How would you run pic related

how would you run pic related

I would lock each of my players in electric chairs and have them roll to kill the same enemy thousands of times in a row while asking them what they think it means to be human.

After that they each must roll to see who is electrocuted. The survivor is framed for their murder.

Fast, in the other direction

Download the OST for starters.

After doing so, create a campaign with a ton of moral ambiguity. Everyone is a bit off, a bit evil, and even the most innocent thing should have something sinister about it.

Establish that not everyone is right, but really no one is good. The player's cutting swathes through enemies should be something reflected upon, and looked at by allies as unnerving if they are overly celebratory.

Toy with implementing a creative sanity/bloodlust system.

Kick up the weird factor. Enemies, magic, the legacy of weapons, even allies and character motivations. This is a world of the bizarre, dreamlike, and uncomfortable. Taboos should be expected, and explored.

Swerve the ending.

As a prologue to a prologue

>bloodlust system

would that be a sanity system tied to how much people in the party killed?

i.e pc no 3 has killed x amount of people so he notices Watcher fuckery more often?

or should that be the more of a party based thing where the more people the party kills the worse the Watcher fuckery gets?

On a ps2, NEXT?!

I kinda like the idea of it being based on the individual player. If you're playing in person, never doubt the strength of handing a player a sticky note or letter that the other players can't read. That alone can create intrigue, fear, and all those other juicy emotions that come when someone has a secret the others don't.

Admittedly that relies on a party that is able to role play in a manner that they can handle those kinds of things.

If that is not your group of players, I think the group system works as a way to keep the weird, but keep them all on the same page.

Honestly, though, anyone that ever ran a shitty trainwreck of a campaign with the edge to the max, predictable plot and a dumpster fire of a system has run Drakengard.
Yoko Taro is That DM that can only run a single story and has a group of people that slobber over the deepness of it all for some unimaginable reason. But at least the OST vor Nier and Automata is amazing.

There isn't a single game that I play where I don't expect giant space babies to descend from heaven and eat me.

Every damned time that I play, it's always the damn space babies.

Pull a Taro and just run any camnpaign you want, filled with whatever turns you on.

Except run it badly. Make your players miserable.

When the game is finished and your players inevitably ask, "Why did you have us play through such bullshit?!" , You should respond, "You shouldn't feel good for playing the bad guys."

we sticky note stuff when players are separated all the time so that shouldn't be a problem really.

Then yeah, I'd go in on the individual player stuff then, that feels like it'd be more fun over all.

>run it badly

how do you intentionally run a game badly?

People always wank about the giant floating babies, but past that it's just [DEMONIC CREATURES DESTROYING THE WORLD]
Yes, in the details he has quite a bunch of weird and bizarre ideas, mostly for the sake of being bizarre. Because he sees himself as such an """artist""". But on the whole his characters and storoes are incredibly bland and predictable. I mean come the fuck on, anyone can call the "twist" of Automata after the first fucking sentence.

It's a meme. His games are shit, but people attribute it to genius instead of him just being an untalented hack with an undetfunded studio. Drakengard was never meant to be intentionally bad, the musou levels were just shoved in late in development because he wanted it so. That's why the flying sections are almost approaching "playable".

make sure NONE of the players know that your running a drakengard game or that it has anything to yoko taro

tell them that your running a home brew game set around a stereotypical fantasy game with a evil empire plot then and have everything fall apart slowly from that point forward.

It wouldn't be a Taro game if the gameplay wasn't ass.

Really though, I've always regarded the man as a much better story teller than having any meat in gameplay design. Drakengard 1 had so many wonderful touches in terms of story, and I say that having 100% it long, long ago.

I've never really considered the bad gameplay part of the genius though, there were moment that straight up told you that you were the bad guy, and did it effectively, and it had nothing to do with the terrible gameplay.

Well, it depends. You can go Curse of Strahd style and make the players feel like they're not actually succeeding in the monumental task of your choosing, and then constantly beat them over the head with it. Or you can do a dungeon crawl with very limited story sections, while promising them anyway (i.e., lie to the players).

But yeah, it was a revisionist joke about Taro intentionally making bad interfaces to make people feel bad about doing bad things, started on GameFAQS I believe.

Honestly, I kind of consider him the anti-Kojima. Both of them are just the right sort of crazy to make their shit work, but their focus is in different areas. Taro tells powerful stories effectively about very grim situations, but his gameplay is ass.

Kojima makes incredible games to play about grim situations, and frames them really well, but then he goes fucking insane when he's actually writing. There's bits of genius in there, of course, but so, so much bullshit you have to slog through.

We'll see how his new game goes, and if his issues aren't just Metal Gear related.

I 100%ed all the games but D2 (because it's mostly not relevant to the discussion) because I wanted to see what this shit was all about and I really REALLY liked the first Nier. But what pisses me off is how far up his own ass Taro is. The interview where he prattles on how he wanted to make D1 as a commentary on how all games were just about glorified murder exemplifies this: This was when shit like Harvest Moon, Mother or Animal Crossing had existed for years and MGS2 did literally the same thing two years prior, but vastly better.

oh i know its a joke

im just asking how as a DM to intentionally a game badly because thats genuinely interesting idea for this game

Funny thing that you would mention it. Games usually don't need a good story, if they have a great touch in gameplay. I'm not too sure about Kojima as a designer, as it feels like everything he touches is batshit insane, but his team is so good they manage to pull everything together.

In some way, I think you have to be a bit up your own ass to be the kind of designer Taro is. I think in a lot of ways Taro can be considered an artist, with all the baggage that comes with it. He's not so much interested in pleasing his audience or finding success as he is in expressing an idea. And to do that effectively, he has to be willing to be a shithead when it matters.

Plus, while I think you're right in the point MGS2 was great about the message, I think they were both trying to convey different meanings to the concept.

MGS2 was more about questioning the nature of why the characters fought, rather than any sort of morality angle. It's been forever, but I don't recall the story ever actually blaming you killing people, only questioning the meaning and purpose behind that death.

Drakengard, on the other hand, simply set out to show that the kind of person capable of killing like we see must surely be insane or ignorant, at least to Taro. And with that idea, he intended to punch the player in the gut about that insanity, as many times as he could get away with.

The only other example I can think of off the top of my head was Spec Ops: The Line, which was also massively unfair in how it treated you, but I think the part that people missed is that it being entirely unfair to you was part of the point.

Ok guys talking about Taro is fun and all but please let's get back on rail and talk about running a Drakengard game again?

Speaking of which, how should I do Pacts?

Should I make it the PC have two character sheets and have them play both or should the pact beasts just be DMPC's that sometimes pop up every so often

Storm King's Thunder has a section where the PC's play as giants - the daughters of the titular king, in fact. It has handouts for the players in the form of not-quite monster stat blocks to use, roughly equivalent to normal giant stats, but with each one having different RP tips and skills to represent their individuality. Just do that, nigga. No need to make the DM handle everything. You'll have to, of course, trust that your PCs will use dragons responsibly.

>dragons

>not giving the party the entire monster manual to choose from

His entire premise is off, though. You don't have to be a Twisted Fucking Psychopath to kill. And in most of the games he's trying to criticize, murder isn't the point. When I'm playing Dynasty Warriors and slaughtering the soldiers occupying a fort, it's not because I'm enjoying the act itself and the game doesn't tell me to go and kill them for the hell of it. The point is to capture the fort. What Caim does mostly lacks reason, though, outside of his bloodlust. D1 is a strawman. Of course it's fucked up to kill just for the enjoyment of it. But who are you even trying to criticize here?

Damn, nigga, I was just using them as an example. Shit, get your pill game on and calm down.

Look man if I'm gonna make this a train wreck I might as well go balls to the wall and have everything be a complete mess to manage

Two basic rules

1. Don't make players expect it. Advertise it as a normal dark fantasy campaign and slowly ramp the insanity up. If they know about Drakengard or Taro, don't mention it and don't pull the same twists as the video games.

2. Play with the medium. Add in a sanity meter that will always trickle down and give them more and more power (and reason to not factor in common sense). Make downtime short and hectic so the characters never get rest. When the Watchers-tier part comes, make players literally fight gigantic dice or something.

3. All Jedi or no Jedi - everyone has a pact beast or no-one does.

>can run only a single story

How the fuck are any of his games simillar to each other?

>Swerve the ending.

And crack out that DDR mat.

The entire point there was Taro asking "What kind of person would willingly enjoy being in the same situation as a dynasty warriors PC?" Then making that person the protagonist of a game.

It's more about the celebration of violence than violence itself, honestly. Watch the DoD3 interview if you haven't, it's best to see the author put the points himself rather than have random faggots on the internet telly you about it.

Seeing as I am not a playstation, no.

>2017
>Not having a DVD drive installed in your face

>You don't have to be a Twisted Fucking Psychopath to kill.

Yeah but you do have to be in order to enjoy it.

>What Caim does mostly lacks reason

Not really, the empire is genuinely bad and the cult is trying to destroy the world. He has a perfectly legitimate reason to fight this war, the issue is that he enjoys the killing.

You have to keep in mind the near-pacifist mindset of the modern Japanese and how to them, people who are able to just kill without hesitation, even when completely justified due to circumstances, are kinda seen as monsters.

...

He makes bad games, but he writes great lore and settings with a lot of atmosphere, depth, and nuance to them.

That's enough for me.

Wing it and make joke endings. Then make the joke endings real and actually the next campaign plot.
Yoko Taro can't keep getting away with this.

You can't forget also NTRing someones sister two or three times. Making a useless old bastard, and Aliens.