I talk about how my experiences with tabletop RPGs led to my prioritizing reactivity in my video games. Players never do what you expect them to do, so expect that instead of resisting it.
I love these so much. I've been asked a few times "who would you have lunch with out of anyone in the world" and I've picked you more than once, just to chat about stuff like this. The stories behind everything are so interesting, and I really love that you've started doing these.
Thank you. Coincidentally, someone I worked with at Interplay just asked me to lunch this week to talk stories. We’re both in the Seattle area now. Such a small world.
Reactivity is, in my view, one of the fundamental qualities of your games. Not many RPG devs commit as strongly to it. I really hope you won't stop making RPGs now that you are "semi-retired"; we need more Tim Cain games :) Thanks for the video!
You’ve quickly become one of my favorite people to watch, I love your stories and insights on the gaming industry from angles we wouldn’t always expect. Thank you for giving us this great content and for helping to create some of the worlds we all know and love!
One of the things that gets me all warm and fuzzy inside are the "hidden" reactions or questlines in the games. In Fallout I remember that if you have certain amount of Luck you can go into the Khans "Camp of Everlasting Happines(tm)" and convince everyone that you are the resurrected ghost of the leader's father, to the point that he will be like "wait I KILLED you!", then demand the release of Tandi wich of course they do under the fear of Polterguestic retaliation. In Arcanum I remember one sub-quest wich is very hard to complete, it starts by a man asking you to recover some skulls hidden in the Industrial Complex in Tarant and end up with you finding an entire half-ogre breeding program administrated by the Aristocratic Gnomes, who would abduct human females across the continent and shove them into a breeding facility where they got massively raped by ogres in order to produce an entire line of dumb servants for the corporate top 1%. The great thing is that even if you find the evidence of this catastrophe you can't "win" since the evidence and people involved dissapear, wich is infuriating but an amazing demostration on how you CAN'T win at every turn, even as a "hero", the world has elements beyond your grip. In Darklands if you get captured by the patrolls after been a naughty criminal, as a female Leader (and with the correct stats in persuasion) you can make a deal with the night guard in wich you exchange sex for freedom or if you did some work for the Church, when you are at the stake for your crimes, a High Priest will come over and demand you to be released, with the caviat that NOW you OWE the Church a favor. What I mean is that, when the developers make the effort to implement either trivial or obscure reactivity in the enviroment, just for the sake of presenting more option that ain't in plain sight, can turn a piece of software into an experience that stays in memory for decades if not forever, wich in turn made me an CRPG junkie around 2 decades ago.
Reactivity is such an important part of my enjoyment of games, i often can't enjoy games that lack it, especially if they're rpgs. My own game design prioritizes it, at least as much as it can at this stage, and a huge part of that is because of Arcanum.
Reactivity and multiple ways to approach a situation with multiple potential results, the least desirable being fighting, but with the inevitability of it, is what draws me most to RPGs aside from story-telling, which is deeply tied to reactivity and such, so, the more the better, always! Multiple dialogue options that simply allow for different ways for encounters with others to go is a huuuge part of this, of course, and with that I want for more adventure games to incorporate the reactivity+multiple consequences affecting each other through choices and dialogue options. They are out there I know, but the potential for elaborateness hasn't been explored as far as I'm aware as much as I'd like and think would be great. There's an interactive 'movie' called 'She Sees Red' that has multiple choices to be made that vary the story, narrative, outcome, but it's a bit weak-sauce and simplistic, even though the fundamental concept is great. choose your own adventure style
I think the main thing we can take out of these stories is that Grad students are the nicest people and making people to do grad school is the best way to make them nicer to everyone!
That was fun indeed. Thank god you had all those experiences and was able to incorporate them in games we all know and love today. I'm constantly amused with all the D&D sessions you are bringing up. How is it possible to deliver all those story developments right away when players do all kind of crazy things you could never think of beforehand? I mean I can imagine that this is possible afterwards when putting some thought in it (just like after an argument people come up with the best comeback lines, but it's too late), but right away? Hats off.
Tim you are a legend! I still have my big box complete macplay version of fallout! My brother and I grew up playing and loving that game thank you for making my childhood awesome!
My 'origin of reactivity' was this game I stumbled across when I was really young. Played the demo (it came in a CD attached to a local game magazine). It had so many ways to do things. Other games that were more linear started to feel...boring. I rarely replayed or rewatched stuff, and I would replay this game occasionally. The game was called Fallout. And I've been looking for reactivity in games ever since.
I think one of the big things that keeps people coming back to Bloodlines is the amount of reactivity to things like your clan, your skills, your humanity rating, etc. Whose idea was it to make the entirety of a Malkavian's dialogue options different from the other clans, incidentally? Because that is a legendary bit of reactivity to player choice that I imagine must have been a huge hassle to implement, but has now given rise to everyone distinguishing between a 'normal' Bloodlines playthrough and a Malkavian playthrough.
Honestly I like hearing people who grew up with AD&D talk about their experiences because it certainly sounds like a different game but even more so a different mindset. I couldn't imagine not sharing loot and discussing who gets what based on their capabilities. Well I can but it sounds like hell.
Some great advice I once got from a dm was "you decide the what, they players decide the how." I've tried to consider that when making campaigns, and when considering player agency in video games.
Hey Tim. I've watched almost all of the videos on this channel. I'm a game designer and learned quite a few things from them. I want to say thank you. Wanna tell you that even if you will never see me in person I feel that you kinda friend to me. Like you know when you read many books of the same author and he feels like a friend to you. The question. What was the most heartbreaking episode when you realized that the game doesn't support your desire? For example. Right now I'm playing Baldur's Gate 3 and I can't revive the parents of a little girl just because scrolls of reviving don't work on NPCs in the game. My heart is torn. Like really torn apart. Thanks for your videos and games and being yourself and sharing experiences. ❤
10:14 Makes me think of the story of Oohgie The Innocent, how a group got an ogre to follow them as a party member and the crazy shit that happened because of that. Warning, it's a bit of a tearjerker at one point.
you should get a group together and do a d&d/tabletop podcast! i would go CRAZY if you DMed a tabletop podcast tim. ALSO: you should listen to Not Another D&d Podcast. its very funny and is very often an extremely beautiful story.
I always thought it was a good idea to give the player the opportunity to live in the game after a full playthrough. Observe the reaction of the npc. See and feel the consequences of our choices. This has always been lacking in games. Fallout 2 seems to have that capability, but I'd like to see more of how we've impacted the game's world.
That's one thing that's really disappointing in Skyrim, not that you can't go on after the main story but that finishing it has no bearing on the game itself. You still get the dumb comments from Arnies inbred cousins about magic, beer and arrows to the knee. You think they would treat you differently, seeing that you stopped the world from being destroyed.
Hi Tim, thanks for the content! Do you have a situation in your GM experience when players were afraid to choice? Like I often have a situation when the players have a goal and there is a lot of ways to do it they start fumble along and mostly spent time by debating which pass to take. Or try to squeeze as much info about the quest as they could and when they do not get 100% lead to target they will fumble again. Am I doing something wrong and I should give more straight forward story (I honestly think it can be a good idea in my situation) or maybe I do something wrong? I formulated a common goal for them (to protect a settlement they control from the timed thread) and they have some of their own personal goals made by them. And I think they become more focused on their personal stuff than on the common and because of that they become more disjointed.
Yes, some players are paralyzed by choice, and get angry that the DM won’t tell them what to do. That is not my style. Those players eventually found other DMs to play with.
reminds me of playing the party/forum social-game called "Werewolf" or "Mafia" where there is a game-runner/moderator/creator who oversees the players and controls mechanics between players, but the players have to play, and part of playing is decided every 'day' who to kill out of the group of players (a communal lynch mob working to kill the bad guys, so they have to collectively guess at who the bad guy[s] are and 'lynch' them in order to reveal if they were a bad guy or not and continue progressing the game mechanics towards a win condition) some players/groups of players just don't want to choose and rely on the force-mechanic to decide the ultimate result rather than actively choosing themselves and a whole lot more complexity that can suit certain players but not others depending on the individual game mechanics (each game is different because of the variable mechanics) manoman, miss having a good community to play with!
Dude, you make me want to try D&D SO bad. I’ve always been curious about it. But your stories make it seems so so so fun. When other people talk about it, it seems very serious. How do I find people to play with?!
Your grad school group's pixie mascot sounds like the first campaign I ever played with my friends. Our DM had a small band of goblins attack us just to introduce us to combat, but we purposely kept one alive, bound him, and suspended him over a fire to interrogate him. The DM would occasionally repeat that there was nothing else to this goblin group and plead with us to kill him or let him go, but in the process of voicing the goblin he said "Knob doesn't know anything!" After he had a name, we lowered him to the ground and kept him as a mascot for weeks, making him dance for townsfolk (he always rolled well) and just generally having him play jester. Knob ended up owning a tavern in that town after we cleared out the ruffians running the place, and I think he was elected mayor some time later. You really never know what players are going to insist on doing.
I originally wrote off the outer worlds as it was advertised a lot with the whole "FROM THE MAKERS OF FALLOUT AND FALLOUT NEW VEGAS" so I expected more of a spiritual successor with a similar world, but didn't get that. playing it again now, the game is great, entirely on it's own.
I don't know if you have noticed but ttrpgs and d&d made a comeback with OSR (old school renaissance) lately. I would like if you started a ttrpg channel, or just talk more about it! I am curious how you ran games now more and more as you tell about them. I have been reading and playing more ttrpg stuff than computer games for the past few years.
Haha I have the tendency to play the same way over and over as well. And ive played Fallout and Arcanum so many many times (30? 40? More?). But just the option to talk down the master or blow him up with science makes me feel like, even thoug I mostly fight him, the world is so alive and free. Just knowing there is other options makes me feel like my choice is so much more mine and impactful (and as I said the world feels so alive and free because there are other ways to do it)
I also almost always play the same! I need to actually make it through Arcanum, I get to the mines early in the game and can't kill the golems and get frustarted and quit, like 8 times since it was released. I suppose now I can look up on the internet how tf to beat them.
Reactivity has to be tied to permanent story arc changes/alterations too. Not just tunnel 1, 2, or 3 all leading to the same exit from the mine. That can be very hard to story-board and prepare for. Even in one game you can see good branched arcs and others where no matter your choice you end up with the same result. (
Oof that coeraive pregnancy anecdote is pretty rough in retrospect. Thank God for ttrpg safety tools now. Would you ever want to roleplay again, Tim? I'd happily run something. FO1 and 2 were games I played everyday in the same era when I first discovered D&D, and a lot of those early lessons informed much of how I write and design TTRPGs now.
Yeah, that pregnancy thing was weird even then. I never liked romances in RPGs, tabletop or computer, so that whole storyline came from a comment another player made about Catherine's druid agreeing to marry the Dirk the anti-paladin to save the party. That player said that she hoped that the druid and anti-paladin didn't consummate their marriage, so Catherine and I agreed to roll a die to see if she was pregnant. She was. Later the party found a cursed belt that changed the wearer's gender, and it started a LONG uncomfortable discussion about what would happen if the pregnant druid put it on.
@@CainOnGames Romance in TTRPGs is fine, as long as the players agree that's the kind of game they want to play. Plenty of indie TTRPGs have that as a design focus. It's the lack of consent in the forced marriage and pregnancy that becomes an issue.
Agreed. I should point out that the druid initiated the conversation with the anti-paladin, who was just going to attack the party, and suggested sacrificing herself so the party could live. I rolled a really high reaction roll from the anti-paladin, even before adding the druid's 18 charisma bonus, so he agreed. None of this was planned, and the players directed this interaction as much as I did. Still, these things make me uncomfortable because you can never tell if everyone at the table is perceiving this situation the same way. I mean, here I was planning on a big battle in dark castle between the anti-paladin (and his men-at-arms) and the player party, and I ended up with the druid discussing which room in the castle to use as a nursery. It was a weird night. But if anything, it underscores my point that the DM never knows what the players are going to do.
@Graham Gentz Issue? Why is it an issue? Are we so fragile that we can't tell stories and play games the way we want to? There's no issue with the way that group of friends played a game together. If someone was uncomfortable, they would have said so. It was a very interesting story and dilemma.
I do not enjoy this old-school style of tabletop RPG. I prefer long-lived characters I can do character drama with. Also, my primary gaming group is one of those "ultra-cooperative" parties (both in games where I've been the player and the DM).
You're ignoring that the earliest technologies/ideas have to be the most "simple" or fundamental so that improvements have something to build upon, and that concepts (e.g. reactivity) are constrained by the medium in which they are expressed. You can't play Duck Duck Goose in a computer game displayed on a regular screen and expect to have to get up and run after someone when they tap on your actual real-world head and call "Goose."
I love how shocked Tim was to encounter a group that wasn't made of murderhobos.
I love these so much. I've been asked a few times "who would you have lunch with out of anyone in the world" and I've picked you more than once, just to chat about stuff like this. The stories behind everything are so interesting, and I really love that you've started doing these.
Thank you. Coincidentally, someone I worked with at Interplay just asked me to lunch this week to talk stories. We’re both in the Seattle area now. Such a small world.
Reactivity is, in my view, one of the fundamental qualities of your games. Not many RPG devs commit as strongly to it. I really hope you won't stop making RPGs now that you are "semi-retired"; we need more Tim Cain games :)
Thanks for the video!
You’ve quickly become one of my favorite people to watch, I love your stories and insights on the gaming industry from angles we wouldn’t always expect. Thank you for giving us this great content and for helping to create some of the worlds we all know and love!
One of the things that gets me all warm and fuzzy inside are the "hidden" reactions or questlines in the games. In Fallout I remember that if you have certain amount of Luck you can go into the Khans "Camp of Everlasting Happines(tm)" and convince everyone that you are the resurrected ghost of the leader's father, to the point that he will be like "wait I KILLED you!", then demand the release of Tandi wich of course they do under the fear of Polterguestic retaliation.
In Arcanum I remember one sub-quest wich is very hard to complete, it starts by a man asking you to recover some skulls hidden in the Industrial Complex in Tarant and end up with you finding an entire half-ogre breeding program administrated by the Aristocratic Gnomes, who would abduct human females across the continent and shove them into a breeding facility where they got massively raped by ogres in order to produce an entire line of dumb servants for the corporate top 1%. The great thing is that even if you find the evidence of this catastrophe you can't "win" since the evidence and people involved dissapear, wich is infuriating but an amazing demostration on how you CAN'T win at every turn, even as a "hero", the world has elements beyond your grip.
In Darklands if you get captured by the patrolls after been a naughty criminal, as a female Leader (and with the correct stats in persuasion) you can make a deal with the night guard in wich you exchange sex for freedom or if you did some work for the Church, when you are at the stake for your crimes, a High Priest will come over and demand you to be released, with the caviat that NOW you OWE the Church a favor.
What I mean is that, when the developers make the effort to implement either trivial or obscure reactivity in the enviroment, just for the sake of presenting more option that ain't in plain sight, can turn a piece of software into an experience that stays in memory for decades if not forever, wich in turn made me an CRPG junkie around 2 decades ago.
I love your tabletop stories so much
Thanks for sharing Tim. The anecdote about the gloves of dexterity being the price is absolutely ruthless lol
What great stories. Reminds me of playing AD&D and Traveler back in the day. Good times.
6:50 Best use of a sphere of annihilation ive ever heard, that outhouse is not one you want to drop your smartphone in 🤣
Reactivity is such an important part of my enjoyment of games, i often can't enjoy games that lack it, especially if they're rpgs. My own game design prioritizes it, at least as much as it can at this stage, and a huge part of that is because of Arcanum.
Reactivity and multiple ways to approach a situation with multiple potential results, the least desirable being fighting, but with the inevitability of it, is what draws me most to RPGs aside from story-telling, which is deeply tied to reactivity and such, so, the more the better, always! Multiple dialogue options that simply allow for different ways for encounters with others to go is a huuuge part of this, of course, and with that
I want for more adventure games to incorporate the reactivity+multiple consequences affecting each other through choices and dialogue options. They are out there I know, but the potential for elaborateness hasn't been explored as far as I'm aware as much as I'd like and think would be great.
There's an interactive 'movie' called 'She Sees Red' that has multiple choices to be made that vary the story, narrative, outcome, but it's a bit weak-sauce and simplistic, even though the fundamental concept is great.
choose your own adventure style
Great stuff Tim
Not a TTRPG player myself but I love the stories that come out of TTRPGs.
Thanks Tim for sharing your wisdom with us 👍
Plus that's some straight up great storytelling about the Gloves of Dex value being more than the gloves themselves.
Your videos are fantastic, they remind me of Matt Colville in a very good way. Your storytelling is so engaging.
I think the main thing we can take out of these stories is that Grad students are the nicest people and making people to do grad school is the best way to make them nicer to everyone!
ohmyno
That was fun indeed. Thank god you had all those experiences and was able to incorporate them in games we all know and love today. I'm constantly amused with all the D&D sessions you are bringing up. How is it possible to deliver all those story developments right away when players do all kind of crazy things you could never think of beforehand? I mean I can imagine that this is possible afterwards when putting some thought in it (just like after an argument people come up with the best comeback lines, but it's too late), but right away? Hats off.
Tim you are a legend! I still have my big box complete macplay version of fallout! My brother and I grew up playing and loving that game thank you for making my childhood awesome!
I love these stories! ❤
Loved these stories and the takeaways that informed some of design approach for Fallout and later games.
Thank you for sharing!
My 'origin of reactivity' was this game I stumbled across when I was really young. Played the demo (it came in a CD attached to a local game magazine). It had so many ways to do things. Other games that were more linear started to feel...boring. I rarely replayed or rewatched stuff, and I would replay this game occasionally.
The game was called Fallout.
And I've been looking for reactivity in games ever since.
I think one of the big things that keeps people coming back to Bloodlines is the amount of reactivity to things like your clan, your skills, your humanity rating, etc.
Whose idea was it to make the entirety of a Malkavian's dialogue options different from the other clans, incidentally? Because that is a legendary bit of reactivity to player choice that I imagine must have been a huge hassle to implement, but has now given rise to everyone distinguishing between a 'normal' Bloodlines playthrough and a Malkavian playthrough.
Honestly I like hearing people who grew up with AD&D talk about their experiences because it certainly sounds like a different game but even more so a different mindset.
I couldn't imagine not sharing loot and discussing who gets what based on their capabilities. Well I can but it sounds like hell.
Ok wow I wish I discovered your channel sooner, this all feels super important for anyone into gamedev.
This is fantastic, I need more of these stories
Some great advice I once got from a dm was "you decide the what, they players decide the how." I've tried to consider that when making campaigns, and when considering player agency in video games.
Hey Tim. I've watched almost all of the videos on this channel. I'm a game designer and learned quite a few things from them. I want to say thank you. Wanna tell you that even if you will never see me in person I feel that you kinda friend to me. Like you know when you read many books of the same author and he feels like a friend to you. The question. What was the most heartbreaking episode when you realized that the game doesn't support your desire? For example. Right now I'm playing Baldur's Gate 3 and I can't revive the parents of a little girl just because scrolls of reviving don't work on NPCs in the game. My heart is torn. Like really torn apart.
Thanks for your videos and games and being yourself and sharing experiences. ❤
Man, those sound like some awesome DND memories! I have a few that I really enjoyed, but sadly I don't have anyone to play with anymore.
Please make the beep sound louder -at the start- Tim. I'm hooked on that satisfying sound :)
10:14 Makes me think of the story of Oohgie The Innocent, how a group got an ogre to follow them as a party member and the crazy shit that happened because of that. Warning, it's a bit of a tearjerker at one point.
I think it’s great that you enjoy that type of stuff. I would personally find it tedious, different strokes!
you should get a group together and do a d&d/tabletop podcast! i would go CRAZY if you DMed a tabletop podcast tim. ALSO: you should listen to Not Another D&d Podcast. its very funny and is very often an extremely beautiful story.
I always thought it was a good idea to give the player the opportunity to live in the game after a full playthrough. Observe the reaction of the npc. See and feel the consequences of our choices. This has always been lacking in games. Fallout 2 seems to have that capability, but I'd like to see more of how we've impacted the game's world.
That's one thing that's really disappointing in Skyrim, not that you can't go on after the main story but that finishing it has no bearing on the game itself. You still get the dumb comments from Arnies inbred cousins about magic, beer and arrows to the knee. You think they would treat you differently, seeing that you stopped the world from being destroyed.
Hi Tim, thanks for the content! Do you have a situation in your GM experience when players were afraid to choice? Like I often have a situation when the players have a goal and there is a lot of ways to do it they start fumble along and mostly spent time by debating which pass to take. Or try to squeeze as much info about the quest as they could and when they do not get 100% lead to target they will fumble again.
Am I doing something wrong and I should give more straight forward story (I honestly think it can be a good idea in my situation) or maybe I do something wrong? I formulated a common goal for them (to protect a settlement they control from the timed thread) and they have some of their own personal goals made by them. And I think they become more focused on their personal stuff than on the common and because of that they become more disjointed.
Yes, some players are paralyzed by choice, and get angry that the DM won’t tell them what to do. That is not my style. Those players eventually found other DMs to play with.
@@CainOnGames sometimes the best way to do it is to do it till the end) Thanks, TImothy, once again!
reminds me of playing the party/forum social-game called "Werewolf" or "Mafia"
where there is a game-runner/moderator/creator who oversees the players and controls mechanics between players, but the players have to play, and part of playing is decided every 'day' who to kill out of the group of players (a communal lynch mob working to kill the bad guys, so they have to collectively guess at who the bad guy[s] are and 'lynch' them in order to reveal if they were a bad guy or not and continue progressing the game mechanics towards a win condition)
some players/groups of players just don't want to choose and rely on the force-mechanic to decide the ultimate result rather than actively choosing themselves
and a whole lot more complexity that can suit certain players but not others depending on the individual game mechanics (each game is different because of the variable mechanics)
manoman, miss having a good community to play with!
Dude, you make me want to try D&D SO bad. I’ve always been curious about it. But your stories make it seems so so so fun. When other people talk about it, it seems very serious.
How do I find people to play with?!
Your grad school group's pixie mascot sounds like the first campaign I ever played with my friends. Our DM had a small band of goblins attack us just to introduce us to combat, but we purposely kept one alive, bound him, and suspended him over a fire to interrogate him. The DM would occasionally repeat that there was nothing else to this goblin group and plead with us to kill him or let him go, but in the process of voicing the goblin he said "Knob doesn't know anything!" After he had a name, we lowered him to the ground and kept him as a mascot for weeks, making him dance for townsfolk (he always rolled well) and just generally having him play jester. Knob ended up owning a tavern in that town after we cleared out the ruffians running the place, and I think he was elected mayor some time later. You really never know what players are going to insist on doing.
I originally wrote off the outer worlds as it was advertised a lot with the whole "FROM THE MAKERS OF FALLOUT AND FALLOUT NEW VEGAS" so I expected more of a spiritual successor with a similar world, but didn't get that. playing it again now, the game is great, entirely on it's own.
I could listen to your DnD stories for hours. Do you still play at all these days? Especially with your move to Washington?
I don't know if you have noticed but ttrpgs and d&d made a comeback with OSR (old school renaissance) lately. I would like if you started a ttrpg channel, or just talk more about it! I am curious how you ran games now more and more as you tell about them. I have been reading and playing more ttrpg stuff than computer games for the past few years.
I wish I was as creative as you or your DnD playmates! I generally do the same stuff in each Fallout playthrough.. it's still fun though.
Haha I have the tendency to play the same way over and over as well. And ive played Fallout and Arcanum so many many times (30? 40? More?). But just the option to talk down the master or blow him up with science makes me feel like, even thoug I mostly fight him, the world is so alive and free. Just knowing there is other options makes me feel like my choice is so much more mine and impactful (and as I said the world feels so alive and free because there are other ways to do it)
I also almost always play the same!
I need to actually make it through Arcanum, I get to the mines early in the game and can't kill the golems and get frustarted and quit, like 8 times since it was released. I suppose now I can look up on the internet how tf to beat them.
5:39 (I laughed harder than I think I should've at that part).
You should do a video about the hidden quotes from employees taken out of context that can be found in fallout 1&2
Reactivity has to be tied to permanent story arc changes/alterations too. Not just tunnel 1, 2, or 3 all leading to the same exit from the mine. That can be very hard to story-board and prepare for. Even in one game you can see good branched arcs and others where no matter your choice you end up with the same result. (
I would love to watch you dm a campaign.
The magic of RPGs
"Super cooperative" i.e. the way most of my groups have played :)
6:06 Talisman of the Sphere
Never heard of that artifact before, sounds like quite a fun thing to play around with (until someone that doesn't like you gets hold of it).
@@SvengelskaBlondie "With great power comes great responsibility..." ~Some wise DM
Maybe make DM campaigns? For fun or money? "From the creator of Fallout" ;)
Bone utensils for the monk would have been good.
I've got just one question: have Scaramouche did the fandango?
«There are no wrong ways to play» 😉
Oof that coeraive pregnancy anecdote is pretty rough in retrospect. Thank God for ttrpg safety tools now.
Would you ever want to roleplay again, Tim? I'd happily run something. FO1 and 2 were games I played everyday in the same era when I first discovered D&D, and a lot of those early lessons informed much of how I write and design TTRPGs now.
Yeah, that pregnancy thing was weird even then. I never liked romances in RPGs, tabletop or computer, so that whole storyline came from a comment another player made about Catherine's druid agreeing to marry the Dirk the anti-paladin to save the party. That player said that she hoped that the druid and anti-paladin didn't consummate their marriage, so Catherine and I agreed to roll a die to see if she was pregnant. She was.
Later the party found a cursed belt that changed the wearer's gender, and it started a LONG uncomfortable discussion about what would happen if the pregnant druid put it on.
@@CainOnGames Romance in TTRPGs is fine, as long as the players agree that's the kind of game they want to play. Plenty of indie TTRPGs have that as a design focus. It's the lack of consent in the forced marriage and pregnancy that becomes an issue.
Agreed. I should point out that the druid initiated the conversation with the anti-paladin, who was just going to attack the party, and suggested sacrificing herself so the party could live. I rolled a really high reaction roll from the anti-paladin, even before adding the druid's 18 charisma bonus, so he agreed. None of this was planned, and the players directed this interaction as much as I did.
Still, these things make me uncomfortable because you can never tell if everyone at the table is perceiving this situation the same way. I mean, here I was planning on a big battle in dark castle between the anti-paladin (and his men-at-arms) and the player party, and I ended up with the druid discussing which room in the castle to use as a nursery.
It was a weird night. But if anything, it underscores my point that the DM never knows what the players are going to do.
@@CainOnGames It's cool, Tim. Aside from the surprise pregnancy twist this is what I automatically think of as a 'reverse Odysseus/Cerci'!
@Graham Gentz Issue? Why is it an issue? Are we so fragile that we can't tell stories and play games the way we want to? There's no issue with the way that group of friends played a game together. If someone was uncomfortable, they would have said so. It was a very interesting story and dilemma.
I do not enjoy this old-school style of tabletop RPG. I prefer long-lived characters I can do character drama with.
Also, my primary gaming group is one of those "ultra-cooperative" parties (both in games where I've been the player and the DM).
Can you patch Fallout 1 so I can walk thru NPCs blocking the doorway 🥺🥺🥺
The game came out in 1996 I don’t think there are gonna be patches anymore lol
Reactivity?
Bold claim even from creator or fallout
You're ignoring that the earliest technologies/ideas have to be the most "simple" or fundamental so that improvements have something to build upon, and that concepts (e.g. reactivity) are constrained by the medium in which they are expressed.
You can't play Duck Duck Goose in a computer game displayed on a regular screen and expect to have to get up and run after someone when they tap on your actual real-world head and call "Goose."
Playing as not intended and breaking games is one of greatest and the most fun things to do.