Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;936703Well, I assume that most D&D games still consist of the general "go into dungeons, kill stuff, loot treasure," so let's go with that for the sake of comparison.

I suppose games that focus on gathering gold don't have many quests about accomplishing good deeds, but gaining power and profit. That's one big difference between games nowadays and back then.

1: You assume wrongly then. Nearly out the gate players were getting into purely non-com political intrigue campaigns and other oddities.

2: Why? Theres nothing stopping players from focusing on the quest rather than the loot? And actually that hasnt changed from now and then. Players still get into dungeon crawls for the loot rather than the combat despite not a drop of EXP from that loot. And players got into intrigues even if it didnt garner as much EXP as dungeoncrawling. Theres allways been more to D&D and most any other RPG than kill kill kill.

Quote from: Omega;9367231: You assume wrongly then. Nearly out the gate players were getting into purely non-com political intrigue campaigns and other oddities.

2: Why? Theres nothing stopping players from focusing on the quest rather than the loot? And actually that hasnt changed from now and then. Players still get into dungeon crawls for the loot rather than the combat despite not a drop of EXP from that loot. And players got into intrigues even if it didnt garner as much EXP as dungeoncrawling. Theres allways been more to D&D and most any other RPG than kill kill kill.

Wait...
You mean D&D players were doing things because they were roleplaying their characters and not just grinding for exp?  
You mean RPGs aren't just about one single thing at a time?  
...crazy talk.

I'd use another Mind Blown meme but two in one thread and I'll probably get yelled at.

Quote from: CRKrueger;936707Are there different official terms for the "Up front, on the tongue, pucker your mouth like a nun's arsehole bitterness" and the "back of the mouth, aftertaste-like, distillate scorch type bitterness"?

Yes. The official terms are "drink tequila instead". Solves the beer problem nicely.

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;936689Do you think it's better with that system compared to the "modern" system of getting experience for milestones, or killing monsters, or doing quests?

I suppose it becomes less useful if your game is not just about dungeon crawling. If it's a political game for instance... what are you going to do.

I've always given xp for overcoming obstacles and challenges (be they monster, traps, exceptional acts of pilfering, or difficult parley), I include exploration these days to satisfy my own desire to see the PCs explore the dungeons more, they're too damn cautious

On a political game I guess it would be difficult parley I'd give xp and espionage, but I've never run a primarily political game.  Oh politics come up, as consistently bringing gold and magic items into the city gets you noticed.

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;936703....

I suppose games that focus on gathering gold don't have many quests about accomplishing good deeds, but gaining power and profit. That's one big difference between games nowadays and back then.

As it's almost Christmas I'll just say that is a very, very incorrect assumption and a little condescending.  Me and my friends always played D&D for high adventure, to right wrongs and protect the innocent.  All out quests were about doing something good.  Gaining power and profit was never an issue, or hampered by doing good.

If someone would make a survival MMO conversion to PnP RPG, I could see making survival mechanics being a major part of the game, and perhaps even the major part.

I have on occasion made the journey across a rough environment the major opponent the characters face, and it has always been received as a great change of pace.

Dragon Storm is close with its hostile environment and need to manage food as its mostly outdoors or ruins. No dungeons. Alot of warped flora and fauna out to kill you on sight. Or the fae thing in the pristine zones where the very purity of the land is damaging you every day you linger.

Dark Sun was supposed to be this and early on had that feel. But over time seemed to shift away.

Star Frontiers pack in module was another.

It can be alot of fun when played right.

Quote from: Spinachcat;936731Yes. The official terms are "drink tequila instead". Solves the beer problem nicely.

Eh, it's not Tequila-like or Scotch-like or anything like that, it was something different I tasted in some IPAs and not others, not the Grapefruit/Alum/Stomach Acid type of bitterness, but something else.

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;936703I suppose games that focus on gathering gold don't have many quests about accomplishing good deeds, but gaining power and profit. That's one big difference between games nowadays and back then.

No, it's the difference between you and people who aren't condescending assmunching pigfuckers who are too stupid to shit unassisted.

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;936703I suppose games that focus on gathering gold don't have many quests about accomplishing good deeds, but gaining power and profit. That's one big difference between games nowadays and back then.

The only real difference between playing nowadays and back then are, you weren't there, playing back then...so, maybe stop making grand, sweeping, ridiculously incorrect assumptions about what other people did in a different place and time.  There are actual, well researched books on the early days of the hobby.  It is possible to educate yourself.

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;936645Random question: everyone talks about 1 gold = 1XP as a great system from the good old days.

But nobody ever uses it anymore, even the people who say it's good.

Why not use it?

It's great for reaver campaigns.

If you want your campaign to be about poor scum trying to become rich scum, maybe even heroic along the way, then GP = XP rocks the house. Its a constant motivator for PCs to figure out how to get more GPs, so they seek out adventure in your sandbox. Also, if XP doesn't come from monsters (or a wee bit does), then fighting monsters isn't as important as getting the gold so game time becomes more about smart looting than slashing.

My buddy played a "dragonslayer" campaign last year and it was easy to motivate the players. The story was Tiamat (as a goddess, not a big dragon) was coming to the world in one year and the only way to hold her back was to slay 100 of her children.  90% XP came from dragon kills, 10% from other stuff. Thus, the PCs used their time and resources to hunt down dragons, only doing side treks to loot dungeons to buy more stuff to hunt dragons. Gold was for magic crafting or sage lore or organizing expeditions so NPCs would also become slayers.  

Quote from: CRKrueger;936780it was something different I tasted in some IPAs and not others,

Yes, your tongue was telling you that you were tasting bitter beer when instead you could be tasting tequila.

Thus your tongue made the sad face.

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;936645Random question: everyone talks about 1 gold = 1XP as a great system from the good old days.

But nobody ever uses it anymore, even the people who say it's good.

Back in the good old days, I was a teenage boy playing with a bunch of other teenage boys, and we always thought XP for GP was stupid, so we didn't use it and then proceeded to play pure hack-n-slash games because killing monsters was all that mattered.  (Of course, being teenage boys probably had something to do with the hack-n-slash, too.)

These days, the most recent D&D-style game I've played was an ACKS campaign that I ran a couple years ago.  I did use XP for GP, with about 80% of available XP being from loot.  Unfortunately, the players were all more accustomed to D&D 3.x, so they didn't really catch on to the importance of gathering up the loot and spent most of their time getting beat to hell by lizardmen for 500 XP, then running home to heal up without even trying to find the 6000 XP worth of treasure in the next room over and feeling cheated when they came back two weeks later to find nothing left there aside from some scrape marks on the floor from when the surviving lizardmen dragged their chests of loot away.  I did finally manage to get the XP system through to them, but, yeah...

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;936645Why not use it?

Because the latest trend seems to be towards "XP is pointless bookkeeping, so don't track XP, just level everyone up in unison when the GM thinks it's dramatically appropriate".  Because it's unthinkable that you might have a 7th level character and an 8th level character in the same party, or something.

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;936689Do you think it's better with that system compared to the "modern" system of getting experience for milestones, or killing monsters, or doing quests?

It's different.  Personally, I tend to favor systems where you get better at doing a thing explicitly by doing that thing, so I'm mostly into BRP-based systems these days, rather than those which give out bundles of nebulous, non-specific XP.  If you are going to do XP bundles, though, I prefer that they be delivered for objective, in-character actions, whether that be finding loot or killing monsters or picking pockets or whatever, rather than for out-of-character narrative goals like reaching the next station on the GM's railroad.

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;936689I suppose it becomes less useful if your game is not just about dungeon crawling. If it's a political game for instance... what are you going to do.

ACKS doesn't restrict its XP for GP model to only loot taken from monsters.  GP earned through mercantile ventures, taxing your peasants, etc. also provides XP.  So negotiating a trade deal or convincing your neighbor to cede a border village might not net you any XP today, but it will provide a steady stream of XP month after month for as long as you can keep the trade route open or hold on to the village.

Quote from: Bluddworth;936772If someone would make a survival MMO conversion to PnP RPG, I could see making survival mechanics being a major part of the game, and perhaps even the major part.

I have on occasion made the journey across a rough environment the major opponent the characters face, and it has always been received as a great change of pace.

It always is in my post-apocalyptic games.  I like to use attrition, so being slight hungry, thirsty, eating questionable food, all lower your performance.  That might be one reasons marauders use chems all the time.

Quote from: CRKrueger;936707Hey Daztur, you're a brewer, maybe you know (or Vulmea or Geezer).

Are there different official terms for the "Up front, on the tongue, pucker your mouth like a nun's arsehole bitterness" and the "back of the mouth, aftertaste-like, distillate scorch type bitterness"?  I tried a real strong (11%) triple IPA (Black Diamond's Carnage) and it seemed to have more of the second type of bitterness, but I don't know how to describe it.

Sorta. The main source of bitterness in IPAs is isomerized hop alpha acids. It's the stuff that's measured by IBUs (internatinal bitterness units) and it's pretty front of the tongue.

But it's not the only kind of bitterness

There's yeast bite that might be there if the beer isn't filtered. That can be pretty harsh. Also bits of hop goop but those won't be in commercial beer unless someone fucked up.

But these days it's getting more popular to get hop oils in beer. Hops don't have a lot of oils and they're a pain in the ass to get into the beer so people often do it by putting in insane amount of hops and boiling the hops less. For a big IPA like that it probably had a huge dry hop (soaking raw hops in the beer for days instead of cooking them). If you have a lot of hop oils in beer they can be bitter and if you have enough they can coat your mouth, go to the back of your throat and have a long long aftertaste that just IBUs don't give.

Hop oils also dissipate and react in bad ways with oxygen. With alpha acids you just boil shit a lot but hop oils are so annoying to manage so beers that do it well become very trendy.

Hop oils are also confusing as all hell since there's a bunch of different ones and they react with each other and the fermentatin process in weird ways that are hard to understand. Or at least hard to understand in ways aside from "add more citra hops."

Edit: oh one more thing. There are a couple different kinds of alpha acids (what's measured by IBUs) and some people percieve cohumolone alpha acids as being a lot harsher than the other ones. If you're getting a nasty bite from some IPAs that isn't present in others it might be the cohumolone.

There are also beta acids. But I don't understand what they do.

Beer geekery is a deep deep deep rabbit hole. You get beer nerd posts with a dozen academic footnotes.

Quote from: CRKrueger;936787The only real difference between playing nowadays and back then are, you weren't there, playing back then...so, maybe stop making grand, sweeping, ridiculously incorrect assumptions about what other people did in a different place and time.  There are actual, well researched books on the early days of the hobby.  It is possible to educate yourself.

I got my assumptions from reading all the "back in my day" from you guys on this forum lol

Quote from: Omega;9367231: You assume wrongly then. Nearly out the gate players were getting into purely non-com political intrigue campaigns and other oddities.

2: Why? Theres nothing stopping players from focusing on the quest rather than the loot? And actually that hasnt changed from now and then. Players still get into dungeon crawls for the loot rather than the combat despite not a drop of EXP from that loot. And players got into intrigues even if it didnt garner as much EXP as dungeoncrawling. Theres allways been more to D&D and most any other RPG than kill kill kill.

Well, I assume people want to level up. So -if- you only get EXP from gold, then it seems players would focus on the gold rather than questing. That's what I meant.

If people just ignored that and then went on to quest anyway, well that's another matter. Or if people used their own different rules.

But it seems to me that if you use gold for exp, and then run that as is, it would encourage primarily gold hunting.

In my own 5e game to get around the experience forcing a certain game style, I just award a set level of experience every session no matter what. That way if they spend the night carousing in a bar, or hunting monsters, or negotiating deals with a baron, they get the same experience.

The gold the system always looked interesting though so I wondered how different mechanical incentives would affect player behavior.