Quote from: daniel_ream;908210I think this topic is long overdue for its own thread, as personally I'd love a codex of "how things behave in stressful situations".  Although admittedly I have no interest in "how things behave in dungeon corridors" because I don't play dungeon fantasy any more.

Fantasy, modern urban, SF... Dungeons are omnipresent and everlasting.

Quote from: Ravenswing;908213One thing that might inform people's opinions is to not blather on concerning things they know nothing about.  The only way someone could say "You can't block a Molotov with a shield" with a straight face is to have no idea how a Molotov works.  It wouldn't surprise me if the misperception is of an airburst fireball with a 10' wide blast radius.

Well, one can only work with the information one has, after all. But, then, I'm a forgiving sort.

Quote from: Ravenswing;908213One thing that might inform people's opinions is to not blather on concerning things they know nothing about.  The only way someone could say "You can't block a Molotov with a shield" with a straight face is to have no idea how a Molotov works.  It wouldn't surprise me if the misperception is of an airburst fireball with a 10' wide blast radius.

I realize that pontificating based on That Gamebook You Read or That Movie You Saw Once is endemic in the gaming world, but sheesh.

Amusingly I had a problem somewhat related to this. I was going to run a Star Trek game. Two of the players had previous experience in the navy. I have no military background. It took me about five seconds flat to realize that I could not provide enough verisimilitude to make the experience what the players wanted and as such had to shut the game down. That was the first time I could not run a game due to lack of real life knowledge. Won't be trying Trek ever again.

Quote from: Krimson;908227Amusingly I had a problem somewhat related to this. I was going to run a Star Trek game. Two of the players had previous experience in the navy. I have no military background. It took me about five seconds flat to realize that I could not provide enough verisimilitude to make the experience what the players wanted and as such had to shut the game down. That was the first time I could not run a game due to lack of real life knowledge. Won't be trying Trek ever again.

This reminds me the time when I had an actual economist at my table. Turns out I know shit about money (can actually confirm).

Quote from: Krimson;908227Amusingly I had a problem somewhat related to this. I was going to run a Star Trek game. Two of the players had previous experience in the navy. I have no military background. It took me about five seconds flat to realize that I could not provide enough verisimilitude to make the experience what the players wanted and as such had to shut the game down. That was the first time I could not run a game due to lack of real life knowledge. Won't be trying Trek ever again.

That's a bit of a disappointing story. I mean, I would hope that players with real world expertise could understand that it's fiction that we're playing at. Trek itself is pretty freaking far from real world navies. Not just from being set in space, but from being a fictional universe where writers of most episodes probably know less about navy experience than you do.

Apparently there are just some things that are going to drive someone crazy. A friend and I are designing a Mad Max: Fury Road style game for our group, and we have two gear heads in our groups. Balancing making it acceptably playable and also not break their verisimilitude threshold has been a nightmare of a challenge.

Quote from: Opaopajr;908164Easiest way to challenge them is volume & distance. Can't be two places at once, can't have everyone be a hyper-specialist in everything. Eventually once the party splits up the generalists shine because "good enough right now" beats "perfect but unavailable."

The biggest challenge about that is getting your players to trust travelling your campaigns unglued from each other's hip.

Yeah, that make's good sense.  However, this particular group (that I am a little annoyed with) flat out refuses to "scooby doo."  The realization of which brings me to the conclusion that niche protection is only a symptom or a tool of this group's insistence on metagaming to overcome any challenge that I might throw at them.  I generally put my foot down on rules-lawyering and munchkinism  so I think they have tuned to ooc cooperative metagaming as a response.  It's a natural enough response I guess to overcome challenging situations so I can't really blame them.  We still have a lot of fun.  It's not a bad group, but these tactics are a little immersion breaking for me (sorry about that buzz word) and probably for them as well, and they lead me to design the same old mission-based scenarios because that's what fits their play-style and that's what I figured they want. It gets old. I didn't realize till now that I was reacting, and feeding in, to their metagaming impulses.

QuoteContinuous Mission-based adventures don't help that. They tend to be high pressure, high stakes challenges that don't leave too much in the way of unclenching one's sphincters. If everything is in a pressure cooker, you're going to get "boiler room" solutions. (Go, go, mixed metaphors!)

Right.  This is exactly what I am doing, and it's driving them further into cooperative metagame land.  Maybe next campaign I'll run Pendragon (vastly different pace, basically one niche with lots of weaknesses, lots of roleplaying, emphasis on individual characters, passions personalities, etc.) - but for now I'm stuck in mid-steam of a D&D campaign with a fairly heavy mission based plot.

Quote from: Ratman_tf;908234That's a bit of a disappointing story. I mean, I would hope that players with real world expertise could understand that it's fiction that we're playing at. Trek itself is pretty freaking far from real world navies. Not just from being set in space, but from being a fictional universe where writers of most episodes probably know less about navy experience than you do.

Well it certainly makes me think twice before getting involved in a game. I do tend to ask now what real world knowledge I need to run the game and if lack of it will ruin it for the players.

Quote from: Opaopajr;908164Well, thank you, you're kind. I'll bring the calamine lotion once everyone's done.

Easiest way to challenge them is volume & distance. Can't be two places at once, can't have everyone be a hyper-specialist in everything. Eventually once the party splits up the generalists shine because "good enough right now" beats "perfect but unavailable."

The biggest challenge about that is getting your players to trust travelling your campaigns unglued from each other's hip.

Continuous Mission-based adventures don't help that. They tend to be high pressure, high stakes challenges that don't leave too much in the way of unclenching one's sphincters. If everything is in a pressure cooker, you're going to get "boiler room" solutions. (Go, go, mixed metaphors!)

Isn't splitting the party generally a bad idea as DM though? You end up with people twiddling their thumbs or wasting half the night.

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;908244Isn't splitting the party generally a bad idea as DM though? You end up with people twiddling their thumbs or wasting half the night.

Just play with adults without personality disorders.

Quote from: DavetheLost;908172So, Chris Brady, did your first level characters routinely encounter 200 goblins in a single encounter in a dungeon? What party size and what tactics were successfully employed in actual play for a party to defeat 200 goblins in one encounter? How many characters were in the party? Same question applied to wilderness encounters? What rules were you playing? Actual play, not theoretical?

No, the tables I ran did not.  But the tables I played at?  Yes.  I was typically the party thief or mage.  More Thieves though. Well, given that I played at about 30+ tables, most of them being 'second generation' meaning that most of us didn't actually do the wargame thing.  I can only really remember two major instances.  Most of the rest of the mage deaths was anecdotal stores from various BBS and internet stories as well as local players not using the 'rules' to not have the Magic User die all the time like their 'other games'.

The few that played Warhammer were very cutthroat, we once had a twenty man 'party' (15 retainers, they died in the first pass) against an entire 200 Goblin tribe in a forest (we had just gotten the Wilderness Survival Guide, so we started having outdoor adventures) and cave complex.  We actually stumbled on that, and it was OUR fault for just wandering into it  We played the rules as written, which mean 'tactics' was assumed by the rules.  So we rolled and we hit and it was very dull, but that is technically how the game is supposed to be run, at least to us.

We once did the Keep on The Borderlands, that had a huge amount of Goblins per encounter, and then there's the Ogre in one of the caves, we got past that one a couple of times.  Otherwise ouch.  But that was for a lark, so we expected to die a lot and often.  I remember swapping a lot of characters for that one, I went through most of the party wizards as I died a lot, even hiding behind the big burly fighter and cleric.  Flaming oil did a lot of damage to the Goblins mind you.  Ranged was king in that game.

Quote from: DavetheLost;908172The tactics we used to protect the MU were not based on "gentleman's agreement". They were tactics that evolved out of teh monsters doing their best to kill the MU, forcing the party to take preventative measures.

The 'Tactics' that the DM allows is part of this agreement, because the base rules assumes that you ARE using tactics to keep the magic user safe, that roll to hit back in the AD&D's 1 minute round was a lucky shot, an opening, or otherwise a chance to hit, despite the player's best plans.  But if the DM allows you to prevent the monsters from attacking the wizard, they're agreeing to allow you to keep the wizards/casters safe above and beyond what the system allows.

Quote from: Krimson;908227Amusingly I had a problem somewhat related to this. I was going to run a Star Trek game. Two of the players had previous experience in the navy. I have no military background. It took me about five seconds flat to realize that I could not provide enough verisimilitude to make the experience what the players wanted and as such had to shut the game down. That was the first time I could not run a game due to lack of real life knowledge. Won't be trying Trek ever again.

But...there's a very minimal, entirely superficial connection between our modern Navy and Star Trek in any version of the show. Weird.

Quote from: Ratman_tf;908234That's a bit of a disappointing story. I mean, I would hope that players with real world expertise could understand that it's fiction that we're playing at. Trek itself is pretty freaking far from real world navies. Not just from being set in space, but from being a fictional universe where writers of most episodes probably know less about navy experience than you do.

While Star Trek doesn't operate much like a real military, there are some minimal similarities. Even the TV shows expect you to obey orders most of the time and treat the exceptions as unusual. Some roleplayers don't enjoy, and are not any good at, operating a command hierarchy. Which is not to say that's what happened here as some roleplayers are also very intolerant of anything that violates or contradicts their own area of expertise.

I would certainly have a conversation with players before a Star Trek game to make sure we are at least somewhat on the same page, e.g.

• You know Star Fleet has ranks like a real military and 99% of the time you will need to follow orders and if you don't follow orders you better be able to cite some really compelling reason for the violation either before or after the fact. Stuff like, "Well Admiral, I knew that Captain Smirk was under the control of an alien intelligence at the time he gave the order for every crew member to beam down to the planet leaving no one on board the Defiant.
  

• You know Star Trek is based on a TV show and there is a presumption that main characters (i.e. the player characters) are the heroes and that they get to act like heroes.

• Sometimes being heroes means they have to face moral challenges that occasionally may call for them to violate prime directive or the orders of their superiors and even though in the real military that would be a career limiting, if not career ending, action what we are going to play is a lot like the TV show so if your characters did the right thing and they can at least halfway justify why they did the right thing, they continue in their career. Depending on the cirumstances and the outcome they may be reprimanded (which probably means they remain in their current position onboard the Defiant), their violation may be ignored, or they may even be complemented or even get a medal.

I've certainly known players/GMs who would have difficulty with the first point or with the third one.

Quote from: camazotz;908256But...there's a very minimal, entirely superficial connection between our modern Navy and Star Trek in any version of the show. Weird.

I suspect that this may have been more of a case where the players' habits overrode the assumed premise.  Trek isn't anything close to a real-world Navy (it's Wagon Train) but it uses some of the superficial tropes and I can see how the players would have latched on to that and fallen into familiar patterns.

It's a danger with any premise that relies heavily on genre conventions that exist for story purposes.  A lot of stuff that happens on Trek happens because it looks cool or it supports the morality play A-plot.  Someone playing in an "immersive" style isn't going to necessarily do the things a Trek character would because they're nonsensical.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;908249We actually stumbled on that, and it was OUR fault for just wandering into it  We played the rules as written, which mean 'tactics' was assumed by the rules.  So we rolled and we hit and it was very dull, but that is technically how the game is supposed to be run, at least to us.

QuoteThe 'Tactics' that the DM allows is part of this agreement, because the base rules assumes that you ARE using tactics to keep the magic user safe, that roll to hit back in the AD&D's 1 minute round was a lucky shot, an opening, or otherwise a chance to hit, despite the player's best plans.  But if the DM allows you to prevent the monsters from attacking the wizard, they're agreeing to allow you to keep the wizards/casters safe above and beyond what the system allows.

The base rules were written by people who played wargames. The original rules were written by and for people who played wargames. The designers assumed that the players would use tactics to the best of their abilities in the circumstances they were confronted with. The rules to OD&D and AD&D did not assume that all tactics were baked into your PC's To Hit roll. (I won't speak to 3E, 4E, or 5E, but I'd be really shocked if all tactics were baked into to hit rolls and various class abilities. I've certainly never read anything that would lead me to believe the rules assume that nor that they prevent using actual tactics of some kind.)

And your misunderstanding of what tactics are and how they get used is why you don't get to have nice things or play with the big kids.