|
The Escapist (the dumb one) had a post about The Warren (the PbtA Watership Down type game). The handful of comments were positive except for this gem:quote:I always said what Watership Down was missing was a bunch of D20 rolls and pen/paper rules.
|
#
?
Aug 1, 2015 15:07
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 9, 2024 09:04 |
|
|
Rulebook Heavily posted:The ENnies just gave an award to the escapist. ProfessorCirno posted:A website that thinks it's still the 80's in terms of people fearing D&D, that appears to have been last updated in 2004, that only talks about D&D, Call of Cthulhu, GURPs, and a little bit of World of Darkness.
|
|
#
?
Aug 1, 2015 18:19
|
|
|
Halloween Jack posted:I didn't know that 1998 was capable of literally becoming sentient, and physically manifesting itself, and then vomiting all over a website. 
|
|
#
?
Aug 2, 2015 02:29
|
|
|
El Estrago Bonito posted:Oddly enough Warcaster isn't racially locked. Using the base book you can 100% make a legal Trollkin Warcaster, if he's from Cygnar he can even also be a Trencher. So your troll man can be a Warcaster, IE one of the most rare professions and skills in the entire game world. A skill so rare you could cram every IK Warcaster into a Red Lion conference room, and not even one of the big ones, honestly you could probably just all meet at Waffle House or Dennys. Yet under no circumstance can he ever be a Knight. Only the Humans and Iosans really have a true grip on being a noble wandering warrior for justice who uses a sword and shield in plate. I'll accept that there is no real way a troll would ever be a Khadoran Man O War, I can accept that one would probably not be a Paladin of the Wall, but a loving generic-rear end Knight? Does not compute. Plus it seems really lame to lock them out of stuff even if it doesn't make sense in canon. PC's are heroes, that means they are exceptions to the rules of how settings work. Katniss is from a literal slum of dirt farmers yet she becomes a badass archer who starts a revolution, that's why she's the main character. Tony Stark took Aristocrat/Arcane Mechanik which is a fine combo, but there's no reason why Hulk should have been locked out of Alchemist/Pugilist just because Pugilist is a restricted class for Humans, he came up with a cool reason why he was a pugilist and rule of cool should basically always win in fantasy adventure games. My friend wanted to make a Trollkin Veteran from Cygnar who comes home from war and decides to write a best-selling novel as a coping mechanism. J.R.R. Trollkin
|
|
#
?
Aug 2, 2015 02:33
|
|
|
ProfessorCirno posted:So, there's an oncomming orc army and the Ranger - who specialises in orcs - wants to ride on to scout the army then go off to find allies and bring them back for a cool moment of glory. The DM nods, then when they leave, the orc army attacks and the other PCs hold them off, making the ranger useless. On top of that the whole thing took literal hours that the ranger spent doing nothing. hosed up right? Well... Man, this really pisses me off. What a lovely DM to lead on the player like that and then leave them with egg on their face afterwards. If I was running that, I'd have had the battle start- the orcs overwhelming the defenses and, despite the rest of the party putting up a valiant defense, the orcs would appear to be winning until the ranger, with reinforcements at hand, show up to turn the tide of battle.
|
|
#
?
Aug 2, 2015 22:23
|
|
|
ProfessorCirno posted:So, there's an oncomming orc army and the Ranger - who specialises in orcs - wants to ride on to scout the army then go off to find allies and bring them back for a cool moment of glory. The DM nods, then when they leave, the orc army attacks and the other PCs hold them off, making the ranger useless. On top of that the whole thing took literal hours that the ranger spent doing nothing. hosed up right? Well... Even ignoring the lovely attitude, it doesn't even make sense from the You Gambled And Lost point of view. Orc-specialist ranger scouts the army. Then shouldn't the DM immediately inform him that the orc army is already too close and it's too late to get allies anymore? Like, how can the orc specialist not notice this? He just peeks over a hill and says to himself, "Well, those guys will be here in two days, time to kick off my month-long solo quest!" This is really one of the stupidest loving things about RPGs. Characters know more and perceive more than their players do. The DM, allegedly being an intelligent actor, should account and compensate for this. But no, way too often we hear about PCs getting themselves hosed over and then catching the blame because they should've known better somehow. This is the same poo poo like there being a dragon in the middle of the room and it eats you, because you didn't ask specifically about monsters.
|
|
#
?
Aug 3, 2015 08:07
|
|
|
Try playing shadowrun and having nerds being responsible for being being, not playing, street smart individuals. Oi vey. (Some GM's let you get around this with the Common Sense quality*) *the fact this needed to exist in the first place... 
|
|
#
?
Aug 3, 2015 08:09
|
|
|
"...only if something is horribly broken will they alter it." Then why remove overchanneled cantrips for evokers? It's like 3 dpr (45 v. 42) higher than warlock, hardly broken, and the capstone skill for the flagship class that is all about dealing damage. quote:Because an errata is for fixing mistakes, not balancing things. quote:Errata isn't for fixing balance problems, it's for correcting mistakes and clarifying rules. Overchannel was never meant to be usable on cantrips, only on spells. The errata clarified that. quote:No no, as in errata is meant to update RAW to fit the original RAI where they simply misworded something. Coldermoss is right, they were fixing a "bug," or perhaps a "typo."
|
|
#
?
Aug 3, 2015 11:53
|
|
|
"Errata is not for balancing things, it's for fixing mistakes." ... What? Unless poor balance was done on purpose that just doesn't make sense. So like the Champion Fighter is on pu- ohhhh....
|
|
#
?
Aug 3, 2015 12:02
|
|
|
Sage Genesis posted:Even ignoring the lovely attitude, it doesn't even make sense from the You Gambled And Lost point of view. Orc-specialist ranger scouts the army. Then shouldn't the DM immediately inform him that the orc army is already too close and it's too late to get allies anymore? Like, how can the orc specialist not notice this? He just peeks over a hill and says to himself, "Well, those guys will be here in two days, time to kick off my month-long solo quest!" Worth noting this is explicitly the joke of Paranoia, which apparently people have taken as a textbook.
|
|
#
?
Aug 3, 2015 12:23
|
|
|
I once played in a Spelljammer campaign where the setting was only explained in the broadest terms before the first sesh. We basically got lambasted for letting a benevolent NPC "drown" because we were going by more conventional physics and assumed he was a goner as soon as he fell overboard into the vacuum of space during a fight. Only later was it explained that everyone has like a personal gravity with a few minutes worth of air bubble by default in 'Jammer physics. I had a point to this but I forgot what it was.
|
|
#
?
Aug 3, 2015 12:28
|
|
|
Sage Genesis posted:Even ignoring the lovely attitude, it doesn't even make sense from the You Gambled And Lost point of view. Orc-specialist ranger scouts the army. Then shouldn't the DM immediately inform him that the orc army is already too close and it's too late to get allies anymore? Like, how can the orc specialist not notice this? He just peeks over a hill and says to himself, "Well, those guys will be here in two days, time to kick off my month-long solo quest!" The last time someone brought up the player/character information incongruity there was a multi page argument centered around the legitimacy of a GM asking "are you sure?" in response to an assault against a city's guard tower. The long and short is that there are a lot of holes and blindspots in the basic idea of running a game. 'Protagonization' would seemingly demand that you either delay the orc army to allow the assault to occur with allies.
|
|
#
?
Aug 3, 2015 16:42
|
|
|
Gerund posted:The last time someone brought up the player/character information incongruity there was a multi page argument centered around the legitimacy of a GM asking "are you sure?" in response to an assault against a city's guard tower. Well, "Are you sure?" doesn't sound helpful, since it'd be the kind of thing that you'd expect someone to just go "Yeah?" to. "Are you sure? The tower is full of experienced and well armed guards, they're like level 15" sounds like it's actually informing someone of something their character should know but they might not.
|
|
#
?
Aug 3, 2015 17:30
|
|
|
It probably doesn't help that for decades GM advice sections in books and articles have been full of tips like "roll dice in secret for no reason, then chuckle evilly and when the players ask what's up tell them 'Oh it's nothing, tee hee'" or asking "Are you suuuuuure?" every time they do anything just to make them extra paranoid.
|
|
#
?
Aug 3, 2015 17:45
|
|
|
Which is weird, because an OOCly truthful "You don't know" is usually much more frightening and much less frustrating. "I don't know; do you know? You sure? Teehee!" is just annoying since if you make a bad decision it's because the GM was loving around. Whereas "What's in the cave?" "You don't know. It's eerily silent and too dark to see." is a known blind-spot and possible risk.
|
|
#
?
Aug 3, 2015 17:53
|
|
|
Kai Tave posted:It probably doesn't help that for decades GM advice sections in books and articles have been full of tips like "roll dice in secret for no reason, then chuckle evilly and when the players ask what's up tell them 'Oh it's nothing, tee hee'" or asking "Are you suuuuuure?" every time they do anything just to make them extra paranoid.
|
|
#
?
Aug 3, 2015 23:34
|
|
|
Nope, it's still there.
|
|
#
?
Aug 3, 2015 23:51
|
|
|
GURPS has an advantage that gives you bad GMing advice?
|
|
#
?
Aug 4, 2015 00:06
|
|
|
drunkencarp posted:GURPS has an advantage that gives you bad GMing advice?
|
|
#
?
Aug 4, 2015 00:12
|
|
|
GURPS (and several other games) have 'Common Sense' merits available which are codified rules telling the GM not to be a dick to you for not knowing the setting inside and out and so on. Because, you know, the GM should need you to spend chargen points for that, rather than it just being expected.
|
|
#
?
Aug 4, 2015 00:13
|
|
|
I once heard tell at the local gamestore about a GURPS supers game some of them played in. Apparently one of them took only the luck based powers and nothing else. They played two "rounds" of the game, one based on DC and one based on Marvel. In the DC game he basically solved every problem, and then when they were fighting some not very powerful villain (captain cold IIRC) his luck ran out and the rest of the party fleed in terror because they were positive that if the one guy had died they were totally hosed. In the Marvel game the reverse happened. The rest of the party got killed by Doctor Doom, so the lucky guy ran away, wen't into a thrift store, looked at the GM, spent all of his luck based points and said "I'm building a TIME MACHINE." Basically what I'm trying to say is that GURPS is full of grog, but it's almost worth it because it can make some really hilarious rules interactions.
|
|
#
?
Aug 4, 2015 00:19
|
|
|
Mors Rattus posted:GURPS (and several other games) have 'Common Sense' merits available which are codified rules telling the GM not to be a dick to you for not knowing the setting inside and out and so on. Also because it had corresponding Disadvantages in 'Curious', 'Impulsive', and 'Overconfident', which gave you extra chargen points in exchange for acting like Johnny Knoxville on command.
|
|
#
?
Aug 4, 2015 01:03
|
|
|
Mors Rattus posted:GURPS (and several other games) have 'Common Sense' merits available which are codified rules telling the GM not to be a dick to you for not knowing the setting inside and out and so on. Mmmm, eeeeeh... hmmmm... I'm not so sure I'd characterize GURPS in that way. GURPS is in many ways based on a style of play wherein you play "a person in a world (un)like our own"[1], with a philosophy that the GM facilitates the world and its running, while the players get to make decisions about how to act in response to things. If you make a stupid decision, well, bad things happen. (The GM of course has a responsibility to ensure that players make informed decisions, and I'll agree that this is not spelled out often enough[2], and perhaps an inherent weakness of that style of play[3].) The 'Common Sense' Advantage forces[4] the GM to intervene on the player's behalf if they make a decision that the GM sees as, and I quote, "STUPID". It's explicitly spelled out allow players to play [u[characters[/u] more thoughtful than themselves. This isn't usually something that happens under this paradigm of play, because players are responsible for their character's actions. The GM isn't supposed to step in and stop people from doing something stupid, because that removes much of the purpose of getting to make those decisions yourself. (Now, having defend it at length, I wouldn't be adverse to simply giving it to all characters for free. It's like an Idea roll in CoC to avoid doing something stupid.) [1] Generally as opposed to "a character in a work of fiction", which sets different expectations for how the game should progress. If you expect the game to be played as "a person in a world (un)like our own", there's an expectation that the world will behave like a realistic, world-like manner. If you expect the game to be played as "a character in a work of fiction", there's probably an expectation for character arcs and growth, and an expectation that the game will follow a form of dramatic pacing. [2] Like, "in the header of every page". [3] Because of the gap between the GM and the players' understanding of something presented by the GM, disagreements can arise. I've played a lot of games like this, and it tends to produce a lot of cautious questioning before decisions are made. [4] Sadly, without any enforcement, so a dickish GM can turn it into a complete waste of points.
|
|
#
?
Aug 4, 2015 01:33
|
|
|
quote:
|
|
#
?
Aug 4, 2015 02:10
|
|
|
I loved FFG's work on the Only War games in terms of female guardsmen and I hated that Dark Heresy 2 went for the Nightmare before Christmas: now with more gothic skanks look.
|
|
#
?
Aug 4, 2015 02:17
|
|
|
It's a woman? I don't get it.  Ronwayne posted:I loved FFG's work on the Only War games in terms of female guardsmen and I hated that Dark Heresy 2 went for the Nightmare before Christmas: now with more gothic skanks look. ...You know, I didn't hear about this. I was already turned off by the gameplay changes; is the interior art really bad too?
|
|
#
?
Aug 4, 2015 02:21
|
|
|
its super clearly a black woman and that guy's mental disorder prevents him from admitting it
|
|
#
?
Aug 4, 2015 02:22
|
|
|
Uh its androgynous since there's no heaving bosom to confirm that is in fact a woman.
|
|
#
?
Aug 4, 2015 02:37
|
|
|
Chill la Chill posted:Uh its androgynous since there's no heaving bosom to confirm that is in fact a woman. Conclusion: Must be a dude.
|
|
#
?
Aug 4, 2015 02:56
|
|
|
spectralent posted:It's a woman? I don't get it. Its a matter of opinion. Its not objectively bad, its just that while FFG had things being both grim and functional this does the bad acid trip nightmare blotted ink thing. Which is a legit look for 40k just not my personal preference. quote:> smoke coming from the headless corpse on page 20 looks noticeably blocky Ronwayne fucked around with this message at 03:02 on Aug 4, 2015 |
|
#
?
Aug 4, 2015 03:00
|
|
|
alg posted:its super clearly a black woman and that guy's mental disorder prevents him from admitting it I'm pretty sure that Lord Raziere is legitimately autistic, he's the guy who once had a huge meltdown over how he's unable to play normal human characters in RPGs because he doesn't understand how to make them interesting.
|
|
#
?
Aug 4, 2015 04:24
|
|
|
Kai Tave posted:I'm pretty sure that Lord Raziere is legitimately autistic, he's the guy who once had a huge meltdown over how he's unable to play normal human characters in RPGs because he doesn't understand how to make them interesting. Autism does not render people incapable of telling someone's gender or ethnicity.
|
|
#
?
Aug 4, 2015 04:25
|
|
|
Mors Rattus posted:Autism does not render people incapable of telling someone's gender or ethnicity. I don't know. I have a slight autism spectrum disorder, and I have problems telling exactly which ethnic group that character belongs to. :V
|
|
#
?
Aug 4, 2015 04:32
|
|
|
drunkencarp posted:GURPS has an advantage that gives you bad GMing advice? Yeah, but I think they eventually phased 'Unusual Background' out.
|
|
#
?
Aug 4, 2015 04:41
|
|
|
Kai Tave posted:I'm pretty sure that Lord Raziere is legitimately autistic, he's the guy who once had a huge meltdown over how he's unable to play normal human characters in RPGs because he doesn't understand how to make them interesting. Is this the same guy who got called out by another poster with the great "catgirl with dickfingers" line?
|
|
#
?
Aug 4, 2015 04:44
|
|
|
LatwPIAT posted:I don't know. I have a slight autism spectrum disorder, and I have problems telling exactly which ethnic group that character belongs to. :V Granted, her ethnicity's uncertain but 'is a non-white woman' is still pretty clear.
|
|
#
?
Aug 4, 2015 04:50
|
|
|
Yeah but I have problems with that just by being colorblind. (Literally, not racist not-racist kind.) And you know ignorance. Honestly my reaction, devoid of context, was that sure is a person in a robe? I mean I'm pro non-white women being represented just as favorably and fairly as everyone else, but I did have to google why I should care because by its nature it's a picture of someone in a shapeless robe with some of their head visible. Which is a cool statement to make, but needs a little context beyond a heart emoticon to be understood. poo poo if this wasn't grogs.txt and I saw that on facebook or whatever I'd assume it was just liking the art style. Like it literally only makes sense if you know the context.
|
|
#
?
Aug 4, 2015 04:56
|
|
|
alg posted:Or are you happy because the picture is so androgynous and the skin tone is so ambiguous, that I cannot tell whether the person is male, female, or whatever their skin tone is, thus representing an androgyne of any race? because I honestly can't. Its like I'm looking at the 404 error of identifying features here. My fiancee saw that picture at Gen Con in FFG's booth and was super-excited that there was a picture of a woman being a badass Jedi with nary a boob popping out of her blouse. Also, saw some more drow there in blackface this year. But I did not see the really bad blackface on a white guy trying to be Blankman, so improvements!
|
|
#
?
Aug 4, 2015 05:42
|
|
|
Bieeardo posted:Yeah, but I think they eventually phased 'Unusual Background' out. Jonas Albrecht posted:Is this the same guy who got called out by another poster with the great "catgirl with dickfingers" line?  EDIT: I bit the bullet and Googled that. Yeah, that was her (Raziere, that is) post that started the kerfuffle that got that reply. Fossilized Rappy fucked around with this message at 07:20 on Aug 4, 2015 |
|
#
?
Aug 4, 2015 07:16
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 9, 2024 09:04 |
|
|
Fossilized Rappy posted:As someone who has gotten really into GURPS over the past few months, I can say that Unusual Background definitely still exists, but I can't see anything that would indicate bad GMing tied to it. It's usually referred to in books as a go-to advantage for why you get to have fancy powers almost nobody else does. You googled, it, while I went searching for the infraction like an idiot. Ah well, here's what I was referring to anyway. quote:Y'all are arguing over the larger implications of this idea, when really [Lord Raziere] probably just wanted to play a catgirl with dickfingers, and his GM was like OKAY FINE BUT EXPECT THERE TO BE DISCRIMINATION. That's how this guy rolls, check his post history. I'm ready for my infraction now Darren.
|
|
#
?
Aug 4, 2015 07:30
|
|