Відео

I tried to pitch games like LOTFP but nobody wants to play that. In VTM it was just easier to play because I would just react to the situation. Because the players more want to be terrible people. I see that more at tables more often are players who want to play these gritty characters but don't want to be called out on it. They want the immersion without the consequences of actions.

It feels as though the game design often undermines the difficulty of achieving anything within these aspects of play (Gritty Realism/Grey Morality/Grim Dark). Lawful Stupid was a thing, especially when it became conflated with "this is your character's personality" and not a moral compass. The use of these three is also undermined when a game design is over-reliant on so-called game balance; not all conflicts are symmetrical. Lately, I've been hearing an increased usage of the phrase "Meaningful Choice" combined with "Meaningful stakes." This, too, gets undermined by design and in favor of avoiding character death, plot armor, or even just a bias toward a style of play. Adventure gaming, killing monsters, gaining experience, taking their shit, and leveling up are not served well by forays into moral quandaries and quagmires. It seems to me that the previous parts of my comment, along with what you are discussing in the video, all get undermined when most of the game advice and discussion becomes embroiled in "what's fun." Has this led to a general player maximum becoming, "It's ok when bad things happen to the NPCs, but not my character or their possessions?" You can have meaningful choices with meaningful stakes when the extent of playing with those parameters is meaningfully accepted, even within a gritty, realistic, morally grey, or grim and dark world. But there's always a but, right? When the default is set asymmetrically, the sunk costs of "building a character" and plot armor are set so that "the player character is special," where are we left to derive any meaning for anything within the game? Thanks for the videos, by the way. As a recent subscriber, I appreciate the expressions you've developed over time.

I don't entirely disagree. This is why I think Fantasy Races should be have some roleplay focus, over just mechanical. For instance, Tieflings are supposed to be stealthy, yet monstrous demon children shunned from society, but usually they're some of the most common races and these traits don't actually impact roleplay. What if Tiefling needed to kill people in order to appear more human? This allows for roleplay choices. A more evil character could use this often to disguise themself and stealthily blend into human society. Knowing this, distrust against Tieflings is justifiable, since their very presence invokes the possibility of murder and paranoia. A more virtuous tiefling character would refrain from their power, but ironically retain a more demonic appearance. Therefore, they would be outing themself as a potential and legitimate danger to humans, while also physically demonstrating their virtue to those less ignorant. I'm trying to build a setting where every race has some version of this. An ability that, regardless of culture, affects the way they can interact with other characters and with society.

Liked, subbed, and subscribed. You've given me something that I thought I had lost forever: hope. Through your verbose criticisms of roleplaying games, I no longer want to kill myself. You see, I walked in on my wife a few years ago getting drilled by a neighbor called Mastadon. He was a retired NFL linebacker, Google tells the full tale. Anyway, after drowning in the bottom of a bottle for the last thousand days, I found your channel. I am saved. Thank YOU, brother.

top notch content as usual brother...please never stop uploading, your videos have gotten me through a tough time with my girlfriend of 5 years cheating on me recently. your vids have given me something to look forward to at least after losing the most important thing in my life, thanks again

A very nuanced take!

While I like gritty realism in my fantasy books, when it comes to games I would much rather play a game that's more fun and where I can be full on chaotic good.

I very much prefer a lighter gameplay, with fun and chaotic energy into the world. I feel that in a lighter gameplay I am actually freer to create a more complex character infused with more humor and with interesting traits, whereas in a gritty / grim setting there's more falling back on cliché edgy characters.

Witcher games and books did a good job of grey morality. Geralt isn't always perfect, but we know his goals and beliefs are good and worth rooting for. The rest of the world is believably human too, even if it is a flawed and at times a very cruel place.

"Grey morality" is just the default, especially if your players are new and murder hobo-y. Not me though, my Arms Dealer PC was Morally Silver. Basically Han Solo in New Hope.

I think morally grey vs morally complex is an interesting dichotomy. I love this video because I didn’t agree with all of your opinions, but I in the end agree with your premise.

I have a player who has often said that he doesn't like heroic games where the players have to save something and would like to play in a morally grey campaign. When I had a campaign where my players were driven by personal goals and worked for a criminal organization (while trying to get out of said organization), he'd just have his character sit home alone and question why the others kept involving him in their quests.

Finally some delta green runners making content....you're doin God's work out here man, i'm a new subscriber but i'm liking what i see so far...keep it up! I just thought of a joke you might appreciate: What did the wanted poster for the escaped halfling Divination Wizard say? Small medium at large.

This is one of the reasons why Mythic Bastionland is slowly becoming one of my favorite ttrpgs. The Myths keep on going with strange Casts of Characters and weird supernatural happenings. It's a great game.

The Elder Scrolls series is an incredible example of a series where the "Weird" Worldbuilding is constantly clashing with the "Grounded" Worldbuilding, and without exception the former is ALWAYS better.

Sick video, a breath of fresh air. Always thought the same and always struggled with realism.

You think the humans in your campaign aren't superficial? Stereotypes are not bad things in and of themselves. You are the one who is saying that the nonhuman races are played as stereotypes or that they're too alien to be played. You sound like you're actually having trouble disengaging the real world from the fantastical. The races are given characteristics and often have broad behavioral stereotypes based on what people imagine such an existence could lead to. They are races of people, meant to be similar enough to interact, but with a variety of unique traits and behaviors. People have this amazingly stupid fascination with trying to be different for the sake of being different. There is nothing wrong with normal. If someone wants to play the snooty elf who can't stand dwarves, who cares? As long as they stick to that character, how is your immersion broken? This sounds like an issue with you not liking people playing standard templates, but if they don't follow the standard template, you argue that they're just playing a human in a costume.

If you want a story that includes the strange and the uncanny in its world building that offers no logical explanation check out the animated series Over the Garden Wall. It's a wonderful tale that is also perfect to watch for the Halloween season

I make a framework. I stopped trying to anticipate every move my players are going to do, I have fun when they throw a curveball at me. I'm getting slowly better as a dm. I still need a frame work, as a dm or I will go off the rails. (ADHD) I need some bullet points to help me stay cohesive on my end. But I've learned a lot in the few years I've been running.

Dare I say that the reason as to why fantasy became more grounded is thanks to the rise of atheism? From Prag and Goethe to Tolkien and Lewis, fantasy and fiction was always (almost fundamentaly) religious. It is only the last couple decades that fiction started to become less and less fantastical.

2:33 & 3:42, those are almost universally understood racial stereotypes. You tell just about anyone you’re playing an elf or a dwarf and they’ll imagine those things; this allows the player to then play to or against those stereotypes. What is the human stereotype? Older additions made humans very customizable, as a race they were jacks of all trades but masters of none, but an individual could be min/maxed, and that play just as much to type. The human stereotype was diversity, because real world humans are diverse as opposed to fantasy races which come from one specific source. You could say that the player wants a self-insert, or min/max character, but those are neither overwhelmingly common, nor do they say anything particular about the PC. Playing to it against rope says something about the character, without needing to actually say anything. Humans can be anything, but an orc bard, an elf barbarian, a dwarf wizard? Those are stories that mostly tell themselves. Hell, an elf fighting out aspiring to fight with an axe says something a human character would have to explain.

Yeah, I lean into this in my TTRPG setting. Although I don't use a "mythic underworld" per se. Instead, my setting is very heavy on Faeries (the old spooky kind). So the players can often stumble onto weird Faerie shenanigans, or a portal to their realm, where all kinds of unusual things can happen. :P

I tend to think of different fantasy races as an allegory for how ancient and medieval peoples saw other ethnic groups. Something similar, but alien to their own group. In that sense, it starts to be understandable that they would just have one culture, because the same ethnic group tends to have the same culture with only minor variance. Besides, the game is about escapism, and some of us want to escape from being human, if only for a few hours

One thing I always strive to include more of is mundane magic. Things like liberal use of the prestidigitation cantrip in the world and carnivorous potted plants as garbage disposals.

One thing we've found useful at my table (we take turns running and playing, keeps burnout low) is making use of other planes in limited ways. A gate that leads to a dungeon that is in the Feydark means you're not going to playing by mortal world rules. In a recent game, players found themselves in a homebrewed planet called Jotunheim and ended up having to quest through the ruins of a city that was thrown into Jotunheim by an angry angel (long story, much in game lore) to find an enchanted bell they could use to save a girl from 3 evil giant witches. It was purposely surreal and played by different rules (in character rules not game mechanics as such) than the physical dungeons of the characters homeworld and honestly? The players loved it. It felt like they were legendary heroes going where mortals dare not to do strange, great and sometimes terrible things beyond the bounds of their normal experience. It works great when you make a kind of real-strange-real sandwich to make the experience stand out more in my experence.

I'm not actually sure what your point was. I feel like you talked in such a vague way, I don't know what's good about a 'mythic underworld' or bad about an incredibly grounded one. It was too vague for me to learn anything.

the point about the river of forgetfulness isn't really accurate, just to get the Greek mythology right, but there was no widespread concept of reincarnation in Ancient Greece. I'm sure people have extrapolated the river might be a sign of previously believing in reincarnation but as it stands we have evidence of that, and most of that sorta stuff tends to be people misapplying Hindu beliefs

This video literally described my journey through the world of character creation over the years

You can play a fictional character race as a serious character. "Human but" applies to all fictional races...

Exactly, a couple of sessions ago i had the players visit a frog men society where they lived in the sewers and it was like victorian london. The party had to get some info and steal a staff, they were caught and had to run from the frog guards that were trying to catch them with man sized fishing nets on spears. It was a very funny chase sequence to play out

I once heard someone describe the scorpion bits I’d a manticore as “unrealistic” and found that too baffling to comment on. It’s a MANTICORE, the whole premise is unrealistic! That’s kinda the point! It’s fantasy! 😅

Personally, I think it is less productive to tell people that they shouldn't do something because you have a bunch of reasons it could be bad, and more productive to discuss the ways that people who do want to do this sort of thing can do it better. Personally, I think the thing that makes a non-human character good is basically the same as what makes a human character good: personality and motivation. Finding ways to conceptualize how their experiences as their particular type of non-human race might have shaped those traits is work that can be done to enhance that foundation, but ultimately, even if people don't do that work and just chose their race for aesthetic reasons, those basics will get you further than 95% of players. To be fair, though, I feel like the bigger issue is that people get caught up on enjoyment of the aesthetics, and forget to do that part. Edit: Also, as an admission, I don't think I have ever been in or seen a campaign that I would consider "immersive," though I have experienced some that eventually convinced me to take their stakes fairly seriously, mostly by contrasting those moments with others that are significantly less serious.

Wow. You put into words something I've been bothered by for years but couldn't quite describe: [paraphrasing] "if the game is built on strict realism and you have elite level players the game becomes completely procedural at a certain point and then you lose tension and excitement." TRUE! Keeping that "discovery phase" going is essential.

Better Worldbuilding : Enstrage the Brace

Coming back to this after letting it digest a bit, in my case I think A big fear of going full free-style is part of the fear from the GM side for new ones. "What do I do if the players does X?" and when back in the day there may have been some roll tables you could fumble with while asking the players to roll initiative to a tiny scene that barely requires your attention, that is absolutely something lacking today. I never did much DnD but I have done Symbaroum and Dragonbane, both Free League systems and both really flawed with the "here is huge books. read it all!", whereas the first campaign I ran was completely homebrew in a system without a setting, it really did feel open but even then there were moments where nobody wanted to take action, sometimes it was out of a "This isn't my characters quest/I didn't want to be here" or real life draining away.

I've got a worldbuilding project for a novel, in which most of the weird fantasy stuff that happens is due to a god-like supercomputer that believes itself to be the gamemaster of an rpg. It takes aspects of mortals' mythologies and makes them real.

Unrelated to the topic of the (great!) video: does anybody know what movie the scenes in black and white are from? It looks real nice

I would think the more realistic it can be, the more immersive it is, even if only subconsciously

I understand that this video is addressing tabletop RPG storytelling/worldbuilding in particular but I feel like this notion of “realism” or “emulated naturalism” (I’m not really sure what to call it) being some kind of objective good in storytelling is a problem for pretty much every medium. I don’t really understand where the idea of “GOOD storytelling is predicated on logic” comes from. Maybe it’s just because I’m an experienced fiction writer but the premise is pretty inherently flawed, even conceptually speaking. FICTION of all things has to be REALISTIC? I’m really curious where this trend comes from and why people feel so vehemently about it. I think it’s partially due to two factors: Media elitism and the artist/consumer disconnect. There’s a pretty obvious pipeline from “The more logical the storytelling is, the better” to “Anything which doesn’t adhere to our real world is objectively bad”. It’s just bog-standard ego fulfillment. People with media elitist mindsets aren’t trying to understand/engage with media on fair and equal terms, they’re trying to “beat” media, to think they’re always smarter/better than the work and the person who made because they assert their easy to nitpick and ultimately arbitrary standards carry some kind of objective weight behind them. It’s really sad to me how much media elitism has permeated this realm of discussion, mainly because it’s patently incorrect and the people who believe in it have disingenuous ulterior motives and won’t listen to reason and their very presence RUINS the discussion. There’s no room for nuance or alternative views, it’s just LOGICAL or BAD. But ultimately it’s storytelling. It’s inherently subjective, every and anything is valid. It’s ok for a story to not make sense, it’s ok to have magic that is inconsistent and poorly defined, it’s ok to have a river that connects two shores or a mountain range that’s no on a fault line. There’s a freedom to just doing whatever you please. My TTRPG world will just have a mountain sized skeleton of a dead dragon god. No, I won’t explain why it’s there or any ecological impact it should have etc. It’s there because I thought it was cool and wanted it there. Not every question needs to be answered and it’s a fruitless endeavor to try and it’s even more fruitless to demand it.

one of the tid bits of D&D lore that I enjoyed so much I want to include on a campain is the fact that death knights would sing hauntingly beautifull songs about their past in specific times, it's part of the mytic quality a fantasy settting should have.

I grew up with another kind of fantasy, even if I was born in 1992 and Lord of the Rings was a big part of my teen years... BUT I never found myself enjoying it that much, not more than H.P. Lovecraft and his group of friends: Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian is my type of fantasy (Sword and Sorcery), the weird in those stories are what drives my insane and makes me love it. The old D&D had many of those weird tropes in it that were lost for a higher fantasy setting that I don't like much. Keep it weird folks!

People often forget that Fantasy RPGs are typically not intended to simulate a realistic medieval world, they're supposed to simulate a believable enough Fantasy world.

If the problem is immersion, and hear me out on this, you can READ the lore of the races. I can't speak for every table top RPG, but games like Shadow Run and especially D&D have material to read to you can immerse yourself in the world and character. The point of a ROLE PLAYING GAME is to play a character that is not you and enjoy a fantastical world that is not our own.

Wack take, sounds like a lack of imagination and understanding of the human condition that all humanoid creatures would and could endure

I fully agree, currently I'm creating a kingdom that due to a supernatural threat has resorted to extreame eugenics and class separation to have more magically capable population, treating the unskilled like kattle. Miserable and dark fantasy. Also their current emperor's name is Ragnarokark Super Gandhi and sushi is an actual type of fish.

Its so bizarre that people worry if their FANTASY story is realistic enough to the point they make it mundane

rather than calling the most misguided, vulnerable, hurt and disturbed individuals within hobby a "morons who need to be weeded out", encouraging their already isolating conditions and sometims suicidal tendencies, I'd rather have a respectful real talk with such people and redirect them to the support groups and therapists and or dedicated RPG therapists and groups. There are yt channels, books, and growing body of research on topic. Not to troll / strawman our arguments into "boys don't cry" or "duh, lets exile every sad friend and player into rehab for 10 years of therapy", that would be truly moronic. I welcome and support pretty much everything else said in this video. Refining how we talk about approaches and expectations in hobby is helpful and interesting.

I think this is a player problem rather than a roleplay game problem. I personally have seen some very interesting takes on dwarves and elves that would not be able to be portrayed by humans. For example, I once played a dwarf artificer who was a cartographer and used his strange dwarf technology to map out the depths of the world. The DM Said that humans and dwarves had only recently come into serious contact. So, my dwarf's king sent him above-ground to create maps of the above-ground areas to better understand the human lands. He joined a party doing so, because he was struggling to use the same equipment and techniques that would work in mines for above-ground mapping. I also delved into the psychology of a dwarf trying to figure out races other than his and played him to intentionally misunderstand jokes and other phrases. It was a blast and my dwarf grew to cherish the party and to develop not just his mapping skills, but his social skills with the outside races.

I disagree, intently. I don’t know but maybe it’s the fumes of protection in that “if your genuinely interested enumeration, realism and meaningful RPing experience.” You sound chill but you may be overbearing to play at the table with.

I think this phenomenon is largely about insecurity in one's own work. I realized that I could suspend my disbelief for the work of other people, and other people could suspend their disbelief for my work, but I couldn’t give myself that same grace. Since I've been letting go of that perfectionism, I've felt like I could actually create again instead of just give the real world a different coat of paint. I think creators should ask themselves if they actually enjoy being so realistic and thorough; are those the kind of settings they actually engage with as a player/reader/etc.? I imagine a lot do, but I also think there are many like myself that are creating like this because of self-doubt and a kind of egotism.