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I hope more boardgamers and miniaturers post in the new year.
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# ¿ Jan 2, 2021 22:39 |
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# ¿ May 23, 2024 16:22 |
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Drone posted:This is a great idea for a thread but it leaves out those of us who perma-GM There's a setting thread and a GM advice thread.
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# ¿ Jan 4, 2021 19:54 |
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You know, I'm looking at the website for the product Band of Blades and it says this:quote:
what I'm not seeing there is: Lemon-Lime posted:This is extremely not the case. BoB is very good at doing the exactly one thing it wants to do, which is replicating the early Black Company/Malaz 7th Army feeling from Black Company/MBotF. It's not a generic "Blades in the Dark but you're mercenaries" hack, it's a hack for playing one specific military campaign with a very specific fictional positioning and an understanding of the game's theme that everyone at the table needs to share for the game to work. 90% of the stuff you bring up (Corruption, high lethality, recruits being a shared pool of initially-nameless characters, campaign roles being given out to players, the existence of Scale and Threat as two different axes) exist specifically to drive that fiction. It's not designed to, and will not, work for anything else, but it also makes it very clear that it's not interested in even trying to work for anything else. The ad copy definitely does not "make it very clear that it's not interested in even trying to work for anything else". It has a bunch of fluff, before and after what I quoted, but none of that says "we are telling the story in these particular works and nothing else". The cover says that it's "Military Fantasy - Forged in the Dark". I'm glad that people in the know who are aware what the game was actually for had a blast, but this isn't how the product is sold. It is absolutely legitimate for someone to buy this thinking they're getting something with more general applicability and to judge it by that standard and find it wanting. Absurd Alhazred fucked around with this message at 03:31 on Jan 6, 2021 |
# ¿ Jan 6, 2021 02:08 |
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Leperflesh, if you're soliciting sources for a terminology stickie, I think this would be a good addition: the what I like glossary, which should be relevant to all traditional games.aldantefax posted:Also, and this is maybe going too far over the hill on this one, but since most of TG's discussion is focused on megathreads, perhaps a sub-subforum for those megathreads might be useful...? Probably not the best idea since it just makes accessibility even harder, but just spitballing stuff while it's in my noggin. I think moving away from megathreads would be nice. Your specialized Megadungeon thread is a good example of something focused that allows for more productive discussion, in my opinion. A more focused subject matter makes moderation easier, too, I would think.
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# ¿ Jan 7, 2021 14:41 |
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No pet is an island.
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# ¿ Jan 8, 2021 03:34 |
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Len posted:I'm sorry did you see my chunk of a cat? That happens when you've eaten the one kid.
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# ¿ Jan 8, 2021 04:20 |
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Len posted:She has not eaten a kid under my watch, but she came to us a chunk. Cannot confirm her prior life Has anyone come to you demanding the two pieces of silver?
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# ¿ Jan 8, 2021 04:23 |
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Len posted:N...no, should they have? It's either that or the dog!
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# ¿ Jan 8, 2021 04:31 |
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SkyeAuroline posted:So I'm actually curious. How many of us are in ongoing (or imminent) games & what are they? I'm about to conclude my first campaign and last D&D 5E campaign. Been running for more than a year. Honestly I think that if it weren't 5E and so tied to a bunch of D&D crap I felt compelled to allow in or didn't really think through before I let in, I'd want to continue further. As it stands, one of the players will be running the next campaign, so I'll move back to being a player, maybe running something else for a different group.
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# ¿ Jan 10, 2021 01:17 |
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When I teach my still very rudimentary understanding of Chess to someone who doesn't even have that, I make sure to explain to them the ramifications of bad moves, let them undo them and try something else, etc. It usually leads to me handholding them to a mate on me.
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# ¿ Jan 12, 2021 20:13 |
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It's not exactly what you're looking for but Fair Winds and Following Seas has a sea shanty as part of its mechanics.
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# ¿ Jan 14, 2021 06:02 |
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SkyeAuroline posted:Insightful stuff about how cyberpunk games get it wrong This is really good. You should start a blog so more people get exposed to your thoughts.
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# ¿ Jan 21, 2021 06:06 |
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Tibalt posted:At least Victorian naturalists were basing on their own observations. For a long time European anthropologists would base their work on the travel diaries of administrators and colonialists. Or based on American media?
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# ¿ Jan 25, 2021 06:09 |
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DalaranJ posted:Has anyone else read Jon Peterson's The Elusive Shift? Yeah, really impressive stuff, isn't it? Really wish I could read some of those old zines for myself.
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# ¿ Jan 27, 2021 22:04 |
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aldantefax posted:You could just send me money. Money is pretty dope With all the content you're providing, whether you paywall it or not, I imagine you could get quite a few Patreon or other such type supporters.
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# ¿ Jan 31, 2021 04:17 |
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aldantefax posted:I could do that but I dunno how to get one set up, and I dunno what tiers I would set up. I think that if I did do a Patreon I'd just use the money to hire an editor to go through my ridiculous word soups that I get through? Does anybody know someone who would be willing to wade through like 50 to 80 thousand words and edit it for more public consumption? And, if so, rates?? Some people just have one tier where you're letting people support you. It doesn't necessarily have to be all "$1 to show minimal support, $5 for Discord access, $100 for exclusive weekly one-on-one GM workshops". But I'm not really familiar with it myself.
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# ¿ Jan 31, 2021 06:27 |
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aldantefax posted:Anybody playing any games recently? Kind of the opposite, perhaps, in that I just concluded my first campaign, which was in D&D 5E - but this increases the chances of me living up to one of my year's resolutions, running not D&D. Actually, my other resolution was to play not D&D, which I did recently! Can't really go into it in detail for self-doxing reasons, but it was definitely a breath of fresh air.
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# ¿ Feb 4, 2021 17:32 |
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SkyeAuroline posted:If you find a good one, let me know - I'm still looking for a quality replacement that can sit firmly on carpet and can fit my tall-format books (mainly LANCER and Electric Bastionland, which were too tall for my old case). I've got a bookcase that fits Electric Bastionland and pretty much every RPG book I threw at it other than the oversized Goodman Games stuff that fits sideways: the Sauder Trestle 5 Shelf.
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# ¿ Feb 5, 2021 02:27 |
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Len posted:This is brilliant holy poo poo
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# ¿ Feb 7, 2021 03:31 |
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Is there a good rundown somewhere of what the significance is of roll under vs. roll to target vs. dice pools as mechanical building blocks?
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# ¿ Feb 9, 2021 05:17 |
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Xiahou Dun posted:Target numbers and dicepools should not be mixed at the table because seriously that's too much math for anyone to do on the fly. If you think you can do it, you're wrong and just being an example of the Dunning-Kruger Effect. Like, this isn't me being lovely but if you think you can do the odds of 6d10 at TN7 vs. 5d10 at TN6 at the speed to make a GM judgement, you're either wrong or some kind of prodigy. I'm a nerd enough that I bring that up with PhD math people and the response is always some variation of, "Whoof! Uh... Let me think." That makes me realize that I should have split it into "additive dice pools" vs. "success counting dice pools", and that still wouldn't quite cover Blades in the Dark, I guess. (I think that's what you're getting at here, too?) Anyway, thanks for the responses, all!
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# ¿ Feb 9, 2021 17:42 |
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Leperflesh posted:We've got a CYOA thread tag now, in TG and in TGR. If anyone wants a thread's tag changed, just let me know. BYOB is full of talented sweethearts!
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# ¿ Feb 10, 2021 22:18 |
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I was mulling whether to say something or report it and ended up getting distracted.
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# ¿ Feb 11, 2021 16:50 |
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I think it's been an SA-wide trend to move away from such language, although I see the relevant smiley is still there.
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# ¿ Feb 11, 2021 16:52 |
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aldantefax posted:For example, you can emulate having 3d6 by having 3 piles of cards numbered 1 through 6 and you dealt from each pile Keep in mind that unless you put the cards back and reshuffle, the probability distribution is going to be different after the first deal. That might be what you want to do, but then a 216-card deck with the possible 3d6 results with repetition is what's going to not start going off really really fast and will give an actual same overall distribution when gone through. Depending on how many multiples of 6 cards numbered 1-6 you have in the three piles.
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# ¿ Feb 12, 2021 16:29 |
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dwarf74 posted:So for those who have moved from in-person games to remote via roll20 or whatever... Who's considering keeping it that way even post-pandemic? End of pandemic is when I might be moving to another city, so if the group I'm playing with isn't staying online, that'll be it for me with them. Generally, doing things online turns out to provide access to a lot of options I haven't had before, so I'll definitely keep it as one venue.
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# ¿ Feb 18, 2021 15:30 |
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mellonbread posted:I like playing online, but I strongly dislike the way maps and tokens work in every virtual tabletop I've used. Nothing has ever come close to the ease of just drawing on a chessex grid with a wet erase marker and throwing down a couple random objects to sub for miniatures. I've tried hooking up a graphics tablet and using it in roll20, but you still have to wrestle with the clunky web interface. Tabletop simulator gets you part of the way there, but adds a lot of friction with the physics simulation - pieces falling through the table or ricocheting off each other and flying into space, an undo function which doesn't work because it's trying to remember the position of every 3D object. Yeah, improvising details like this is the first thing I had to give up on when moving digital.
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# ¿ Feb 18, 2021 20:06 |
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Boba Pearl posted:Is anyone willing to do a PBP FATE game? I've always had a hard time understanding it, and I'd love to pick someone's brain on how it's actually supposed to work. I'd be interested as well. I read the core book and it sounded interesting conceptually, and I played a session of Accelerated, but would be interested in seeing more of it in action.
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# ¿ Mar 4, 2021 20:29 |
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When did Hans Landa get an account?
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# ¿ Mar 18, 2021 18:18 |
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Mycroft Holmes posted:drat, too bad. Wanted a WWII game where you could do that. What's stopping you from taking a one-character-per-player WWII RPG and simply having each player build a squad of character? Are you looking for mechanical support for intra-squad dynamics?
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# ¿ Mar 28, 2021 02:10 |
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When I was running in person, if I sat down right after the session, I was able to type down pretty good notes, even if during the session I'd only scribble or write down small highlights. Remotely I do more typing during, otherwise I forget.
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# ¿ Apr 23, 2021 01:10 |
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Even with 5E the group I'm playing with consistently has at least one person playing a very non-human species, and had sometimes very positive relations with NPC groups that were predominantly very non-human. It's really a matter of attitude. The very fact that there's at least one book (Volo's Guide to Monsters) that's essentially dedicated to expanding "monstrous" PCs shows that there's demand for it widely. It can also be very dark and gritty, just have a den of scum and villainy which has a bunch of people from various species working together to cheat and steal from each other.
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# ¿ May 2, 2021 00:43 |
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Going to quote myself from the other thread about Howard:Absurd Alhazred posted:I think the easiest way to judge how racist these pulp writers are is to see what happened when they placed their stories in Africa. Here's a quote that really struck me when I read a collection of REH's Solomon Kane stories more than a decade ago, and while I no longer have the volume, thankfully Australia's Project Gutenberg considers them to be public domain, so I was able to track it down. It's from "Wings in the Night", first published in Weird Tales, July 1932.
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# ¿ May 16, 2021 19:18 |
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You might get some different opinions in the Old School thread, and potentially some suggestions for better modules.
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# ¿ May 25, 2021 03:47 |
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bbcisdabomb posted:I ran the 5e port of Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh and all the bugs in the house nearly murdered a 2nd level party. For a house that has people moving through it on a regular basis there sure are a lot of giant killer bugs. Everything about that house is murder. I'm sure it worked great in AD&D and there's a lot evocative about it but yeesh, nobody gave a single thought to converting it to 5E and stamping "Level 1 Adventure" on it. Wish it had gotten the Goodman Games treatment instead.
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# ¿ May 25, 2021 16:17 |
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People play really elaborate hex and chit wargames, too. Some people just like doing all of those calculations and rolls manually, as Countblanc noted, with other people. Flow is their mode of immersion.
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# ¿ May 29, 2021 02:50 |
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Asterite34 posted:Well that brings up the hypothetical: What situations and kinds of stories lend themselves to the traditional RPG mold (a party of differently classed specialists overcoming challenges with discrete moves and skills and attributes) but which would usually involve no physical combat of any sort? Interdisciplinary research, or an engineering project? Civil Engineering TTRPG?
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# ¿ Jun 1, 2021 16:56 |
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# ¿ Jun 1, 2021 17:56 |
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Leperflesh posted:As we all know, roleplaying game combat originated from tabletop miniature wargames, Gygax's shadow still looms large, and while there are RPGs that don't use minis/grid, the "puzzle" part of combat generally still sticks to mechanisms familiar to wargamers: opposed abilities, chances to succeed or fail at attempts to hinder/injure/kill individuals or groups, maneuver, terrain and cover, morale, and so forth. That sounds a lot like clocks, famous from Blades in the Dark, although introduced either in Apocalypse World or some PbtA game.
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# ¿ Jun 1, 2021 19:38 |
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# ¿ May 23, 2024 16:22 |
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moths posted:Almost no games are actually about violence - they're about violence as depicted in entertainment. Always going to use an excuse to post this (somewhat spoilery for Season 4 of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, I guess) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P89X-j-TWVE As for non-combat mechanics in video games, don't the Frogwares Sherlock games where you get to combine the clues you pick up in a kind of 2d mind-palace to see how they fit together? Return of the Obra Dinn has something similar with the journal you fill up.
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# ¿ Jun 2, 2021 16:19 |