beardycoxmilkshakeman:

Corruption Points: Choose Your Own Adventure

corruptionpoints:

I find myself in an interesting position, wedged between two very different experiences of two games I have never played before.

The first being World of Darkness, in which the group, including…

As it seems the opinions regarding this particular question are split fairly even, I find myself throwing my hat into the ring just at the right time to balance the opinions somewhat. Acknowledging, of course, that each and every person comes to the table for their own reasons and in their own ways, I have to say that I absolutely fall into one category more than the other regarding the specific debate of character identity and its relationship to the player. As such, I’ll take the first moment here to respond to that.

Regarding character identity and my own personality, I will never deny that some characters are related to myself directly in some exaggerated fashion. For example, I have run characters whose identities are entirely based in the idea that I personally existed in the fantasy setting that is being used for the particular game. To be perfectly honest, these characters are absolutely not characters that I would ever wish to be or experience in reality and generally wind up being rather grim, but this is mostly due to my comprehension of the metaphysics involved and the ways that it interacts with a character in a completely different universe.

The majority of my characters, however, are only related to me in that they reside primarily in my brain. Any aspects of their personality that are not accounted for by accidental overlap (which happens to the best of us from time to time) tend to relate to my own self only as much as they would relate to any other person on the face of the planet. Just like with the NPCs I make for my games, these characters are all alive in their own right. They respond and act according to their own personalities and their own lives, completely independent of my own. This is not how everyone runs their characters of course, but it’s absolutely important to me to have that distinction. Especially given in-character conflicts that arise on occasion.

Even in the most lighthearted of games, you need to have a firm separation between your self and your character. Even if the character genuinely is a reflection of your own self, but I have absolutely had difficulties with this perception in the past as a DM. When someone makes the mistake of thinking that a character reflects the player in some fashion and that aspect of the character is conflict with their own who they relate to strongly, things can get very personal very quick.

I recall once having a difficulty wherein a particular NPC happened to share my first name and was somewhat central to events taking place in the plot. Given my clear personal religious devotions, it was assumed and stated on more than one occasion by one of my players that it was a self-insert messianic representation of Jesus and I was essentially using the entire plot to force the characters to follow Jesus (me, apparently) if they were to have any chance at stopping the BBEG from taking over the world. While this particular character did indeed happen to ever so loosely bear a resemblance to my self (mostly by the name connection) he was absolutely in no way, shape, or form to be connected in such a fashion and this line of relating a character back to the player is a dangerous line of assumptions that can both hinder in-game actions based upon even entirely mundane and innocent meta reasons as well as real interpersonal difficulties when someone reads a bit too much into a given character and “learns” something about the player that isn’t true at all.

Of course, there is absolutely no right or wrong way to approach your characters, but it seems a very strong point to never assume that another player has any kind of connection with their character unless explicitly stated otherwise. I’ll save my direct and personal answers for this prompt for a reblog of the original post, however.

So, a few members of my gaming group have tested D&D Next. Myself and Literaryfirearms, though perhaps a touch overdue, are posting a pair of reviews of the system as we have experienced it. For my own review, I will be focusing on the realm of classes, races, feats, and actions in combat along with an examination of the Wizard class specifically. For matters of skills, Movement, spells, and an in-depth examination of the Druid class, check out the posting HERE.

Also, for an extremely concise review (complete with media reference pictures) check HERE.

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In an attempt not to let being busy intrude on my postings any longer, as I have an unfortunate tendency to do, I will join in on my prompted discussions of morality in a fantasy setting. CorruptionPoints based the concept of what is good or evil almost completely in the realm of motivations, declaring that essentially any action which is motivated to better the life of others over the self is good whereas any action which is motivated to better the self at the expense of others is evil, those which are at the expense of neither I would assume to be neutral in nature. Literaryfirearms based her own account of good and evil upon not only the motivation lining up, but also the action itself and thereby discounting any situation where the ends justify the means as essentially good acts. For both of these systems the assumption would be that an individual whose core identity can be described in one of these ways would be either good or evil. My own explanation is somewhat different than these, but takes a moment to explain.

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It’s tough to say without some degree of knowledge on the system you’re using, but my first steps on homebrewed monsters are usually pretty play-it-by-ear. One of the safest bets is to simply find a monster that has already been printed and balanced properly and simply extract the information for it. If you want it to be post-apocalyptic and have some kind of terrifying extra feel to it from that, consider throwing on a disease or poison effect to one of its attacks.

If you have to start from scratch, with nothing to base your information off of, here’s a decent guideline: Work off the party fighter or equivalent. If you want something of average challenge for the party, give it an attack bonus high enough to hit the fighter with an average roll of 11 for a D20 system. Then check the hit points on that fghter and make sure you can drop him with average damage rolls over the span of five turns or so, depending on how man attacks he has. This gives enough time for the party to attack the guy and feel like it’s a fight that fights back. Do something similar for the monster’s hit points and armor class, comparing it with the primary fighter’s bonuses in the same manner. Thow on a couple of flavorful abilities that you like, like disease/poison for the mundane things, but get creatve here. You want abilities your players will always attach to this creature. Unique diseases will do, but sothing that stands out in their minds works the best. Once you have that as a guideline, you can tweak the numbers up and down to fit your need, making it have more hit points or a higher AC as needed. For something aberrant and radioactive, I recommend the feeling of having a low AC but monstrously high hit points or damage reduction. The party can hit the beast, but have no idea why it is still standing and marvel at the creature’s endurance and fortitude. Or vice versa, being unable to hit it, but it cracking like glass when they do. Radioactive monstrosities feel really exciting to run to extremes like that. Keeping those distinctions and reusing them while mix and matching the monsters you make gives you plenty of variety as well. Paint them all to extremes and make savage warbands of radioactive beasts with a bunch of small creatures that always hit, but for very little damge and a big nasty brute wth really high AC but almost never hits, dealing massive damage when it finally does.

Finally, if you’re working some serious homebrew and trying to implement it in a balanced way, give it a few test combat runs. This is a necessity when you’re new to the concept of homebrew monsters. Test them in a full blown combat with the party before the session, rolling all the dice yourself to see if the combat looks like it would be fun and adjust from there.

As an example monster for strange abilities, I created one for my own game where the creature is simply a roiling black mass of energy. They inhabit the gap between worlds and bled into this reality upon the destruction of another. They don’t really do damage that’s noteworthy, but they have the ability to force dice to reroll and every time they hit a living creature, they select two random ability scores, lowering one and raising the other. They are the chaos stuff of the void. The essence of creation and destruction. And my players recognize them on sight because they are unique.

Hopefully this tidbit is helpful for you! I’m always open for answering questions I find in my inbox as soon as I find them!

For most everyone, the topic of what term to call the person responsible for producing the world and narration as well as handling all non-player characters is a very mundane topic without any real need for exploration or any real substance that could come from such an exploration. Of course, there is no need to get into any kind of heated disputes over such terms and everyone should be free to use whichever ones suit their fancy at the time, but I know that I have personally chosen the term of choice for myself for a reason and find there to be a distinction between the two while recognizing that very few people would ever think so far into the terms used for this. As it was requested that I elaborate, however, I am glad to do so.

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Prompted by a discussion by CorruptionPoints, the matter of “fudging the dice” in various circumstances is one that can have some rather diametrically opposed views from people sitting at the very same table. It is also one of the points of gaming that I feel very strongly about personally and thus am glad to take the time to write about. This is an issue that every DM must face from time to time and having a consistent view on whether you intend to modify the numbers and overrule the dice is important for being able to smoothly run the game without distraction regardless of which side you fall on with the issue. That being said, I will start the conversation off by noting that I flatly refuse to stray from the rolls of the dice and the numbers of the encounter once it has gotten rolling. That might seem strange given some of my other postings, but allow me to explain.

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Alright, this is the official notification that I am kicking off the play by post campaign for Pokémon that I had previously mentioned. We shall see how well this one works here. At the moment I cannot promise any particular update schedule, but this game will take place in a bit of a one on one setting via email. For now, let me put out some of the details a bit more specifically so you know what’s going on.

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Continuing the series on worlds in the Pokemon setting and their conversions for the tabletop we come to Vermilion. Vermilion being the first genuine coastal city that has been seen in this series, even more so than Cerulean, we have come to the center of open seas activities in the Kanto region. With the decision made to keep Vermilion intact for a variety of reasons, it serves as the primary connection point between Johto and Kanto as well as being the primary hub of activity and travel as travel via the sea is far safer than travel via land in these dangerous times when Pokemon can emerge from the woods and attack any passing travelers unprepared for their presence in the tall grass. As the primary activity center of the Kanto region, this is also where the military has centralized under the leadership of General Surge.

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I am gauging the response from the Tumblr community here. I am considering kicking off a play by post or play by email campaign in the Pokémon tabletop. I’m inviting the network of people in the small group that sees my postings as well as some people from my Friday gaming group if they are interested. I can post further details on what the setting would be like and what the options might be, but at the moment I am simply gauging the kind of attention this might have here and who would be interested.

Some information about myself: I’m 26 years old and have been DMing Dungeons and Dragons campaigns for about a decade now if my memory is correct. I have also run a Pokémon tabletop in person on our friday game nights. I have yet to run a play by post with more than a single player, but I have done solo adventures as such. In that vein, I may not be opposed to running a large number of solo adventures in a simultaneous game.

My intention here is to flesh out the Kanto world for our friday game. At the moment we run a game in Johto and my duties have been to develop and design the Kanto region, as well as that of Sinnoh. I would be willing to run adventures in each, but the intention is to populate a world and have thriving, living characters abounding in it. In that manner, these plots can interact and you may even meet people who are running in the same fashion, but you won’t know they are anything but NPCs unless I would see fit to let you in on the secret. Essentially, the call is going out here to be the NPCs who populate the world. If you’re interested in making a character who would integrate into the world around them and become a permanent (for so long as they live) fixture in a campaign setting, this is the opportunity.

It’s an interesting concept, but let me know how you feel. I’m leaving this post untagged to retain the audience to the smaller circle here on Tumblr. As Literaryfirearms is the person currently running the active game for the Friday session, I’ll extend the invitation to her to reblog this. Otherwise, just respond to me via a reply to this post so I can see the responses in one place. I’m only taking replies as legitimate interest, not likes.

Again, this is merely a test for how large the interested audience would be here. I’m making no promises for fully implementing this, but I do firmly intend to do so. If the response is too large, I might design some manner of applications process. I’ll be sure to post again should that be the case, however.

If you’d like a sneak peek at the kind of setting this is, check my archives. Any posts tagged “Pokemon” are probably my catalog of world design for this very setting.

My apologies for the long absence in this series, but now it is time to finally arrive in Celadon City. Keeping in mind the setting we have been working with throughout this series, there is a lot of adaptation that is going to take place. While we have seen in Viridian and Cerulean some rather distinct natural occurrences that have changed things, as well as some less dramatic changes in Saffron, Celadon will be a venture into something a bit less of the normal variety. This is a chance to really drive home the uniqueness of the setting and tie it in with the world of Pokemon as a whole.

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