Відео

Glad that you found it helpful, and thank you for letting me know.

Thanks! Again, appreciate your earlier note.

You're once again not crazy. Apologies for the confusion. UA-cam doesn't let you replace a video; you have to create a new one. So when I bumped the volume a bit I had to create this new one. I changed the name and thumbnail to differentiate them, but I should probably also delete the original. I think you're right about the aversion to violence thing. The more you put pressure on humans, the more they'll come into conflict with each other. At the same time, I think the tropes assume that people would all be at each other's throats all the time, which doesn't really bear up to under close scrutiny. Love that file story. Heh heh... one man's trash... .

"Call me crazy but I examine relationships between the individual and the group even in medieval settings." You're crazy. ;-)

Nice! I hope you and your crew enjoy it as much as we have.

Thank you! I’m glad you enjoyed it.

Thank you!

I'd love to!

@@SettingFirstRPG Excellent. I will take a look at the schedule then reach out to you on Discord~

Thank you for saying so. I really appreciate the comment, and I'm glad you liked the vid.

Thanks!

Thanks for the note, I’m glad you liked the video. As for fear of failure, I need to put together a video in which I describe some of my failures as a GM. The TL;DR is that it’s OK to screw up!

@@SettingFirstRPG Thank you, and I agree on the logical point. Failure is just a way of messing up and trying again, but for some reason it became a very big treshhold to climb. I've given myself the task of reading more rpg books and just letting it take time.

Amen to that. In my experience most players don't see GM "mistakes" and are far more forgiving than GMs think. Players are usually just very happy to have someone to run the game!

@@SettingFirstRPG Amen to that as well! I think I consider myself possibly the most privilieged player on the planet, because so far, every player I have gamemastered except for one, has then GM'd me and the rest of the group, and everyone has really understood just what it is like, including a favorite little scenario. I GM'd a campaign where two players wanted to invest and get money back over time as real life investments, and I told one of them who was a close friend, "This really drains the fun out of it, it is like preparing combat where one player is a powerhouse", and later, when he in turn GM'd a campaign and the other player wanted to do the same, invest, and that was when he understood how game breaking it can be and how hard it can be to balance for it. It is one of those "I told you so" but we both know I mean it with all the love I can spare for him as he is the most hardworking GM I have ever seen.

Thanks for the thoughtful note.

Hey, thanks for that note, and I'm really glad you found it useful!

Thank you!

Thanks for the note, and here's hoping it's a good fit for you and your crew in spite of the layout concerns.

Amen to the unmediated analog experience, and thank you for the note.

Thank you very much for the kind words. It means a lot to me, and I'm glad to know that you enjoy these videos.

I'm not advocating for anything per se, but in my experience if the intention of a game is to present a "realistic" treatment of combat (e.g., Twilight: 2000), then psychological factors should play a part. In a fantasy setting in which realism isn't a primary factor (e.g., Star Wars), exploring the psychological consequences of combat could actually get in the way.

Glad you liked it, and truly, thank you for all the effort you put into Paleomythic. It's a real breath of fresh air and a lot of fun to play.

Thanks for your note, which is thoughtful as always. I'm not sure if I cut this topic down so much in order to make it come in under 10 minutes that I left too many things unsaid, so it's good to hear you like the length. This is so true: "...what if I formed my first impressions with a different group of players? Would it be noticeably different?" My experience of a game really can differ depending on who is at the table with me, whether I'm GM or player. These games are really just scaffolding. Sometimes the scaffolding is elaborate, sometimes it is bare-bones, but what we do with it depends on the crew we bring to build it out.

Thank you! I appreciate you saying so.

"While the adventurers go off to drink and celebrate the victory, the goblins start looking for ways to pay them back." - I love it. Just as in our world, nothing happens in a vacuum.

Thanks! I really appreciate the note. It's nice to know there are others who have a similar approach to the hobby. All the best to you and your group.

I suppose another way of looking at it would be to ask, "Would those tabletop roleplaying books be regarded as dangerous even if no computers of any kind existed?" I believe the answer is yes, they would be. The mistrust of books existed well before computers arrived.

Hey, thank you for that comment. I really appreciate it, and I’m glad you liked the video.

I’m proof that you can play tabletop RPGs for a lonnng time and still screw things up. But I’m also proof that an old dog can learn new tricks. :D Glad to hear you and your crew had a great time with the campaign!

@@SettingFirstRPG That's a nice way you've put it. I skipped ITB and I started in a similar way you did with the setup for TKG, i.e. that the players all were from there and already had their backstory and connections interwoven with the different players in that scenario.

The Coolness Under Fire rules were there from the start in 1st edition, but the version of CUF I showed was from the Free League edition. That’s too bad that your group didn’t get into the rebuilding possibilities the way you did, but I suspect that was rather common. I actually wrote a post last year that touches on this: settingfirst.com/games/2023/07/03/the-once-and-future-twilight-2000.html

@@SettingFirstRPG It seems to be common in a lot of roleplaying games, even though the designers of the settings work so hard to fill in just enough for DMs and players fill in the rest. The players want to be the ranger Aragorn without ever actually wanting to be the king Aragorn, if that makes sense. They don’t realize that heroic adventures will come to them if all they want to do is settle down on their farm. It’s a type of storytelling that has been lost since the Odyssey and Beowulf were replaced by action movies. They don’t see the retired hero being reluctantly forced to strap on his armor again in those. Some of the best adventures come from going down the road to check on your neighbor because you saw smoke rising from his farm. You have skin in the game at that point.

Your point about giving PCs skin in the game is well taken. This is one of the things I like most about RuneQuest - it positions PCs in the world rather than assuming that they’re rootless wanderers. Those roots in community constrain the range of options, but I’m a big believer in the power of constraints in encouraging creativity. They also, as you noted, help to bring adventure to the PCs.

@@SettingFirstRPG There was a page in one of the old AD&D Forgotten Realms books that really hit home for me. I can’t remember if it was for Daggerdale or Daggerford, but it listed off the names of all of the local farmers and said whether they were given a spear, dagger or some other armor or weapon. It was a militia list for the local farms, because at the end of every entry it said “Oath taken”. That was the point where I started asking about the weapons the orcs were carrying, not their coins. Anything that could be salvaged, refurbished or resized got loaded onto the pack horses. The DM caught on quick when I started using my coins I couldn’t carry to build up the local blacksmith and bowyer’s shops and houses. Over the course of about four years of game time, the other players never caught on. They saw the frontier village getting bigger, but it all hit them when they finally had to ask the DM who was the leader of the village because an orc horde was coming that we couldn’t handle on our own and he just pointed at me and said “him.” That’s when it hit them that I never erased coins when I bought horses, arrows or stayed in the inn. They thought I was trading the old crap we were taking off the orcs for those things. The DM and I did a lot outside of the sessions, so they never caught on that when I “bought” gear, I was collecting taxes. They never caught on that when we accompanied a caravan to the next town, those goods we were protecting were mine. They never saw the local lord was sitting there at the table with them, not in some faraway castle. Everything you want as a DM is right there in front of you if you get players with the right mindset. You have to get them to see that not every treasure is shiny. I did almost the exact same thing a couple campaigns later in 3e playing a goblin fighter/rogue that I called a “merchant” when they asked what class I was playing. They never caught on that I was pocketing the choicest gems out of every stash and I bought the inn that had that cellar chock full of rats that were so tasty. The DM and I played up the wretched conditions in that cellar, because to a goblin, that was a presidential suite, underground and full of tasty foods, with a back entrance that opened out into a sewer tunnel. It was the same group, the same DM and I tricked them almost the exact same way, but they liked that I let them have most of my share of the coins. None of it is dependent on the system. It’s all on the player. You can do it with any game system in any world. For Shadowrun, I convinced the GM to let me extend the lifetime lifestyle rules as a stock portfolio of sorts. Every 100 Nguyen I stuck in paid out 1 per month. Every time we made a big score, I stuck money away as a “retirement fund”. Every month when I got money out of it, I stuck more into it. I was playing the face character and the money man of the group on top of being the magical support. It never dawned on them until I got caught by Lone Star and all my permits were in order, so they released me.

@@almitrahopkins1873 "Everything you want as a DM is right there in front of you if you get players with the right mindset. You have to get them to see that not every treasure is shiny." Amen to that. I'll bet your GMs appreciated you putting those long-term plans in-motion, too, because it demonstrates that you're really thinking about your character's place in the game world rather than just waiting for things to come along.

Represent!

Glad you enjoyed it, and thank you for the note!

I think you're right that digital forms of roleplaying have already overtaken in-person, physical forms, and we're not coming back from that. But I remember thinking with the rise of custom Lego kits in the 90s that plastic model building would go away, and it's still alive and well. Kids don't build them nearly as much as they did back in the day, but the hobby still has its own niche. I suspect that face-to-face analog roleplaying will never go away. It's just too compelling and the barriers to entry are so low. There will always be people out there who are drawn to its special charms.

Thanks for the note, @BarlowKeep - glad you liked this one. Your point about the type of the collective and how the individuals within it are impacted by what happens to it brings up all kinds of ideas. For example, what happens when a character has that "wait, am I one of the baddies?" moments.

I certainly don't disagree with you that those caught up in the Satanic Panic were highly irrational. And Flat Eartherism is really about mistrust of authorities. As @bjornh4664 noted, there's an anti-intellectualism running through all of it, which I believe is at least somewhat correlated to a mistrust of deep engagement with books. I mean, there's a reason book burning pops up rather reliably through American history. This video came from me wondering why it was that to this day, even with is popularity, there's still a certain stigma associated with tabletop roleplaying that doesn't attach to computer gaming. I do believe that part of the reason that stigma continues to gradually be reduced is that TTRPGs are now in many respects a primarily digital affair, and are therefore regarded as inherently less dangerous. But to your point, my examination is far from academically rigorous or exhaustive.

Agreed on all counts. I like your mention of anti-intellectualism, because I think that's absolutely a factor as well. And I think you're right that it does go hand-in-glove with a suspicion of "under-monetized" activities. As you note, those who get really excited about things that most people haven't experienced tend to be looked at warily.

Thanks! I hope the review was useful.

@@SettingFirstRPG sure, informative without becoming over-length. PS: at 1:56 there's a table that appear to be rolled with 4d6 (🤣yes, I'm one of those looking at book skimmings at x0,25 speed to get all the info I can)... Men, I hate when authors put that kind of tables, while you can obtain a similar number of rows in other ways. Anyone having a smattering of dice engines and statistics knows that obtaining a 4 is ultra rare, so for every time you get an object/trait/whatisthat that is in that row, you already obtained more than 100 times the entry in the row number 14 (and other 100 times the item in row number 13, and other 100 times the item in row number 15)... Let's say that this slightly alarm me if I have to base my trust in the game's author based on those tables 😉

@@ishmadrad Maybe the author wanted some kinds of stolen items to be more rare, and deliberately put them at either end of the curve. 😉

@@SettingFirstRPG 😁 Ok, nice try! That isn't a bell curve... itìs a huge pit! Anyway, I put it in my wishlist; ~22€ is a little too much for a PDF, right now, and I'm moving thru two interesting campaigns right now (The Wildsea, sort of post-apocalyptic fantasy based on FitD, and Valraven, medieval-fantasy about military companies heavily inspired by Berserk anime, with a very original light and modern system). I'll look for a drivethru sale, sooner or later 💜

:D I've heard good things about Wildsea. Hope you enjoy it and Valraven.

That’s the old “morale” check in AD&D applied to PCs.

Thanks! I'm glad you like the approach, and I appreciate your note.

Thank you! I'm happy you like it, and I appreciate the feedback.

Thank you! Glad you liked it.

Thanks! I appreciate the note.

Why am I not surprised at your excellent taste in games? :D

I hope you find it as enjoyable as our group did.

Same. I just discovered Wurm last weekend too and was really surprised by how thematic and awesome it was in a primeval sword & sorcery way. The cover and layout and presentation of the book really turned me off of Paleomythic when it came out (prefer the layout, art and look of Wurm by far), but after watching this video I'm grabbing this too

Thanks for the note! I hope you're able to get some players fired up to play Paleomythic. I didn't think my players would be into it. But one night I was telling them about it, and they surprised me by jumping at the opportunity to play. By the way, your idea of a campaign built around competing groups all trying to get to the Ancients' artifacts first sounds very cool.

I can totally see that. I wasn't interested in the thought of sticks n stones cavemen either. But the thought of primeval ice-age weird sword & sorcery along the lines of Fire & Ice, Frazetta artwork, Slaine, death dealeresque land before time stuff does sound awesome. Inject some flint axes, bronze weapons and horror fantasy into it and I think Wurm and/or Paleomythic could be a good way to do it.