05-02-2016, 12:06 AM | #11 | |
Join Date: Dec 2006
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Re: GURPS PC 'roles'- a thought on pen and paper role playing in general
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Given your political game set in roman times- it will never be useful or applicable that being able to mix/deliver poison will be a good thing? (murder- indirect). It will never be applicable that you have resistance to poison or disease (survival)? It will never be useful to support one of your fellow senators via whatever skills you have? Senators will never have to use there own deductive reasoning to figure out situations (problem solving)? They will all obviously have some social traits, and likely divide up multiple sub-types from there as a focus from the game, but I still think my categories encompass the type of activities that would take place in any game. If you believe I am wrong I legitimately want to hear how and why, but please understand this is not a 'flash in the pan' conclusion so much as something that I am drawing from a good deal of role playing background, so I may be resistant to something that appears, to me at least, to be a straightforward application of what I am proposing. |
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05-02-2016, 12:32 AM | #12 | |
Join Date: Feb 2016
Location: Melbourne, Australia (also known as zone Brisbane)
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Re: GURPS PC 'roles'- a thought on pen and paper role playing in general
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05-02-2016, 12:33 AM | #13 | |
Join Date: Dec 2006
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Re: GURPS PC 'roles'- a thought on pen and paper role playing in general
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Murder is a way of getting things dead- which is often a desired end result in both life and role playing, and is sometimes a means to an end. Social interaction is just that- dealing with others, it differs from problem solving in that problem solving is personal your rolling on YOUR search/chemistry/traps skill, rather than trying to convince someone to do something. Support is literally that, it will generally boost (or penalize) any one of the other 4 categories. Healing boosts survival, cursing boosts anything that deals with others. Real life example: I had an infestation of rats (farm land, fact of life). I used problem solving to do some research on the internet and learn about my rodent invaders. I used some more problem solving to go around the outside of the house and reinforce the roof/soffit connections where ice heaving had made the gaps wide enough for the creatures to get in. Then I used more problem solving to actually patch those holes. I still had rats in the house, but more could not get in. Now I switched to murder (indirect- poison), and when that failed Murder (indirect- traps), a few times I had to switch to murder (Ranged- indirect engagement) and once I even had to do Murder (Direct engagement- close up; stomping) All that murder meant that I had to do more problem solving (cleanup and sterilization), and when I realized the attempts to poison the rats had failed problem solving to get rid of the poison. Survival fortunately never played into it (Unless perhaps you count that direct engagement- close up; stomping as having required some type of resistance roll to not have gotten sick from the result) I also did some social interaction when I called experts to make sure I was on the right path, and the wife provided some much needed support when I had to do unpleasant things like mop up blood and sterilize the area. Had my rather mundane life been converted into a full campaign I would have used 3 or 4 of my 5 items encompassing research, prof skill (household repair), traps, Guns (Air rifle), Knife, brawling, prof skill (cleaning), diplomacy/public speaking, and leveraging my average wealth to buy all of the things I needed. My wife would have been using her own problem solving skills to analyze my ideas and tell me which ones were really crazy, and her social skills to explain that to me as well as give me positive encouragement and support during the more unpleasant parts of the endeavor. That'd be a thoroughly boring campaign- but I think it nicely shows how I think all of this comes together. |
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05-02-2016, 12:59 AM | #14 |
Join Date: Jul 2014
Location: New Zealand.
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Re: GURPS PC 'roles'- a thought on pen and paper role playing in general
What would scouting for information gathering be under? A sub set of detective work?
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Waiting for inspiration to strike...... And spending too much time thinking about farming for RPGs Contributor to Citadel at Nordvörn |
05-02-2016, 01:04 AM | #15 | |
Join Date: Dec 2006
Location: Eindhoven, the Netherlands
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Re: GURPS PC 'roles'- a thought on pen and paper role playing in general
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Have you played Nobilis? Most of the proposed roles wouldn't fit or work there. In Legends of the Wulin, essentially everyone is just "a fighter," but the roles are more about how they fight. In Maid, your roles are "Cool" or "Sexy" or "Cute" rather than "Fighter, Mage or Thief." Quite a few explicitly narrativist RPGs turn on roles based on genre, and amount to something more akin to a story-telling game than an action game. Consider a game that focuses on a high-school soap opera crossed with your family drama, where gameplay and choices turn more on handling your schedule/schoolwork and on moral choices you make. Consider a game about corporate lawyers, where gameplay turns around understanding the law, the numbers, and on forming temporary business alliances to move ahead. Consider a game about fantasy chefs with competing restaurants in the imperial city, where they all struggle to have the most exotic dishes full of the most interesting monsters that they need to, somehow, acquire and cook. Gameplay would almost certainly turn on some level of DF-style dungeon-crawling, but you'd also need to create niches for different cooking styles. This is why the template book doesn't say "Oh, here's the only 20 or so niches that matter," because it doesn't work that way. What you're describing is the sort of game you particularly like or have a lot of experience with, but you're trying to say that it represents something universal or fundamental, and it doesn't.
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My Blog: Mailanka's Musing. Currently Playing: Psi-Wars, a step-by-step exploration of building your own Space Opera setting, inspired by Star Wars. |
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05-02-2016, 02:46 AM | #16 |
Join Date: Aug 2012
Location: Estonia
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Re: GURPS PC 'roles'- a thought on pen and paper role playing in general
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05-02-2016, 06:03 AM | #17 |
Join Date: Feb 2009
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Re: GURPS PC 'roles'- a thought on pen and paper role playing in general
I have occasionally used 'killing things', 'not getting killed by things', 'finding things to kill', and 'misc'
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05-02-2016, 06:16 AM | #18 |
Join Date: Feb 2009
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Re: GURPS PC 'roles'- a thought on pen and paper role playing in general
A 'Healer Role' presupposes that A - People will get hurt and B - they won't conveniently healtthemselves
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05-02-2016, 06:25 AM | #19 |
Join Date: Jan 2005
Location: Gothenburg, Sweden
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Re: GURPS PC 'roles'- a thought on pen and paper role playing in general
I don't think you can set up this kind of model for RPGs in general - there are too many varieties of games... but I do think that this kind of thinking is important before setting up a game. In order for every player to get their chance to participate, the game must address the capabilities of each PC. And the players and the GM has to take care that the PC's roles do not overlap too much, so that dominant players don't take over the game and solve all problems while the less dominant players sit off on the side.
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“When you arise in the morning think of what a privilege it is to be alive, to think, to enjoy, to love ...” Marcus Aurelius |
05-02-2016, 10:18 AM | #20 | |
Join Date: Dec 2006
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Re: GURPS PC 'roles'- a thought on pen and paper role playing in general
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But it is a good point that PCs may well have there own survival include rapid injury recovery, which would invalidate a 'healer' support role. |
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Tags |
general advice, niche, role playing |
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