So me and a few of the other players from our local group have finished playing/watching "Let's Play" videos of Undertale, and it got us thinking, how would a game where the heroes have the ability to simply talk down the monsters work? Has anyone ever accomplished that to a large scale in a tabletop setting?Ever talked down the BBEG?
>>43539111
I think that DVV allowed you to do this.
It works, but some times it's a lot more satisfying to just take the simple solution. Not everything needs to be a completely balanced 50/50 gray, you know? People have biases.
>>43539111
How would it work? Players RP with a GM and the GM responds while trying to kill the players.
>>43539122
DVV?
>>43539129
Yeah, sometimes it is just easier to kill the opponent instead. I can get that. I mean, the group I'm in thoroughly enjoys wrecking faces when things go sour.
>>43539140
That's what I was asking. I genuinely don't know, but it's just an interesting concept. I was wondering if anyone on /tg/ has attempted it. I know I've heard about people playing full pacifists in tabletop, after all.
>>43539111
In my games it's something entirely covered by roleplaying rather than rolling any dice or wearing down a social defense track or anything like that.
It relies heavily on the GM setting up hints and giving cues that maybe murder isn't the only solution -- describe enemies as fighting defensively or half-heartedly or not going for obvious openings, as seeming nervous or reluctant to fight, or even having enemies offer to parley can go a long way toward making a game feel a bit more like a living world than a murderhobo simulator where everything exists to be killed.
One example of this was when the party raided a necromancer's lair. The necromancer had his undead minions but had also hired a mercenary who the party knew of, and who had a reputation for being a big badass. During the fight, the necromancer and mercenary got into an argument, and the merc got caught in the AOE of one of the necromancer's spells. The merc focused on defending instead of attacking and said "A thousand gold and I'll fight for you instead" and the party agreed, so they made a new ally right then and there.
Being good people, they didn't just kill the mercenary afterward. They paid him, and I made him a recurring NPC.
>>43539111
It exists. Its called Planescape:Torment.
In the entire game, there is only one fight that you HAVE to settle with violence to progress the plot. Every other encounter you can either run away from or settle with words. Presuming, of course, that you are smart/charismatic enough to unlock those options.
That fight you need to have? Isn't even the final boss. There are, like, 3 different ways to make the endboss give up without firing a shot.
Fantastic game.
>>43539672
I've seen stuff like that happen in a few of the games I've participated in. Can't say that it happened without dice rolls though. But concepts like that might be just what I'm aiming for. I appreciate the input, and might start working on forming some habits of "humanizing" NPCs a bit more. At least, when it gets to be my turn to run the next campaign in our group.
>>43539111
>playing/watching "Let's Play" videos of Undertale
Fuck you you goddamn worm Let's Play videos are the putrid sewage of the internet today, fuck you for helping to perpetrate these atrocious pile of turds I bet you didn't even play the game did you? You just watched some fucking gayboy blonde make le funnay facees xD at the camera wile sliogging through it like a fucking retarded man-monkey a man-monkey with no fucking decency or respect for himself or others fuck you rat-basterd son of a gun go jump a cliff and die
>>43539767
You could also keep track of enemy morale (even a simple low/mid/high instead of numbers) and have them surrender or run away if things are looking especially grim. If the PCs pull off some sick moves or have great rolls or outright kill their leader and end up steamrolling, that could make at least a few of the remaining foes consider their true allegiances and their odds of surviving.
Another good way to handle these things is to have encounters begin with talking, with the enemies asking the PCs questions: Who are you? What are you doing here? What do you want? Why are you so heavily-armed?
>>43539811
You...you do know that lets play videos have literally existed for more then 10 years or so now, right? Hell, technically even older then now.
Or are you one of those guys that just literally just jumped on the band wagon of hating lets plays when facecam started?
Also.
Please.
Thats at least few years bad luck with all that spilled salt.
>>43539842
I actually did a bit of that before. Can't say I ever kept a general morale check of enemies. Normally if things looked especially grim, maybe a save vs. fear, but that's about it. I'll keep a morale track in mind.
>>43539875
lets plays were always scum and you are scum too for defending them. "oh a bloo bloo I'm not defending them wha wha" yes by being so arragagant as to refer to this injustice as salt you are fuck you, yuo're just a elipsees abusing hairbrained shota fuck I hope you choke on a fucking duck you bastard
>>43539166
Disney Villains victorious
>>43539811
/v/ please calm down
>>43539892
A morale track isn't necessary but it can be helpful. It's just a matter of humanizing your enemies and trying to think of the situation from their perspective. A group of heavily-armed vagabonds comes stomping in, hurling spells and out-fencing your best swordsmen, outright killing three of them in less than a minute's time? Fuck, dude, get out of there. They are not fucking around.
Also, be mindful of what you're humanizing. Not every enemy needs to act this way, and some NPCs might be from warrior cultures that favor a "warrior's death" or are especially fatalistic, possibly looking for a place to die because they have nothing else. Others could be crazed fanatics who believe death is just one step in getting closer to their god. Consider beasts and other less intelligent creatures, too, and how a cornered animal becomes especially ferocious.
>>43539934
Ah! I was interested in trying that out with my group, but it didn't quite sell well with them. A shame, really.
Sometimes, there is no such option.
>>43539875
LPs have had a kinda shitty past.
At first, generally knowledgeable people were doing them for fun, but as soon as people started making money off them, you had nothing but tons of autists with no idea what they're doing jumping on the bandwagon because NOW I DONT HAVE TO GET A REAL JOB BECAUSE VIDEOGAMES ARE MY JOB.
That time has passed. But instead, now we just have a bunch of douches who are aiming for the PDP kid demographic bucks, and other fake 'nerd celebrities' who don't even like video games doing this shit while being forced TV personalities.
The quality is better now, but the educational type of Let's Play is gone, in favor of TV variety show style commentary. It's pretty sad.
>>43539111
>Has anyone ever accomplished that to a large scale in a tabletop setting?
Oh my god... YES! Get out /v/. For the last few decades even in the most combat drive RPG has. An RPGs main selling features is that:
>You can think of a clever way around combat!
Barring that, even video games have done no-combat before. One of the best examples:
>>43539710
Undertale has NOT done any brand new ideas that shake the gaming world.
>Saying undertale sucks!?
No. It's one of the most fantastic game I've played in a long, long while. Hardly innovation except for it's zany style thou.
>>43540031
As someone who prefers informative and skilled LPs, the Youtube LP bubble just fills me with disgust and I wish it would hurry up and pop.
>>43540070
Undertale was fun and it made me feel some feelings that I hadn't felt since Earthbound, and it gets points for having jokes that actually made me laugh, but the important thing to do regarding that game is to avoid the fanbase. They're autism on the level of Kingdom Hearts, Homestuck, MLP, Steven Universe, and Sonic the Hedgehog.
>>43540024
>Asgore is smiling
BUT THAT'S WRONG
>>43540111
Where are you seeing a smile? He has a grimace going on.
In Undertale it is a design decision to allow you to finish each fight by 'talking'but talking is actually just its own combat minigame. You could easily make this design decision in a PnP as well.
>>43540111
That's just the shape of his beard. His lack of a smile is directly below it.
>>43540091
It's important to remember that "fan" is short for "fanatic".
When someone starts making their life revolve around 1 given thing for any extended period of time, they get weird and disconnected from everything else.
>>43539111
Let me tell you about Basic D&D, Reaction Rolls, and Morale.
We're talking maybe a 28% chance that the monsters you meet will even want to fight in the first place if you've got average Charisma (and if a fight starts then chances are that it's 50/50 that one side will run away or surrender rather than fight to the death, but that's not all that relevant here.)
Except for the stuff that'll attack you no matter what, like rabid dogs and whatnot, and stuff that won't stop fighting until they're dead like zombies (hence turning, which is basically the Cleric forcing a morale roll). Other stuff that fights until the end includes berzerkers and lizardmen, IIRC, while stuff that attacks on sight includes stuff like Gelatinous Cubes, Ghouls, and various racist monsters (Cavemen attack Ogres on sight, so if you have one join the party you'd better hope you don't meet the other.)
It's not quite Undertale in terms of "you never need to kill someone", but it's up there. If you've got a 18 charisma guy and get a +2 roleplaying bonus then you'll literally never need to enter combat unless you're facing something that'll attack no matter what or flub your roleplaying!
Also, of course, Mentzer changed Morale a bit so that monsters need to check it individually after first taking damage and after being reduced to quarter health, in addition to Moldvay's group checks when the first death occurs or half the monsters are unable to fight.
That means that unless you're fighting Lizardmen you could probably get 'em to surrender if you're lucky.
And then there's nonlethal damage, of course, which started out as a specific rule for capturing dragons but basically just means getting -4 to-hit in exchange for not killing the target.
And remember, that's a game from 30+ years ago! Roleplaying games have come a long way since then, and not everything is a D&D3+-style combat slogfest. There's games out there that don't even have rules for combat!
>>43540091
The bubble already has popped. Which is why every major LP youtuber is part of some big management firm or another. The only way they can stay afloat is with corporate bucks turning them into generic e-celebs.
Also merch and Patreon. The thing is that Educational LPs predated Web 2.0, and now that the internet is popular, there just isn't any incentive to produce such content, when you are at risk of being sued, having your videos and pictures pulled down, and otherwise being shoved out of sight because you don't have LEL RANDUM COMMENTARY.
Also Undertale a good. It is a $10 game that is clean and polished, and delivers a solid experience. It's not perfect, but it shows a lot of love and effort.
Love and effort I don't see a lot of GMs put in, generally.
>>43540221
One could easily blame video games for the whole "you only get exp if you kill it" attitude that seems to pervade tabletop these days.
>>43540248
It's pretty sad, because the great grandaddy of CRPGs, Wizardry even had lots of friendly encounters.
>>43540244
The Youtube LP "industry" is also heavily quantity over quality. Even if a content creator has the ability to put up 30-40 minute long videos, they choose to split it all into 10-15 minute chunks and release them one at a time over the course of days just to game the system that favors quantity.
Thanks everyone for the suggestions and references! I'm glad to have gotten some feedback on this topic. I want to be a better GM, and the way it's leaning towards, adding humanization to NPCs can make things a ton better, both for me and my players. The tips I've seen so far in the thread will definitely help in getting a better gaming experience for my players.
Thanks, /tg/.
>>43540281
Cheers, big ears! I think with this advice you'll find your players will get more invested in the world because they'll feel like their characters are a part of it, rather than apart from it. It will also allow you to more easily identify That Guys, because they'll get bored and complain about not getting to kill stuff.
>>43540248
Well, modern video games. Even old CRPGs like Fallout gave xp if you resolved things peacefully. In fact, usually you got more exp for resolving things peacefully than for fighting.
>>43540281
You need to remember the motives of the characters. Why is the BBEG fighting? If they are just a madman who wants to control the world, no amount of talking is going to solve the issue. If their motivation is revenge, it's possible to make them change their mind etc.
>>43539111
>So me and a few of the other players from our local group have finished playing/watching "Let's Play" videos of Undertale, and it got us thinking, how would a game where the heroes have the ability to simply talk down the monsters work? Has anyone ever accomplished that to a large scale in a tabletop setting?
You'll want to look into Hunter: The Vigil/Reckoning, Exalted, Monsterhearts, Dresden Files or Legends of the Wulin. These games allow non-lethal conflict resolution by defaulr, be it due to having factions dedicated to non-lethal monster neutralization, a huge amount of social magicks or types of battle that influence people in a way that essentially allows you to punch people into being your friends or at least think twice about messing with you again.
>>43540274
Interestingly enough, the new Youtube Red subscription service favors long videos over short ones.
>>43540248
>One could easily blame video games for the whole "you only get exp if you kill it" attitude that seems to pervade tabletop these days.
Maybe? Even old D&D still had you get XP for killing things, it's just that you got a whole lot more from treasure.
Three quarters of the XP came from treasure in Moldvay, for instance.
I can kind of see why Final Fantasy et. al. cut that in favor of just getting XP for killing monsters, though. It seems like it'd get messy and hard to balance, although you could probably do it just fine these days when you're not limited by the likes of the NES.
>>43540497
But that has been the YouTube algorithm for the past two-ish years. Minutes watched vs view count.
You sit at one end of a table and say things like "Hey, come on now, please stop fighting." and after every sentence the DM throws some white ping pong balls at you, if you dodge enough of them and say sort of the right things the enemy's Diplomacy HP goes down. Repeat until they have 0 Diplomacy HP then roleplay out the rest of the 'encounter'.
I've had a DM allow this to happen with a lesser boss. Our bard spent most of the fight throwing his voice using magic, pretending to be a god, until the bad guy went insane due to failed will saves
>>43539111
My players could have and they didn't.
>>43539811
you sure seem to care a lot about this
have you considered examining your priorities in life
>>43539111
I have in an exalted campaign. I had to figure out why the BBEG was so angry, so for the first little arc we not only came out with him being a friend, but potentially a protector of the humans because he wanted a cult to worship the fallen.
I would absolutely stab monsters while the rest of the party tries to talk/hug/fuck it.
>Have you ever talked down the BBEG?
I once DMed a large, one-off group of friends where the town we were in was attacked by necromancers. In true murderhobo form, we all joined up, looted the town (everyone was dead, zombiefied, and gone.) Afterwards, we followed the incredibly obvious zombie trail and assaulted the necromancers' tower. We ended up talking to the head necromancer, who was an adventurer back in his day. We smoked a joint with him and talked.
Then we stabbed him in the neck, killed all his apprentices and zombies, looted his tower, stole the secrets to life and death, and burned everything to the ground. Goddamn murderhobos.
>>43539919
Boatmurdered was a Let's Play.
>>43539111
>a game where the heroes have the ability to simply talk down the monsters
I could see an Undertale RPG having a full "social combat" system. There'd be a number of social actions (cheer, flirt, terrorize, spare, etc), to which monsters have resistances, vulnerabilities, or immunities (only in very rare or extreme cases), and players would have varying levels of competency in them. Each social action could have different effects, altering both physical and social resistances (terrorizing someone before flirting with them is unlikely to go over well, for example). Of course other stuff would impact it too, like the players' prior actions, the context of the encounter, and how hardened the monster's emotions are.
I'm not sure if it would be appropriate to give monsters "diplomacy hp". I'd consider using some kind of mood/disposition chart, wherein some positions (depending on the monster) indicate that a creature can be spared. Monsters would start in different places depending on the situation, and moving them toward a "sparable" position would be a major goal in most encounters.
>>43539111
exalted's been doing that. 2e has a more nuanced system but it's kinda canned by "i ignore that and start combat"
3e's "attacks with benefits based on the opponent's intimate feelings for specific things" system is great though
>>43548057
I'm not agreeing with that other guy, but to be fair, that isn't a great defense. the second half of boatmurdered was pretty shitty (when they started building shrines to themselves, and when that guy who behaved like a 10-year-old got his 2nd and 3rd turns at the helm), almost shitty enough to make me regret reading it at all
>>43540274
That's why I like the TBFP guys. 2 videos a day, normally around 30 minutes, EACH. They do actually work for their shit.
>>43546093
That Guy spotted
>>43539111
I just did a genocide run and didn't even bother with the neutral or pacifists routes. That me had the end of the genocide route really understood that half the reason I play rpgs is to feel good when I see the numbers go up as I get stronger by killing more enemies.
>>43539111
You can talk the final boss down in Fallout New Veges
>>43540024
They really should have made the mustache portion of the beard a tad thicker.
>>43551256
Closet Psychopath detected
>>43551516
>Plays an rpg
>Doesn't kill the monsters
Weirdo.
>>43551637
>plays a game whose slogan is "The RPG game where you don't have to destroy anyone"
>destroys everyone
>doesn't bother trying anything else
Nope, you're still a psychopath
maybe i'm spoiled by games like Fallout or >>43539710 which actually questions on whatever you do in game but I felt Undertale never actually explored character behavior at it's full extent. I mean, it has a very black and white morality as the game goes on (probably intentional despite what the demo used to say). Particularly nobody can be an asshole except you in this game and i would've expected backstabs in some cases as much as the former would have. The whole thing quite shallow beyond deconstructing the main RPG/vidya troupes
>>43553367
>very black and white morality
If you only do genocide and pacifist, sure. I did a neutral run, killing some and sparing others.Some characters were pretty understanding, saying things like "well, you were thrust into those situations", and they were pretty reasonable about it, given the circumstances.
>nobody can be an asshole except you in this gameMuffet wants to kill Frisk, eat him, and sell his soul because he didn't buy a 999 gold donut. Also Flowey, Chara, and Asriel in most of their interactions with the player. Papyrus throws Frisk into a goddamn dog kennel if he wins in a fight
>i would've expected backstabsPapyrus rats out Frisk to Undyne. In genocide, Flowey tries to backstab Frisk, and Monster Kid tries to stand up to Frisk. So that's at least three.
>The whole thing quite shallow
>[undertale doesn't] actually question whatever you do in game
You might be trolling, but you could be doing a better job of it.
>>43553590
>i would've expected backstabs
Same anon. I missed at least one before.In genocide, Sans offers to spare Frisk, but kills him instead if Frisk accepts
>>43553590
only for a few exceptions sure but most of the monster there don't even know what the fuck they are doing or why they want to kill you aside from Asgore half-heartedly promising them freedom for bringing him human souls to break the barrier. Muffet is really doing it just so she can help her spiders like the other monsters are doing by raising money rather than purely just trying to feed you to her oversized cupcake pet
and of course they are going to backstab a murdering prick in genocide but what i mean is that no monsters would do that to you if you go pascifist as some people would've dickmoved at that point.
the only things that it would like to question you is either the equivalent of
>would you smooch a ghost?
or
>do you like hurting other people?
>>43553880
I can almost feel the goalposts moving.
>>43554793
fine then. it's a very perfect game that ends all other games and so smart that it lets you question what could change the nature of anybody who plays it. truly a paragon in video game design don't you think?
>>43555371
*spare*
>>43555408
*You won!
*You earned 0 Xp and 15 gold
>watching lets plays of Undertale
why ruin the game for yourself?
>>43553590
>muffet
Actually she tries to kill you because she thinks you're there to kill spiders. If you wait out her attacks she's informed you've never killed a spider (even on Genocide: there are no spider enemies) and offers to let you go. Also if you have a spider donut or cider from the sale in the Ruins, it counts too if you eat it in front of her.
>>43553367
>black and white morality
I wouldn't say that.
In the neutral route where you kill some stuff, Sans says that he understands why you did what you did, but raises the question if it was necessary, but I get what you mean.
At it's core the game is a game about making cool friends, it's not meant to be "realisitc" in that aspect (Asriel mentions that the world isn't as nice as the underground and being a nice guy doesn't always work.)
Of course the genocide route is obviously evil since you are tracking down every person you can find and killing them in a war of extermination.
>>43558796
If you buy stuff from the bakesale in the ruins the memo says you supported the spiders in the ruins instead.
>>43551256
Why not play literally any other RPG?
Running things by the book a social focused character in 1st ed Exalted could talk basically anything he could communicate with into being his bitch.
>>43558840
Because hipster tears are delicious.
>>43558892
Ever seen what a D&D 3.5E Diplomancer can do?
That's a prime example of why static DCs in a system where modifiers are a dime a dozen might be a bad idea. At least in Exalted they're INTENDED to be charismatic ubermensch.
>>43539842
This image would be so much better if the face was static and unmoving on the head as the body seizures about
>>43559195
>>43559195
>I dislike popular and well-received thing regardless of quality.
>Lol you guys are hipsters.
>TFW I played a gentle monster hunter who only ever killed as a last resort, knocking foes unconscious when possible
>The other players hated him
