Recurring silly comment about Apocalypse World and similar RPGs

[Micah Sweet]

What colour are your pantaloons?

Blue and white plaid, at the moment.

 

[loverdrive]

This also reminded me of a joke:

A ship is sailing though the sea, when a crewmate runs to the captain:
— Captain! Captain! Pirates! Two big ships! They are going for a boarding attack!
Captain with a stoic face says:
— Bring me my red shirt.

Crewmate does as he is told, and captain in his red shirt leads the defense and they win.
— Captain, you are a great leader! But why did you ask for the red shirt?
— So when I get wounded in battle it wouldn't be noticeable and will not impact morale.

A few days pass.
— Captain! Captain! Pirates! Whole fleet of them!
Captain looks around as says:
— Fine. Bring me my brown pantaloons.

 

[FrogReaver]

What colour are your pantaloons?

Not sure what pantaloons are but I’m pretty sure I don’t got any.

 

[Faolyn]

Why is all this talk about dungeon crawling??

Does anyone have complaints about Monster Hearts???

What dungeon can compete with the horrors of High School??

I always find games with sex moves to be a bit creepy, since it really sets the tone for what the game should be like, and I wouldn't want to ERP with my friends even if I weren't asexual.

 

[Faolyn]

Sure, but do we consider most folks talkinrg RPGs here to be new?

To be fair, there's lots of people who barely read the books or remember, or bother to even try to remember, the rules of games they've played for a long time. A friend of mine gamed with someone (can't remember if he was another player or the GM) who could never remember what her human champion fighter's abilities were.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Right, but we weren’t actually playing the game. We were discussing the game. No one answered as specifically as requested because many previous answers had made the answer fairly clear. I realized what was happening and offered a clear and specific answer.

When asked why no one else had done so, I said because it was unclear that was still needed.

I can see where you’re coming from, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable or weird or anything to not have the easiest time piecing together a complete picture from a dozen different posts, and wondering “why didn’t someone do that from the start” when someone finally lays the whole thing out in one post.

 

[niklinna]

EDIT - Eg a D&D 5e game where the Diviner player's game never comes close to touching questions about "the dangers of messing around with fate and becoming entangled with future possibilities/rewriting timeline" (or anything remotely kindred) but they sure do read the signs and employ that power and it feels and looks the part in the play!

Hey man I just picked the subclass for the sweet die roll swaps.

 

[Faolyn]

Because of both GM and player moves being geared towards propelling the process of play towards, well, interesting things, more or less regardless of what you actually do. This is not by any means unique to PbtA, mind you, there are plenty of games that provide the same, uhm, safety net? I wasn't able to parse Burning Wheel, but I trust @pemerton 's opinion about it; my favorite MUJIK IS DEAD which doesn't even remotely resemble AW does that; and not to toot my own horn, but I myself largely moved on from PbtA in my own design and I think my games still retain this strength.

The issue I have with trad games, especially World of Darkness, is that because rules aren't concerned with things being interesting and only concerned with modeling the state of an imaginary world, it often ends up being dull unless the situation itself is extraordinary.

My character in this V:tM campaign wants to be just left alone and run his bar in peace. And that is... exactly what happens. He is left alone to run his bar in peace. Which is boring.

Well, OK, my whole spotlight in the first two sessions largely revolved around showing a vampire gang what happens when you mess with my guy, but still, by pursuing my character's goals I basically reduced my character to an NPC bartender.

The clunkiness of the system that dragged what would otherwise be an interesting moment when my guy broke the Masquerade to protect his human friend into a long boring overly detailed combat mini-game by the end of which I had to take a moment to return to my character's mindset didn't help either, I guess.

...which itself is also kind of irrelevant, because I made a conscious decision to use vampire magic mumbo-jumbo to beat the bastard into a bloody pulp instead of just threatening or shooting him in the head with a rifle my character keeps behind the counter, because that would have more interesting consequences. A decision that was both suboptimal and ran contrary to how I envisioned my character anyway.

Um. Are you sure it's the game and not just because you wanted to play a character who doesn't want to engage with the plot?

 

[niklinna]

It's not that puzzling at all IMO. Regardless of the why and wherefore that we come to play a particular TTRPG, we often smuggle into a game our own biases, habits, and assumptions based on past games that we have played, moreso if those games bare any sort of associative similiarity.

I couldn't figure out Fate when I first picked it up because I was trying to parse it through the lense of the d20 fantasy that I was accustomed to. And then when I first played Fate after "understanding" it, I realized that I was still trying to play and run it more like a d20 game because of those "d20 habits" that I had formed.

I likewise had a similar experience when running Dungeon World for the first time. I was probably calling for Moves that should not have been called, because I was arguably treating them more like d20 skills and attack rolls.

Understanding how a game works in theory is different from running it well in practice.

I've run into and talked with other people with similar experiences with transitioning between various tabletop games.

Edit: I would say that this is in some ways comparable to learning a new language. We bring in a lot of assumptions and modes of thinking when we learn a new language. We often look for shortcuts, such as cognates, that help us make mental connections with something we already know. Sometimes we are successful, but sometimes we stumble into "false friends." Sometimes we try to translate our ideas too directly from the phraseology or sentence composition of our native language rather than how we would more naturally express that idea in the other language.

Indeed, linguists have a word for it – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlanguage

 

[loverdrive]

Um. Are you sure it's the game and not just because you wanted to play a character who doesn't want to engage with the plot?

Well, I was invited to a game of mundane personal horror without katana trenchcoats, and it was a pregen anyway, so... Yeah, I'm pretty sure?