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I always ask the players for feedback after a session, and in a recent one they said "you should really use more female NPCs, it was really odd only ever meeting guys, you don't even need to do a voice or anything, just mention that they're women but they're doing all the same things you need them to do as NPCs" and I was mentally hanging my head in shame because I felt like such a grog right then. That's my story.
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Feb 19, 2015 19:16
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gradenko_2000 posted:That's my story. When I was running Mummy I found doing the post-session write-ups a very clear indicator of my biases when it came to default NPC assumptions. The pre-planned ones had a decent gender balance but the spontaneous ones were men way more than half the time. So now I make a conscious effort to make my spontaneous NPCs female as well, and that seems to be working out well.
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Feb 19, 2015 19:34
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A note on style that threw me. When talking about gender, it's odd to say "male" and "female." It makes you sound like a Ferengi. Certainly those sexual characteristics broadly inform gender, but this would have been a more natural way to put it, for me: "I'm striving for a more inclusive representation of gender in the art of Strike! This means the art will include as many identifiably masculine characters as feminine, as well as characters somewhere in the middle and also completely nongendered characters."
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Feb 19, 2015 19:37
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You know what? Why not just use Species for goblin?
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Feb 19, 2015 19:41
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Galaga Galaxian posted:So which move is my example above? Use up their resources, turn their move back on them, or put soneone else on the spot? I'm guessing mostly the last one. There's always overlap between them. Figuring out exactly which GM move you're doing doesn't really matter, since they're really just formalised guidelines for what actions you should have NPCs take; as long as the action is covered by at least one GM move, you're fine. That said, that sounds like putting them on the spot and using up their resources at the same time, which is a bit too harsh for a 7-9. "Turn their move back on them" is more for stuff like having e.g. magic backfire (or the move make the PC do something dumb, but that doesn't work as well for an attack).
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Feb 19, 2015 19:54
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potatocubed posted:When I was running Mummy I found doing the post-session write-ups a very clear indicator of my biases when it came to default NPC assumptions. The pre-planned ones had a decent gender balance but the spontaneous ones were men way more than half the time. When I found myself doing the same thing, I just rolled an die every time I introduced a new NPC. Odd is man, even is woman. Keeps things at a decent ratio.
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Feb 19, 2015 20:09
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Harrow posted:Dear chat thread, Depends on how granular you're actually being. CRPGs of any stripe can have a lot more variables going on at any given time because there's a machine to keep track of them and compute them all on the fly. In my experience as a colossal dork who cares about these things, you can reasonably expect your players to remember when they have a bonus, and what that bonus is if it's simple. Otherwise the onus of running slashing vs. bludgeoning is on you, and you'll eventually forget when you're running a game. As an example, I'd go with a flat system. If your weapon cuts, it does Slash, period, no "well if I bend it turnways," etc. That bonus is best expressed as a straight up plus to damage, preferably a small number. because introducing percentages or multipliers means you have to deal with players being bad at multiplication and rounding. People seem to remember +1, +2, +5 and +10 the best, so base that off your general assumptions about however much damage your monsters are calibrated to take. I'd recommend against a penalty for using the wrong kind of weapon. For starters, they're already not getting a bonus, and if you're not able to switch equipment on the fly, you're basically penalizing your players for not reading your mind and knowing a certain kind of enemy was going to show up.
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Feb 19, 2015 20:15
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Harrow posted:Dear chat thread, Maybe trim it down to Cut and Bash, instead of having Pierce be its own thing? I dunno. Also, remember that in Persona only physical attacks have a crit chance, while elemental magic is more accurate and can proc weaknesses easier.
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Feb 19, 2015 20:45
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woke up this morning with the burning urge to find a game to play a bard in
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Feb 19, 2015 21:09
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grassy gnoll posted:Depends on how granular you're actually being. CRPGs of any stripe can have a lot more variables going on at any given time because there's a machine to keep track of them and compute them all on the fly. My current plan, damage-wise, is to have the damage bonus for hitting a weakness be fairly small, like you recommend, but you get a Press Token (shared by the whole party) that can be spent at any time to take an extra action. Because that can cascade out of control, there's also a limit on how many Press Tokens can be generated per target per round (one, or maybe even just a flat one per round), and how many the party can accumulate at a time (number of party members minus one). So your real reason for targeting an enemy's weakness isn't to do an individual big hit, but to generate extra actions for the party. I'm not sure how I want to handle resistances yet. Part of me wants to have them really matter--like, we're talking half damage if you resist a damage type--but that's mostly because I want players to feel like their resistances really matter. With physical things, physical resistances and weaknesses are both relatively rare (for the reasons Captain Walker outlined), but at the same time, every character is going to be capable of multiple damage types. Like, in Persona 3 and 4, I think there's a grand total of two characters who can't at least cast one type of elemental magic (Shinjiro and Aigis from Persona 3), and even they both have multiple types of physical damage at their disposal. Also, because enemies can generate Press Tokens by hitting players' weaknesses too, I'm going to have a few ways for players to help each other shield their respective weaknesses, like a talent that lets you send your Persona to body-block an attack for an ally. I'm 100% on board for your suggestion of a flat system. If nothing else, I can justify it by saying that, because Persona is all about ideas influencing the real world, then it's not the physical sharpness of your sword that matters--it's the idea that "swords cut things."
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Feb 19, 2015 21:15
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Blockhouse posted:woke up this morning with the burning urge to find a game to play a bard in My favorite bard is Johan from The Adventure Zone.  Imagine him speaking in like the biggest dullard sadsack voice.
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Feb 19, 2015 21:22
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grassy gnoll posted:I'd recommend against a penalty for using the wrong kind of weapon. For starters, they're already not getting a bonus, and if you're not able to switch equipment on the fly, you're basically penalizing your players for not reading your mind and knowing a certain kind of enemy was going to show up. Definitely this. Damage penalties are bad, they mean that the reward for your planning is status quo instead of an actual advantage.
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Feb 19, 2015 21:22
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gradenko_2000 posted:I always ask the players for feedback after a session, and in a recent one they said "you should really use more female NPCs, it was really odd only ever meeting guys, you don't even need to do a voice or anything, just mention that they're women but they're doing all the same things you need them to do as NPCs" and I was mentally hanging my head in shame because I felt like such a grog right then. e: I was very happy when one player gave me a matriarchal My Lovely Horse fucked around with this message at 21:31 on Feb 19, 2015 |
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Feb 19, 2015 21:27
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What are some good resources for commissioning art? I’m looking in to getting a series of pieces made for a project, a mix of illustrations and portraits, and an evening spent browsing the freelancer sections of DeviantArt and RPGnet were nearly enough to drive me to drink with their terrible scribblings and unintelligible posts. Granted, I’m limiting myself with the need for a style that isn’t All Anime All The Time, but still.
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Feb 19, 2015 21:35
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LightWarden posted:Definitely this. Damage penalties are bad, they mean that the reward for your planning is status quo instead of an actual advantage. Well, here's an idea: maybe resistances aren't really a thing for enemies, but they are for players. But they're not passive. Basically, I'm planning on a turn-based battle system with cyclical initiative, but I want to grab that PbtA-style "the GM never rolls for things" approach. So when an enemy attacks a PC, the player rolls an active defense, rather than the GM rolling the enemy's attack roll. Maybe one way you can defend yourself in that case is to use your Persona's resistances. You'd roll plus Understanding or something and on a success you null the damage you take, and on a partial success you take half damage. (Maybe there's a feat you can grab later on that turns that null into an absorb.) Maybe that could even work for covering your weakness: you roll plus Diligence and on a success the enemy loses their bonus damage and doesn't gain a Press Token, and on a partial success you just take the extra damage but the enemy still doesn't get an extra action.
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Feb 19, 2015 21:39
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I think I would shy away from explicitly differentiating stab/cut/bash, in part for the reasons stated and in part because it's pretty rare that it actually makes the game more interesting. Now, funny enough, the Persona video games kinda do punish you for not being psychic and bringing the wrong elements to fights. But they also let you switch Persona on the fly (for the MC) and in general expect you to make several trips through a dungeon before you find the configuration that works the best, neither of which work well for a pen and paper version.
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Feb 19, 2015 21:54
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Persona Q brought the three damage types back because Etrian Odyssey already had them anyways, and Q is just an EO game with a different skin. Persona 3's different damage types were just annoying or in the rare cases they applied against enemies, made things too easy because there were a lot more enemies you could hit weaknesses on just with a normal attack. In a tabletop, it'd also throw in the old dumb 'well you can't use that kind of weapon because it wouldn't be as good' that limits people's choices of weapon. Considering how goofy weapons can get in Persona, limiting people's choices by damage type would mostly just be lame. If I wanna punch shadows with a pair of puppets on my hands, just let me. sentrygun fucked around with this message at 22:38 on Feb 19, 2015 |
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Feb 19, 2015 22:36
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Yeah, I'm on board for just lumping all physical stuff into "physical," then. Now to decide if I want to include earth spells like in pre-P3 games.
Harrow fucked around with this message at 22:46 on Feb 19, 2015 |
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Feb 19, 2015 22:39
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Most people familiar with Persona are familiar with it because of 3 and 4. I'd suggest appealing to that for the most part just because it's what people picking it up would almost certainly be interested in and understand. There's also already a lot of elements for the average 3-4 person party to deal with just in P4's list, you probably don't need more.
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Feb 19, 2015 22:43
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About weapons: it's interesting to note that there actually aren't a lot of non-standard weapons in Persona games. Persona 1 and 2 mostly feature melee weapons and actual guns (Baofu's kickass coin-slinging being the exception, of course), and Persona 3's weapon selection is surprisingly standard for a JRPG (a couple types of swords, bows, fist weapons, spears, heavy weapons, knives, and... well, okay, robot arm-cannons). Persona 4's kind of a mixed bag of "practical" weapons (swords, knives, someone smart enough to just bring a gun) and Kanji running and smacking shadows with a desk like the badass he is. That said, it is super easy to justify weird weapons in Persona. All you have to say is "your mind makes it real" and it fits right in. And yeah, that makes sense. Sticking with physical, fire, ice, lightning, wind, light, and dark works for me. (Almighty will be actually completely impossible to resist, unlike in Persona 4 where some enemies were weak to it or resisted it, which defeats the whole purpose of almighty damage.)
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Feb 19, 2015 22:46
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Between a folding chair, a golf club, some wrenches, a girl who wears impractical knight boots to kick things, a fan, and a mascot suit, and I'm probably forgetting some stuff, P4's chock full of goofy weapons on a base level. There's also plenty of joke weapons in P3, and while I couldn't tell you a single thing about P1 and 2, that kind of feeds into my 'most people didn't play the old Personas' comment. Basically, I'd say it depends on the tone people want to go with for their game. This just makes people being able to choose whatever they want even more important so they can decide if they're going with Special Forces High School Kids with assault rifles, or "yo I found some katanas in my dad's closet" levels of goof.
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Feb 19, 2015 23:10
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Yeah, Persona can accommodate a really wide range of tones. It doesn't even strictly have to be high school students (see Eternal Punishment). poo poo, players can be a gang of old people whose retirement home has been turned into the lair of the anthropomorphic representation of Death or something like that. That would rule. I'd GM that. I'm not planning on incorporating a steep weapon or armor damage curve. I don't like loot treadmills in tabletop games and I don't know if it's really in the "spirit" of Persona anyway. I mean, in Persona 4, weapon attack values are essentially meaningless once you start learning physical skills. I'd much rather let the group decide on the tone (is this the kind of campaign where we're going after demons with real weapons/do you care if people do roughly the same amount of damage with a chair and a katana?) and go from there. I'm not even sure if I want to include armor as an equipment slot at all. I'm thinking just weapon (or multiple weapons, to accommodate the Persona 1/Persona 5 thing where everyone carries both a melee weapon and a gun) and a few "accessory" slots where you can equip random trinkets whose symbolic attributes grant you certain bonuses. If one of those happens to be a chain mail shirt that your Ren Faire-going cousin made you, sure.
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Feb 19, 2015 23:19
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Harrow posted:Dear chat thread, Also I feel like Press Tokens should stack up to Party Size so if you go all out everybody gets an extra turn.
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Feb 20, 2015 07:39
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Man, I now find myself contemplating what extras I would add into a slightly more bulky "Advanced World of Dungeons" besides GM advice/moves. Maybe some extra classes (Paladin, Barbarian, Druids could all be done easily enough using existing abilities), and miscellaneous other bits and bobs. Plus maybe Matt Rundle's Anti-Hammerspace Item Tracker, if only because I loving love it as a simplistic way of dealing with "encumbrance" (though I'd probably remove worn armor taking up space).
Galaga Galaxian fucked around with this message at 08:24 on Feb 20, 2015 |
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Feb 20, 2015 08:05
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So the other day a coworker reminded me that Lent is happening, so I decided to quit swearing  I told some family members, and some friends I went to (catholic) school with, and the unanimous response was laughter.
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Feb 20, 2015 09:52
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One good friend and the only dude I know IRL that's as much as an RPG geek as I am moved to Madrid as well, so now I finally, after 4 years, have a decent core group that won't be flaky as poo poo, plus another GM (that happens to be the best GM I've played with!). We're playing two games this weekend alone! That's double of what I've played in four months! What I'm saying is,  Hugoon got his RPG groove back.
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Feb 20, 2015 11:49
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P.d0t posted:So the other day a coworker reminded me that Lent is happening, so I decided to quit swearing I decided to quite Alcohol for Lent, personally. I've spent too much money on it, recently, and it's obvious I'm using it in an unhealthy way. It's for the best for my health, mind, and spirit to put the stuff away. Hopefully, the pressure of keeping to my sacrifice will help me stay off it.
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Feb 20, 2015 11:52
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Covok posted:I decided to quite Alcohol for Lent, personally. I've spent too much money on it, recently, and it's obvious I'm using it in an unhealthy way. It's for the best for my health, mind, and spirit to put the stuff away. Hopefully, the pressure of keeping to my sacrifice will help me stay off it. I feel for you. Back when I still worked a job with extremely uneven hours (I sometimes even had multiple days off in the middle of the week only to be stuck working through the weekend!) I used to spend a lot of my free time drinking with my friends. Since I started a nine-to-five job at an elementary school (meaning I can no longer touch the stuff during the week lest the kids smell it on me the next day) I've actually felt a significant boost in my health and mental well-being. I'll still sometimes indulge over the weekend, but most of the time I just like to spend the weekends at home with my cat, or doing something with my friends that doesn't involve getting drunk off my rear end and feeling horrible the next day. I wish you the best in quitting alcohol for Lent, and if you pull it off I'd urge you to try to make it a more permanent change. Like, you don't need to quit drinking entirely, but if you've found that you drink too much and for the wrong reasons, I think moderation is the key. (This coming from a guy who lives in a country where moderation seems to be an alien concept to a majority of the populace.)
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Feb 20, 2015 12:04
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Galaga Galaxian posted:Man, I now find myself contemplating what extras I would add into a slightly more bulky "Advanced World of Dungeons" besides GM advice/moves. Maybe some extra classes (Paladin, Barbarian, Druids could all be done easily enough using existing abilities), and miscellaneous other bits and bobs. Plus maybe Matt Rundle's Anti-Hammerspace Item Tracker, if only because I loving love it as a simplistic way of dealing with "encumbrance" (though I'd probably remove worn armor taking up space). If you wanted to turn it into a full-er game, I think you should also look at the other PbtA's Fronts to give the GM tools for making cool dungeons. Related to those, some kind of robust random hazard generator could be cool. I'm thinking something like the "overloaded encounter die" idea presented in this blog post, but detailed out further. The same mechanic could be extended out for overland travel too, why not. Example monsters, with cool monster moves to go with them. (I think someone in the DW thread came up with cool alternative moves that followed an if-then structure. Like, goblins could be "when they hesitate, charge!" instead of just "Charge!".) On the player side, a couple of new class abilities should be enough to make a crapload of weird new classes. Examples of weird magical items and weirder magical rituals, so people don't have something to go by when inventing their own. Guidelines for carving out a holding and gathering followers. Of course, it wouldn't be Advanced if you didn't also staple on unrelated, fiddly and/or contradictory rules on top of the core system, so having proper grappling rules is a must. I'm getting way into this myself now. Dang. Ratpick posted:(This coming from a guy who lives in a country where moderation seems to be an alien concept to a majority of the populace.) 
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Feb 20, 2015 13:51
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P.d0t posted:So the other day a coworker reminded me that Lent is happening, so I decided to quit swearing Sup Lent buddy. I'm giving up meat and whisky this year.
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Feb 20, 2015 14:31
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P.d0t posted:So the other day a coworker reminded me that Lent is happening, so I decided to quit swearing I made the same resolution and so far I've been entirely terrible at it. LongDarkNight posted:Sup Lent buddy. I'm giving up meat and whisky this year. Dear God, man. It's Lent, not hell.
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Feb 20, 2015 19:14
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LongDarkNight posted:Sup Lent buddy. I'm giving up meat and whisky this year. Ron Swanson does not approve.
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Feb 20, 2015 19:16
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The solution is to just not do lent 
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Feb 20, 2015 20:12
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Do Satanists get to take on an additional vice during lent?
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Feb 20, 2015 20:16
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Covok posted:I decided to quite Alcohol for Lent, personally. I've spent too much money on it, recently, and it's obvious I'm using it in an unhealthy way. It's for the best for my health, mind, and spirit to put the stuff away. Hopefully, the pressure of keeping to my sacrifice will help me stay off it. I have quit drinking on and off, and then for the past 2 years I decided "Drinking season" would be June through August.. But this past summer I was in the process of househunting up until October so yadda yadda yadda, I decided to just do a full year of drinking season. When you only drink for part of a year, people are always like "awwww but you're gonna miss out on ____." So, knowing this, I figured doing the full year would be a good idea. (Hence not bothering to quit for Lent) I think I'm gonna try and quit for a year or two once June rolls around again, or maybe just stop altogether; I'll be 30 so my glory days are behind me anywho.
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Feb 20, 2015 20:17
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Len posted:The solution is to just not do lent
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Feb 20, 2015 21:25
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I've been thinking about Lent. The thing is I gave up alcohol for reals about a month and a half ago. I'm going all in, AA meetings and everything, and have been focusing a lot on my sobriety, so part of me doesn't want to put stress on that by giving up something else so quickly, on top of that. I do want to lose some weight, though. Giving up sugar cold-turkey might not be in the cards, but I should consider giving up sweets for Lent.
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Feb 20, 2015 21:29
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Try doing a thing instead. Give up "not going to the gym".
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Feb 20, 2015 21:38
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Splicer posted:Try doing a thing instead. Give up "not going to the gym". Good idea! "Add" rather than "subtract."
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Feb 20, 2015 21:46
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I gave up sugar and coffee for Lent which has significantly changed my strategy in Puerto Rico.
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Feb 20, 2015 21:50
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