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Tatum Girlparts posted:Oh yea sorry she's just a normal lady in a clan called Scorpion. He got a stripper dressed up as her for his bachelor party. He treasures a lock of her hair he cut off as part of the erotic live action roleplay. She was subsequently an incredibly important NPC in every event for the rest of the friggin' setting, because setting up scenerios and plot hooks that are easy for GMs to use for their players is less important than his sexy asian waifu.
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Feb 26, 2016 15:09
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Can someone fill me in on what Kult is about? As far as I can tell, it is Lovecraft meets Christian mysticism, which is a one to one description of my interests.
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Feb 26, 2016 15:18
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I read the quick start rules for 7th sea and they seem overly complicated, but then again I'm used to super simple mechanic systems these days. Wick is and has always been an awesome dude though, and the setting seems awesome.
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Feb 26, 2016 16:13
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Hiro Protagonist posted:Can someone fill me in on what Kult is about? As far as I can tell, it is Lovecraft meets Christian mysticism, which is a one to one description of my interests. Kult is your 9th grade morose gothic poetry in RPG form.
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Feb 26, 2016 20:30
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Knockoff Hellraiser, the RPG. I like the concept and the fluff, but from what I remember of an F&F review of the original version its mechanics were barely functional.
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Feb 26, 2016 20:52
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I'm gonna continue to chat about the Conan RPG. I asked a question and got a good answer: Leperflesh posted:There is a long and sordid tradition of magic users becoming dominant in RPGs, due to the designer's failure to restrict their capabilities to being balanced vs. non-magic users, not only in terms of sheer damage potential, but in terms of flexibility of action - the "swiss army knife" problem where a mage is simply more versatile than any non-magic but very skilled character. I'm hopeful that the necessity for balance is being carefully considered and applied in this game. Can you guys address the balance question? Apologies if this was already answered in an earlier update, I only just now backed. Benn posted:Benn about 10 hours ago This Q&A was in the context of the announcement of the Nameless Cults expansion book as a stretch goal, so I don't know how much of the stuff he mentioned is in the core book vs. the expansion; maybe the 13 spells are core book spells, or maybe not. Either way, though, I'm pretty pleased that character optimization in the Conan RPG shouldn't favor sorcerers over warriors, since that's not only boring and done, but also totally inappropriate for the setting. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 21:20 on Feb 26, 2016 |
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Feb 26, 2016 21:16
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That guy seriously needs to learn the difference between your and you're.
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Feb 26, 2016 21:29
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Atlas Hugged posted:That guy seriously needs to learn the difference between your and you're. Yeah, that was hard to read.
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Feb 26, 2016 21:32
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Yeah it's interesting reading horribly written comments from RPG dudes after reading Luke Crane's bullshit
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Feb 26, 2016 21:33
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Drives me fuckin' nuts, you don't even know. If you're writing on behalf of a company, in places where customers can see them, your poor grammar reflects on the (lack of) professionalism and quality of your services and products. That said, Benn isn't showing in the different color that indicates he's part of the official team, so I dunno. He seems to be speaking from a position of knowing the content. e. It's Benn Beaton, who is on the staff of writers for the game, with credits for Mutant Chronicles, Infinity, and John Carter Warlord of Mars. Yikes. I assume there's a beleaguered editor on Modiphius' staff who deserves a big raise. e2. Here's an update by Benn on character generation that is also pretty sloppy, especially when it comes to (missing) commas, random capitalization, etc., but it's not horrible. I've seen worse. So, so, so much worse. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 21:47 on Feb 26, 2016 |
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Feb 26, 2016 21:39
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Also, that is not really one of the "good" possible answers to Quadratic Wizards. "Yes, you can do cool things and make the story about your character, but the more you use the thing that defines your character, the more you run the grave risk of having a bad thing happen, also making the story more about your character."
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Feb 26, 2016 22:49
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Just found this game called Emissary. As a big dune fan, I'm tempted.
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Feb 27, 2016 00:50
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So I've never heard of Kult before, but reading the description is really appealing to the late 90's gamer in me. What's it like? Any idea what the new rule set is like?
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Feb 27, 2016 01:47
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homullus posted:Also, that is not really one of the "good" possible answers to Quadratic Wizards. "Yes, you can do cool things and make the story about your character, but the more you use the thing that defines your character, the more you run the grave risk of having a bad thing happen, also making the story more about your character." While that's true, it seems to be an underlying theme to all of the characters' abilities in this game. Whenever you do anything that requires a test, you take a risk. Even if you succeed: you could, for example, attempt a difficulty 2 task, roll your two dice plus use a Momentum token to get a third die, succeed with two of the dice, but roll a natural 20 on the third, which adds a Complication. Either immediately, or, the GM can take a Doom token. Whenever you push your luck, such as by making successive Defend reactions in a fight, you add more Doom tokens, which build up to apply consequences to the party. And, every character has access to at least one attack power that attacks the opponent's mind instead of their body. So a party - or a group of enemies - can attempt to beat down opponents psychologically. The ultimate consequence of running out of mind points and taking mind wounds is that when you run out of mind wounds you go insane. But you do have a point. If using your magic spell is more consequential (positively or negatively or both) than another character using one of their major abilities, it's a problem.
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Feb 27, 2016 02:03
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Lord Hypnostache posted:Time Bomb is basically the Ric Flair retirement angle, the gimmick is all about having just a few more great matches and maybe passing the torch before being forced to retire due to health concerns. I hope to convert more of the Wrestlehut goons but who knows.
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Feb 27, 2016 02:44
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Reading through the 7th Sea Quickstart ( I put in $60 because the amount of material seems worth it and I'm tempted to put in $20 more for the deck from the next tier maybe) Things of note
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Feb 27, 2016 03:07
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Xelkelvos posted:
Given that scorpion girl story a few posts up, I bet it is just as skeevy as it sounds. If anything I feel like you're under selling the skeevy.
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Feb 27, 2016 03:16
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Ominous Jazz posted:Given that scorpion girl story a few posts up, I bet it is just as skeevy as it sounds. If anything I feel like you're under selling the skeevy. That's the entire description for that skill and unless there's more in the sample adventure (I don't usually read those except for task resolution examples), it's a little up in the air. Also, a number of the rules still seem to be up in the air such as bonuses for Ranks 3, 4, and 5 for Skills as well as Dueling as a subsystem in general. One of the skill bonuses, in particular, gives extra Raises by making sets of 15 rather than sets of 10 which can create a bit more of an optimization headache for players. Then there's rerolling of dice and so forth and Raises are meant to be a resolution currency so the GM has to keep track of it for each player since problems seem to be presented to the party as groups rather than as individuals.
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Feb 27, 2016 03:24
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To be fair, it's swashbuckling, if there weren't a skill that lets you seduce attractive people into having a relationship with you and paying for all your gear, it would be failing the source material. 
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Feb 27, 2016 03:29
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Here's the belated announcement that my Squadron Strike: Traveller project is up on Kickstarter. This is 3D space combat in the Traveller setting. There are PDF only options, a folio for Squadron Strike players, and a boxed set that's the base game with the standard setting swapped out for Traveller stuff. I am especially pleased because the first stretch goal was "Mike was right" about needing a fourth counter sheet. Hey, it's not my fault the scenarios got written before Ken had me worry about the counter mix. As it stands, you get a couple of extras above what the scenarios need. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1386934735/squadron-strike-traveller/
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Feb 27, 2016 04:04
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mllaneza posted:Here's the belated announcement that my Squadron Strike: Traveller project is up on Kickstarter. This is 3D space combat in the Traveller setting. There are PDF only options, a folio for Squadron Strike players, and a boxed set that's the base game with the standard setting swapped out for Traveller stuff. poo poo, were you at the Gameholecon in Madison a year or two ago? I remember seeing this setup, though not sure if it was using the generic rules.
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Feb 27, 2016 05:11
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So, has anyone taken a look at the campaign for the EVERYVERSE RPG. I feel a little bad making fun of this, since it is a woman trying to get her late husband's RPG published, but there are some previews available of the system, and seriously what the Christ?EVERYVERSE RPG posted:To [make pretty much any roll], roll four 10-sided dice in a predetermined order (result is a 4-digit decimal). Consult the standard distribution (SD) table (see Table 1) to find the score (from 60-139) that corresponds to this 4-digit number (round down). The table is open-ended, so if you roll all 0s or all 9s, you may roll an additional digit to get a number below 60 or above 139... So this is basically a roll under system, but instead of rolling a d100 or whatever, you instead roll 4 d10s to generate a decimal number, and cross reference that on a table of results to find out the actual result of your roll, and compare that to the target number. A glimpse of the table can be seen here. Also, the game has 15 attributes plus separate skills. The preview of the game rules is here. The character creation section is a highlight.
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Feb 27, 2016 07:35
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If only there were a simpler way of generating random results on a bell curve.
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Feb 27, 2016 07:48
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That's a metric fuckton of effort for a person to just re-create GURPS. For it being dedicated to her late husband's memory, this KS is remarkably low-effort: 
Zurui fucked around with this message at 07:57 on Feb 27, 2016 |
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Feb 27, 2016 07:54
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Xelkelvos posted:Reading through the 7th Sea Quickstart ( I put in $60 because the amount of material seems worth it and I'm tempted to put in $20 more for the deck from the next tier maybe) I'm actually really annoyed with the new mechanism. I suspect that grouping your dice perfectly is an NP optimization problem as a special variant of one-dimensional bin-packing. Even over small inputs, asking a player to perform an NP optimization problem for each dice roll seems... genuinely mean. Someone once told me that the reason the roll-keep system was so wonky was that John Wick tried to make a slightly obtuse system to avoid players doing the math to figure out how to best spend their points,. The idea was that if it was obfuscated, players would put them where it was "cool". This new system also seems like a new attempt to do that. Also, I can only imagine the mildly-disengaged player taking forever to group things up quasi-effectively when rolling 8 or so dice. QuantumNinja fucked around with this message at 08:15 on Feb 27, 2016 |
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Feb 27, 2016 08:11
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Solemn Sloth posted:If only there were a simpler way of generating random results on a bell curve. Like what? I mean, I guess you could flip a coin a bunch of times -- no, better if you had a more spread out uniform distribution, say -1, 0, and 1 with equal probability. Then you could add together some number of IID draws from that distribution, like 4 or something might be close enough to Gaussian for gameplay, I dunno. But nobody would be able to back-translate to z-scores or probabilities in their heads; you'd have to design the whole system from the ground up to account for the various discrete-valued outcomes you'd get. And you'd need like a laptop at the table -- unless maybe you took a d6? And blanked it out, then painted two +s and two -s on it or something? But I mean, what are the chances that somebody would already have come up with something like that in 1995?
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Feb 27, 2016 08:16
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QuantumNinja posted:I'm actually really annoyed with the new mechanism. I suspect that grouping your dice perfectly is an NP optimization problem as a special variant of one-dimensional bin-packing. Even over small inputs, asking a player to perform an NP optimization problem for each dice roll seems... genuinely mean. Counting to 10 is neither an extraordinary effort nor remotely mean
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Feb 27, 2016 08:55
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QuantumNinja posted:Someone once told me that the reason the roll-keep system was so wonky was that John Wick tried to make a slightly obtuse system to avoid players doing the math to figure out how to best spend their points,. The idea was that if it was obfuscated, players would put them where it was "cool". This new system also seems like a new attempt to do that. It's possible that this is a thing - I've heard at least from boardgame designers consider obfuscation of "victory conditions" as something can be done deliberately to prevent people from "playing to win", or avoiding situations where a game is thrown to one player or another because out-of-game factors. Applied to TRPGs, one might think it was worth doing in order to discourage outright competitiveness, or meta-gaming, or powergaming, or whatever you want to call it.
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Feb 27, 2016 09:04
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For what it's worth, after more mathematical investigation (i.e., writing code), the system seems pretty resilient to producing plenty of "optimal" answers. For example, the roll 9,7,7,6,5,4,2,2 has 167 unique arrangements that yield 3 Raises and 0 unique arrangements that yield 4 Raises. The arrangement 9,7,7,7,5,4,4,2 actually has a solution that will yield 4 Raises, but it's the obvious one. In general, a good heuristic seems to be to sort the dice and simply pair off from the inside-out and then "crunch together" smaller results you get from this. That said, I haven't considered the 15-case, which seems like it will add a lot of complexity. I also haven't considered the minimality restriction of the system, which seems to state that you cannot add arbitrary dice to a roll for the sake of using them. This matters because of the GM buying your orphan dice. For example, in the first sequence above, these will both get you 3 hits: [4] ,[5,9],[2,2,6],[7,7] [2,2],[4,9],[5,6], [7,7] The latter, however, gives the GM a chance to trade one Hero Point for two Danger Points, so it's a worse arrangement. The system isn't impossible, but it's got a lot of serious gotchas for new players and for optimal arrangements. Also, the relative value of adding another die is... hard to compute. It's obviously better, but it's much more difficult now to compute the relative merit of buying up several skills versus buying up the trait you most often use with them. E: On a more philosophical note, I don't think that making math opaque to push the player out of metagaming is the right approach. Plenty of games manage to be story-first, fun, and always follow the fiction without baroque math and time-consuming roll resolution to get there. QuantumNinja fucked around with this message at 18:31 on Feb 27, 2016 |
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Feb 27, 2016 18:28
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So the problem is that unless your obfuscation involves incomparables you can pretty much solve the system with a simple spreadsheet macro. Which was something you (probably? depending on date) couldn't do when the first version of the game came out.
DalaranJ fucked around with this message at 19:26 on Feb 27, 2016 |
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Feb 27, 2016 19:23
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QuantumNinja posted:E: On a more philosophical note, I don't think that making math opaque to push the player out of metagaming is the right approach. Plenty of games manage to be story-first, fun, and always follow the fiction without baroque math and time-consuming roll resolution to get there. Yeah, it's my biggest frustration with Cortex+ is that the core of the system seems to be based around making the odds as opaque as possible. The real problem with systems like this is that they don't make metagaming less important, they make it more important, because those who actually can work out the odds will often have a notable advantage over those that don't, as opposed to a system where everybody understands the odds and nobody's left out. Of course, it's also a way to try and cover over weaknesses in the system itself by making them less obvious. Mind, I don't think designers do that deliberately, but if you're worried about people metagaming the system, that's probably an issue with the system, not the people doing the metagaming.
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Feb 27, 2016 19:45
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Yeah, it's my biggest frustration with Cortex+ is that the core of the system seems to be based around making the odds as opaque as possible. The real problem with systems like this is that they don't make metagaming less important, they make it more important, because those who actually can work out the odds will often have a notable advantage over those that don't, as opposed to a system where everybody understands the odds and nobody's left out. Additionally, unless the devs know the math behind their own system, balance becomes harder on their end as well and increases the likelihood of over or underpowered advancements being included with no awareness of the degree of over or underpoweredness.
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Feb 27, 2016 20:36
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Xelkelvos posted:Additionally, unless the devs know the math behind their own system, balance becomes harder on their end as well and increases the likelihood of over or underpowered advancements being included with no awareness of the degree of over or underpoweredness. Um excuse me, you don't need to know math when you're an artist
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Feb 27, 2016 21:14
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So the new Kult game just had an update answering a bunch of questions from the comments section. The answers...could be better.
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Feb 27, 2016 22:00
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thefakenews posted:So, has anyone taken a look at the campaign for the EVERYVERSE RPG. I feel a little bad making fun of this, since it is a woman trying to get her late husband's RPG published, but there are some previews available of the system, and seriously what the Christ? This reminds me of a cross between FATAL and a system my buddy tried to make after six months of playing his first RPG. That character creation is...something.
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Feb 28, 2016 01:18
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 1. For anyone that has Dungeon Crawl Classics on PDF, it's been updated on DTRPG to reflect the kickstarted 4th printing. New art, a different starter adventure, and table/chart summaries in the back.  2. Delta Green has updated with an official release of its quick-start rules, which are freely available here. The Handler's Screen PDF is expected next week, and the Agent's Handbook, now officially titled Delta Green: The Roleplaying Game, is expected by May.   3. Apocalypse World 2nd Edition has an update with Fallen Empires, a rewrite of the AW playbooks to make them more in-line with historical/fantasy post-apocalypse.
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Feb 28, 2016 01:48
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Good news if you've been backing the Modiphius Kickstarters: There's stretch goals in Conan to produce additional content for Achtung! Cthulhu and for their Mutant Chronicles RPG! It's basically free "thank-you" content, and that's just classy.
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Feb 28, 2016 01:57
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moths posted:Good news if you've been backing the Modiphius Kickstarters: There's stretch goals in Conan to produce additional content for Achtung! Cthulhu and for their Mutant Chronicles RPG! And Thunderbirds! 
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Feb 28, 2016 01:58
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moths posted:Good news if you've been backing the Modiphius Kickstarters: There's stretch goals in Conan to produce additional content for Achtung! Cthulhu and for their Mutant Chronicles RPG! "Thank you for backing our game! Rather than give you more content for the game you chose to back, we're going to give you stuff for a completely different game."
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Feb 29, 2016 01:58
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QuantumNinja posted:For what it's worth, after more mathematical investigation (i.e., writing code), the system seems pretty resilient to producing plenty of "optimal" answers. For example, the roll 9,7,7,6,5,4,2,2 has 167 unique arrangements that yield 3 Raises and 0 unique arrangements that yield 4 Raises. The arrangement 9,7,7,7,5,4,4,2 actually has a solution that will yield 4 Raises, but it's the obvious one. here's another thing that's relevant regarding 7th Sea's current system: There's no defensive rolling. In a typical "Risk," one of the consequences might be taking damage from a source. Raises rolled can be used to mitigate that damage. The way the rules are written in the quickstart, this is not done when facing "Brute Squads" which are a collective enemy mob (a single enemy that's not a major enemy could also fall under this). Brute Squads have only one stat: Strength. That number is both how much damage they deal and how many raises are needed to defeat it. Presumably, it's possible to spend Raises to avoid damage, but the way the resolution system works right now, that'd be a useless action. Wick has this to say about "I Dodge" as an action: quote:“I Dodge” What's particularly nasty are Special Brute Squads who have abilities that are activated by spending Danger Points. One of these abilities allows them to deal their damage before being reduced. The book lists Brute Squads of Strength 5, 8 and 10. As there's no general encounter rules or character generation rules, it's not super clear as to how big an appropriate Squad might be or what the typical health of a Character is. Villains are the other broad enemy type in the game and are generally meant to be Bosses or Sub-Bosses. They have two stats: Influence and Strength. Strength is mostly the same as it is with Brute Squads except instead of it counting how many Wounds the Villain can take, it's how many Wounds are necessary to inflict before the Villain receives a Dramatic Wound to a Villain and how many Dramatic Wounds they can take before being defeated. It's not clear how overflow damage works based on the Quickstart. Also, the more rounds spent in combat with a Villain, the more Dramatic Wounds a villain takes when they take one (i.e. A Strength 5 Villain that takes 6 damage on Round 1 loses 1 DW. That same amount of damage in Round 3 means they take 3 DWs). Influence is the other stat and is far more annoying. It's essentially the Villain's currency for getting more Brute Squads, acquiring more Influence and doing other annoying things (like escaping!). Players can reduce this by basically harming the Villain's networks (and may require explicit notification to the players) or stopping a Villain's Scheme. Schemes are how a Villain acquires more Influence. A successful Scheme doubles the amount of Influence invested in it and an unsuccessful one is a total loss of investment. There's no rules as to how the players are made aware of these Schemes so it's possible for a Villain to engage and profit from a Scheme offscreen and the players are just left unaware of it with no recourse until after the fact. Villains can also make Risk rolls. It's not mentioned what situation causes these rolls or what the effects of them are. Without extra abilities, Maximum Wounds that can be taken by a player is 32. This is based on a character being able to take 4 Dramatic Wounds and the amount of wounds necessary to be able to deal a Dramatic wound being Resolve+2 (so 4*[Resolve+3]). Dramatic Wounds are basically checkpoints that give players or the GM bonuses. Xelkelvos fucked around with this message at 04:30 on Feb 29, 2016 |
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Feb 29, 2016 04:16
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