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Old 05-11-2017, 12:30 PM   #21
RyanW
 
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Default Re: DF: Does the world matter?

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Originally Posted by Ulairi View Post
When I've run D&D and those types of games, there is usually a reason the King with the Elite Guards needs the PCs to do the job. They have a piece of information about it. I've never had trivial things been that high of an interaction. I don't think that's a D&D fluff issue but a DM issue.
The problem could be in a region the king can't easily send his elite guards to for legal or political reasons. He could suspect that his elite guards are compromised and needs an outside (and expendable) element to take care of it. He could need the elite guard to deal with a different threat. Most of those kinds of things need at least an implied world if you aren't willing to ignore the issue.
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Old 05-11-2017, 01:02 PM   #22
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Default Re: DF: Does the world matter?

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Most of those kinds of things need at least an implied world if you aren't willing to ignore the issue.
But the thing is that it's not really that ridiculous that he would do it. Meaning if you're in the camp that's willing to ignore the issue, it's not with a big gaping plothole.

The dragon being wiped in three turns of combat is (if D&D 4e) an issue with someone being grossly about some of the rules and guidelines. I'm assuming D&D 4e because of the use of the term "Solo" - usually this particular problem comes from confusing a "solo" with "boss monster". A "solo" of your level is "a single monster that's kinda like a group of five monsters"... of your level. And PCs can generally mop the floor with five monsters of their level. In practice, the first go around in 4e a Solo was more like 3-4 monsters, but they eventually figured out how to fix that with the Rules Compendium era.
Regardless of which 4e version you're using, "encounter of your level" ain't what the GM really wanted there - your level + 4-8 is much more appropriate.
Another consideration is what level the PCs are. If the PCs are Heroic tier, then no dragon they should survive fighting should be described as being a terror of the nation. Those are young dragons. I'd frankly hesitate to use that description at Paragon tier, although Epic tier monsters definitely can earn the term.

System Agnostic comment: If the PCs are a bunch of munchkin cheese-weasels then they're going to trash everything anyways and giving them a beautifully constructed world is quite possibly pointless and missing the point.
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Old 05-11-2017, 02:01 PM   #23
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Default Re: DF: Does the world matter?

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Originally Posted by RyanW View Post
The problem could be in a region the king can't easily send his elite guards to for legal or political reasons. He could suspect that his elite guards are compromised and needs an outside (and expendable) element to take care of it. He could need the elite guard to deal with a different threat. Most of those kinds of things need at least an implied world if you aren't willing to ignore the issue.
A lot of that from my experienced is made up on the spot anyway. The King needs you to do something, "Why can't the King's guard do it?" bla bla.

To me, the thing that I want is a consistent world that makes sense and that can be (and I believe is best when) established at the table.
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Old 05-11-2017, 02:02 PM   #24
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Default Re: DF: Does the world matter?

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But the thing is that it's not really that ridiculous that he would do it. Meaning if you're in the camp that's willing to ignore the issue, it's not with a big gaping plothole.

The dragon being wiped in three turns of combat is (if D&D 4e) an issue with someone being grossly about some of the rules and guidelines. I'm assuming D&D 4e because of the use of the term "Solo" - usually this particular problem comes from confusing a "solo" with "boss monster". A "solo" of your level is "a single monster that's kinda like a group of five monsters"... of your level. And PCs can generally mop the floor with five monsters of their level. In practice, the first go around in 4e a Solo was more like 3-4 monsters, but they eventually figured out how to fix that with the Rules Compendium era.
Regardless of which 4e version you're using, "encounter of your level" ain't what the GM really wanted there - your level + 4-8 is much more appropriate.
Another consideration is what level the PCs are. If the PCs are Heroic tier, then no dragon they should survive fighting should be described as being a terror of the nation. Those are young dragons. I'd frankly hesitate to use that description at Paragon tier, although Epic tier monsters definitely can earn the term.

System Agnostic comment: If the PCs are a bunch of munchkin cheese-weasels then they're going to trash everything anyways and giving them a beautifully constructed world is quite possibly pointless and missing the point.
I never played a lot of D&D 4E (not a fan of 3.x and 4.x era). But I strongly agree with the second point.
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Old 05-11-2017, 03:52 PM   #25
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Default Re: DF: Does the world matter?

The minimum seems to me to be:
  • Enough religion that PC clerics have someone to pray to.
  • Enough local politics and factions that there are organized bands of troublemakers for the PCs to deal with.
  • Enough shops, rumors, patrons, and so on that the rules for getting stuff done in towns in DF2 are usable.
  • Enough geography that there's a least one town and one dungeon.

That said, my last DF game was entirely improvised by me, if a PC needed a god, lo I came up with a god, if they needed a faction, lo, they were part of a faction. The things they put on their character sheets and the things they said prompted my choices. I took good notes and filled things in as I came up with them. This was mainly as a personal challenge, but I still had players comparing my world-building extremely favorably to other people's games.

So you can start with a blank slate, but you probably ought to have a world when you are done.
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Old 05-11-2017, 05:57 PM   #26
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Default Re: DF: Does the world matter?

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Originally Posted by sir_pudding View Post
The minimum seems to me to be:
  • Enough religion that PC clerics have someone to pray to.
  • Enough local politics and factions that there are organized bands of troublemakers for the PCs to deal with.
  • Enough shops, rumors, patrons, and so on that the rules for getting stuff done in towns in DF2 are usable.
  • Enough geography that there's a least one town and one dungeon.
Yes, that's pretty much it. If you use training rules, you need folks who handle training. You'd want a watering hole where you can swap rumors. If you're using DF 16, you'll want a minimal wilderness with the big lairs marked, which makes a hex crawl. "Minimal" for wilderness means what Survival skill is in use, what the multiplier is for movement, and what the bonus or penalty is for Survival rolls for foraging.

A pretty good list that I've posted many times for game-focused world-building is Jeff Rients's Twenty Questions.
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Old 05-11-2017, 08:41 PM   #27
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Default Re: DF: Does the world matter?

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Originally Posted by Bruno View Post
But the thing is that it's not really that ridiculous that he would do it. Meaning if you're in the camp that's willing to ignore the issue, it's not with a big gaping plothole.

The dragon being wiped in three turns of combat is (if D&D 4e) an issue with someone being grossly about some of the rules and guidelines. I'm assuming D&D 4e because of the use of the term "Solo" - usually this particular problem comes from confusing a "solo" with "boss monster". A "solo" of your level is "a single monster that's kinda like a group of five monsters"... of your level. And PCs can generally mop the floor with five monsters of their level. In practice, the first go around in 4e a Solo was more like 3-4 monsters, but they eventually figured out how to fix that with the Rules Compendium era.
Regardless of which 4e version you're using, "encounter of your level" ain't what the GM really wanted there - your level + 4-8 is much more appropriate.
Another consideration is what level the PCs are. If the PCs are Heroic tier, then no dragon they should survive fighting should be described as being a terror of the nation. Those are young dragons. I'd frankly hesitate to use that description at Paragon tier, although Epic tier monsters definitely can earn the term.

System Agnostic comment: If the PCs are a bunch of munchkin cheese-weasels then they're going to trash everything anyways and giving them a beautifully constructed world is quite possibly pointless and missing the point.
There is some truth in this.

However, the group I was playing with at the time was easily crushing even Level+4 (and sometimes more) encounters. Yes, later books fixed some of the math, but there were still some issues when comparing fluff to crunch. Essentially, the issue I had was that the story the books were telling was a lot different from the story that actual play was telling. The dragon example was a simplified account of something which happened in play.

In the context of a game as a whole, I have some better examples, but I'm trying not to derail the thread too much as I'm already posting a lengthy comment. The short version is: even as a non-munchkin, if the game is built around the assumption of numbers getting higher and higher, it's difficult to make character choices which mean I do not keep up with those assumptions. An example of this is how magic items are handled in some games. If my choice is between an item which gives a +X bonus and an item which has a cool effect, I'd like to be able to take the item which has a cool effect, but doing so means I do not keep up with the game or the other party members.

Yes, ridiculous power-gaming is a problem, but I think it's hard to fault a player for making choices if one choice is obviously better than the other in virtually every situation.


Quote:
Originally Posted by Ulairi View Post
When I've run D&D and those types of games, there is usually a reason the King with the Elite Guards needs the PCs to do the job. They have a piece of information about it. I've never had trivial things been that high of an interaction. I don't think that's a D&D fluff issue but a DM issue.

I tend to run all of my games as Westerns no matter what the setting. The PCs are in boomtowns or villages that don't have a ton of law. That's why they are hiring the PCs. Or they are on the frontier and there is a scarcity of law. Once the players move into the cosmopolitan areas the types of things they are doing there is different. They are trying not to get shanghai'd more than anything, if that makes sense.

But I agree with you that I want the game to make sense within the context of the game world. That's why I've always viewed game rules as not a way to "tell a story" but more of the world's physics.

I've had some great DMs who were able to make it some kind of sense, but my experience has been that there is often a point in which the PCs realize they are no longer bound to the world around them. When that happens, I typically see one of two outcomes.

1) Some of the less-than-good PCs (and the players controlling them) have the realization that they should just rule the kingdom instead of listening to the king at all. Without going into too many details, I remember one of my friends who DMed a D&D 4E* game saying he eventually stopped trying to create non-combat encounters because the PC power level was high enough that the players often chose violence over diplomacy and other options because of how easy it was for them to impose their will upon the game world.

*Not picking on the system. It's just what the guy was running at the time he made the comment. (I'm also aware there are fixes for this, but see my comments on the "arms race" below.)

2) You start to have what I've called "The Superman Problem" in conversations with friends. Superman is an iconic hero, but his power level and abilities have grown so much that the rest of the world around him needs to change to make sense. Yes, I'm aware this is an oversimplification, and I know that characters such as Green Lantern and various others exist, but the basic idea is that the extent of Superman's powers require the rest of the world to adjust. This can be seen in some high-level D&D and Dungeon Fantasy games. A knight in shining armor and riding a horse into battle (one of the most iconic medieval fantasy images) stops working beyond a certain level because the horse is not built with the same ideas of the world in mind. Either the knight trades in his horse for a griffon, you learn to not even bother with having a horse as a character, or you need to design a better horse. (One of the later DF pdfs introduced a horse more suited for DF characters.)

Even if you do adjust the rest of the world, it slowly starts to turn into an arms race of adjustment. It's no longer good enough for the castle to be guarded by regular guards, so they become guards who have special equipment or feats. The world around the PCs starts being built out of magic wood and elemental stones instead of normal wood and stone. While, yes, I think those special and stronger elements are cool, I like them to be special instead of commonplace; it's similar to why I sometimes get bored of magic weapons being a treadmill of trading in +1 swords for +2 swords and so on. (I'd prefer a legendary sword to do something more interesting than just adding more numbers) As the numbers on one side build, the other side needs to adjust to keep pace. This works as long as the inflated numbers do not clash with the "regular" game world too often.

Much like Superman, when that does happen, the fiction needs to engage in a lot of convoluted reasoning to make sense. He's required to save Lois Lane or Jimmy Olson every other week; while that can work for PCs by threatening innocent people or villages, there comes a point when the players stop caring about saving the same guy/gal every week. ...or you end up saying that the super-rare weakness of the PCs is something suddenly easily acquired by all of their opponents. At worst, you end up with a situation like in #1; the power available to the players corrupts their ability to engage the world, and they instead seek to impose their will upon it.

I am totally on board with PCs being bigger, stronger, faster, and better than the average person in the campaign world. They are PCs and important characters for exactly that reason. However, I prefer for those special characters to remain at a level where they are part of the world rather than reaching a point where they are above and beyond the world around them.

Epic and mythic fantasy can be a lot of fun. I've played in games like that, and I've enjoyed them, but my favorite games are the ones that have high level heroes leading armies and nations rather than fighting them. I like the idea that an ancient dragon is a challenge for small armies (perhaps PCs w/ cohorts and sidekicks) rather than being a bigger bag of hitpoints worth more XP.

Again, I can and often do enjoy games in which this is not the case. In Dungeon Fantasy, it's likely fine for the world to be something vague that is painted in broad strokes. That's something which depends upon the expectations of the game and the group.

I apologize if any of my comments come across as though I'm accusing people of badwrongfun or crapping on a playstyle. I'm not. I'm simply commenting on what my own personal preferences are.

Last edited by Johnny Angel; 05-11-2017 at 08:52 PM. Reason: added Bruno comment
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Old 05-11-2017, 10:29 PM   #28
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Default Re: DF: Does the world matter?

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Many animals (and thus I presume many monsters) also keep middens, where they poop and dump food waste. That's half a fluff detail, but when you're talking monsters prone to biting off large parts of people and swallowing them whole, casting or poop (or half-eaten carcasses) can come with treasure.
This is how my uncle used to get money when he had an extra-stingy Dungeon Master who insisted on sending only wolves at the party because wolves have no treasure. That and wolf pelts.
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Old 05-11-2017, 10:39 PM   #29
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Default Re: DF: Does the world matter?

I have run the spectrum. My group has a pass-around game with whoever feels like it picking up the GM mantle. Sometimes, there is a king, dukes, several neighbors, politics, and established races. Sometimes, there's just a dungeon and nothing makes sense if you think about it too hard. Each type of game can be fun if you just embrace the appropriate conventions and tropes.
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Old 05-12-2017, 07:50 AM   #30
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Default Re: DF: Does the world matter?

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Again, I can and often do enjoy games in which this is not the case. In Dungeon Fantasy, it's likely fine for the world to be something vague that is painted in broad strokes. That's something which depends upon the expectations of the game and the group.

I apologize if any of my comments come across as though I'm accusing people of badwrongfun or crapping on a playstyle. I'm not. I'm simply commenting on what my own personal preferences are.
No problem with that, but I think you're arguing about an entirely different thing than people here are talking about. You're complaining when you have a world described, possibly quite detailed, but you don't feel the rules don't back it up, well that's no fun.

The thread is debating whether the world should be described at all.
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