Fancy Feast
I may have had a certain M:tG card in mind for today’s comic. When it came time to set a table for Demon Lords, I could think of no finer menu. No doubt Magus would disagree with my picks for entrée though. She’s had to live by her rather dubious wits for the past several weeks, bluffing everyone from minor minions to today’s big bad dining demons. Fortunately for our body-swapped catgirl however, any entity with a lick of sense knows better than to call a Demon Lord’s bluff.
While Her Majesty, Queen Scratchypaws of the Demon Web Pits fills up on dinner rolls, what do you say the rest of us talk about her predicament more generally? Because even if I’ve never had to make nice with soul-eating monstrosities, I’ve had my share of uncomfortable group dynamics before. Forced to sit at the same table with a bunch of creeps, unable to find friends more her speed, and faced with a plateful of I’m-not-really-having-any-fun, we’re looking at the very essence of “no gaming in better than bad gaming.” And when you find yourself at such a table, there’s only one question to ask: Do you try and make it work or do you bounce?
While picking up your dice and leaving is a common piece of advice, it’s also important to remember that not all demons are created equal. RPG horror stories and actual red flags are certainly a thing. But suppose you prefer tactical combat to funny voices and bad acting, while the rest of the table wants to go for the Oscar. Does that necessarily mean you should leave? If you’re a devotee of Forge Theory, you might say yes. (And if you feel like taking a deep dive down the rabbit hole of internet RPG theory, then here you go.) But interpersonal relationships, geographical location, and general scarcity of games can all be factors when it comes time to decide, “Who am I willing to game with?” In other words, picking out a group based on ‘creative agenda’ is a nice-to-have, but I find that it’s not the only factor.
I’ve linked it a number of times before, but one of my favorite RPG resources is The Manyfold Glossary. It offers a big list of the different kinds of fun you can get from playing an RPG, and many of them have nothing to do with broad categories like “actor” or “munchkin.” The list is by no means exhaustive, but I do think it’s a handy tool for wrapping your head around “what I’m looking for from an RPG.”
Therefore, for today’s discussion, what do you say we go through and list our top three types of fun from The Manyfold Glossary? What kinds of enjoyment are most important to you? And just as importantly, are you willing to play at a table with players that share different priorities? Whatever your preference, tell us all about your flavor of fun down in the comments!
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If Queen Scratchypaws of the Demon Web Pit had a gold piece for every time she hand to commit gastronomic atrocities to blend in at a dinner party… She’d have two gold pieces. Which isn’t much but it’s an unsettling sign of a running gag.
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/disguise
*she had to commit. Dang typo. Though hands might be part of the dessert dish.
Running gags? In this comic?
https://i.gifer.com/13T4.gif
It would be a galloping gag normally, but… well…
What’s most important, you ask…
1. Having actual fun with the game. We’re there to have a good time, DM and players, not be miserable or bored.
2. Decent communication between players and DM, and a willingness to listen to each other, read the room and make concessions. Players are not playing pieces. Even the strongest PC is not the MC, with the rest as backup singers.
3. Being able to laugh about the silly stuff we do and survive with the other players. Getting laughed at is NOT the same.
Poor Magus… I hope that servile spider got the salads ready. And the bread.
I’m impressed she’s managed to keep herself from being found out thus far, really.
Methinks you didn’t click on the “manyfold glossary” link.
The problem with “have fun, don’t be bored” is that this might look different for different people.
Ah, so the cat is a fussy eater. No problem with dragging in dead birds and rodents, but draws a line at unicorn?
I bet she won’t even walk through a door if you open it for her!
Maybe she’ll be more interested in the live ratfolk babies.
She probably thinks of the moder soft and kind unicorn and not the old violent carnivorous unicorn.
No demonic napkin-origami? Those Woolantulas aren’t pulling their weight!
String ’em up by their own webs!
This is actually a big problem at one of my tables. Our GM wants to run different system, and we’re having trouble finding one that fits our needs. One player loves RP but has some trouble wrapping their head around more complex rule systems, I like more tactical combat and while I certainly don’t hate RP it’s more of a side-dish for me, so many of the rules-lite systems proposed haven’t been very compelling for me.
LANCER looked like a balanced solution but then it turned out some players really weren’t a fan of Mecha… suffice to say we’ve been having issues.
Luckily there seems to be enough people interested in the premise of Pathfinder 2e’s Strength of Thousands AP that we’re steadily finding some middle ground
I’m about to start running a LANCER game! If you’re looking for something similar, the same company is playtesting a fantasy game called ICON—I haven’t looked at it yet myself, but I expect it’s about the same level of complexity
Maybe things have changes from last I looked, but Icon lacked customization options when I first checked it out
It occurs to me that the “big tent” systems decried by so many of the narrative games crowd are popular precisely because they’re about compromising with the real people in your social circle. Rather than a laser-focus on some particular play experience, they allow you to serve multiple simultaneous needs without having to play half a dozen different campaigns.
Humour, Venting, Schadenfreude (we call it vahingonilo, nothing warms a wargamers heart more than to see nuffles blessings escape the opponent). But can and will laugh at myself as some one whose 20/40 games into Blood Bowl league with Halflings and still havibg fun.
I’m sure you’re a lovely human. Nevertheless, those sound suspiciously like the preferences of a serial killer.
“It’s amazing how much better I feel after a few disembowelings. Their screams never fail to give me a chuckle.”
I hear what you’re saying though. Watching the random horrible fates plot out of the dice and screw over your wargaming opponent (or your own dudes) is usually hilarious.
You know the kind of characters I play and If you believe in astrology I am a scorpio, the sign with most massmurderers. Oh and national stereotype of being drunken, knife wielding, violent lunatic.
Well have roles to play in theis stage that is world, I’m just an humble entertainer, a joker. Am I joking, am I serious, am I just having a big long con on my fellows only to change the masks of parody and tragedy between groups I interact. 😀
I’ve used the Manyfold list a LOT since you first linked it here, so I’ll happily follow instructions and do my top three:
1. Ludus – I’ve been playing almost exclusively PF1E since it started, and I loves me some crunchy theorycraft. Fortunately, I realized very early that optimizing for combat is silly, there’s always a bigger CR. So now I work with the folks at my table who haven’t memorized the feat tree and help turn their cool ideas into satisfying builds. Which brings me to…
2. Kairosis – Having the encyclopedic knowledge lets me find the right rules to make the fluff come alive. When my fellow PCs get those last pieces of their build at lvl 9 and its woven into their story and relationship with my PC, that’s verrry satisfying. “Monk friend taught me violence isn’t all I’m good for. But I can still embrace wereshark ancestors and protect! Blood Frenzy Assault RRRAGLBLAGL!”
3. Naches – So then it all comes together and we’re all happy with the story AND the 5d6 bleed damage on all melee targets plus bonus full attack that the wereshark got to unleash.
Oh man… I just reread Naches for the first time in a while. I’m gaming with some newbies this summer, and it would have been the perfect time to play a Ben Kenobi character. Missed the boat on that one. :/
Kairosis, Kenosis, Expression for me, but I enjoy and will play at tables with prople who enjoy just about any of them. I’m a bit iffy with Ludus – I love optimizing a character, but playing them optimally when it makes little sense to do so in world is a big no-no for me.
Sounds to me like a pure role-player. 😀
I often get tripped up on kenosis. I’m talking this bit:
Laurel dislikes the “authoring” style of kairosis, as jumping out of the fiction and into a writerly mindset. It disrupts her sense of being the character rather than the player playin the character.
It’s tough to limit the list, but I’d say the top three for our group —
1) Sociability: We’re there to socialize and have a good time, RPGs, boardgames, cards, or whatever, plus delivery-food and beverages.
2) Paida: Again, this is supposed to be fun, people. Bad puns, worse jokes, pop-culture discussions are all part-and-parcel of the experience.
3) Ludus: That being said, put together a roomful of hobbyists, engineers, mechanics, ex-military, programmers, and scientists, and certain rules will be followed: you can build any character you can successfully justify to the rest of the table within RAW; actions in combat are sacred, and dice rolls must be honest; however, it’s anticipated that whoever is DM will quietly fudge behind the screen to keep the evening interesting, fun, but avoid the dreaded TPK.
After one or two outings with one set of friends (who were perfectly nice people), I decided to stick with my current game group (also great folks). Both groups discuss gaming theory, fiction, science, and pop culture, but my guys also drink dark beer and watch NASCAR (sometimes all at the same time). (It came down to feeling like the caveman in the room or feeling like the bookish nerd at the table. I chose the latter.)
Do you think Paida and Ludus are at all opposed? One wants to wing it and avoid overly-complex rules debates, while ludus takes those rules debates seriously.
Or is it more that you enjoy interesting character builds + shenanigans?
I can see them as being opposites at some tables, Woo-Hoo zany vs Lords of Necessity. At ours, other than a) Actions in Combat trumping “rule of cool” (most of the time), and b) basic dice etiquette, the only other RAW adherence is c) “no make-believe things like pink dragons” for character creation (if you can cite a splatbook to support it and the table doesn’t object). I think some of the few sticking points carry over from miniatures gaming and card and boardgames we sometimes play.
Once we started including tokens for Victory Points or Hero Points or Action Points or whatever, having a player be able to toss a red marble or i ching coin to the GM and say “Please?” in order to do something silly or amazing (but not quite according to Hoyle), Paida vs. Ludus seemed to finally strike a consistent balance, since we had an “official” excuse to sometimes say “Yah, whatever. Okay, your plan worked. Once the flood of mashed potatoes subsides–“
> having a player be able to toss a red marble or i ching coin to the GM and say “Please?” in order to do something silly or amazing (but not quite according to Hoyle), Paida vs. Ludus seemed to finally strike a consistent balance
Well said. I quite like the idea of “meta currencies” striking a happy medium between the two styles.
Mostly, I just want to hang out with friends and play a game that I don’t completely hate.
My current D&D group is in the bottom half of groups I’ve played with, but they’re nice enough people. We play 5e, which is my least favorite edition of the game (for simplicity’s sake, it was the best choice for a group that’s not great with anything too complicated), but I don’t despise 5e to the point that I won’t play it at all.
I attend that 5e game because I like the people themselves (even if they’re not great players). For good gaming with good players, I have my Mutants and Masterminds group.
…Or to use the terms from that Manyfold Glossary you linked:
1. Sociability
2. Naches
3. Nachos (The snacks are important)
I like your gaming philosophy.
Called it! =D
Yeah ya did. Cracked me up when I saw the flavor text quote over on the Patreon side.
Why is hell-patron, which should be LE, on a dinner with a demon-queen,CE?
Oh, IFFC, crossover? 😀
I don’t see what the International Film Festival Cologne has to do with it.
Coppola is promoting his new brimstone fragrance? 😛
I’m assuming Schattensturm meant the ‘Inter-Fiend Cooperation Commission’, or IFCC from *Order of the Stick: Don’t Split the Party*
Pretty sure Colin knows it 🙂
Otherwise shame, shame SHAME!!!! 😛
Shibboleth. 🙂
Please, language, kids read this 😛
I immediately got the card reference, which is a surprising change since my irl best friend is still into MtG while I left that particular hobby behind long ago and when conversations about it come up there’s often a lot of “remind me/explain what that does again?”
The title for this comic made me chuckle probably more than it should have.
Manyfold Glossary Top Three: Expression and Kairosis are the two I can say “certainly this”. I think Kenosis might be the third if I have to pick one.
But honestly I enjoy a lot of these, though not to a 100% mode and/or all of the time.
Agon, Closure, and Venting are pretty low priority for me.
And Kinesis is too, though largely because I’ve gotten quite used to those things not really being available or as important as other things to me. I do still like to roll my irl dice whenever I have the opportunity though (so usually as GM), so at least in that regard Kinesis is a part of my enjoyment makeup.
> I immediately got the card reference,
That particular card has a way of sticking with ya.
> I enjoy a lot of these, though not to a 100% mode and/or all of the time.
What do you make of the argument that a game ought to fit a particular kind of enjoyment rather than attempting to cater to multiple fun experiences?
If you mean a system: I dunno about “ought”. But there’s already D&D and many others for jack-of-all-trades experiences. So it’s probably more useful to yourself/others to design a new system for a specific kind of experience. Admittedly in this view we’re late enough to the party that PbtA games have a pretty good roadmap for how to do that.
Not that you have to follow the broad mechanical design of PbtA type games or offshoots of them *coughBladescough*, just noting that it’s clear many others out there have already realized this and there’s at least a decent chance of finding something out there someone might like that’s more specific rather than the old never really works right method you always see of people trying to mod D&D/d20 systems to make those systems be a thing they aren’t designed to be.
I don’t think I could say that one is “better” in terms of what people “ought” to do than another. (Though obviously certain specific examples I might say are fundamentally worse than others.)
If you mean an individual game someone is running: I mean… you’re welcome to try? I don’t know that it’s feasibly possible to accomplish only *one* kind of fun at a table with more than….0(?) players.
To be more serious, you can certainly aim for a particular kind or kinds of enjoyment and not others. And honestly that probably works better than trying to accomplish all of them or not thinking about what you’re aiming for at all. Maybe. *shrug* (I feel like PvP or PvGM behavior or full on rules lawyer/munchkin mode are going to clash with other things for example.)
As for my opinion on the argument as stated…. I mean… obviously not. You shouldn’t be saying what kind of fun other people *should* be having. D&D isn’t successful just because it offers a little bit of what everyone wants and is well known and people are sheeple who don’t know better to move on to better things. The “can do a bit of everything” is a perfectly valid way of enjoying the hobby and I think by this point anyone who’s been at a D&D table for a few sessions is probably *aware* other games exist out there. If D&D doesn’t work for them, they’ll surely go out and discover those other things. (Whether they can pull together enough other interested parties is a totally different story though.)
For myself, as I’ve often said, Blades in the Dark is my favorite system. And it’s also not designed for only one kind of enjoyment. It’s a bit less jack-of-all-trades than D&D and a bit less narrowly focused than a lot of PbtA games. I’ve seen extremely serious character driven games, I’ve seen episodic comedic games, and so on and so forth. And to me, it’s great that people can easily make it what they want.
What I *do* think a game “ought” to be, by which I mean system, is mechanically in tune with its stated goals for the experience. As an example of a system I think fails at this, I’d point at FATE. Which claims to be a game where you don’t have to think too much about the mechanics and can do more or less whatever you want….and is mechanically designed where you will be straight up bad at accomplishing things if you actually don’t think about how the mechanics work.
>>“no gaming in better than bad gaming”
Every time I hear/read this phrase (or it’s dupes, about sex and pizza) I only think, “Mate, yer lucky you’ve never had truly bad game/sex/pizza.”
I’m too old for this shit, is my catchphrase now, so I bounce on bad anything, “no-thing is preferable to bad-thing”.
>>list our top three types of fun from The Manyfold Glossary?
Hmmm… I’m a bit of a “manic-depressive” gamer, I’ve two sides, the Expression/Kairosis/Kenosis side which is all about delving into the character
and there’s the Fiero/Kinesis?Ludo side where I can engage in the rules, push paper mans around the squared hexes and defeat things using tactical rulesmastery.
But mostly it’s the Humour/Socialbility side, ye olde “just having game” side that wins out. I’m ultimately there to have fun at teh table with my mates, and if that means putting my thumb on that scale above to create/fit the atmosphere we’re all agreeing on, so be it.
>>What kinds of enjoyment are most important to you?
The fun kind. Really, I play tactical minis games, board games, story games, rpgs. So it’s about the game and having fun and as long as the table isn’t seated by asshats, I can have a decent time.
I do tend to prefer doing both “Rules Wonking” and “Amateur Thespiansism” in my rpgaming though, which is why I prefer GURPS, it allows for both.
>>And just as importantly, are you willing to play at a table with players that share different priorities?
I don’t think I’ve ever sat at a table that this wasn’t the case, but generally we can agree on a share set of priorities for that game.
Generally. Usually. Mostly.
I’m a little confused by the phrasing in your first sentence. The point of ‘no X is better than bad X’ isn’t that bad X is the best X, it is that it’s better to not have X than only have X that is bad. It sounds like you’re agreeing with people, but only after disagreeing with what you thought they’d said originally.
Huh… I actually read (and reread and rereread) that sentence as “bad X is better than no X” because that’s the phrase I always encounter.
SO yes, I agree that “no X is better than bad X”, because I’ve had bad Xs, and they’re bad.
No worries. Popular phrases like that tend to lose meaning with repetition. Happens to all of us.
Your “many sides” to gaming is similar to my own experience. It makes me think that The Forge guys I linked were so caught up in Platonic ideals that they forgot how these games exist in messy reality.
Still, they did produce some cool games, so can’t fault ’em for a bit of ideologically-driven design exploration.
Blimey. If that’s the entrée, what does the main course look like? Is it the rest of the unicorn with some phoenix pâté de foie gras?
As for the types of joy, well, I like most of them well enough. Alea is the one that I most agree with, and Fiero, and I do like passively stumbling into blobs of Ludus.
There are some gaps, though, that I think need filling. Where’s the Fiero-like feeling of ‘maybe I didn’t win, but it was a close-run thing and I tried my best’ like your brain has had a good stretch? What about Freudefreude, where you’re just happy because everyone else is happy?
> Blimey. If that’s the entrée, what does the main course look like?
I live in the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entr%C3%A9e
I find that Ludus is the one that first-timers struggle with most. They just see a tax return form at first, and don’t get how slotting together mechanics can be a fun puzzle in its own right.
Good show coming up with your originals as well! I think it’s important to remember that none of these taxonomies are absolute, and I can certainly think of some freudefreude pals who were (as an offshoot of sociability) happy when everyone else was having fun.
She really should try the unicorn; I hear it makes you immortal. Also she’s already a magus; that’s basically a heretic-it’s not like she’ll get any MORE damned. ;p
I think this is where GMing for decades gives you the perspective you need to make the most of the hobby. Especially if you’ve GM’d for tables full of people you have never met before at all (even online!). You get exposed to all of the player types very quickly and learn who you CAN and CANNOT get along with.
FOR INSTANCE, I think I saw Quest Giver being burned at the stake by CLERIC of all people last week and as it turns out, I find myself increasingly in the group of people who would put Quest Giver up there for being an incessant font of ‘life was better in 1e/2e.’ In fact, I would go so far as to say that the overwhelming majority of players that defend and insist TSR DnD is the only ‘real’ DnD are the specific subset of players where I draw the line *based solely* on the sort of players they are! I’m pretty sure it has something to do with echoing psychic damage from when I was first getting into role playing in the ’90s when they were a bunch of insufferable jerks THEN and apparently have grown not at all since.
Of course, there’s the other sort of player that I won’t game with because of who they are as a person. These are the people that are dangerous, manipulative, and show signs of anti social or predatory behavior. I’ve read too many RPG Horror Stories where the group has let ‘that one guy’ darken the game for too many sessions.
Don’t let that happen to you.