers will automatically empathize with the human characters by default, and they wanted complex factional politics where the reader was capable of choosing any of the characters on different sides of a conflict as the one they identified best with.
This does happen in fantasy game design, especially from designers who are more concerned with baking in-depth cultures and variety into their settings. Often these are smaller indie projects with less visibility though.
There is an advantage of "baby's first introduction to the idea that different peoples can have different cultures, and they're all valuable." - for some people they've never experienced or ever thought about this... and it's "simpler" to grasp than (the much better design) of different regions having different cultures, and each region having a mix of races.
On the other hand, there's a massive disadvantage in portraying "all people of this race are (stereotype x), all people of that race are (stereotype y)"
DMs and GMs, this is a place where you can shine with your worldbuilding. Make towns that have a mix of races, and give towns their own culture. It's worth it and much more immersive.
That's why Faelys is holding that paper up - so she can read it and not mess it up.
The EOS-LRP system in the UK was planned to be a 10-year project, and it died within 4 events because of this exact problem.
The designers created a game that was largely factionalized by race(1) - elves, orcs, goblins, humans, undead, and a few other player options. The idea was to build a dark, gritty "survival" setting where different factions would compete over limited resources, and the game story would be mostly driven by player-vs-player conflict. They kept prices for attendance low by running an extremely small crew.
This has been a successful strategy for many larp systems over the years, player-driven conflict is extremely valuable in keeping your players engaged, because NPC-driven conflict is expensive to run... if all of your game content is being delivered by your crew, you need a large crew in order to be able to keep the players interested and engaged, and this means high prices. If your game content largely stems from player-vs-player conflict, then you can potentially run a game with thousands of players using a crew of 20-50. I've been involved in several of these in the past.
So what happened with EOS? Well, the costume requirements for playing anything other than a human were extreme (this is a common requirement in larp systems that want a high quality immersive experience.) - we're talking full-head makeup, prosthetics, masks, etc etc. 80% of the players in the first event rocked up as humans, and because they were allied, they managed to wipe out the other factions completely. Some of those players went home, some of them rolled new characters, and got wiped out again, and went home.
By the third event, 100% of the playerbase were humans, and allied to each other. The game crew was six people, and they were unable to create any credible threat to the players. Because everyone was part of one monolithic faction, there was no conflict, and the players rapidly became bored, with nothing to do.
The designers tried to fix this by first banning players from rolling more human characters, and second introducing some overwhelmingly powerful hunter monsters to pick off isolated players. When characters died, the game admins told them they had to roll non-humans if they wanted to continue playing, and in response those players quit. Their friends followed quickly, and the game collapsed.
EOS had an interesting setting, with a lot of good design ideas, and some really cool handles for roleplay and conflict. They talked a big game, and promised an exciting, fast-paced, dangerous competitive game. Players were drawn to the events because of what the design brief promised, but in choosing to all play the same race, everything promising from the design brief was undermined, and the game died.
(1) There is, of course, a second, highly problematic issue with drawing your lines of conflict purely on "race" grounds, which is an uncomfortable issue all by itself. Modern fantasy gaming design is moving away from this, for reasons that I hope are well-understood.
I'll try to explain it again:
If you create a setting where a core part of the setting is that there's all these different races interacting in a rich, vibrant, cultural melting pot, but all your players choose to play humans, then you have a complete mismatch between the setting you created, and the experience the players are having.
This is a problem.
It's not a problem that "players are doing what they want". The problem is that the reality of your game experience is fundamentally different to the setting design you've written. You have a setting document that says one thing, and a playerbase experiencing something different. The disconnect might seem trivial or unimportant to you, or you might not care - but the result is that your setting document is fundamentally inaccurate to the reality of play.
For a designer, this is a problem.
BG3 is a single player RPG where an individual player can make whatever decision they want and experience the game the way they want to play it. I'm not trying to claim this specific problem is an issue in BG3. The only reason I brought that game up was that they publicly released statistical data on millions of players, so it gives good data for the proportionality of player choices.
For most tabletop settings, this isn't (usually) a major issue - a character party is typically on the order of 4-6 players, if they're all humans, that's fine. It's the duty of the DM to make sure that the NPCs and the setting are accurate if that's a thing they care about. It can be a problem if your game is fundamentally about exploring these different perspectives, which some indie-RPGs are focused on.
This is mainly an issue in large-scale social play games, like MMOs and Fest-games, which can easily result in this disparity between setting design and play experience.
Alternate ending:
It's important training! don't want to get rusty.
(Real reason) - The rest of the party have a lot of credibility and renown in Waterdeep, due to having done quite a lot of very overt acts of heroism. They're recognized by the Lord Protector as heroes of the city, and they are widely known to be powerful adventurers.
Razira joined the party later and, while Konsi knows she's a big damn hero, nobody else seems to know this or view Razira as being that important. Konsi's constantly looking for opportunities to have Razira perform impressive heroic feats (like catching a falling person out of the sky) in public, so she gets a reputation that matches how awesome she is.
I think, the first casting of MMM always needs a dedicated scene where the rest of the party get to explore what the wizard has made for them. It's a massive opportunity for creativity with the players, and as a DM you can just take a load off and let the wizard player run the session for a while, explaining all the cool things they incorporated.
The first time I cast MMM in 5e, it was with my pyrophobic gnome librarian wizard, Neff. She build a special room for each member of the party to cater to their needs, and I built a map for it (we were on VTT)
Sorry for the small text size (vertical format haha) - if you click on it enough times it'll show full size.
"Worker productivity" has been going up for 50 years, but compensation hasn't been. That extra money goes into the pockets of the board and shareholders and CEOs.
80 years ago, the average CEO pay was about 20x the lowest pay in his company. Now, instead, we have billionaires.