Tabletop Community Watch

[Loose Goose]

You're probably right, but tabletop horror stories go back to long before the days of X cards and safety tools. There was an RPG.net thread going back to the early 2000s, well before the site went nuts, that reached thousands of pages in length before the mods eventually nuked it.

Were any of these stories true, even back then? Probably not, or at least not most of them, and mostly not that lurid. But they're entertaining as a sort of gaming folklore.

I remember that RPGNet thread very well, because that's where I realized a lot of the gaming horror stories were bullshit, as they bore so little resemblance to the way we played, or what we saw with our own eyes in the wider hobby. There were always weirdos and assholes in gaming, but never as many or as bad as that thread suggested. Then came the sudden realization that the posters there were mostly misanthropes who grew to hate gaming, were barely playing anymore, and they were just spreading imaginary stories about the great unwashed masses. It was one part snotty elitism, one part one-upmanship, and three or four parts self loathing, in a stew of posters reinforcing each others' spite for their fellow gamers.

That thread, I think, was one of the large warning signs of the site going nuts, but few people noticed back then. I sure didn't until a few years later. In hindsight, it was a preview of what RPGNet would become.

 

[Sunflower Samurai]

4chan stories of "greasus mc faggotlord" atleast had the decency to be funny and entertaining, even if some were a tad bit forced. But everything posted on Reddit is tailor made to appeal to the autistic forever warring nature of the ledditor, its not even fun, the authors all want asspats for being stunning and brave

 

[harbringer883]

Cameras have been readily available on common phones for damn near 20 years at this point. Yet even with the one instance a few years ago of that retarded 40k tournament in spain which was confirmed to have a bunch of problems besides the one retard who showed up as "austrian painter" even somehow no one managed to take photos of that. 99% of that RPG horror story bullshit is weirdos writing their fanfic about owning the nazi chuds, submitting their entry for the sympathy olympics, or are just generally fucking retarded. But with the wargaming shit there's never a photo on the neckbeard with his SS shirt, there's never someone snapping a photo of the supposed krieg(who are ww1 and mostly French) armies that are covered in swastikas, cadian flags replaced with black suns, etc. in an actual game store and isn't just someone posting some bullshit from their basement.

I was arguing with some people who kept claiming le hekkin nazi players came to their tournament before the brave redditor kicked them out (everyone clapped), shockingly, despite everyone having a iphone with a camera nowdays, no evidence of such was ever recorded. Its all so tiresome really.

 

[Flexo]

You're probably right, but tabletop horror stories go back to long before the days of X cards and safety tools. There was an RPG.net thread going back to the early 2000s, well before the site went nuts, that reached thousands of pages in length before the mods eventually nuked it.

Were any of these stories true, even back then? Probably not, or at least not most of them, and mostly not that lurid. But they're entertaining as a sort of gaming folklore.

Screw you guys, I will always believe in the legend of Old Man Henderson. In a world of fake and gay, his saga is 100% real and you won't convince me otherwise!

Anyway, look at this promo that landed in my inbox today.


The jokes write themselves...

 

[Paradox Mystic]

The jokes write themselves...

I judged the 50+ year old killer dms far too harshly in my hubris of years long past. I did not know it was like a load-bearing wall.

 

[Flexo]

I judged the 50+ year old killer dms far too harshly in my hubris of years long past. I did not know it was like a load-bearing wall.

Sure you don't want a link to their kickstarter? Free pastel dice set for early backers.

 

[p1138]

Sure you don't want a link to their kickstarter? Free pastel dice set for early backers.

View attachment 8011156

Let's take a look at this faggotry.

I'm sorry, why do these people think they deserve a 4 day work week and minimum salary instead of minimum wage?

SHIFT’s innovative Trait and SHIFT Die mechanic is the building block of the whole system. Learn how to create a Trait, and you’ll be designing new content for your SHIFT games right at the table!

• Use Traits to represent your character’s strengths & weaknesses, equipment and vehicles, monsters, allies... anything!
• Use a SHIFT Die (from D4 to D12) to track your likelihood of success. The fewer faces the die has, the better your odds!
• But watch out: rolling the highest number on a SHIFT die means your Trait becomes less reliable!

So no matter what I do, I have a 25% chance right off the bat to not only fail at it, but also permanently fuck whatever that die roll was to only a 50% failure rate next time? Sounds fun! I did read elsewhere that a crit success lets you go up a die, but if you've exhausted the "trait" you're shit out of luck unless someone else at the table uses their crit success to bump you back into the d12 category. The problem is this applies to a MENTAL stat for a character. You make a guy good at math(they'd likely opt to never play this shit), and if they have to roll to solve a math problem they've got a 25% chance of being dumber than when they started? Instead of being "mother may I" with traits like PbtA, this is the fucking opposite because the ideal thing is to avoid marking shit down to ever have to roll for it I guess.

So the one die people are most likely to have outside of a d6, that can readily be loosely bought for cheap at any gaming store without even having to buy a set of polys, isn't used? All while making part of the set of polys anyone has bought useless. This really does reinforce my idea that retards have a fear of handling double digit numbers.

Their chart looks like brightly colored poo emojis.

edit: Found another image. The DM can decide a roll is "risky" increasing your chance of being retarded.

 

[Paradox Mystic]

Sure you don't want a link to their kickstarter? Free pastel dice set for early backers.

It seems a bit too autism (the bad kind) -coded for me. I'm not that desperate for dice.

 

[Very Professional]

Let's take a look at this faggotry.

I love when hipster faggots try and fail to reinvent the wheel.

 

[40 Year Old Boomer]

The worst players I've dealt with always fell into three categories: The EdgeKiller that exists only to ruin storylines and cries when his actions have consequences. The Pervert who is constantly trying to exert his (and occasionally her) horrible fetishes into the game, and the Girlfriend who will never learn how to even make a basic attack and is just another player's codependent foid.

 

[Paradox Mystic]

The worst players I've dealt with always fell into three categories: The EdgeKiller that exists only to ruin storylines and cries when his actions have consequences. The Pervert who is constantly trying to exert his (and occasionally her) horrible fetishes into the game, and the Girlfriend who will never learn how to even make a basic attack and is just another player's codependent foid.

That reminds me how brutal the Vampire Storyteller book from Revised is when it comes to tardwrangling players. It accurately describes a lot of the problem player types I've seen before, and it's pretty blunt about punishing them. It's worth a read/re-read.

 

[Ghostse]

Anyway, look at this promo that landed in my inbox today.

They need better proof readers, there is an extra 'F' in that title.

So the one die people are most likely to have outside of a d6, that can readily be loosely bought for cheap at any gaming store without even having to buy a set of polys, isn't used? All while making part of the set of polys anyone has bought useless. This really does reinforce my idea that retards have a fear of handling double digit numbers.

"You need to get a 7-dice set but only will use 6 of them" KYS.

I dislike a lot of d6 systems mathematically but I understand them from a practicality stand point. This bullshit offers neither.

This is really just a failure cascade game, as once you start getting your shit pushed in you go from 75% success to 50% after your first fuck up and eventually 25%. Also you really have to have a bad fucking night to deplete any stat.

The other thing is they use "narrative descriptions of traits" which firstly KYS and secondly this just tells me we have another PbtA "Its not a story game, there are DICE!".

That said, there are a few diamonds to fish out of thier fecal soup. The shift mechanic is pretty easy to understand, except they are doing the "low number = gooder" thing which never works well, as everyone knows big number = better.
The Risky/Inspired mechanic isn't bad (even if the rest of the math is shit) except it does nothing to your D4 so there is no point in trying to be clever when your die is maxed, and given how powerful a critical success is that it improves all future rolls, it doesn't work very well mechanically

It would be much better to have something for Risky, given how shit your odds are as your die degraded, that hits the "better" dice harder than the degraded ones. And For inspired, soemthign that makes your D12 have better than 25% odds of success even if its not a crit.

I would think a SW sort of "All In" mechanic would be better with less swingy dice, where it becomes Critical Failure or Critical Success, no inbetween.

---

The changing dice size stuff is very similar to a "narrative resource depletion" mechanic I read about and liked the IDEA of: If you have a bag of "Numerous but not infinite" items you give it a dice size. Everytime they pull from the bag, they roll the die. If the roll comes up one, the die 'shrinks' all the way down to a d1 and then the bag is exhausted.

If you want to think about this in terms of a quiver of arrows, maybe some of the arrows aren't good or were broke from that last hit you took. Or a bag of rations, maybe some of them have gotten moldy.

Its fun from a mechanical sense as players need to deal with unpredictable supply, but it doesn't work great in game: narratively it can be difficult to justify results, and the odds are very, very swingy. Which can be fun in some situations, but not in all of them.

I have thought about flipping it on its head as a "search"/"investigation" mechanic - that is, players are searching for information about a thing in the local archives, or are searching for a specific gem in a pile of treasure. The initial dice size represents complexity of the search and they roll until they run out of time or the dice depletes.
There are some serious issues that would need to resolved, such as the search being forced to take a minimum number of steps.
But the biggest one I can think of it is a completely unique dice mechanic so it doesn't harmonize well with other rolls, it 'sticks out'.

 

[Flexo]

The changing dice size stuff is very similar to a "narrative resource depletion" mechanic I read about and liked the IDEA of: If you have a bag of "Numerous but not infinite" items you give it a dice size. Everytime they pull from the bag, they roll the die. If the roll comes up one, the die 'shrinks' all the way down to a d1 and then the bag is exhausted.

It's almost literally Margaret Weiss' Cortex system backwards.

That system also used the d2-d12 system only it did "step up" dice as you improved and aimed for the big numbers. (so like the amateur at something rolled the d2, the professional was rolling the d12)

They also at least had the excuse that the D20 was missing because the scale was going up 2 at a time so jumping ahead 8 would have kind of broken the scaling system.

(I really liked parts of the cortex system. - Though it seems like it was in some ways a precursor to PTBtA stuff.)

 

[Loose Goose]

Looks like the vibe coding school of system design: no understanding of what the mechanical chassis actually does and how it interacts with the players in an actual game session, only vague aesthetic decisions based on feels. Fortunately, nobody will play the game extensively, and it will mainly be bought by people who are looking for their Kickstarter fix. It's a perfect product for that, and the design team looks almost like it was engineered for diversity: slightly older soy looking bugman, gay Asian, unconvincing troon. They couldn't get the sassy ethnic brown token, so the project will only do moderately well.


"I am a walking, talking red flag!"

 

[p1138]

That said, there are a few diamonds to fish out of thier fecal soup. The shift mechanic is pretty easy to understand, except they are doing the "low number = gooder" thing which never works well, as everyone knows big number = better.

I can actually see the logic with this one. If 1 through 3 are the successes, then they never change. If the high numbers were the successes it'd be 2-4, 4-6, 6-8, and so on. Keeping it the low number reduces the mental load for simpletons(this is another reason I think they got rid of the d20 so they could avoid "complex" numbers, it's amazing how many people seem to hate the idea of needing to add up 15+4+2 to get their result and I've seen some of these live streamers have to count this shit on their fingers, including critical role people).

Also if this mechanic only applied to shit the character pulled out of a bag or whatever, that would be fine. But the problem is this also applies to any intrinsic traits a character might have. While you could make an argument for someone failing a feat of strength and straining muscles or tearing a tendon or something, for this to apply to a purely mental trait?

Let's say we're playing some fucking modern setting and we've got a character who is amazing at math. It's his thing, he can calculate shit in his head super quick. Wakes up in the morning, goes to mix some pancake batter, jokingly rolls a d4 to get the ratio right to make pancakes, crit fail now he's more retarded than he woke up. Get in the car to drive to work, notices the fuel gauge is kind of low, do some quick math to figure out if you can make it to work... but that's risky, so d6 risky roll 50% chance to crit fail, you fail and now you're standing on the side of the road calling a tow truck because you ran out of gas and now you're operating on a d8 unless you can keep rolling and hit a crit success, or have someone pass a crit success to your character so they'll be less retarded.

This is a system that discourages dice rolls. I'll roll dice at anything in most games, fuck it let's see what the dice say the result is, could be fun, could be dumb. But when you've got such a cascading failure of something so fucking basic applying penalties that make no sense depending on what the trait is even for? This is worse than PF2Es early(at least I know this was the case early on, it might have been fixed) profession skills where a crit failure that was a 5% chance to just be permanently fired from your character's job, imagine you're at work and you run the risk of failing so hard you haven't just lost your job but your career once every 3 weeks?

Who is SHIFT for?​

• Gamers who want a TTRPG experience without an enormous tome of rules to follow
• Players who want a TTRPG that's fun for both hardcore and casual friends
• Game Masters who want a break from complex game-building
• Friends who want to build a wild new game world together
• Families who love building & experiencing stories together

This is desperately trying to tick every box, and doesn't even succeed at being a game that makes sense for people who simply like to roll dice, let alone anyone "hardcore" as the moment anyone narratively brings something up it turns into a d4 roll with a 25% chance of fucking up so hard it'll be a d6 next time.

 

[Sunflower Samurai]

Let's say we're playing some fucking modern setting and we've got a character who is amazing at math. It's his thing, he can calculate shit in his head super quick. Wakes up in the morning, goes to mix some pancake batter, jokingly rolls a d4 to get the ratio right to make pancakes, crit fail now he's more retarded than he woke up. Get in the car to drive to work, notices the fuel gauge is kind of low, do some quick math to figure out if you can make it to work... but that's risky, so d6 risky roll 50% chance to crit fail, you fail and now you're standing on the side of the road calling a tow truck because you ran out of gas and now you're operating on a d8 unless you can keep rolling and hit a crit success, or have someone pass a crit success to your character so they'll be less retarded

If you think about it like the retarded target audience. Its probably eerily realistic for them to immediatly shut down into being retarded after experiencing a minor setback because muh anxiety

 

[p1138]

If you think about it like the retarded target audience. Its probably eerily realistic for them to immediatly shut down into being retarded after experiencing a minor setback because muh anxiety

I damn near spit out my coffee reading that, and it's probably correct.

 

[Smoltine Kiminal]

im not a fan of d4 at all, if you ever used a d4 you know that they just dont roll good
d20 systems already have the problem of them causing pc's to fail in the most ridiculous ways, dont get me wrong it can be funny at times, but having a 5% chance to axe yourself instead of the door your trying to break open is kinda crazy
instead of using multiple dice for a roll, which creates a nice bellcurve, this system increases the problem with the d20 system even further, and then punishes you even more for failing?
is this system supposed to be used for a looney tunes campaign?

Everytime they pull from the bag, they roll the die. If the roll comes up one, the die 'shrinks' all the way down to a d1 and then the bag is exhausted.

If you want to think about this in terms of a quiver of arrows, maybe some of the arrows aren't good or were broke from that last hit you took. Or a bag of rations, maybe some of them have gotten moldy.

the problem with inventory-management things like tracking arrows is that its tedious and takes a lot of time on the table, this implementation increases the problem even further, you still have to keep track of the number, but also roll each time

the archer having 20-30 arrows per session or adventure, and it is assumed the character just replenishes them in the offtime seems a simpler solution in every way
infinite arrows are of course even simpler and less work on the table, but something is just wrong with that
a good solution might be for the dm to decide at some point
>you shot a lot of arrows this adventure, and you feel your quiver getting light, roll for them now, you have 2d6 arrows left

 

[Smoltine Kiminal]

Is there a term we can use for these people that LARP as players?

they are called /nogames/

Half of the stories these days usually seem to involve someone at the table(including the DM sometimes) having characters go on rape sprees, stories of morons having their character sexually assault the character of the only woman at the table, the occasional DM that for some reason wants to include a breeding dungeon

thats nothing new, if you know autistic neckbeards then you know that all of these are sadly realistic
if you play with randoms you will at some point run into thatguy, and if your unlucky you have to deal with a dm that creeps his fetish more or less obviously into the world
you can say many bad things about theaterkids, but they dont do this shit, smelly neckbeard OG's do

people throwing fits about DMs not including enough gay or trans characters, evil trump supporters showing up to the game store and menacingly wearing their MAGA hat(I've heard this as an RPG horror story and a 40k horror story)

that shit is obviously made up for reddit, trannies are already happy when you use their fav pronoun in character when they inadvertently cross-play (the only time when i ever respect pronouns)

You're already triggering leftists by playing Skaven, since I've seen leftists claim that Skaven are also literally nazis.

skaven are the chubby leftist alt-girls faction of choice because they are cute
>in 40k they pick nids for "some" biological penis cannon tentacle rape hentai reason
skaven are not nazis at all, skaven are macciavellian jews
they even infiltrate the empire, run criminal operations for funding, even bribe imperials to do their dirty work

they got rid of the d20 so they could avoid "complex" numbers, it's amazing how many people seem to hate the idea of needing to add up 15+4+2 to get their result and I've seen some of these live streamers have to count this shit on their fingers, including critical role people)

and here i was thinking the d20 system is already too simplistic and designed for people who dont like statistics

Wakes up in the morning, goes to mix some pancake batter, jokingly rolls a d4 to get the ratio right to make pancakes

the system also doenst seem to have any way to add modifiers to especially easy or especially hard rolls, except for inspired/risky rolls
the way to game the system are exactly these "roll to calculate pancake dough ratios", this is easy, so you get inspiration, so you have a 50/50 chance to increase an attribute, and suddenly your party member can lift more weights because you calculated pancake batter
this is pure looney tunes shit

 

[p1138]

thats nothing new, if you know autistic neckbeards then you know that all of these are sadly realistic
if you play with randoms you will at some point run into thatguy, and if your unlucky you have to deal with a dm that creeps his fetish more or less obviously into the world

And you know what you do? You tell that person to knock off the bullshit. If you aren't the DM, or the DM allows it to continue, you just leave. That's the problem with most of these horror stories, is people not just leaving to telling people immediately in plain english to just knock it off.

and here i was thinking the d20 system is already too simplistic and designed for people who dont like statistics

Hell, if you want to see an absurd statistics failure in gaming look at any game that involves rolling 2d6 for anything and the droves of people that can't understand the average is a 7.

the system also doenst seem to have any way to add modifiers to especially easy or especially hard rolls, except for inspired/risky rolls

Because that gets into the icky/complicated single and double digit arithmetic.

the way to game the system are exactly these "roll to calculate pancake dough ratios", this is easy, so you get inspiration, so you have a 50/50 chance to increase an attribute, and suddenly your party member can lift more weights because you calculated pancake batter
this is pure looney tunes shit

I mean, that's assuming the DM would call it an inspired roll. But yes, it's fucking stupid as anything you can do to justify an inspired roll can be used to bump something back down a die size, but even then still has the same crit failure rate as a regular roll so you're still doomed to be dumber from that easy "roll to calculate pancake dough ratios" 1/4 of the time. But the problem even with the risky/inspired rolls still gets worse as you go up in die size.

An inspired d12 roll is a crit success on a 1-3, failure on a 4-11, and crit fail on a 12.
A risky d12 roll is a crit success on a 1, success on a 2-3, and crit fail on a 4-12.

So no matter what bullshit contrivance you come up with the "inspired" modifier can never be as impactful as the "risky" modifier once you get above a d6.