I may be old fashioned, but I love to start in a tavern. It's a place that can have a lot of npcs hanging around that can be introduced and then reappear later in the adventure.
Usually I prefer to start with the party already formed, or have the characters have a connection between each other from before the start of the adventure. Imo it speeds up the initial stages of the game and gives everyone a preexisting reason to be in the party.
I had some pain in the past with players that didn't want to find a reason for their character to join the party, and asking them to have one as a prerequisite can help to filter too mich edginess from the scene.
I also like to start with combat or some other dangerous situation. I start with some talking and a breef introduction to the aim of the adventure, then have something unexpected interrupt the talking, a fight, then back to the talking.
@Jocarnail@TwistedFox Reminds me of a #MasksANewGeneration anecdote I read: One player picked the Soldier playbook, read it and said "This here says I give Influence to two other characters I respect. But I don't respect any of them, so I don't have to give Influence, right?"
Pre-game connections and expectation management. So important.
@Jocarnail@TwistedFox I really like this approach—having the group formed or with knowledge of one another—as it makes for a smoother start but still with room for differing personalities.
One thing I have started doing is telling the players what the call to adventure will be. “There’s a job notice to meet at a shady bar and deliver a shady package to a shady place. Build a character that would answer the call.” #ttrpg
Apocalypse World, the system that spawned the PbtAs, have a pronciple for the GM
Play to find out
For me that is the guiding light. I play to find out. There is no plot, no story. Only the situation the game finds itself in. I dont know where it will go. But I do know where it starts and who is involved.
As for managing the chaos I use two tools. First is only call for a roll when it really, really matters. When there are consequences. Second is something that can have fallen out of favor in more recent PbtAs and that 8s clearly defined Threats along with the moves they take and a few clocks/fronts. That way when I need to Play to find out I have tools to keep it contained. Which also ties into only testing when it matters because there are a threat or two involved.
Or put in another way: Read and absorb Apocalypse World.
Out of curiosity, as I don't play D&D, does it includes character and their helpsheets?
I fill like that the most complicated part of a lvl 20 OS would be the character creation and management. And I assume that GM who bring their PC that far over a campaign have so much ongoing plot that they can just sit down at the table and let the PC do all the prep work
It's been a while since I read the rulebook, but what I remember was that completing a clock causes a thing to happen. So I imagine smaller clocks are generally better for incrementally upping the ante, e.g. first the guards know someone's here (making your position default to risky), then more arrive (meaning stealth is out and you need to run or fight).
I don't usually use any kind of pre determined timing that would be measured with a clock. I use story beats to introduce new ideas and events in the story so it always flows naturally based not just on what I have my NPCs doing in the background, but also what the PCs are doing in the foreground. I might have things that are timed out in weeks or months that can be triggered by the party resting or training or whatever, but this would only be because they've triggered an event like an incoming invasion force or something as it falls along the way the story has progressed.
Let's say the players are asking questions they shouldn't be asking about...
If the players are asking questions that are metagaming, I direct them back to the game and what information their characters have and what questions they would have based on that. If the characters shouldn't be asking the question because of some in-world reason, such as the characters they are talking to are loyal to a king who finds such talk treasonous, well then it would just play out in-game taking those things into account and the party may be pushed into a fight or taken to jail.
I employ as much improv as I write things down ahead of time. There is no way you can account for every single thing that every other player at the table may do, so I think it's best to leave a huge degree of vagueness until things start happening, so you can just make shit up on the fly for things you couldn't prepare for.
I talk Forged in the dark mechanic (FITD) which have a mechanic called "clock". It's a bit similar to long term action on traditional games where you stack success points / failure points until a long term goal is reached except that FITD uses it really everywhere no matter whether we talk about "HP", "opening a door" "being seen by the guard". An So it's not about general "time in RPG" which is also an interesting discussion (especially in a game like Vampire, the threat of the dawn coming can add a lot of pressure to the PC). And like other so called "rule light games" you end-up with large rule books and mechanics that you need to follow.
Regarding the asking question, I am not talking about meta-gaming, but question that would drag attention story wise. Without going asking question about the Kim family in North Korea, if you start asking about the local mafia, it's likely that at some point the local mafia will hear about these persons asking questions. I took that as an example of a threat which isn't immediate (You're spacesuit is running out of air if you don't make it soon to the ship you'll die) but which is present. In a more traditional game, I could use what make sense in the story to plan the encounter with the mobsters.
I think I played Ironsworn once. It was pretty okay. We played it GMless, if I'm thinking of the right game. I didn't really like that group that much, but it was an okay time.
PbtA really rubs me the wrong way and I'm not entirely sure why. Maybe because the two times i've played it, I didn't really like the person running it or how they ran it.
But strangely, I really like Fate. Maybe because it's biased more towards success. When I played PbtA and BitD I always felt like my character was a fuckup.
You do the thing in the fiction; you follow the procedure in the rules. That is true in all roleplaying games, of course, but the nature of moves makes those procedures something you have permission to reference. Instead of being expected to remember some obscure rule on page 348, you are in constant engagement with these individual subsystems.
This is a nice description of PTBA, and how despite their light rules you end up having to follow them strictly why more traditional rpg would let more room for GM interpretation of the rules. because nobody want to stall game to check the exact rule which usually isn't in the section where you expect it.
Request: if you decide to add new blogs, could you also make a post about it on your blog, please?
After some time I discovered that I'd prefer narrower choice of blogs, so I copied your selection and manually created my own list. But I'd still like to leverage your moderation, so if you wrote about it on your blog, I would know to check them out
I don't think there's one answer to that. To me it depends on the context of the clock and what's your plan for pacing. Also it will be part of your style that you just have to find for yourself, what works for you
(Cyberpunk examples)
Tripping guards suspicion on-site: one small clock
Consequence is not an alarm yet but from now on everything that has to do with guards can have lower position
Tripping alarms for the whole building: bigger clock
Or don't set up such clock at all if everything going completely south doesn't fit your overarching plot plans
Mafia responds to characters asking around: small clock
They have reputation to uphold, they can't have someone nosing around in visible way
Consequence:
someone who said something gets in trouble, making others harder to work with (lower position)
Mafia learns who they are (if that would be serious problem for the whole run, I'd make it a bigger clock)
They get set up and have an unplanned meeting with a bunch of enforcers
It gets so obvious that they get contacted by this group's opponents and the situation is stacked that characters either comply with demands or will have very hard time completing the run
Police/corp responds to characters doing runs against the corp
If you plan the corp to be present in the plot, make it a big clock to fill it after a few runs
Or make it small to force the characters to manage their footprint from the early stage (lower position when doing things the corp can piece together)
If it makes sense that corp would first send police after them, make it two small clocks
If you don't care about the corp, make it a short clock, to hopefully resolve it during this session
If they manage to not fill it, after all, keep the clock for the future. The next time you feel it's going too well for them, you can fill this clock instead of more current one. Suddenly bringing old grudges into the mix
So depending on what you want to do it's either bigger or smaller clock, with consequences either in fiction or mechanical
If the bad guy hears rumours about someone asking the question, does anything change?
When a clock fills in these contexts that should indicate that something needs to happen, and that something likely requires PC response. So if it isn't going to significantly impact the PCs until the third clock, it may as well be one big clock with stuff happening in the background as it fills. But if each clock has an impact and the PCs can do something to impact future clocks, stacking makes sense.
Regarding handling the consequence: it definitely depends. I'll sometimes use a clock if they're trying to overcome some major obstacle, so filling it means that they have less to deal with and that's probably going to be an RP exercise. But most of the time it's going to result in a change in position, or a need to resist something, or even a material change in their crew's territory that requires some response. In the example above, especially for such a large clock, I'd probably have the consequence be something like the bad guys invading their territory targeting the PC asking questions, which requires more than a mere change in position to resolve. That could involve a full-on heist to thwart.
So, trying to have a Filled clock --> Something having immediate/clear consequences happens. And better having a bigger clock with more dramatic effect coming (Bad guys found you and launch a surprise attack) rather than blurry smaller clock (Bad guys heard rumours about you which would only present as a NPC saying do not aks too many questions) make sense said like that.
I have a hard time remembering what about the Beast is from the original rules and what is Jason Carl's personal interpretation, in L.A. By Night. He highly personifies the Beast to provide players something definitive to roleplay against that might otherwise have just been an entirely internal struggle.
If you haven't already, I'd recommend watching LA By Night. It's basically the "Critical Role" of VtM, replete with actors playing the characters and extremely high production value. But most importantly, Carl is an excellent storyteller, and I think this one particular tip is the easiest concrete thing to take and apply at your own game.
I know a lot of people like actual plays, but because they are often full of GM/ST interpretation and house rules, I generally avoid them. I also don't plan on using splat books, which based on the title alone, I assume that the actual play uses at least 1.
Yeah I get it. In this case it's being STed by the product lead. It's like if you saw a D&D 5e game DMed by Jeremy Crawford, except that Jason Carl also has a level of charisma closer to Matt Mercer than the painfully dull Crawford. So because you're going to the official designer, I suspect you'll get something much closer to the official rules than a typical actual play.
That said, the reason I brought it up was actually to point to one specific thing that he does which I know is a house rule, because I've seen him say as much in interviews, and it suggest that this is a good house rule. I don't remember what exactly the boundary is between the official rules and Carl's interpretation; it's been a while since I watched that interview (and couldn't easily track it down when I looked yesterday), and even longer since I read the actual rulebook or watched the actual play. If you were to watch just a few episodes of the show with an eye specifically to how Jason Carl runs the Beast (and treat the rest of it as though it were entirely scripted content and ignore the actual gameplay), you'd come away with something useful and easily actionable in your own games.
As far as splatbooks, I'm not sure, but I don't think so. LA By Night was essentially a launch title for V5 itself, commencing in November 2018 after an August release of the Core Rulebook. Camarilla and Anarch sourcebooks had also been published earlier that same month, but as far as I can tell (I own neither) the only actual mechanics in both are two and one clans respectively, and those clans were not used by the core cast.
These are just things I learned running it and they worked for me but might not be the case for everybody
Focus on just the core book. WoD has always suffered from bloat and an early game I ran got out of hand pretty quick bc I let PCs pick from anything
Start small. 5e I think does a balance of horror great, but don't worry about shit going on in the far corners of the world with millennia-old vampires; let your PCs carve their niche out first
Lorebooks at your own risk. I didn't like them but again, IDGAF about the metaplot
Don't forget hunger is always there and should affect rolls but also you should always be challenging that hunger. I'm not a combative dm/st/gm whatever but like ... I think that's the whole point. Kindred existence is just a constant war of controlling the Beast.
Ask lots of questions and use those answers against the players especially during character creation and extra especially with Advantages and Flaws
Watch having thin-bloods in with your genned kindred. I felt like there was a huge power gap, or at least make players aware it might get weird
Idk the rules went fine but I'm used to WoD dice pool weirdness. I never house-ruled any of the 5e rules myself other than the mixed-gen coterie thing
I kind of like the idea of solarpunk and optimism, but I'm not sure about the system.
Using 2d10 instead of 1d20 is cool because, as they describe in the main book, that gets away from the "every outcome is equally likely" problem. So that's cool.
But otherwise I think this is crunchier than I'm in the mood for. I'd just play Fate nowadays. That even has reasonably good rules for non-violent conflict.
But I appreciate the effort that went into this, and like that it's not yet more grimdark fantasy or "absolute monarchy is totally cool" gristle.
That's totally fair. I think the main system provides a heavy dose of what people associate with DnD, which is rolling dice, adding them to something and shouting out a number and then it's either big (yay!) or small (oh no!) without having to think about it any more than that. But we understand the subjectivity, and really tried to make the content as portable between game systems as we could.
I'm still curious to hear others try out combat. I know it's a wild claim, but I think our combat systems is genuinely kind of next-level. I know that sounds totally braggadocios to say, but I really think there's something there.
rpg
Hot