ITT: Red Flags

>the GM introduces time traveling to the setting
>not just "stable time loop" time-traveling
>but "infinite off-shoot timelines" time-traveling
>and "going back affects the future reality" time-traveling

>but "infinite off-shoot timelines" time-traveling
>and "going back affects the future reality" time-traveling

Sounds fucking awful, OP.

Actually, didn't WARCRAFT fucking do that?

>op starts a meme anime thread with greentexting

The way I handle time travel, the universe goes out of its way to make sure the current future is not impossible, meaning the butterfly effect is kept to a minimum. Catastrophic changes result in the time travel failing.

>uses the words "cuck" or "degenerate"
>can't not bring up politics
>is fat
>is a virgin

Any of these are red flags

There is nothing with being a virgin though.
Sex is something inherently personal and nobody should be judged for how they are doing it (or even not doing it) as long as they are not hurting anyone.

I think he was using virgin to refer to a kind of person, not necessarily one who hasn't had sex. Internet speak allows you to be a virgin even if you've had sex, just so long as you fit the traits


Funny how personally you took that, though

Let's see, how many types of time travel are there, even? You've got...
>Singular yet infinitely flexible (changing the past/future, but the original timeline ceases)
>Infinite yet rigid (changing stuff just lands you in a new timeline)
>Singular and rigid (You already changed the past)
>Infinite Branches and Zero Freewill (A timeline for ANYTHING! Even that messiah over there has a timeline where he eats children!)
>Dr. Who shit ('ello, guv! We seem to have a fuckin' insufferable plothole.)
>Set yet flexible (things try to snap to a certain pattern, but determined assholes can subvert this in gradually escalating ways.)
>The Pretentious Model (Time is, like, an illusion, man.)
>No time travel (Fuck you, live with your mistakes)

>>the GM introduces time traveling to the setting
>not just "stable time loop" time-traveling
>but "infinite off-shoot timelines" time-traveling
>and "going back affects the future reality" time-traveling


What's the problem?

>>Infinite Branches and Zero Freewill (A timeline for ANYTHING! Even that messiah over there has a timeline where he eats children!)
Why does everyone always assume that this means that they're the same person? They're in two seperate places and have made completely different decisions for reasons not always clear, but usually because they have opposing temperaments or motivations. They're completely different people.

These are usually made by people who like to insist there's no such thing as good in the world because people derive pleasure from doing good things

>New player that plays CN
>Person who tries to reason with the rules rather than just doing the shit it says
>Rolling on a separate table where no one can see
>always talks about how macho their character

>>but "infinite off-shoot timelines" time-traveling
>>and "going back affects the future reality" time-traveling
These two things are mutually exclusive.

>been playing and reading game recaps for 25 years
>literally never encountered this even once

Sounds like a virgin talking

>be guided by strange tips to tzeentch cults
>murder all we find for emps
>eventually go to meet contact
>gm describes a uncorrupted chaos primarine
>starts talking about how he's a good chaos marine
>commisar demands we kill the traitor
>multimelta melts all the faces
>gm fucking flips for killing the guy

I dunno, maybe some universal constants get changed, and BAM, the kind of time travel you could do before, you can't, and now it's different.

If we allow that both are possible, but not at the same time, it could just be that the rules changed at some point.

>Uncorrupted chaos

Does he realize being a chaos marine sort of implies being corrupted outright? If you aren't corrupted, you'd just be a regular one.

What kind of horseshit is that? Sure, it's righteous to move forward despite being thankless in the face of injustice, but it's also right to reward someone for doing something the right way. You shouldn't feel bad about accomplishing something good, so long as you don't let it get to your head.

This
FEERY PARIS

Sort of. If Broxigar is canon then there's at least one stable time loop.

Otherwise there are entities in place (Such as the Bronze Dragon Flight) which ensure the integrity of time and space by stopping those who would meddle in past affairs.

There are also parallel worlds they don't watch over though, which is how you got Warlords of Draenor.

>FEERY PARIS
Sorry phoneposting and captchas and phone deciding I'm not in the right line and I don't even know what

Rolling off-table is only acceptable for GMs

What does this have to do with poorly written time travel plots?

Tell that to the fucking hacks who wrote Bioshock Infinite

It's obvious but he's still right, you know.

>not having time traveling be dimensional hopping.

Both run on poorly-constructed logic and try to look cleverer than they actually are. Nothing pisses me off more with reference to time-traveling than someone trying to come up with an extensive and often nonsensical technobabble explanation trying to explain why 'it's scyence, guis!' when it's really not and it doesn't take into account the main problems with time travel (namely, how it affects continuity) in the first place.
Just say its magic or superscience, I didn't come here to read your hack essay that supposedly has insights that escape cutting-edge physicists.

Renegades do exist.

But I'm not responding to anyone talking about technobabble.

I've ran a few games that had time travelling and really it was more about the group than about making a believable handwave as to why it works

When I ran it with a group that was more focused on what is happening right now I could make up pretty much everything and the flow of the game was still fine. Meanwhile when I ran a time travel scenario with the group that enjoys setting consistency I had to tighten that shit up.

On a related note, getting the party into a Groundhog Day scenario is fun as fuck

I think we're talking about two different things in the same conversation.

I misclicked and thought you were responding to something else.

Behold the glories of phoneposting, and despair.

This is what I came here to post

Yep.

>tfw the dungeon is rigged with a time loop spell that can only be dispelled by forgoing the treasure or killing the immortal that casted the spell
Everything reset with the loop except for their awareness. That means all items found, exp earned, and so on. Running version control on their stat sheets got kinda tiring after a few sessions, though. They did have a lot of fun experimenting with the specifics of the loop, so I guess it was a success.

Theres the Steins;Gate approach to timelines which I felt was rather unique.

>There is only one world (timeline) in existence at a time which resists changes from time travel. If enough changes are caused however, a new world is spawned and the old one fades into possibility.

That would be a fantastic cursed item.

The fact that Marty came back from the past in the first movie and didn't seem to care at all that his entire family were different people entirely and his old family were DEAD FOREVER.

Is 1 but the first timeline is just "remade" rather than replaced, with minimal changes and often reusing the same people its own type?

>GM uses miniatures

>player builds a point buy character

>GM fudges rolls

>GM uses quantum ogres

>GM clearly hasn't read the rulebook

Is this bait?

No I'm very much against the use of dice fudging, quantum ogres , points buy systems , grid and miniature combat (because this is an RPG not warhammer) and not understanding the rules and see it as a sign of a GM who has no idea what they're doing or a min/max player.

Hence a red flag.

Be honest user, if you were 17 and just went on a time-traveling adventure and returned to find your family in a much nicer living situation and had a sweet new truck, would you question the nature of your place in the timeline?

My red flag is gamers who see anything wrong with pointbuy.

Those aren't red flags, those are preferences. Each of those things has their place in games, all things considered.

Though i will agree on the GM not reading the rulebook thing. Unless everyone is completely new and he hasn't had the chance to at the time of bringing it up, but does read it before the actual session 0. Thats the only case its excusable.

>but "infinite off-shoot timelines" time-traveling
>and "going back affects the future reality" time-traveling

How are these not mutually exclusive?

But then they wouldn't be chaos marines.

Dice fudging isn't always inherently bad, and can be good so long as no one notices and it served to make the game more fun. So long as its not abused to punish a player the gm doesn't like or something its perfectly alright.

>No time travel (Fuck you, live with your mistakes)
>Not time travel is possible but would require too much energy and travelling more than a few minutes into the past is impossible even if you harvest the energy of the entire world

We implemented a "if your die roll isn't visible on the table with the other players, its an automatic failure"

Her boyfriend built a dice box

It might have been possible if some assholes weren't blowing holes in your giant time travel machine

>DM wants to do something other than generic fantasy. Wants to do some space travel campaigns.
Oh cool, I've always wanted to try Traveller
>Haha no, GM would rather homebrew the shit out of D&D than try something new.

Cheating at the game by fudging rolls and therefore destroying player agency is a preference?

Using quantum ogres so that your players choices are meaningless as they'll always fight your super special encounter whatever they do is a preference?

Turning a roleplaying game into a tactic miniatures wargame is a preference?

I can see points buy perhaps being a preference but coming to one of my games with a twinked out points buy character is a massive red flag for me.

>Destroying player agency

This is entirely dependent on the scenario, reason, and many other factors. To be blunt, this is hyperbolic as fuck.

Maybe the fight is going particularly badly and you want to give the party a leg up, and one guy rolled just close enough for you to say he got it. Is that destroying player agency? not at all. Player agency is in the choices they make, not the rolls that proceed from them. The only time fudging rolls is bad is when its overused and abused. now and again, there is nothing wrong with fudging rolls a slight bit to help things along some.

Quantum ogre is the same thing. the players will almost never know when you are using this. So who fucking cares unless its a very blatant issue. Sometimes its easier to just use this than waste people's time stalling while you grab the stats for something due to some unforeseen circumstance. Once again, it has its place.

If the guy wants to use miniatures, let him. If he wants to make the grid, let him. This fundamentally hurts no one and changes nothing, especially since a great many games work in a grid-based fashion anyways. So yes, its a preference.

As for the point buy thing, i admit it can attract twinks, and min-maxers are very often "That guy". But even if you don't allow pointbuy, those guys will still min-max to shit. All you do is make their job a bit more interesting.

I have no idea why you are so hung up on some of this.

>"You think the goblins wouldn't notice you always keep the mage at the back? Of course they're going to try and set up an ambush specifically for him."

>I DON'T LIKE THING
Ok.png

>rolled just close enough for you to say he got it. Is that destroying player agency?

Yes. Their character missed with their attack and you've arbitrarily decided they hit. If you don't want probability in your games don't use dice. Just decide if they hit based on your feelings.

>The players will never know when you are using this.

Everytime this has happened to me in a game I've known. GMs are fairly obvious about it. If the players have no choice what they do it would be far more adult to say 'ive prepped this one encounter and I want your characters to play through it's than giving players the arbitrary choice between two paths that both lead to the same encounter.

Better yet don't be a shit GM and design two (or more) unique encounters within unique areas for your players. It's not hard.

I don't care as much about the other stuff but those two genuinely destroy games for me.

>my anecdotes give my arguments credibility
They don't.
>fudging dice destroys player agency
A player in a game I am in had a character concept they really liked. Then they got hit once by an enemy and got instantly killed after only a couple of sessions. They were salty.

Point is, fudging does not destroy player agency if it's not used to railroad the players. You better try again, without yelling
>REEEEEEEEEEEEEE MY PLAYERS' CHOICES HAVE TO COUNT REEEE

>every time this has happened in a game i've known

how? Were you looking at the GM screen? Peaking at his notes?

Its not always about the choices the GM presents. Often the party will say "Fuck it" to those options entirely and decide to go up a river for no reason whatsoever, or because of some random fluff sentence 3 sessions back that was nothing more than that.

Quantum ogre has its place, whether you like it or not, simply because its never just about the choices you give the players, but the ones they make in spite of that.

>As for the point buy thing, i admit it can attract twinks, and min-maxers are very often "That guy". But even if you don't allow pointbuy, those guys will still min-max to shit. All you do is make their job a bit more interesting.

Fucking this. I won't deny some minmaxers just love their nice and neat 18's, but more often than not when I see minmaxers, the real problem is class/feat/item selection more than anything.

Basically I feel like pointbuy helps Minmaxers less than not having it sometimes punishes players who are already doing less optimal builds for fluff reasons.

>anecdotes

It's very obvious when a GM is fudging and using quantum ogres. You're not some genius weaving the players u suspecting through you're narrative. You're lazy and spent five minutes prepping. As I say I spot it every time

>Point is, fudging does not destroy player agency if it's not used to railroad the players.

By definition it is railroading them as it's forcing one outcome regardless of their actions or the games rules.

>They were salty.

Then they will learn to approach situations better in future and should accept luck exists in the system and play something else if they don't like that.

>every NPC is a smarmy shit, quipping and insulting you at every opportunity even if they're just rando commoners speaking to heavily armed mercs
>basically just a vehicle for the DM to insult his friends and jerk himself off
God, fuck these people. Nobody thinks that the local fucking peasant who isnt impressed by your anything is a cool character.

>all of them just laugh off any attempts at intimidation, and just in case you decide to start shit are all secretly your-level+3 wizards/fighters/whatever with built in radios to the local epic level captain of the guard even though we're in bumfuck nowhere

Shit, I used to have a DM that did this exact fucking thing, and it still makes me mad years later.

I've also seen red flags with the direct opposite, though, players who just want their character's dick sucked constantly and crying railroading if any NPCs in the setting could even stand up to them.

>Its very obvious
[Citation needed]

Okay, this is just the point where you sit your dm down, to have a civil talk about not being that guy.

Or so i would say if this didn't enrage me. Instead, throw a glass of water in his face and punch him. People will only jerk off to that kinda shit if they think they are in power. Any threat to that power will cause one of two outcomes.

First is that they go on a temper tantrum and you get kicked out of the group.

The other is that he tones his shit down and learns to stop being a smarmy cunt.

Either way, you win.

Seems you have a case of either shit DM or I-am-very-smart-itus. As long as the set piece fits thematically and within context, it'll all appear as part of the plan. How successful the DM can do this will vary but unless you're reading his notes, the average player should be none the wiser.

Also, players expect their characters to die in a cool way. Not choking to death on a Plague Rat's dick because they literally cannot roll above a 3 and the rat rolling 20s. Unless the DM makes it clear that they're playing lethally, it's perfectly fine to reserve death for the dramatic and the retarded.

Do you GM yourself? Seriously, this is a question.

Because if you GM, you would know that things like miniatures, fudging and quantum ogres are just tools to keep yourself sane.

GM:s are not all-knowing gods, and they are people with limited time and resources. If you make this quest where the party was supposed to find about this ruined city in the west from the mayor of this town, but the opportunity never presents itself when they're already going north to go find some winter pumpkins, what do you do?

You either make the mayor actually be the mayor of some other town or make another character make them interested of the ruined city. Or do you just forget the seven pages of encounters and plot threads?

Same with fudging. Using upwards to an hour making a character first time, a player is ready to play D&D for the first time. Oh, a goblin critted you and your Wizard died instantly? Too fucking bad. Or playing a fighter, but having a streak of under 5s for an entire fight and dying because of that?

People play games to enjoy their time. Dying because of some stupid shit out of your control isn't really all that enjoyable, and as said, GM:s are people with limited time and resources, one of said resources being players.

Both "cuck" and "degenerate" are okay when used in context, but I do cringe a bit even if it's perfectly in character for a rouge to taunt cuckolds and for a gent from the 1920s to call slum dwellers degenerates.

>GM bases his ideas on passing media interests and constantly throws around concepts usually at intervals of 2-3 days

Fuck. This thread is giving me 'nam flashbacks of all the bad groups I've been in.

>GM has a bunch of ideas all going at once, and rotates interest between them over a year or two
Arguably worse, because it's so close to being a functional game, and yet so very far.

Half a red flag if exactly one person in the group but nobody else shows up to sessions drunk.

Full red flag if it's the DM.

>The DM tells you "I want to craft an experience with this game"

Does anyone else have a problem with smug GMs? I mean, I can handle a hard capaing and not take it personally, but when I see this fucker throwing more and more shit at us, with his shit eating grin, twisting his sausage fingers I just want to punch his face in.

>The player starts the first session talking about his next character and how awesome he is

Go back in time and abort your GM.

yes

>DM fails to properly balance encounters
>DM says "Wow, you sure got your asses kicked! Hahaha!"

That post didn't really read like he took it personally tho...

Incels?

In-game memes.

Intelligent monsters would totally target the spellcaster first.

Goblins? Probably not.

I'm sorry user but Back to the Future will always be one of the most popular time travel stories.

Some kinds of time travel stories are infinitely funner to watch than they are to try and play.

I did this _once_ - the offenders were literally inbred shits who religiously believed their piece of shit burg in the Underdark was (IIRC) Arlon, Pearl of the Underworld.

No class twits with switchblades and delusions of roguehood, no one over level 3 in the town, surviving only due to being off everyone's radar. In the end the players were defeated by these people's sheer shiftiness. They got some profit by selling Arlon's position to some drow.

They never got to see the drow go into the red from trying to get decent slaves out of the deal.

When the campaign is fully of epic-level special snowflakes around whom all the quests revolve.

>"Oh, crit! Good luck getting out of this one, user! Kekekeke"

Broxigar is canon.

Then yes, but there are people invested in making sure you don't fuck up the timestream.

The only reason Broxigar and Co. get a pass is because they get the Legion to fuck off until Azeroth collectively becomes too hot to handle.

Or the homestuck method.

>alternate timelines always end badly and you have to go back to fi that bullshit and keep the main timeline going forward

All of those things are only problems if the GM tries to force some sort of "plan", or a particular "narrative structure"

If he only ever "spawns in ogres" because (and only when) it could make sense for them to be there, and ideally based on some sort of chance roll, then the world is still completely consistent and all the GM is doing is running it moment-to-moment rather than ahead of time.

If the GM has some sort of "plot" he's trying to make happen, practically everything he does is going to be poison to immersion. Because things don't happen because they make sense - instead, they happen because the "author of the novel" wants them to happen just so. Suddenly you have things like status quo resets, plot armor, and general railroading shit.

Instead, if the GM just tries to honestly run the game world based mainly on what has been established so far in gameplay (this is immutable), and ideally based on some notion of what major factions/forces are doing and why (this can be changed if you realize you made a mistake or something, but should be adhered to fairly well), then excellent GMing simply comes down to looking at what's going on in the session and trying to come up with ideas for interesting things that could possibly happen in that moment...
Then you won't have to try to force/finagle anything contrived into happening, to get the state of affairs to comply with the plan.
And that's the biggest issue with the more common, "planned out" GMing styles. That's why we get quantum ogres, and so on and so on.

It's a fundamental error in the most common approach go GMing; the method most intermediate GMs end up employing.
But the truth is that approach doesn't do them all the favors they think it does. It's a crutch, and stories on every level feel much more satisfying when the GM simply facilitates them and then allows them happen procedurally, rather than when they are forced at the expense of player agency.

>player makes their character before they even knows what kind of setting they're playing in
>"Oh cool, can I import my character from [other person]'s campaign?"
>first thing player does is ask for a homebrew race

It's easy when you're writing a novel/screenplay, not when you're GMing a game for real people whose actions you can't control and will do things you don't expect. It's a red flag not because the GM is a bad person, but because it ALWAYS means the GM is biting off more than they can chew and the game will either turn into an absolute clusterfuck with the internal consistency of a jellyfish or just crash entirely when the GM inevitably burns out.

This. I really think beeing richer helps with that kind of questions.

Whats wrong with infinite paralell timelines?

Could be a cool way to have a sliders themed campaign. The DM rolls for the world the players Slide in and maybe whats the Problem in this World.

Going back affects the Future is shit though. I like the Stephen King approach. Small scale changes don't matter (in moderation). Time resists mid scale changes and if you pull of to really change shit you have the apocalypse at your hands.

Nothing after TFT is cannon.

t. virgin

Being a Virgin (except for real a-sexuality and not the meme stuff) is a clear indication that there is something seriously wrong with your Social skills. At least past a certain age (20 imho).

>fuck a prostitute
>suddenly not a freak of society, a social mutant, an outcast with no redemption
I'm not seeing it. Getting your dick wet isn't some grand achievement. You're probably confusing "virgin" with "dateless kissless bachelor".

If you're an adult in today's society being in a relationship without losing the v-card is unthinkable. I don't think you can be a virgin without being a dateless kissless bachelor.
That said, the premise is flawed. It assumes all men are able to think about is sex and if they don't get it it's because they aren't able to, instead of just unwilling.

>Nobody talks to you
>Pay people to talk to you
>shiggy diggy

Obviously i meant acquiring a female due to your Social skills.