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Author Topic: Gaming Block (Game Discussion Thread) (Totally Not Roller's Block)  (Read 415974 times)

Fniff

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Re: Gaming Block (Game Discussion Thread) (Totally Not Roller's Block)
« Reply #2640 on: June 01, 2016, 08:55:28 pm »

There is such a thing as too big. When you're building fifteen whole civilisations, that would be going overboard in a fantasy novel. If it's not too big for you, it might be too big for your players. Think about it from their perspective: all that background is a serious effort to learn.

Maybe you should consider tightening the scope. From experience, it makes things way-easier. You want feudal intrigue? You can achieve that if you focus it on one barony and its court. Those civilizations can be the guilds of the town.

Here's the clever thing anout this. Even if you work insanely hard at it, building a whole continent is going to fall flat because you have to spread the details so thin. But if you expend the same amount of effort on a small play-area, it will be an incredibly interesting place by contrast since every part of it has a personality. It's like the difference between Oblivion and Pathologic; the former is huge but dull, the latter is small but intricate.

Elephant Parade

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Re: Gaming Block (Game Discussion Thread) (Totally Not Roller's Block)
« Reply #2641 on: June 01, 2016, 08:56:56 pm »

image
That looks pretty great, though I'd need to scale the tiles up a bit; as it is, there isn't enough room on them for names.

Quote
Some of them, could easily be fixed with a few edits (like making that road 1-tiled), but many more can't. You also don't want to build any too many cities, as most houses have about twenty tiles, give or take. Though any "existing towns", can easily be dl-ed as a screenshot, and layered under a grid.
Yeah, the size of multi-tile buildings could be an issue. I was planning to set my game in a Mystery Dungeon-style world where humans don't exist, but I recognize that not everyone will want that—my long-term goal is to create a FEF-style rulebook that other people will be able to use—and buildings need to not take up half the map.

It's an issue of scale, I guess. Still, those tiles will be great for small-scale stuff!

Quote
To cut it short: The tilesets and icons are nice - real nice, in fact - but would they be worth the possible work-over of your rules / the lesser options that would stem from taking these tiles as basis?
My rules don't rely on scale at all. Using those tiles wouldn't require a rework—I'd just need to assign bonuses/maluses to different tiles, which I haven't even done for my current tiles.



Probably going to launch Pokemon Tactics as an SG, since that way
  • People will be able to play without reading through through the entire rulebook
  • I can reveal the rules a bit at a time, concealing the fact that they aren't actually done yet
  • I won't feel bad about nerfing stuff
  • It'll be significantly less work



Fifteen kingdoms sounds overkill, unless you're planning to have a heavy focus on travel.
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heydude6

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Re: Gaming Block (Game Discussion Thread) (Totally Not Roller's Block)
« Reply #2642 on: June 01, 2016, 09:02:39 pm »

Building on the idea of trimming the fat, I think 8 is a good number to settle with, perhaps even less.
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Yoink

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Re: Gaming Block (Game Discussion Thread) (Totally Not Roller's Block)
« Reply #2643 on: June 01, 2016, 09:09:56 pm »

-snip-
The main problem I can see is that you just spoiled the major twist right off the bat...
I think fifteen kingdoms would be doable, although perhaps it would be a good idea to keep some/most of them quite vaguely defined, and perhaps let players decide on certain details as they write their backstories. That way you could cut down on your own workload and the amount of reading required to join.
RTDs often do something like this, letting players help in the worldbuilding through their bios.

Of course, if you wanted to you could then flesh out a couple of the kingdoms a lot more, presumably the most plot-relevant ones, or the ones the players are intended to spend the most time in.
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Tawa

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Re: Gaming Block (Game Discussion Thread) (Totally Not Roller's Block)
« Reply #2644 on: June 01, 2016, 09:32:10 pm »

-snip-
You have a point... I guess I don't really have to define all of them to their full extent. A good six of those are going to be the East Asia and Africa stand-ins, and the other ones are split roughly three a pop to three different cultural groups (Western European, general mix of Scandinavia/Eastern Europe, and the last one I'm thinking either Balkans/Byzantines or Italy with Spanish elements.) To keep with the general feel of the game, I could have the East Asia and Africa stand-ins remain mysterious and ill-defined, with the extent of development being basically limited to each country's name and a vague idea of what differentiates each one from the other ones. Most of the European and Middle East-style countries will probably manage to be visited through the course of the story, and any of the ones that don't can get fleshed out through player or NPC backstories anyway.

Anyway, from the perspective of somebody who isn't me (I literally make D&D character sheets for fun when I'm bored sometimes), is the prospect of creating two characters in two different time periods intimidating at all? I was thinking that the end of the prologue wouldn't really have to be the end of the first character, because they could be posthumously fleshed out by the person playing their descendant.

As for the plot twist thing, I suppose that having a plot twist in this sort of massive time-skip thing is kind of assumed anyway, but the whole "cliché adventure" doesn't necessarily have to be a bad thing. It can still be interesting and do its job of setting up the rest of the plot, and if I miraculously manage to improve my writing skills on the spot I might manage to save it through fluff alone.

Now that I think about it, I don't really have to set it up that way anyway...

Hmm... I think that instead of cliché dungeon crawling, I'll set up something concerning minor political intrigue and have the far-reaching future changes come about through ye olde butterfly effect. Plus, that gives me a legitimate excuse for having the characters be famous and also like level 3, since they'll just be shanking guards and political rivals at best.
« Last Edit: June 02, 2016, 06:46:49 pm by Tawa »
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Parsely

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Re: Gaming Block (Game Discussion Thread) (Totally Not Roller's Block)
« Reply #2645 on: June 01, 2016, 09:48:18 pm »

If you really want to do a whopping 15 kingdoms, only name them at first, and describe them in detail as they become important. If it's not pertinent to their situation even the most attentive player will just forget what you've told them anyways. That'll save your players from info overload and you from exhaustion.

Preferably the GM is the only one who has to refer to a lexicon and then only when he's preparing for a session. This makes for the smoothest type of game.

No doubt they'll start in one country, then hop to the next one after some time. And not only that, they don't have to visit every corner of the globe. You can give the players an impression of the size of the world you envision without breaking your back explaining every last insignificant detail of it to them.
« Last Edit: June 01, 2016, 09:49:59 pm by GUNINANRUNIN »
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Rolepgeek

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Re: Gaming Block (Game Discussion Thread) (Totally Not Roller's Block)
« Reply #2646 on: June 01, 2016, 10:11:26 pm »

Also don't forget that there were a lot of super-similar countries that only got united comparatively recently. Culture groups are really what you gotta look out for, that and the places the PCs actually give a shit about. But you already knew that. :P
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Tawa

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Re: Gaming Block (Game Discussion Thread) (Totally Not Roller's Block)
« Reply #2647 on: June 04, 2016, 09:01:54 pm »

After careful consideration, I've decided to drop the prologue bit entirely. It would work in, say, a video game or a movie, but in a tabletop game it'll only make everything take even longer and add comparatively little.

Oh, and I think I'll bump it up to late-1800s instead of early-1800s/late-1700s. this is in no way influenced by reading Dracula or Hound of the Baskervilles
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High tyrol

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Re: Gaming Block (Game Discussion Thread) (Totally Not Roller's Block)
« Reply #2648 on: June 05, 2016, 10:48:08 pm »

w
« Last Edit: June 18, 2016, 10:16:54 am by High tyrol »
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Harry Baldman

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Re: Gaming Block (Game Discussion Thread) (Totally Not Roller's Block)
« Reply #2649 on: June 14, 2016, 06:17:51 am »

Should I start a FG?

Do you have free time?

Do you have a concept?

If yes to both, feel free.
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Parsely

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Re: Gaming Block (Game Discussion Thread) (Totally Not Roller's Block)
« Reply #2650 on: June 18, 2016, 01:21:33 am »

Spoiler (click to show/hide)
« Last Edit: June 18, 2016, 11:46:53 am by GUNINANRUNIN »
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StrawBarrel

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Re: Gaming Block (Game Discussion Thread) (Totally Not Roller's Block)
« Reply #2651 on: June 18, 2016, 11:14:01 am »

Very interested. Would be pleased to see more hilarity and good writing. My incomplete sentences bother me.
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TheBiggerFish

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Tawa

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Re: Gaming Block (Game Discussion Thread) (Totally Not Roller's Block)
« Reply #2653 on: June 22, 2016, 06:50:02 pm »

After discarding like five different campaign settings and plot ideas, I've finally settled on one I'm happy with.

What I'm looking at here is a game set in a fictional, Victorian Britain-esque country, in a slightly steampunk, pretty magical setting. Drawing vague inspiration from various sorts of literature from the period (Sherlock Holmes in particular), I'm thinking I'll have a crime-themed campaign where the players investigate all sorts of mundane and magical criminal activity in their efforts to take down a criminal mastermind. It'll be pretty RP-heavy and put at least as much (if not more) focus on the investigations, puzzles, and deductions as the fights. Definitely going to run it in Pathfinder (with strict gentleman's agreements on the more broken character classes to prevent the intrigue of the setting from being shattered in two by, say, divination spells.)

There's interest for this sort of thing, right?
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FallacyofUrist

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Re: Gaming Block (Game Discussion Thread) (Totally Not Roller's Block)
« Reply #2654 on: June 22, 2016, 07:10:02 pm »

Would anybody be interested in a Wikipedia Wars like game, but using TV Tropes instead?
I'm running a test game for this in my sigtext.
~~~
Interesting, definitely. Something I would play? No- not my sort of thing, but good luck regardless.
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