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Oct. 19th, 2020 06:47 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethAnd then I forgot to post for a few days.
I've been reading through the Adventure Path and I quote like Hell's Rebels but it's not as much my thing as I expected from the summaries. Like you can invest in Charisma skills and get a lot out of that, but there will be fights, because a lot of people are mind controlled, or bound in supernatural terms, or just evil outsiders who are just gonna evil.
Someone on the paizo board said something about 'there's no way for players to know' and, well, yes? There always is? You. The GM. You tell them things. You can put things in a rumour or you can make them roll Sense Motive or Perception and you can make the DCs as low as you like.
And in the specific case of the new minigame rules... Hell's Rebels has new rules for running Rebellions and also rules for Banquet and Masque and Authority points so far, so you can keep track of who is winning at social things. This to me suggests the main rules need a bit more work in those respects. But it's also because not everyone is going to have bought Ultimate Intrigue or Campaign. But: the rule books explain to the players what the rules are. So the players guide tells them all the Rebellion rules. And they're as allowed to know how Banquet Points work as they are to know how Hit Points work. Sure it's an abstraction that you can't convey in character, but, of cours the players can know the rules.
So I might not always see the easiest way to get from the Adventure Path to actually conveying this stuff to the players, but I have grasped that it's the GM's responsibility to figure that out.
NPCs having conversations has to do a lot of heavy lifting, and the APs don't script that stuff, just give you the data the NPC would have.
Also in this one they keep finding document caches that have been almost destryoed except for the important stuff, rather than busy full buildings with records going back centuries, so that's nice. ... or like tragic for librarians, but, means you dont have to full and nudge your players into figuring out what they 'should' look for in there.
So I feel like I'm getting the hang of how APs convey information and what a GM is expected to figure out themselves.
But I still dont understand the rules very well and every time I find a couple lines that actually explains how they work I realise there's a lot of invisible assumptions in there. And for all that the classes and levels thing is supposed to help you make a playable character every time, it's also got so many twiddlers to everything, you can totally unoptimise yourself too.
Lots of reading, lots of Adventure, still a frustrating amount of fighting
and I know feeling that way strongly suggests I actually want a different game, so that's not even a complaint.
I've been reading through the Adventure Path and I quote like Hell's Rebels but it's not as much my thing as I expected from the summaries. Like you can invest in Charisma skills and get a lot out of that, but there will be fights, because a lot of people are mind controlled, or bound in supernatural terms, or just evil outsiders who are just gonna evil.
Someone on the paizo board said something about 'there's no way for players to know' and, well, yes? There always is? You. The GM. You tell them things. You can put things in a rumour or you can make them roll Sense Motive or Perception and you can make the DCs as low as you like.
And in the specific case of the new minigame rules... Hell's Rebels has new rules for running Rebellions and also rules for Banquet and Masque and Authority points so far, so you can keep track of who is winning at social things. This to me suggests the main rules need a bit more work in those respects. But it's also because not everyone is going to have bought Ultimate Intrigue or Campaign. But: the rule books explain to the players what the rules are. So the players guide tells them all the Rebellion rules. And they're as allowed to know how Banquet Points work as they are to know how Hit Points work. Sure it's an abstraction that you can't convey in character, but, of cours the players can know the rules.
So I might not always see the easiest way to get from the Adventure Path to actually conveying this stuff to the players, but I have grasped that it's the GM's responsibility to figure that out.
NPCs having conversations has to do a lot of heavy lifting, and the APs don't script that stuff, just give you the data the NPC would have.
Also in this one they keep finding document caches that have been almost destryoed except for the important stuff, rather than busy full buildings with records going back centuries, so that's nice. ... or like tragic for librarians, but, means you dont have to full and nudge your players into figuring out what they 'should' look for in there.
So I feel like I'm getting the hang of how APs convey information and what a GM is expected to figure out themselves.
But I still dont understand the rules very well and every time I find a couple lines that actually explains how they work I realise there's a lot of invisible assumptions in there. And for all that the classes and levels thing is supposed to help you make a playable character every time, it's also got so many twiddlers to everything, you can totally unoptimise yourself too.
Lots of reading, lots of Adventure, still a frustrating amount of fighting
and I know feeling that way strongly suggests I actually want a different game, so that's not even a complaint.