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The Uncanny Resurrection of Dungeons and Dragons

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Re: The Uncanny Resurrection of Dungeons and Dragons

#101

Post by pfooti »

SubiculumCode wrote: post #98

I always wanted to give it a go, but could never find a group. Now as a careered adult with kids, it is even harder to find time to try this kind of thing, especially since my spouse has few gaming tendencies. Last year or so though, I saw a Pathfinder Humble Bundle for a bunch of rule books and I decided to buy them for fun. And that got me thinking..I started poking around some forums and ended up joining a play-by…

depending on where you live, you might have some luck via meetups. i'm a long-time rpg player, but I lost my group when I moved to esseph. Meetup started the networking process - there's a lot of D&D and other RPG meetup groups.

Re: The Uncanny Resurrection of Dungeons and Dragons

#102

Post by pfooti »

Poiesis wrote: post #60
nevster wrote: post #30

I think the main thing is 5th edition - it's really good. I briefly tried 4th edition and it just didn't feel right - way too combat heavy and video-gamey. Then 5th edition came out and it was immediately obvious that it had that 1st edition feel but with all the bugs worked out. I play it with my kids and it's awesome.

If you have any, I’d love tips for running a game for kids. (I’ve never DM’ed or played but am pretty familiar from many podcasts)

depending on the age of the kids, you might be interested in facilitating No Thank You, Evil. It's designed to be run by an older kid, but parents can GM as well. I've not played, but I have heard good reviews.

http://www.nothankyouevil.com/

Re: The Uncanny Resurrection of Dungeons and Dragons

#103

Post by pfooti »

sago wrote: post #75

I'm not sure if it's resurrecting, or just improving it's image, either way it's welcome. Still, it is sad that it is so focused on one game: D&D. It's a decent game, particularly fifth edition, but I can't help finding it a bit... um, artless. Which isn't a problem, sometimes that's fun. But when there are so many amazing and sophisticated RPGs, with game mechanics that expand the form and support interesting play,…

We've got this amazing supply of great and interesting RPG engines out now, which I think the broad internet community (just people getting together to DIY stuff) and crowdfunding (lots of these systems are kickstarted) sort of came together to support.

That said, I think that most systems authors need to start with a paragraph or two about "why this RPG engine is necessary, instead of making it work as a plugin to GURPS / Fate / d20 / Apocalypse world." There's a lot of good reasons to do this, but there's also a lot of cruddy systems with half-baked rules that are ripe for rules-lawyering and just bad implementation details (looking at you, FFG Star Wars). Writing a well-crafted, minimal-bug RPG engine is similar to writing a front end framework or something along those lines.

Re: The Uncanny Resurrection of Dungeons and Dragons

#104

Post by Illniyar »

SubiculumCode wrote: post #98

I always wanted to give it a go, but could never find a group. Now as a careered adult with kids, it is even harder to find time to try this kind of thing, especially since my spouse has few gaming tendencies. Last year or so though, I saw a Pathfinder Humble Bundle for a bunch of rule books and I decided to buy them for fun. And that got me thinking..I started poking around some forums and ended up joining a play-by…

When I was doing PbP a while back the best site, hands down, was https://www.myth-weavers.com .

I suggest you give it a try

Re: The Uncanny Resurrection of Dungeons and Dragons

#105

Post by pfooti »

11thEarlOfMar wrote: post #10

>half a dozen paid Dungeon Masters... Still trying to process that. Do I need to polish my resume? What type of experience is required? How many applications did he get? How old were the applicants?

i thought about this at some point (i enjoy game mastering and have a lot of campaigns i've written up in notebooks and so on), but I can't see any way to make this actually work. Assume you can run one session a night, for five players each session. It's unlikely you'd be able to run more than one per day, just because your players only are really able to play in the evening. This puts your effective work week at around 20-25 hours.

You would need to have a really high hourly rate to make this a primary source of income, and I'm not sure you can ask players to pay more than 20-30 bucks each per session. You could use this to supplement income from writing or whatever, but I just doubt the market would support an hourly rate that actually paid a GM a wage they could live on.

In some real way, this is just like hand-knit socks. If you knit socks, you know how much time and effort goes into them, but you still give them as gifts. But if someone wanted to buy a pair, would they be willing to pay $150 for them? Probably not, despite the socks often taking five or six hours to make (if they're intricate or interesting).

Similarly, I game master because I enjoy it. I get to play my favorite part of the game (storytelling). I will say: I'd pay to have someone else deal with the (rare, but still nonzero frequency) drama that happens when you bring six people together on the regular. As GM, it somehow ends up being me who has to referee.

Re: The Uncanny Resurrection of Dungeons and Dragons

#106

Post by fulafel »

mamurphy wrote: post #92

If you have tried getting your friends to play D&D and they say, "too many rules," try Dungeon World. It's designed to be in a similar setting but uses much simpler rules. It also allows you to be much more collaborative in story-building, requiring substantially less DM prep. https://www.reddit.com/r/DungeonWorld/ http://www.dungeon-world.com/

There are also many RPGs don't have much mechanics and are more about playing the characters, if you're not hung up on dungeons.

Re: The Uncanny Resurrection of Dungeons and Dragons

#107

Post by jwfxpr »

fapjacks wrote: post #95
Poiesis wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have any, I’d love tips for running a game for kids. (I’ve never DM’ed or played but am pretty familiar from many podcasts)

I would strongly suggest you take a look at "The Lazy DM" by Sky Flourish [0]. He has other books that are pretty good also. This method of running games will get you going immediately and takes almost no preparation. You will stumble a couple of times when you first try it, because it feels unnatural versus drawing everything out ahead of time. But once you get used to it, you'll never go back, and you'll be able to…

This looks really interesting — the only reason I don't run more games more often is the time burden. At a glance it appears to be focused on the various D&D editions + Pathfinder, and was published pre-5th (though I can't find a publication date on the site).

Is it generalised/generalisable enough for use with other source material and RPGs? In other words, is it D&D specific?

Re: The Uncanny Resurrection of Dungeons and Dragons

#108

Post by sago »

ceades wrote: post #97
mikepurvis wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a total noob to all of this, where would I go to find helpful commentary on how these different games compare to each other and what they offer?

A good start would be the beginners guide on /rpg/ https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/wiki/beginnersguide If you've never seen how a particular game works and want to get a feel, search around and watch an episode or two of the game online. Rollplay on Youtube has a good channel that covers a lot of different types of games. You can also find games on Roll20's channel as well, and many more on Twitch and other channels. As…

Great summaries. To round out my examples:

In "My life with Master" the party play the henchmen of an evil master. It explores ideas of culpability, fear, self-loathing, humanity and, possibly, redemption. It is the only role-playing game to give me heart ache. Literally, pathos I felt as a physical reaction.

"The Clay that Woke", another by Paul Czege, concerns a race of Minotaurs, more physically powerful but utterly subjugated by humans. It explores themes of racism, power, imperialism, and ethics. Not quite as good MLWM, but very much worth playing.

I added "The Beast" to go all in on a game totally unlike D&D. It is a single player game, using cards and a diary, with an erotic theme, and dark overtones. I haven't finished my play through, and I'm not sure I recommend it, quite, but it has got under my skin.

"Hillfolk" is Robin D Law's 'Drama system', essentially game mechanics built around generating interesting interpersonal conflict. The setting is Iron Age subsistence, but it includes several other settings, from horror to modern life.

Re: The Uncanny Resurrection of Dungeons and Dragons

#109

Post by knappe »

Mizza wrote: post #6

It's because of Stranger Things. The article sees it as a symptom, but from a lot of people I know, it's actually a cause. Shameless plug: If any of you have ever wanted to try DnD but didn't know how to get started, or if you've played before and want to start again, try playing my fun-optimized rule set, _DnD: TL;DR_ - https://github.com/Miserlou/dnd-tldr

This can't possibly be the case.

Nerd culture has spread and with it all things nerdy.

Look at the growth of GenCon for one example of how explosive this has been. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gen_Con#Timeline

Board games sales are up 28% in the US http://www.adweek.com/brand-marketing/from-monopoly-to-explo...

If anything, I'd say that Stranger things is a symptom of nerd culture. I mean, look at things like Big Bang Theory. There is no way that show would have hit mainstream without nerd culture being even remotely popular.

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