T w e n t y S i d e d
Now the question is: If the players attack the wrong guys and prevail, do they get XP?
Apologies for the late comic, I got pickpocketed by the ocean and lost my phone. If I begin posting anything particularly oceanic just assume that the crabs got it.
(That isn’t actually why the comic is late, I’m just hoping it’s distracting enough that you’ll forget. I did drop my phone in the ocean.)
Self-Balancing Gameplay
There's a wonderful way to balance difficulty in RPGs, and designers try to prevent it. For some reason.
Dead Island
A stream-of-gameplay review of Dead Island. This game is a cavalcade of bugs and bad design choices.
Bethesda NEVER Understood Fallout
Let's count up the ways in which Bethesda has misunderstood and misused the Fallout property.
Bethesda’s Launcher is Everything You Expect
From the company that brought us Fallout 76 comes a storefront / Steam competitor. It's a work of perfect awfulness. This is a monument to un-usability and anti-features.
Megatextures
A video discussing Megatexture technology. Why we needed it, what it was supposed to do, and why it maybe didn't totally work.
RPGs really bring out the fun in friendly fire incidents.
I love how this comment works regardless of which kind of RPG you’re referring to.
Somewhat tangentially, this reminds me of when I hung out on the GitP forums, and a guy called John_Dahl would occasionally post the most ridiculous stories from their games. Their, let’s call it “style”, was extremely black box, the sort of “you didn’t say you were looking up” sort of thing. But on top of that, their players also seemed terminally incapable of learning from experience, and one of them would abandon the others at the drop of the hat (and then be rewarded for it by not losing levels and looting their bodies later). This lead to things like them posting the only ever campaign journal for the Red Hand of Doom module I’ve ever read that ended in failure. Because they didn’t tell the players what the module was about, or possibly even that it was a module instead of whatever quasi-sandbox random stuff they normally did.
I think when they got to the city defense they had completed zero objectives, and if it wasn’t literally defending a city I’m quite sure they would have run the battle as the comic suggests, not telling the players who’s on what side causing them to immediately kill their own guys.
There are times no amount of GM warnings will suffice.
Example: in one of my games half the party got into melee with a creature. Another player (heavy) decided to fire long burst from the HMG right into melee. Confirming it three times, despite being informed hits will be randomised between characters in said melee and rest of the party protesting vehemently.
As Nuffle was in good mood that day, the result was two party tanks brought back from the brink of death, and a slightly irritated creature finished off by someone else.
That being said, players are always free to make their mistakes. And take on the consequences, including friendly fire.
That reminds me of Fallout 2 whenever I forgot to take Marcus’ minigun away from him…
Or the fact that in our Deadlands game, the party doctor has been wounded more often by our sniper than by the enemy. (And he gets wounded lot as, despite being a gunslinger, he spends almost as much time in melee as the Samurai does).
To be fair at this point she wasn’t so much making a mistake as going “to hell with consequences”. Also, in the past you at least once let me actually roll for aim and with a good roll I hit enemies only. Admittedly the combat was much less intense, the enemies had solid numerical advantage and the weapon I was using was much less volatile (both physically and metaphysically).
Aye, but that’s the bit of a difference between a precise psychic power or a carefully aimed single shot and a long, indiscriminate burst :)