Eris235

I enjoyed minecraft, but its not a game I feel like I want to return to. Like, I played hundreds of hours of it a decade ago in college, so I do like the game.

But my brother in law set up a server for us to play again during the pandemic, and despite all the new stuff, I just hate the feeling of doing the grind all over again, and just can't really get into it. I already spent a buncha effort building a buncha stuff, it just feels like work to do all that again. So I stick around to hang with people, but usually play other games.

Was she Lutheran? It is a belief that some Christians have, that afaik is associated most with Lutherans, that everyone goes to heaven now, since jesus has taken on all sin. (though, I think the general official Lutheran position is everyone who accepts christ goes to heaven, which imo is much funnier, since it says that jesus gets to go to heaven but not, say, the jews he killed).

Regardless, imo Christian afterlife beliefs are super fucked up, but that idea of universalism, that everyone goes to heaven, is the one that makes most sense to me. It always seems weird to me that people insist jesus is all about forgiveness, but also he will condemn for to eternal hellfire if you say he isn't real (or kiss boys or whatever else is in vogue to be considered sinful).

Yeah, if you're using XP in DnD (or similar), it really needs the DM to award full encounter XP for encounters if the PC's smartly sneak/talk their way through, as well as award XP for purely social encounters (provided there is some kind of challenge/goal involved). Otherwise, if feels like the game just wants you to kill, as you note with BG3.

And yeah, I'm not the most attached to 'equal levels'; some of my favorite games are White Wolf and its like, where there's no levels at all, just freeform spend XP on whatever. But however character advancement is, I strongly prefer players to be in lockstep with one another.

Okay, I get that.

I still feel like my preference is for roleplay to reward in-universe rewards, and character advancement to be milestone. For a similar example, with my running Strength of Thousands PF2e game, I added in extra opportunities to have the different NPCs help the PC, in a way outside the fairly gamified rewards pre-written into the book. But, to a certain extent, that is more work than just dumping XP on them.

I do dislike the PF2e AP as-written, 'give extra XP for fully digging into conversations' thing that crops up in some social encounters, as that's another thing where, like, that info is useful in and of itself. I don't think players need rewarded for getting information that is of material use to them. But, I've been doing it milestone anyway, so its a moot point for me on that front.

I thought, for the desperate action thing, that that's the GM's decision?

And, at end of game review, there's that 'group discussion' of 'did I do these things?' which, I feel like is just a reward for playing your character? Maybe I just don't 'get it' but playing your character is what you do, and it felt perfunctory to go through and ask every player: did you do your thing? When it felt like they are RP'd fine anyway. Just felt very arbitrary.

So, the XP difference is mostly, who got more desperate actions taken, which feels weird.

Thanks for the explanation.

I've been enjoying FitD a lot, with the sole exception of XP. I feel like its adds to my work load, and ends up feeling bad for players that do fall behind. I agree that it is a mostly-negligible amount, in terms of 'power loss', but in my experience, players falling behind in XP makes them lose interest in the game, rather than driving them to engage further. Maybe that's just my players not being competitive; I could see a group where that competitive drive would lead them to engage more.

But I ran our game RAW to start (since, as much as I kinda felt I wouldn't enjoy the XP, I think its worth giving systems an honest try RAW before homebrewing things that you don't like), and it definitely felt like the two players that got behind on XP just mostly disengaged, since it gave them a 'what's the point?' feeling, and swapping to milestone reengaged them.

I do like the 'indulging in moments of vice' as a gameplay consideration, but I think it narratively works better as a way to relieve stress, something I more-or-less copped from World of Darkness.

That's a fair take, and I can agree with that.

Though tbh, my preference is there to kind of be kind of two kinds of items.

1. 'expected' items. Not every system needs this, but I think two solid examples are PF2e, and World of Darkness. In PF2e, there's solid guides on expected gold per level, and when players should have access to what tier of item, and how much they should have. Whereas in WoD, (magic) items are buyable with XP, so they're as much a part of your build as any other stat or power you buy, but with the extra interaction of: its an item. It can be passed around the party, or stolen if you're careless. In both cases, these magic items are really just additional branches of character progression that need little GM adjudication.

2. Plot items. These are things GM can award, or the party can work toward, and my preference for plot items is for them to be weird and outside character progression. Maybe can be represented by some kind of boon or bonus, but largely, I like to have them really be 'plot level' powers and not just like, stat or spell modifiers.

If some class or character is weak or unfun, I'd rather fix it through homebrew, than to just shower that player with 'extra' unique loot.

If you want something giant to occupy you for a year or more, I love gloomhaven, and its sequels. Jaw of the Lion is the 'pared down' version that's a good starting point, both for being more accessable and substantially cheaper. Frosthaven is the newest full game, and it is huge, to the point of maybe being too large, but me and my partner are into it. All of this is very RPG-like.

Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective is fun, very much a 'try to solve cases like sherlock holmes' game, so its pretty focused on those type of logic puzzles based on tracking the details of the case, but there's a boardgame-y time managment aspect to it for how you go about collecting clues and interviewing people.

For more of a 'classic boardgame' in terms of just being single session, Spirit Island is great. Theme is being the spirits of an island, in tune with the natives, fighting off colonial empires coming to colonize the island, so that's sick.

All of these are fully co-op.

they built a railroad out to key west, and then just let the tracks rot. You can still see much of the rails and supports still out there.

That blurs the line between spoiling plot details, and telling you puzzle solutions to be fair.

The plot and the puzzles are so intertwined, it's definitely hard to talk too much about the story without giving a new player 'puzzle clues'.

I grew up helping my family 'process' cow and deer (and occasionally other game animals). It doesn't especially gross me out, and I'd do it again if my choice was to butcher animal corpses or have me and my family die.

Luckily, I developed a functioning moral and ethical framework, and don't need to eat animals or animal byproducts to live... so I don't. I think its wrong, even if it doesn't literally turn my stomach to think about doing.

And, I'm not the furthest off from being forced to eat animal products or die; I have a lot of food allergies, and my body seems like it likes getting more over time. Biggest struggle for me is being deathly allergic to all nuts and several seeds, but I'm okay with beans and wheat. Hope my body doesn't take me 🫘 from me. But I really can't eat from any restaurant, due to cross contamination.

I hate 'gamified' XP.

There's a lot I like about the more 'narrative' approach ttrpgs have been taking, but between Chronicles of Darkness, ICON, Forged in the Dark, Apocalypse world, etc. all having XP be earned for specific actions in game, its just a pain in the ass, that takes me out of the action.

FWIW, I mostly GM, but I just vastly, vastly prefer milestone XP. For some of the above games, its easy enough to gut their bespoke XP systems out of it, and just have players advance over time, but in several of them, it fucks with the overall balance, since several actions are 'bad', but made worthwhile because they earn XP.

Even beyond the pain in the ass nature of interrupting session to dole out tidbits of XP, I hate, hate, systems that have players advance unevenly. There's always going to be a certain degree on uneven-ness in player attention, of rules mastery, and of spotlighting. As GM, its important to manage those so that everyone gets a chance to shine. But I despise as GM needing to seperately pay attention to the XP actions, and try to drag or XP share the players that don't find those systems engaging to not mechanically fall behind.

And as a player, I tend to have higher system mastery and attention than the others I play with, and tbh it feels Bad to end up with more XP because of that... but it also feels bad to knowingly pass up free XP by purposefully not engaging with those systems.