modernangel@sh.itjust.works They shape 100% of the storyline. The campaign is the story of their activities in the world.

They don’t shape the world, though, unless they do things to intervene in the current world lines of the people and institutions in it. At the start of the campaign, I scaffold the major political players in the world,and sketch out what their goals are, and how they’re trying to achieve them. I estimate how long it takes them to get to places of import for those goals, and track that in a calendar. I leave hooks for the players to pick up and engage with those things from time to time, but if they’re not interested, those entities just continue on unimpeded.

Meanwhile, everywhere they go, I dig into books of tables to come up with some NPCs with problems that need to be solved, side quests that can be activated, and locations that can be explored. They’re just names on a page until the players pick up the hook, but if they do, then the party does things to encounter and activate new political players who end up on the board. I then do the same thing after the fact, and add them to the calendar.

Their story is 100% theirs. The opportunities to shape the world’s story are there. There’s no “storyline” for me to bend around their gravity.

nocturne Yeah. They just say “5e” without specifying 2014 or 2024, but I think the lack of specifying and the use of legacy terms is implying they’re targeting the original release.

Bo was looking for a long term contract, and long term contracts usually have lower AAV. We know that the Phillies offered $200M for 7 years, and I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the Jays offered similar. This is what Bo had told people he was looking for.

He then turned around and signed a 3 year high AAV deal. He just decided to pivot and play a totally different game than the one he’d told everyone, without telling the other teams he’d engaged with. I don’t think we can blame anyone for not making better offers when he seems to have made a very sudden change in his decision making process.

SilverGM Exactly! It seems, though, that far too few GMs feel like they have permission to go outside the posted guidelines with purpose.

A lot of the people developing early fantasy RPGs were probably deeply influenced by the American western as a film and TV genre. It was really, really hard to avoid in the 50s and 60s, and it functionally provided the blueprints for other adventure-based genres. The western provided the setting of the frontier, and frontier towns were all too often depicted as being deeply isolated and under siege by the “savage wilderness”.

Because indigenous people were usually framed more like wild animals than people whose living room you just plopped yourself down and started squatting in.

So many of the adventure modules seemed to be built around this idea of the frontier, or the hinterland, or of being on the edge of civilization that they didn’t need to have a theory of settlement patterns. They were explicitly showing us what things looked like where the civilization networks wore thin and broke down.

But they also just sort of acted as one of the blueprints for later modules, and later settings. And when your setting is entirely made up of frontier modules, you end up with a setting where there’s no civilization.

> sorcerers have a superhero origin

This is Oracle erasure.

> In the world they would be hated and feared as the person who started fires as a child or drowned a local cow.

Would they, though? Or would they end up in an upper class that controls world leaders from back rooms while looking like flashy celebrities in public? Because the takeaway from the real world is that racists hate on people they see as less powerful than them, and sorcerers are categorically not that.

jjjalljs@ttrpg.network Yeah, the ideas that “I’m not interested in receiving a message, therefore the things I consume have no message” or “this product was inexpensive, therefore the creator has no message” are pretty wild.

Sometimes the politics being presented are invisible to the author, and sometimes they’re not. In either case, they’re communicating real messages about the world, what the creator believes is acceptable, and what they believe is not. Not seeing those messages really just means that you thoughtlessly agree with them.

Which says more about the consumer than it does the producer.

Presumably, they expected it to sell 0% more than their projections.

thegreatdarkness@ttrpg.network Sure. You should be able to use LotR to explain the rules of any fantasy RPG system, really.

LotR is running Pathfinder 2e under the hood, by the sounds of it, using Proficiency Without Level.

Ok, that’s brilliant and awesome. Brisome.

I see. So, you have sticky pages and centrefolds.

Oh, so it’s that kind of dragon book. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

empathicvagrant@lemmy.world Backstory is probably the wrong concept for a low-level character. They, instead, have a background. Backstories are prequel fodder, while backgrounds are used to figure out character motivation, and how a character reacts to future events.

Generally speaking, you don’t want to fill in blanks you don’t need filled i, because it’s creatively limiting your future self. If the events that got you to Session 1 are too interesting, you’ve probably written too much.

ensignwashout@startrek.website I don’t know, zero-to-hero is one of the best story tropes out there. Totally nullifying it seems kind of wild to me. But you have to know who you’re playing, and if you’re playing a highly skilled veteran with a rich history of great deeds, you need to understand that that is not a Level 1 character.

I’ve become increasingly convinced that people don’t want to play low level characters. Level 1 characters are neophyte adventurers. Their backstory shouldn’t include significant a mounts of adventure, combat, or heroics, because it introduces a significant amount of ludo-narrative dissonance into the campaign.

Unless there’s a reason they’ve been de-leveled.

They made $50 million just on the playoff revenue sharing, and the amount of merch they moved over this playoff run probably pays for Cease outright. I’m sure they have a truck full of cash ready for Bo.

This is functionally what Fellmarrow is doing in Narrative Declaration’s Kingmaker 2e actual play.

She must know all about the Clown Wars, then.