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Ice Phisherman posted:I use a lot of imagery when I write horror and I hosed with my players' expectations just enough that they'd keep from turtling up and killing everything but would still be paranoid. Is the smugness part of your technique? Because if my GM sounded like this, I'd be a little unsettled, too.
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Jun 23, 2011 08:38
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TheAnomaly posted:strange creatures from beyond time and space wear the bodies of dead men like suits Now you've gone and made me want to run a Dark City-inspired campaign.
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Jun 23, 2011 09:49
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Doc Hawkins posted:Is the smugness part of your technique? Because if my GM sounded like this, I'd be a little unsettled, too. Smugness is always part of my technique. 
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Jun 23, 2011 09:56
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Hal Gill username posted:You can sort of help that along by suddenly asking which hand their character is using to open a door, or something along those lines. Thanks for all the tips everyone, I feel a lot more confident that I can actually achieve the feel I am aiming for. And if not maybe I will have them try CoC or something similar, I don't know why I feel the need to terrify my friends.
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Jun 23, 2011 16:15
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I'm a very inexperienced GM, all I have under my belt are 2 Star Wars d20 sessions from like 4 years ago that went really well in that my friends really liked them, but I kind of ran out of plot really quick and didn't know what to do next. Sometime this summer my friends want me to start running a game in the Fallout setting and I'm really excited about giving it a try. We had done a couple sessions after Fallout 3 came out that our usual GM ran and we did them using Shadowrun. It's been a long time since we've played Shadowrun but from what I remember it's a fairly simple system, works well with the setting and I have all my GM's old notes for equipment and enemies so I'm probably gonna stick with it. Besides all of my GMs notes all I have prepared so far is a list of locations and descriptions of places that have been mentioned so far in Fallout Lore. I plan to start the game where the party will all be part of a trading caravan going from some point to some other point(that the players will choose beforehand) and depending on where those points are I'll plot out things that happen. I plan on preparing a list of the major factions like NCR, BoS etc and their territories before the game begins as well. My goal is that with a lot of world building preparation it won't be too difficult to make up plot and insert set pieces on the fly. So can I get any advice on general Shadowrun GMing, and encounter building? Or if there's an obviously better system for me to use, it's not too late for me to change, though I don't know how capable I will be to convert Fallout stuff into the system. I'd also appreciate any ideas for encounters or plot hooks. TL;DR: Give me advice for the Fallout Themed Shadowrun game I'm planning on running.
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Jun 25, 2011 20:10
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Check out Apocalypse World. If you still want to use shadowrun after that, fine, but you really should take a look because it's really cool.
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Jun 26, 2011 11:47
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Yeeeeah when you say Shadowrun I don't think "simple". There's a lot of generic systems that could run the interactions of tribals, deathclaws and power armor quicker and easier. I second the AW recommendation - it'd be almost perfect if you just take out the Brainer and other Psychic Maelstrom stuff - but if you want more focused advice, the Shadowrun thread should help.
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Jun 26, 2011 17:40
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Doc Hawkins posted:Yeeeeah when you say Shadowrun I don't think "simple". There's a lot of generic systems that could run the interactions of tribals, deathclaws and power armor quicker and easier. I remember the basic challenge mechanic being fairly simple, but again it was a couple years ago when we last played. I'm not sure why we chose Shadowrun the first time to be honest, but I'm hesitant to use a different system since we have a lot of stuff statted up already for Shadowrun. I'll look into Apocalypse World, and I'll post in the Shadowrun thread and see what happens.
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Jun 26, 2011 17:48
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Epi Lepi posted:TL;DR: Give me advice for the Fallout Themed Shadowrun game I'm planning on running. One of the most memorable set pieces there, was when we had just got ourselves an automobile and we were driving around post-Apocalyptic Reykjavík when a gang of eight bikers (on four bikes) started chasing us down, armed with AK47s. My friend's Solo leans out the window, shoots one of the guys who's driving a bike with a loving domino effect where they pile up, and most of them just die in a big loving traffic collision. (and then I failed a driving check and flipped the car) Or being stuck in a walled off city, where feral ghouls roam the streets. The main thing you should play up is that people are poor, miserable and desperate, with a few guys in every settlement which pretty much have all the good poo poo. (Traders and Law Enforcement) especially outside of ruled lands. Any act of kindness tends to be surprising to NPCs. (Unless they have the advantage of a strong positive community, or something. Which is easily exploitable, he he he) The people who are friendly are only friendly because they want something out of the PCs, be it their business, not getting shot or something extremely dangerous. They discover the Brotherhood of Steel? drat, are they pissed. So they're just going to nap them, pop on some slave collars and make them do some very dangerous work, to see if they can be trusted. (Or maybe a peeved off member of BoS gets to them first and gets them to go in undercover as recruits from "off North" so he can get revenge on the Elder and usurp him. Some guy pays them to go pick up a product, which turn out to be slaves. Works best if it's their first interaction with slavers.
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Jun 26, 2011 17:54
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Epi Lepi posted:I'm hesitant to use a different system since we have a lot of stuff statted up already for Shadowrun
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Jun 26, 2011 18:28
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Jimbozig posted:Sunk costs. If you do Shadowrun you'll have to stat up more things in the future and that's more work. In apocalypse world you don't really stat anything up (well, I guess you decide how much armour dudes are wearing and what weapons they've got. Still a lot less work.) because the GM doesn't roll dice. Really? That sounds odd.
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Jun 26, 2011 22:31
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It works pretty great in practice. Whenever the PCs are in a situation where things they're trying to do might go wrong in an interesting way (the game is less vague on what constitutes a situation like that than I am being), they roll appropriate dice and see if they succeed without incident or encounter complications. The job of the GM is to get the PCs to do stuff by threatening them with bad stuff that will probably happen if they do nothing. These can be personal or communal, physical or intangible, but they all prompt the PCs to go out and be bad-asses. You can find free "playbooks" for the different classes on the game's website. They're like character sheets and character creation rules all in one, and can give you a fair look at the sort of poo poo that goes down in the game. e: Here's what I was thinking of, and actually it has a lot more than I remembered. It starts with the class-specific stuff, then moves on to moves everyone gets, then a summary of the GM's business...it's not a replacement for the book, but it's an extremely good introduction to the idea. Doc Hawkins fucked around with this message at 23:58 on Jun 26, 2011 |
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Jun 26, 2011 22:47
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Epi Lepi, as someone who has both played in and GM'ed Shadowrun games and small campaigns, let me be the first to say that unless you're planning on a very high powered sort of Post-Apoc game set in the Puyallup Barrens it's not really fitting for the system, as the power curve and balanced (haha) is suited for crazy implants, cyberware, and gun specs. Also the rules are overtly clunky as hell, although playing it a lot with everyone in the same page can minimize the effect of it. Personally I'd recommend a simpler system that either caters to what you want or can do the same thing. Apocalypse World is good, as is Octane and Savage Worlds. Savage Worlds even has a non-fantasy Shadowrun version called "Interface Zero" which is fantastic. Savage Worlds is also only 10 bux for the explorer edition you'll need to play.
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Jun 26, 2011 22:58
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Apocalypse World is on the cutting edge, as far as I'm concerned, and people have made some pretty ingenious adaptations of it for various settings; some aspects of it would be fantastic for Shadowrun/Fallout . . . . BUT . . . there is the non-trivial matter of setting the playbooks so that they match what your "world" (as played by you and your players) is like. I like Shadowrun's (now thoroughly-detailed) setting more than any aspect of its mechanics, which are (to me) a huge mess. I cannot think of any aspect of its mechanics that actually supports the theme except for the orgy of gun stats . . . and Fallout has fewer guns than Shadowrun, so . . . . Were I in a hurry and just wanted to tell me some Fallout stories, I'd just use Savage Worlds and tweak some gun stats to give the same feel as the "special" guns of Fallout 3. If I had time, I'd definitely look at adapting Apocalypse World; it feels truer to the whole Fallout series, and as an added bonus you'd have incentive to have sex with Moira.
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Jun 27, 2011 00:24
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Shadowrun clearly could have benefitted from having sex-triggered special moves.
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Jun 27, 2011 01:52
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Doc Hawkins posted:Shadowrun clearly could have benefitted from having sex-triggered special moves. The old Fallout series also let you pimp out your spouse (not in the sense of adding lit hubcaps) and gave you a perk if you were in a porn shoot, if I recall aright, so special sexings are totally part of the Fallout world.
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Jun 27, 2011 02:11
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homullus posted:The old Fallout series also let you pimp out your spouse (not in the sense of adding lit hubcaps) and gave you a perk if you were in a porn shoot, if I recall aright, so special sexings are totally part of the Fallout world. Maybe so but that doesn't mean that it should become a vital part of our Tabletop experience.
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Jun 27, 2011 05:11
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I was googling to see what other people who have done Fallout campaigns have used and came across this: http://falloutpnp.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page a full pnp version of the Fallout system. It seems to work on d% for players and looks pretty solid from what I've seen, pretty intuitive if you're familiar with the games. I'm pretty excited to see if it works out.
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Jun 27, 2011 07:19
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Arrrthritis posted:Maybe so but that doesn't mean that it should become a vital part of our Tabletop experience. Neither should pistol use, horseback riding or being able to steal the shoes of the people you kill, but I'd still like these options. Seriously, this is what "fade to black" is for. You just find out how comfortable everyone is with it and just leave the option open if some guy or girl wants to spice hir life up. No one (sane) expects a loving scene. I have lived in the states though, and saw Watchmen in a packed cinema. So I understand some people are ridiculously uncomfortable with anything sexual. But the point is our world is sexual and it's something that pretty much affects every living breathing creature. It's stupid to act as if it doesn't, unless it's a genre thing. If your players get uncomfortable at this exchange:  Hey, we just got back from the dungeon, I almost died three times. I'm going to the inn for booze and hookers. Alright, how much are you willing to spend? uhhh... 100gp? You spend the evening and night at the best inn in town, with four girls and more wine than any of you can hope to drink. You all pass out shortly before sunrise. Bob, where do you go off to?Then your players have a problem.
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Jun 27, 2011 11:02
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Yeah, but there's a difference between that and sex-based special moves. "Vital part" is what he said, not "something that gets brought up ever"
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Jun 27, 2011 12:36
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And to be clear, I meant that Apocalypse World and Fallout both have sex on the list of "things for which the makers of the game wrote content," so the two match up pretty well. The sex in Apocalypse World is upsetting and/or undesirable to some people, but the game rules for it could be used to match the sex that is also in Fallout (i.e. sex with some game-mechanical effect). Clearly you can play Fallout and Apocalypse World without that stuff and should feel free to do so if that's what you want to do.
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Jun 27, 2011 15:26
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Endorph posted:Yeah, but there's a difference between that and sex-based special moves. "Vital part" is what he said, not "something that gets brought up ever" I'm okay with stories having loving in them (also okay with people not being okay with that), and when that's so, character-driven consequences to loving are a net benefit to play. AW's Driver is my favorite example from the game: if he fails his Cool roll, he takes a penalty until he proves that the person he had sex with "doesn't, like, own him or anything." This is a game that attaches mechanical weight to the PCs' shared history, including, say, causing or healing damage to one another, so having specific mechanical consequences for physical intimacy doesn't seem too out there.
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Jun 27, 2011 22:21
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I've started a new 4e campaign after at-least 4 years of RP-drought, with a group of players that are 100% new to pencil and paper RPGs, and I'm having an awesome time. I'm running a lot more combat encounters that I'm accustomed too, because my players are looking for a tactical experience and fourth edition makes that whole process many times easier on me. I'm curious what other DM's do for mapping solutions? We're using some classics, like a big battle-mat we can draw on with wet-erase markers, as well as dungeon tiles and some pre-printed posters. I've been tempted to do some awesome 3D papercraft setpieces, and I'm pretty certain I will atleast give it a try. Does anyone have experience with doing papercraft dungeons? A fair amount of searching turns up two different pretty good looking brands (https://www.fatdragongames.com and http://www.worldworksgames.com/). Has anyone used either of these papercraft systems, and which would you recommend. I'm leaning towards the Fat Dragon stuff because it looks like it might be quicker to build new layouts, which could be nice. Is this stuff as neat as it seems? I might only end up doing it for a few big scenes, but I think it could be an awesome wow-moment for my players.
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Jun 27, 2011 23:49
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Fat Dragon stuff is fun because you can get some glue, some scissors, and make a night out of it with your players helping you assemble the stuff. However putting everything together can be time consuming and in order to get some nice big sets you need to assemble quite a bit. All we use these days is the crates/tables/chairs/other furniture pieces for when a player or enemy tosses one or breaks it. Just that alone has added some more depth into the game. The walls were nice but it was quicker and less hassle for us to just quickly draw out the map on a wet erase battle mat.
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Jun 28, 2011 02:04
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Does anyone have any good resources for puzzles? I especially mean mechanical puzzles, symbolic ones etc. I have a player in my Dark Heresy group who loves puzzles and plays an almost purely intellectual Adept, so it's his "thing", but I'm having a hard time satisfying this. I'm good with plots and intrigue as well as action, so there is investigating to be done, but I cannot come up with a puzzle to save my life. There are a few plot hooks for getting them in though - the players are investigating the secrets of a long-gone human civilization, that a hostile cult is also interested in figuring out. Lots of opportunity for pulpy ruin-exploring, and the Adept player wants to figure out as much of the civilization's writing and symbolism as he can, helping the plot along. That's definitely something I could use with cool, dynamic puzzles, but I have no idea where to start.
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Jun 30, 2011 14:09
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I was involved in a game where the GM had a bit of success providing players with those wooden puzzles that have a "trick" to opening/closing/whatever. Once you solved it, you got a small mechanical bonus for the rest of the session. I can't remember what the plot justification was, but it was kind of cool (unless you couldn't solve your little puzzle, but then you got to keep trying in the next session). I know that's not what you're looking for, and since none of my players are really into puzzles I can't help much, except to say that you shouldn't make a puzzle a bottleneck in your adventure. That can be super frustrating.
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Jun 30, 2011 14:51
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The problem with puzzles, of course, is that while some people find solving them more engaging than rolling dice, sometimes the characters are explicitly better or worse at puzzle solving than the players. Any solution to this ancient problem (quick, someone name the first gygax dungeon with a secret hidden by a riddle) will necessarily have to strike a balance between those two poles of direct engagement and mechanical weight, and the optimal balance will depend on the game. Or put more generally, sometimes you make your character good at something so you're always dealing with that thing, but sometimes you do it so you never have to worry about that thing. The most recent method I've heard of is in the new Fantasy Flight Lovecraft adventure boardgame, wheremental challenges are puzzles that the players have to solve in a number of moves determined by their character's "intelligence". But of course they have the advantage of huge playtest hours to come up with a set of balanced puzzles, so YMMV.
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Jun 30, 2011 17:43
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Guildenstern posted:Lots of opportunity for pulpy ruin-exploring, and the Adept player wants to figure out as much of the civilization's writing and symbolism as he can, helping the plot along. That's definitely something I could use with cool, dynamic puzzles, but I have no idea where to start. There's a type of puzzle that I got to experience as a player that was fun and seems well-suited for what you're doing. A ruin we were exploring had rooms and devices labelled in a language the characters didn't understand but knew enough about that they could make educated guesses. When we wanted to try to translate a piece of text, we all made skill checks and were then given a partial translation with missing characters, the number of filled-in characters determined by how well we did. I believe he also removed all the spaces and punctuation in order to make things a little more difficult. It created a nice situation where character skill mattered, but so did the player's ability to puzzle things out, and, advantageously, reasoning out the puzzles was helped by thinking about the context of the ruin.
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Jun 30, 2011 18:04
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Guildenstern posted:Adept player wants to figure out as much of the civilization's writing and symbolism as he can, helping the plot along. That's definitely something I could use with cool, dynamic puzzles, but I have no idea where to start. Perhaps a interesting way to do it is to provide puzzles and traps that reveal a certain amount of lore regarding the civilizations writings in the solving of them. If the ancient humans revered something approximating the Greco-Roman pantheon, then a puzzle where the PCs race through a maze filling with water that is decorated with the story of their equivalent to Neptune would be appropriate. Or an electrical puzzle for their Zeus, etc. Basically theme the puzzles to reveal the secret histories. As for where to find ideas, I usually steal them from comics, books, video games, and TV. God of War has some good ones, Goblins the webcomic has some good puzzles as well, from time to time.
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Jun 30, 2011 18:19
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You do have to be a bit careful with puzzles, they can frustrate people far more easily than other mechanical obstacles. A friend and I once ran this pseudo-larp thing in some bushland. It was more like a themed scavenger hunt, with some "history of the world" made up by him and cryptic rhyming clues to things written by a wizard (no, it was me, I admit it). The players had shitloads of fun, roaming around through the bush and solving riddles and finding clues and orienteering and all sorts of things, but then they got stuck. They got stuck on what we'd thought was one of the easiest puzzles. There was a locked box (combination lock), which was 'made of adamantium' (the rules said you couldn't just break it open). They knew the combo was hidden in the Ogre's Diary, which they had. They also had a rhyming clue about the code being hidden in plain sight. There was pages and pages of gibberish in the Ogre's Diary (which looked really cool), and the combination was written inside the front cover, not hidden but surrounded by doodles, with the word "combination" in mirror writing above it. They tried to decipher the gibberish. One girl even got part of it translated somehow (I think she was making it up, to be honest, because it was just gibberish, I know, I wrote it). They worked on that loving thing for two hours, then decided that they'd missed a clue and went roaming round trying to find it for another couple of hours. They didn't want help, they could get this. They spent another hour or so on decoding the diary. Twilight arrived, and we called a halt for the day. Next morning, I told them how to find the code. They were super disappointed about missing it and didn't enjoy the final half of the game (they'd seriously loved the first half). So yeah, be careful with puzzles, especially if your players are super stubborn about figuring it out themselves.
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Jun 30, 2011 18:29
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This is, as experimentally determined, the character of such open-ended problems as you might present. You jump suddenly from having no idea what to do to being right up against the solution. The jump is fun to make, but the lack of progress beforehand is the sticking point.
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Jun 30, 2011 22:22
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Sir Kodiak posted:There's a type of puzzle that I got to experience as a player that was fun and seems well-suited for what you're doing. A ruin we were exploring had rooms and devices labelled in a language the characters didn't understand but knew enough about that they could make educated guesses. When we wanted to try to translate a piece of text, we all made skill checks and were then given a partial translation with missing characters, the number of filled-in characters determined by how well we did. I believe he also removed all the spaces and punctuation in order to make things a little more difficult. This is gold. I could scatter elements of it around the ruins, progressively revealing more lore as they explore. Then, when they're close to the solution, I could up the pace and throw in a bunch of complications - making their way back through the rooms they had already explored, setting up devices to open the way through/escape/get the MacGuffin/whatever while facing newly-appearing enemies and environmental hazards... Yep, I think we have a winner, I smell a good adventure climax right there. Plus it helps avoid the bottlenecking problem AlphaDog mentioned. Some players enjoy riddle-type stuff, but it doesn't fit my style at all - I GM very cinematic games and emphasize good pacing and tension above all else. A set of several devices and labels to decipher means the characters get pieces and hints of the puzzle by exploring and adventuring, but there's still a bunch of thinking to do in the meantime.
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Jul 1, 2011 12:20
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This is for 4e, but I don't think that should make any difference. When my group gets back together in a couple months, I want to give them an airship. They will be entering level 11, and I have story reasons (excuses) for why they'll get it after defeating them BBEG. I want the party to have a "home base" of sorts, but the campaign (typical fantasy homebrew) has ended up sprawling, which makes a fixed castle or keep difficult. What I need help figuring out is how to limit it so that it doesn't ruin the mystique of wandering the dangerous world and exploring. They'll be heading to a new continent soon that they know almost nothing about, and I'd like to prevent trivializing the fun and fear of infiltrating a mindflayer-ruled island kingdom by having an "I go there" button. On the other hand, I don't want to gimp their new toy too much. I was thinking of things like saying it can only fly for 2 days straight (or something), and has to land to recharge. I'd prefer not to just make arbitrary "no fly" zones, although I could make it clear that flying over a city is a good way to get noticed in a bad way. The continent is new, so I could invent any reason for dangerous travel (plagued by flying baddies, high mountains, weather). Also, airships are so rare that they've never even seen one before (i.e. I'm shoehorning it in), so I could adopt any "magical" reason for a limitation. Basically I'm free to come up with any limits, I'm just having a hard time thinking up how to do it. Does anyone have any experience with giving a party an airship and its effect on exploration?
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Jul 4, 2011 07:38
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It's a cool idea, but I can see the potential problems with it. You will not be able to have a perilous overland journey again without taking the airship away or disabling it. That's something you're going to have to live with. Maybe the skies are particularly perilous at night on the new continent? There could be giant nocturnal birds or dragons that wouldn't be interested in eating a human or even a cow, but would definitely want to eat/fight something the size of an airship. Or nightfall could bring perilous winds/conditions to the higher atmosphere. Both necessitate travelling only during the day. Perhaps the airship has limitations on it's altitude? Either the magic dries up as it gets too far from the ground (I'm assuming magic airship since you said D&D) or huge winds up high make flying there impossible (they come lower at night making night air travel impossible or horribly dangerous). That lets mountains become acceptable barriers (if you need to grog out, the ship only functions in a narrow band of distance from the planet's core or from sea level or something, if your players aren't dicks you won't need to mention it beyond "you'd need to fly too high to cross the mountains"). Or the government has an air-defense system and you need to fly "under the radar", meaning that even popping up over a small hill will get you shot at. Landing to recharge is a good idea. Make sure it doesn't need enough recharging that it becomes useless (like 8 hours charging for every 4 hours flown or something). No-fly zones are a pretty horrible idea if it's "a wizard did it" but not if it's "the Imperial Air Regiment doesn't allow flight within 10 miles of a city or major road without permits (you can't get the permits without proof of residency)". Or just operating an airship is arbitrarily deemed illegal by the government (who've never seen one before but it looks like a real safety hazard). That sort of thing allows you to have an exciting airship battle / chase when the PCs decide they really need/want to fly somewhere anyway. Of course, the airship will be a huge status symbol and demonstration of power. Until the mindlfayers or whoever field a fleet of 20 airships against the PCs or have a super big airbattleship or something. (Could even be that the PC's airship is super rare on their continent but kinda common on the new continent, and the one they have is an old merchant ship rather than a sleek new warship. If you wanted to be a dick, that is. I did something similar with Spelljammer and everyone loved it though.) Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 08:26 on Jul 4, 2011 |
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Jul 4, 2011 08:24
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I'm thinking one simple alternative. The airship is mobile, but it's slow...like, below walking speed slow. If they are actually doing anything more than wandering around for the scenery, they need to hoof it. It also maneuvers like a whale tied to a blimp. Make it huge as well, and reasonably well armored. Something like this. The end result is a ridiculously cool base, you can use it for force projection if they have a crew for it and weapons(which well, why not?) but by the time it gets to any location, everyone knows its coming, and you could have gone there, smote evil and came back in the same time. So there it is, a giant mobile town. You have living quarters, workshops, entertainment areas, prisons, etc. Or you could go with the flow and accept that any land/sea travel based adventures have been eliminated. Give them gliders or some other means to engage in air combat. Airships won't fit in dungeons, so those still work. You could even combine with the previous, have it be huge and slow, but have turbo propulsion that consumes exotic fuel that can push it to a decent speed.
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Jul 4, 2011 09:17
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veekie posted:I'm thinking one simple alternative. The airship is mobile, but it's slow...like, below walking speed slow. If they are actually doing anything more than wandering around for the scenery, they need to hoof it. It also maneuvers like a whale tied to a blimp. Huge and slow is kind of what springs into my mind when I hear "airship" (I always think Zeppelin, not Blimp, so you have the connotation of "goes quite slow, is huge and vulnerable, still can't carry much"). It gets you there, without worrying too much about terrain, but it can't fly high and it can't fly fast and it can be shot down by a dude on the ground with a flare pistol. But a hovering fortress works too, and is way cooler. It could need a certain number of crewmen to keep it flying somehow (It runs on their psychic vibrations? It floats when they think happy thoughts? There are 300 dudes "below decks" scraping pixie dust off pixies to keep it running?)
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Jul 4, 2011 09:34
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Keep in mind, also, that a giant airship is going to need a giant flat piece of terrain to land on. If the evil wizard is hiding out in an abandoned mine high in the mountains, the party is going to have to park their airship in the foothills and do some climbing. (Either that, or drop a king-sized rope ladder out of the side of it and work out some way to keep the ship from drifting off as air currents push it around while the party is gallivanting off in the dungeon.)
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Jul 4, 2011 09:44
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Use a cage/gondola lowered on chains I guess? You'd need multiple anchors anyway, might as well build elevators into them. Never need to land.AlphaDog posted:Huge and slow is kind of what springs into my mind when I hear "airship" (I always think Zeppelin, not Blimp, so you have the connotation of "goes quite slow, is huge and vulnerable, still can't carry much"). It gets you there, without worrying too much about terrain, but it can't fly high and it can't fly fast and it can be shot down by a dude on the ground with a flare pistol. Now lets see the actual mechanics...you could run it off a reactor powered by say...a fragment of Primal Chaos and Primal Law(or a pocket universe, minature portal, stacks of demons chained to pedals, shard of everlasting fire immersed in a decanter of endless water or <insert macguffin here>. The infinite chaos energy surges towards its antithesis and is consumed, and some hardcore magictechery taps the flow to turn gears and giant fans. All this engineering needs a crew to keep going, what with the number of moving parts, and definitely needs a spellcaster or two to keep an eye on the reactor. Lights, heat etc are similarly drawn from the system. And then you need people to feed the peoples, people to do the loading of supplies. So you have a skeleton crew of maybe 100 people, and three shifts so they don't actually go nuts, so 300, with about a half dozen spellcasters 'magitech engineers'. Goddamn thats a lot of random magibabble for an elfgame.
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Jul 4, 2011 11:50
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Yeah, but it sounds loving cool. Honestly I wouldn't bother with designing it myself, I'd ask my players "If you had a magical floating base, what would it be like and how would it work" and they'd come up with something very cool and probably "balanced enough". Edit: That technique can have hilarious unintended consequences... Once, one guy was put in charge (by the rest of the group) of the logistics of maintaining the fortress they all shared. He pretty much glossed over food supply, building maintenance, waste disposal, and stuff and wrote this huge treatise on lighting the (mostly underground) place with a system of mirrors and lenses (and bonfires on the surface at night). He was crushed when a fellow player said "dude, why not just use continual lights spells everywhere and ditch the loving lenses?". The look on his face was priceless, but then everyone felt pretty bad. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 16:49 on Jul 4, 2011 |
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Jul 4, 2011 12:22
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You can also require them to land or moor the thing reasonably frequently with simple things like needing to take on fresh water. Going 'ashore' for supplies in unknown terrain could be a pretty fun sidebar adventure sort of deal.
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Jul 4, 2011 16:18
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