Red Flags

Is there a bigger red flag for a shit campaign than "political intrigue"?

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Sandbox. It either isn't, is and everything is a waste of time and GM will be a bitch with information because we are supposed to explore or the players all have divergent agendas and the game becomes a fucking mess.

Homebrew allowed.

Does anyone but the GM ever attempt that? Seriously?

this 100%

Selected game is about X (most of the time kiling shit) but the purpose of the campaign is another.

Pretty much just nailed it on the head here

Do hexcrawls count as sandbox? Is that what people really want when they say sandbox?

So what are your ideas of great campaigns, anons ?

ITT bad personal experiences = objectively bad subject matter

But political intrigue stuff has come up in many anons' bad personal experiences. Moreso than other types of campaigns.

so the only games that are allowed to exist are by the book, run of the mill murder hobo express?

are you guys fucking retarded?

If we're talking about D&D, yes. That's where the political intrigue hate comes from because the GM won't use another game.

I run sandbox games and
>will be a bitch with information
stands out to me. A lot of gm's refuse to tell things about the setting to the players.
When being up to speed on lore and knowing what's going on in the setting is essential.
I usually have players choose a place they're from and a real job background, then use that so if they ask questions they can know general things based on their background.

That's the exact point of the thread.

fucking pay attention

Weird, for me it was the Door-Monster-Treasure trope.

Or the magical realm one, but I'm keeping it off the stats

>D20 outside of D&D or its clones

>political intrigue
>and it's D&D

Sorry to say it user, but most people dont play d&d like you do with your World of Weeaboo-craft. We actually care about character interaction, development, dialog, and generally having fun. Not click-to-accept-quest-now-go-murder

Well magical realm really isn't a campaign type it's more of a bad feature that can show up anywhere. What's that trope?

>I usually have players choose a place they're from and a real job background, then use that so if they ask questions they can know general things based on their background.

is that not common practice? i though doing that or something similar would just be a given.

>If we're talking about D&D, yes.
so you are not aloud to have political intrigue in a universe with politics? if there is anything close to a form of government there will always be political battles, pretending there isn't is just retard. unless you run a game with explicitly murder hobos and refuse to involve any amount of intellectual stimulation i guess its fine to leave that stuff out.

did you reply to the wrong post? cuz you're agreeing with that user

>actually care about character interaction

>defending the anons who think the only way to play is by the book with no room for home brew or intellectual simulation.

this

Homebrew automatically allowed without the DM first looking over the class, race, what-have-you beforehand.

There's a difference between having political intrigue and centering your game around political intrigue. D&D is not ideal for it because it's built for dungeon crawling and has combat focus.

>and refuse to involve any amount of intellectual stimulation
The point of it is that political intrigue is fucking stupid, because the people involved don't have the intellectual capacity to actually make it good. They force conflict for the sake of conflict, and set up political situations that only exist for the sake of existing, with no good justification.

Are you? because you can't seem to read and make up a whole lot of shit

i can agree with that

A lot of failed sandbox campaign happen because the gm refuses to tell a single thing about the setting. They'll start players off in a street in a town and refuse to tell them the name of the town unless they specifically ask an npc. Then the npc requires that the players fetch something to learn the name of the town.

Like, information and acquiring it is an important part of the strategic gameplay in a sandbox but players need a solid grounded base of info to be able to make sense of the sandbox.

what? how does that response make sense?

False dichotomy. You can have those things without trying to turn D&D into GoT.

Yes.
"Mature game"

My point being is that user is bitching that you can't have a interesting game without homebrew bullshit or "political" batshit.

rpgs are not about "le intellectual stimulation" or character interaction, if you want that go read a book fuck

its about leveling your character and playing the game

Because I'm not the one calling red flags a sign that murder-hoboing is the optimal way to game.

A lots of fucking leap in logic

>That image

Oh fuck, forgot about that one.

Intrigue only works if intrigue elements only start getting introduced like 8 or 10 sessions in.
By then the players are familiar with the politics, npc's etc and are creating their own plots.
The problem of trying to make an intrigue campaign is that you're trying to start off session one in a gametype that requires the players to have a lot of knowledge of the politics and for them to give a shit about the politics of the area.

i had no idea that Gm's where that stupid...

>rpgs are not about...

that's where you're wrong.
role playing games are about having fun with friends and interacting... if you wanna get big numbers go play a fucking MMO and stop ruing the table top community with your "get big numbers" bull shit.

It usually happens when bob is like "Hey guys, let's try a sandbox campaign!" wen bob has never ran a sandbox and none of the players have either.
So it ends up being a very detailed world that doesn't have anything to actually do in it or anything really interesting and bob stops the campaign three sessions in, then blames the players for not understanding how to play a sandbox.

>A lots of fucking leap in logic

not really if for you a "red flag" is a dm showing a glimmer of originality and creativity, its not to far to assume your optimal game style is a "by the book murder hobo fetch quest extravaganza

>optimal way to game
then what is your "optimal way to game"?

Ah I see, you are just butthurt that people don't see sandbox or your homebrew as a good draw for a game.

I'll explain.
Most people are terrible. Terrible things are not liked. Sandboxes and homebrews are mostly terrible. Thus people don't like sandboxes and homebrews.

>role playing games are about having fun with friends and interacting...
I don't need the pretext of a game to do that. If we sit down to play a game I want there to be more substance to it than "having fun and interacting"

"Realistic" or "gritty". Red flag X5 COMBO if used together.

alright fair enough

>New player and his gf
This has happened a couple times, once recently. The gf is never interested, doesn't know how to play, doesn't bother to learn, and is doing other shit during the session.

Most recent example:
>She was "too shy" to talk the first session, so the bf played for her
>Was playing DotA or something the entire first two sessions
>Clearly was not interested in playing
To make this example worse, the weak piece of shit bf enabled her every step of the way.

then to be more specific, what is your idea of "substance?" what is it you want/expect from a game?

eh, gritty, I can live with since it's a buzzword for anything wild west or post apocalyptic thing. I will give you on realistic.

If speaking combos, I will never buy a game that advertises it to be fast paced but have deep gameplay. It's a sure fire sign that neither has been achieved.

"Hey guys, do you wanna play a campaign? I've got this awesome story in mind, and I can't wait for you to see it!"

Realistic is my red flag. Gritty is one thing, I mean to say, it is a thing, realistic is hardly ever indicative of the campaign as much as it's a sign that I should avoid the DM.

When a game is described as realistic I always take it to mean that the DM is going to impose his world view on things and have no flexibility at all with them. They'll fall back on justifying any contention with their game as just being realistic, and at best there's a debate on whether or not realistic is better than balanced, or flavourful, and at worst they'll have no fucking clue how something actually works and be taking their idea of realistic off some unresearched work or a piece that never sold itself as realistic in the first place.

Homebrew rules. Because thats how you end up with bullshit like "PCs earn a ability point every level and a feat every other level, plus all other bonus associated with their class"

Yeah that happened once

I wish more people actually learned from Game of Thrones instead of just trying to cram every single thing they thought was cool without any thought or understanding of what made it work in the first place. Look at how it starts: There's some actiony shit with snow zombies, then we meet Sean Bean and his kids and they find some puppies, then his best friend comes for a visit. There's barely a whiff of any political dealings more complex than a marriage arrangement until the Starks get to King's Landing, by which point the main characters are fairly well established and we've learned enough about the setting that we can follow what's going on. That happens in, what, episode 3? I can't remember how far into the book that is, but it's a decent chunk.

>I want there to be more substance to it than "having fun and interacting"
>rpgs are not about "le intellectual stimulation" or character interaction, if you want that go read a book fuck
If you don't want to think or have in character conversations, it sounds like you just want mindless violence. Rolling to disarm the occasional trap isn't really "substance."

Was this online? If not just implement a 'no phone rule' unless they're rolling with it or looking up a rule/spell list.

I'd say "dark and realistic" is a worse combo sign than the "gritty" one. Or unironically describing the setting as "grimdark".

gotta admit it would be fun to have players roll up sats and optimize themselves for combat only to get stuck in political drama

It was online.

If it was real life, I take people's phones. Or shut down the wifi if it is my place.

>The story is the most important thing in this game
This is code for 'i want you all to be good little puppets while i lead you by the hand on what really could have just been a novel'

The issue with D&D political intrigue is PCs get stuff like Zone of Truth and Tongues incredibly early and that's if they don't decide to use their high power level to brute force things and don't feel threatened enough by the consequences. Then there's those who feel D&D has half-assed social mechanics or those that believe it shouldn't have any at all.

The "only dungeon raiding" one ; the one that every fucking problem is to be solved by raiding a dungeon, killing the monster there and loot the place ; that trope divide itself in the dungeon, as each room as a door (trapped or locked), a monster, and a loot. NPCs interaction next to 0 except for quest givers and merchants

And unfortunately, yes, magical realm can be an entire campaign with the "good" setting

Then you are playing with not the right people for it. Does it means that all the players in the world can't do good political intrigue ?

I find for finding good intrigue games, find games that describe themselves as "kingdom building" or "domain management" rather than using the word intrigue.

Just like good sandboxes are really hexcrawls.

>"""narrative"""
Sick and fucking tired of these liberal art cunts who think they're better than everyone because they wrote an interactive novel they want to torture innocent players with. These elitist cunts can't even understand that Gygax invented D&D *explicitly* to loot the dungeon because he was sick of wargaming skirmishes, and trying to glorify the game as anything more than that is a literal slap in the face of Gygax's memory.

It's odd, I don't think a game has to be a classic hexcrawl to be a good sandbox but on the other hand; I've never seen a good sanbox that didn't involve a hexgrid for the map.

Gygax was a shithead, and I have no problem with larger narratives or even narrativist systems, but if the GM is going to be a crybaby about his super cool story because a player did something he didn't account for, or going to railroad to prevent the same, then he can get well and proper fucked

youtu.be/SkGFw2BI_g8

Jesus Christ, Youtube comments for Queen videos aren't this obsessively devoted to defending the memory of someone who's legacy is doing just fine as is. And I wouldn't be complaining about elitism in the same post where I claim my way of playing imaginary funtime adventures is objectively better than everyone else's. Glass houses, friendo.

Virt? Is that you?

The thing about gygax is that there were better adventure writers, game designers, editors, writers and world builders from the same time as him.

It's true, but you've got to give Gygax credit where credit is due: If it weren't for him none of those people would have had the chance to show their talent, or even known they had a talent for this specific thing.

In my experience at least it isn't so bad.

One of the better games I've played was an Ice and Fire political intrigue game.

For me it's

"So I've written my own rules for a tabletop"

Why do so many of my friends do this?

They aren't writers, they have jobs.
They don't have time to make something good.

If they put nearly as much effort into writing a campaign as they did with coming up with 'muh rules' then they might have something good but instead they've wasted their own time on something that's just a bunch of mechanics in a story that's got no depth.

I ONLY PLAY MATURE GAMES FOR MATURE PEOPLE LIKE MYSELF.

which usually happens when joe gets tired of dming and tosses the reigns to bob for a set.

random tables are your friend.

>no responses
Figures.
For the record, any campaign that can actually get a motherfucker to roleplay is a good one in my book.

Post more cute anime girls with question marks

How would you run it well? Give each player an allied part of the faction to run?

A good campaign is a good campaign

>'The theme of the campaign is mystery and secrecy'

Funny, my biggest red flag has always been human only games in a dms personal hombrew setting.

Welcome to a world of being drug down the plot by npcs that explain the world. Also, all these non humans? Better than you at everything. These humans from area X? Better then you and are justified in everything they do. The gods? Hate you and dont you fucking forget it.

I am damn near done with any and every hombrew setting.

This, a thousand times this. Every time a DM has done "realistic" it always meant martials are getting fucked and casters are getting dysentery.

thats not bad if the system is coc or dg

Oh well la dee da, Captain Murderhobo. Who the fuck said anything about D&D? D&D is fucking garbage specifically because without a narrative it is just a videogame that you play extremely slowly on a piece of cardboard. The narrative is what -makes- the fucking hobby, and if you don't understand that then I don't even know what you want out of your TTRPGs.

It was, in order, Pathfinder, D&D 3.5, Mage: The Ascension, and then back to Pathfinder.

Last one collapsed 4 sessions in and I decided to DM instead. I'm not even very good, but it's better than the clusterfuck that the last guy kept trying to run.

Evil alignment campaign.

Were they all done by the same guy?

Yes.

either way, the campaign's probably gonna be full of rape. it's only realistic, jeez.

"This is going to be a role-play focused game"

It either is the most murder hobo of murder hobo games, or a WoD-type angst fest

I have never done a hexcrawl, but they seem immensely fun.

>Gygax was a shithead

Shut the fuck up you millennial cum stain.

>implying screenshots of claims made by anonymous idiots is evidence

No, what they're saying is that majority of DMs are shit and murderhobo express gets it's job done even with a shit DM while anything else is a disappointment from the higher expectations

>girls

>It's a homebrew with homerules political intrigue sandbox
>using 3.5

The only bigger red flag than this is going into the house and seeing that everyone is member of some hate group. Which hates you.

sandbox by far.
So many DMs dont know how to make sandbox games that give your players a lot of options. They try to base it on video games, instead of making a world where you can go anywhere and do anything, but there is only a set amount of places that will move the plot that the DM has to inform the player of (this is why i dont play CoC with new players, last time one of em decided that science it's a open game, he will go to chicago to search for some tome about some randome ritual that they needed to learn about. Compleatly ignored the fact that i informed them that there was a profesor visiting the town who was a expert on such things. We were playing in alaska...).

Does it have to constitute evidence?

It's not like you posted evidence of him being a "shithead".

>Is there a bigger red flag for a shit campaign than "political intrigue"?
Yes, a much more severe one.

>We'll be playing Dungeons and Dragons!

Sounds like you need to play with better GMs rather than bitching about subjective personal experiences.