Lamentations of the Flame Princess is made of lies
lumpley:
James (and Eero):
Huh, well.
In Lamentations' GMing text, I see very definite statements about horror and the weird, including strong systemic support (like not including monster writeups), and I see no emphasis on dungeon crawling at all. So I'm running it as a horror-and-the-weird game, with few or no dungeons. So far it's perfectly suited, as I expected! All that's surprised me is how insistently it's brought the Vance out in me and my NPCs.
Now, that's in me and my NPCs, not in the players or their PCs. I don't know how to say this strongly enough. There's no sign yet of the PCs being psychopaths or scumbags, and maybe one or another of them will turn out to be, individually, but I really don't see any systemic pressure toward it in the game. Unlike my NPCs, I expect the PCs to, mostly, have real compassion and a sound sense of justice.
Most concretely, they don't get XP for treasure they've gained by criminal enterprise, only by adventuring. This is such a clear statement! It gives the PCs this impulse away from the lazy self-interest that, lacking it, nature and I give every NPC in the world.
-Vincent
lumpley:
Ron:
Yes.
1. Who knows! Maybe half of them had read the game individually and brought their own conclusions about it with them. I said "I have this historical weird horror game I've been wanting to design, see if Lamentations does it so I don't have to, yeah?" I also said "don't expect dungeons," and pointed out the picture in the book of the PCs talking to the farmers where we the audience can see a disemboweled body hanging in the barn.
2 & 3. We met to create characters and made them out loud, in public. The step-by-step is quick: roll some stats, choose a class, derive some derived stats, buy your crap. I brought a name list. I said "if magic has been a big part of your life before now, choose chaotic alignment; if you're a priest or nobility, choose lawful alignment; otherwise, choose neutral."
I oversaw lightly. At this point, I believed that I was well-oriented to the rules, and that the process of character creation would put the players in the same orientation - that's how I design my own games, after all! So as character creation proceeded, and the players asked questions that I didn't expect them to care about and began to form shared backstory that I didn't expect them to want, I was surprised. I free-associated halflings' place in the world for Rob, and deferred to Meg about dwarfs' place in the world; that was fine. I blinked dumbly at Eppy when he said that his character was a bearded lady magic user who'd been kept locked up in a tower by her father, also a wizard, until quite recently. That was ALL wrong, but I'd clearly already pre-allowed it. If I was going to impose limits on character creation, I should have thought them through in advance and said them up front.
Then there was this funny piece where Evan said "my guy's a sailor!" and as a group they decided they had a ship, but I was like "have you looked up how much a ship costs? It's in there," so Evan decided that he was a shipwrecked sailor who'd just washed up on the beach and at the same time everyone else decided that they'd all just signed on a ship, which left Evan frowning and scratching his head. Ultimately, with some fumbling around about the voyage, I just grabbed it and said that they were arriving at the New World on this miserable little ship, and they could suck it up. The New World it is.
Oh, this is significant! I'd envisioned characters who were down and out, kind of desperate, hungry, but the game gave them money and weapons and allowed them (by pure default) to create their own non-desperate starting circumstances.
3. Briefly:
Meg's dwarf Van Joost. He's rich and has kind of a lot of crap, because Meg rolled high for starting cash and dwarfs enjoy encumbrance advantages. Meg plays him like I say practical and worldly, with an agreeable but firm personality.
Sam's cleric Brother Leobald. He's an older man who's come to the new world to preach God's word and stamp out sin - he's let on that he's seeking truly unusual sins to stamp out, the usual kind don't do it for him anymore. As a cleric he gets to cast only one spell a day, and he has to choose it in advance, but he can choose from all the cleric spells.
Eppy's magic user Brom. She's a bearded young woman passing for a man, quite tall and robust, with chain mail and a sword and one spell a day. (Eppy: "I rolled perfect stats for a fighter, so I'm making a magic user. It makes for a poor magic user, but it's the only way one can survive level 1!" I don't know if he's right about that. He might be.) She also gets to cast only one spell a day, chosen in advance, but Eppy had to roll to see which 3 spells she could choose from each day. He was happy to get sleep and charm, and I forget the third.
Rob's halfling Leike. She's a teenager, but so small physically that I've decided that my NPCs will take her for a child. Halflings are good at bushcraft and stealth and stuff. Rob made up a backstory about how she's been driven from her home because she has a disease that only halflings get, but I'm ignoring it. If they meet more halflings I'll have to decide what I think about it, but they probably won't.
Even created a specialist sailor whose name and details I don't recall, and dropped out before the first session. He dropped out for grad school reasons that aren't suspicious, but I wouldn't care if they were. We're joking that I have a pool going for who drops out of the game in which order and how soon, and we're a little surprised that Evan dropped out before Rob did, but it's not all the way a joke. The truth is that I'm playing this game entirely for my own entertainment, so no questions asked and no hard feelings for anybody who ditches for any reason.
I can't have answered your questions all the way. Help me out?
-Vincent
Callan S.:
Quote
Callan, your thing about a chesslike approach to play may or may not apply to Lamentations sometimes, I don't know, but it's off the mark for this game.
I suppose I'm looking at psychology upon contact with whatever rules/structure/material is there, given the noted dissonance between GM text and rules/structure. Given that the two examples I gave are wildly different and yet would feel perfectly normal and "How you play" to the individual, the whole Vance style of play may just as much be another wild tangent as well, and yet, just as much as with the others, feel perfectly normal, the status quo and "How you play".
James_Nostack:
Hi Vincent, I may have misread you before so I'm just checking to see if I've got this right:
So the problem is that char-gen let you down as a DM because the process didn't really orient the players to the type of Weird Horror stuff you had in mind? Like, their questions and ways they built their characters didn't take the moral dimension of Weird Horror role-playing sufficiently into account . . . and when you realized they were oriented all wrong, it was an "Aw, fuck it, let's just do Vance" type of moment?
Looking over the Lamentations of the Flame Princess character-creation rules, it looks almost exactly like D&D, except that there's a bit of flavor text associated with each class. Did the players get to read that flavor text? The stuff for the Fighter and Magic-User in particular at least hint at what the game is going for, atmospherically. But without that, it just looks like the creation rules would lead to a standard D&D sandbox with a creepy atmosphere, a custom Thief class, and some easy-to-use encumbrance rules. Getting Weird Horror would probably require a stronger hand from the DM.
Have you read Death Frost Doom? I haven't, but it's widely regarded as one of Raggi's better efforts and an example of what he was hoping Lamentations of the Flame Princess would lead to.
lumpley:
Callan: Maybe, but what other people might find normal isn't on point.
James: Ah, good! No, not quite that, but close.
Character creation, not my pre-play musing, is the real start of the game. Character creation revealed to me that my pre-play musing was just musing, that I was the one oriented all wrong. I grasped at the time, and then it because quite clear over the next couple of days, that what was missing from my orientation was the Vance.
There's no "aw, fuck it, let's just..." for me trying to do Vance. This game so far is some of the best situation creation I've ever done!
-Vincent
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