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And now I want to make a pathfinder alchemist that throws literal exploding dice at everything like a grognardy Gambit, thanks thread. Edit: What a shameful snipe, here's content. I'm running a pathfinder campaign and, because of a momentary lapse in sanity, we're now up to 11 players. It's not as bad as it sounds, since our schedules are all hosed so we end up with a core of 5 players that show up almost every session and some extra characters that show up for a couple of sessions and then go braid their hairs off camera for a while. Last session one of the regulars (a tiefling alchemist) couldn't make it, so I hashed it out with him beforehand and made it so the hook of the adventure would be his and two other absentee characters' disappearance/kidnapping. The group had previously magically impersonated a crime boss to rescue a brothel's nanny goat (don't ask), so the three were kidnapped as retaliation/bargaining chip. The remaining murderhobos were taking their sweet time investigating possible clues, so the boss sent a message they couldn't ignore: a severed tiefling ear with a "better hurry the gently caress up, boys. ps, bring the goat" message. It really got their rear end into gear, and made the final battle with the boss much more urgent, with half the group fighting as a distraction for the other half to sneak in and release the hostages. Also the goat might be a permanent party mascot now. Bubblyblubber fucked around with this message at 17:20 on Jan 24, 2017 |
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Jan 24, 2017 17:04
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Kwyndig posted:Yeah not an indictment of 7th Sea in particular, more of a general rant and a warning to game designers who might otherwise consider adding exploding dice to a game. The #1 example of what happens when you don't bake PC exceptionalism into such a system is L5R, conveniently ALSO by Wick. Played as written, either every PC has to take Great Destiny or Dark Fate (which many GMs ban), or your campaign essentially becomes fantasy loving vietnam. It remains a running joke in L5R that the most dangerous enemies in the game are kama-wielding peasants, because they come in just enough numbers, with just enough damage dice, that is it almost certain one PC is going to get nailed by exploding damage and just die outright from full health. It's what happens when you decide "I want to make a game that plays like a kurosawa movie" but then you make the players play the mooks instead of the heroes and villains.
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Jan 24, 2017 17:10
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Railing Kill posted:Normally, I would agree, but 7th Sea is a bit different. PC exceptionalism is baked into the game, and the PCs are literally heroes that are supposed to do crazy poo poo all the time. PCs can't die unless they are totally incapacitated (the game literally calls it "Knocked Out"), and then a villain has to deliberately take an action to off them after that. Even then, the rules encourage the GM to invent (or contrive) some near-death escape. But the villains often get the same treatment. It's part of the metaphysics of the renaissance high adventure genre. There are no critical hits in the game, except for what exploding dice allow. It's definitely not a grimdark game, so I like it for 7th Sea. But I would agree exploding dice are bad idea for 90% of games. I'm in the middle of a 7th sea game right now with the best GM I've ever had, but the one thing he does do that I don't like is he insists that if you hit your full complement of dramatic wounds in the middle of a fight and have no drama dice, you're just dead, no save. If it's at the end of a battle you get to decide if you're alive or not. It makes the system way more deadly than intended, and, as I'm playing a vengeance-obsessed swordsman who seems to get gut-shot in EVERY BATTLE, it kind of puts a crimp in my style. Other than that, though, it's a pretty amazing game. I'm gonna type up some of our adventure when I get off work today.
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Jan 24, 2017 17:26
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NinjaDebugger posted:The #1 example of what happens when you don't bake PC exceptionalism into such a system is L5R, conveniently ALSO by Wick. Played as written, either every PC has to take Great Destiny or Dark Fate (which many GMs ban), or your campaign essentially becomes fantasy loving vietnam. It remains a running joke in L5R that the most dangerous enemies in the game are kama-wielding peasants, because they come in just enough numbers, with just enough damage dice, that is it almost certain one PC is going to get nailed by exploding damage and just die outright from full health.
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Jan 24, 2017 17:55
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So is there where I say that I was in a three year 7th Sea campaign where someone DID take Natural Aptitude in Melee: Sword at character creation?
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Jan 24, 2017 17:59
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I have to admit, I like the guy that took NA in pistols and then didn't actually use a pistol but always carried one. It makes sense in a dramatic way, they only pull out their best move when it's literally life or death. Which is different than most PCs, who tend to just spam their strongest attack over and over but don't expect their enemies to do the same. Like c'mon guys, this isn't Westworld.
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Jan 24, 2017 18:17
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Railing Kill posted:good 7th sea story The guy who took 132 damage 8 times was a Companion level character in Ars Magica. Not as much paperwork as a magus but still pretty involved. The guy had a Virtue that gave him a guardian angel and another one that made him immortal, fated to only ever die in Just circumstances. It's a shame we were freeing innocent prisoners at the time. edit: we also probably shouldn't have attacked 20 fully armed knights with just him, 5 mercenaries, and some wizards who only really did single target stuff at best and mostly had specializations other than entering combat with 20 fully armed knights. one of the wizards died too. Under the vegetable fucked around with this message at 18:38 on Jan 24, 2017 |
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Jan 24, 2017 18:35
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Honestly I kind of wish NatAp was a thing in L5R because playing the guessing game of "how high will I actually roll?" is irritating as gently caress. Great, my dice exploded and I got TN+40! I can do absolutely fuckall with that! Oh, I rolled absurdly low on my roll and failed even though I called raises for substantially less than my average roll? Grand, just what I wanted to do, fail because I'm supposedly good at this thing. Not to mention that what you actually get with raises and when raises are actually needed is clear as mud in the books; depending on who reads what which way, either your base TN is what you need to get what you're aiming for, or the base TN is the absolutely simplest thing you can do with a skill and raises are necessary to do anything more, or some mutant combination of the two. I really hope FFG just redesigns the system from the ground up, unfortunately that likely also means buying a dozen special dice because FFG.
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Jan 24, 2017 19:09
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Yawgmoth posted:Honestly I kind of wish NatAp was a thing in L5R because playing the guessing game of "how high will I actually roll?" is irritating as gently caress. Great, my dice exploded and I got TN+40! I can do absolutely fuckall with that! Oh, I rolled absurdly low on my roll and failed even though I called raises for substantially less than my average roll? Grand, just what I wanted to do, fail because I'm supposedly good at this thing. Not to mention that what you actually get with raises and when raises are actually needed is clear as mud in the books; depending on who reads what which way, either your base TN is what you need to get what you're aiming for, or the base TN is the absolutely simplest thing you can do with a skill and raises are necessary to do anything more, or some mutant combination of the two. NatAp is a lovely thing to have in a system in large part because it strongly warps things towards itself. If you want to be actually good at a thing, you -have- to take it, you don't really have an option. That's cancer for a decent system, just like feat taxes in 4e D&D. If you want poo poo to be like that, alter the system itself as a ground condition, don't bolt on an advantage that warps everything around it.
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Jan 24, 2017 20:28
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Exploding roll and keep ends up with probability curves like this Which end up obscuring the gently caress out of how likely you are to succeed at something.
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Jan 24, 2017 21:13
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NinjaDebugger posted:NatAp is a lovely thing to have in a system in large part because it strongly warps things towards itself. If you want to be actually good at a thing, you -have- to take it, you don't really have an option. That's cancer for a decent system, just like feat taxes in 4e D&D. If you want poo poo to be like that, alter the system itself as a ground condition, don't bolt on an advantage that warps everything around it. drat, now I wish I could remember how I managed to have an earth/water shugenja with the water 1 spell that was effectively 1/round Lucky constantly active. It was amazing.
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Jan 24, 2017 21:51
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Tunicate posted:Exploding roll and keep ends up with probability curves like this That is not a curve a sane person uses.
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Jan 24, 2017 21:54
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NinjaDebugger posted:The #1 example of what happens when you don't bake PC exceptionalism into such a system is L5R, conveniently ALSO by Wick. Played as written, either every PC has to take Great Destiny or Dark Fate (which many GMs ban), or your campaign essentially becomes fantasy loving vietnam. It remains a running joke in L5R that the most dangerous enemies in the game are kama-wielding peasants, because they come in just enough numbers, with just enough damage dice, that is it almost certain one PC is going to get nailed by exploding damage and just die outright from full health. Definitely. I don't like L5R as much as 7th Sea, partly because I've always had a harder time not getting mowed down by the combat system. 7th Sea is fundamentally the same, as it is Wick's roll and keep system, but there's different stuff built atop it so that it is less lethal. I guess it's part of the setting a bit: samurai duels should be really lethal, but that doesn't jive well with high drama in the same way. If players could stay engaged with a combat where 90% of it was staredowns and pacing and the combatants only cross swords half a dozen times as in the end of Musashi, then L5R would work better. But players want more conventional fights, so lethal katanas flying around everywhere makes for an ugly, bloody mess, and often not in a good or dramatic way. Strange Cares posted:I'm in the middle of a 7th sea game right now with the best GM I've ever had, but the one thing he does do that I don't like is he insists that if you hit your full complement of dramatic wounds in the middle of a fight and have no drama dice, you're just dead, no save. If it's at the end of a battle you get to decide if you're alive or not. It makes the system way more deadly than intended, and, as I'm playing a vengeance-obsessed swordsman who seems to get gut-shot in EVERY BATTLE, it kind of puts a crimp in my style. I don't often say this, but tell your GM to play by the rules. The rules explicity state (in 1st ed, if not in 2nd ed; I just don't know 2nd ed as well yet) that Heroes don't die when they're at 2 x Resolve in Dramatic Wounds. It says they're "knocked out," and another action must be taken to kill them. Yur GM doesn't even need to be playing in the spirit of the genre (although that would also help). It's right there in the rules. CobiWann posted:So is there where I say that I was in a three year 7th Sea campaign where someone DID take Natural Aptitude in Melee: Sword at character creation?  The first game of 7th Sea I ever played had a veteran player with NA for the Vilskap knack. Vilskap is a knack in the Viking rune magic that chucks lightning. The character was also min-maxed as gently caress, so could easily hit 30+ on every to-hit roll with lightning. He could do little else and I think had no civil (i.e. non-combat) skills. The rest of us were playing The Three Musketeers. That guy was playing a fire/lightning bender from Avatar. Although it did get pretty funny when the player started leaning into his min-maxing and trying to solve every problem with lightning. "We need to save those children before the building collapses!" "I got this poo poo."  "NOOOOOOOOO" "They were fatherless bastards. A swift death was more than they deserved."  That was, perhaps, not in the spirit of heroism and do-goodery. Kwyndig posted:I have to admit, I like the guy that took NA in pistols and then didn't actually use a pistol but always carried one. It makes sense in a dramatic way, they only pull out their best move when it's literally life or death. Which is different than most PCs, who tend to just spam their strongest attack over and over but don't expect their enemies to do the same. Yeah. The spy's player is one of my best buddies (he was actually the best man in my wedding). He's a good guy, as are all of the folks I game with these days. He has a good mind for tooling around with systems, but he doesn't ever min-max just to do it. He'll try to do weird things with the mechanics, but he'll also try to fit that into a character in an interesting way. He's the guy that will spend tons of XP on stuff he's going to use once (like Catch, which I think he used literally once, but boy was it a doozy), just because he likes the sound of it on paper. This is not practical, but it is often cool as hell. I also game with his brother, and his brother does the same thing. For example, he spent a very long time in a Dark Ages Vampire game not buying the Lure of Flames Thaumaturgical path, simply because it would have broken the game. He could have, since we had a tome that taught it without needing a teacher. He was playing a freed gargoyle with 4 dots in Vicissitude, 4 dots in the Gargoyle discipline (enough to take bashing damage form fire), and 5 Courage. Being able to set a building on fire with his mind would have been too much for our poor GM, so he simply didn't take it. Both of these guys have a good eye for separating what is cool and worth it for a game, and what is cool just to be self-absorbed. NinjaDebugger posted:NatAp is a lovely thing to have in a system in large part because it strongly warps things towards itself. If you want to be actually good at a thing, you -have- to take it, you don't really have an option. That's cancer for a decent system, just like feat taxes in 4e D&D. If you want poo poo to be like that, alter the system itself as a ground condition, don't bolt on an advantage that warps everything around it. Exactly. I barred it following the campaign that I described earlier. A friend and I actually wrote it out of 7th Sea entirely when we did the revision. NA is horrible garbage, despite that one example of a player absolutely blowing up a major NPC with it. For every one example like that, there's probably 20 like CobiWann's example. It's simply not worth having around. 1st ed. 7th Sea had that problem with a lot of stuff, which is why we rewrote it from the ground up. NA is just the most extreme case of that. But I digress. Bubblyblubber posted:I'm running a pathfinder campaign and, because of a momentary lapse in sanity, we're now up to 11 players. Dear god no. Get out now.
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Jan 24, 2017 22:00
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Kwyndig posted:That is not a curve a sane person uses. Exploding dice gets a nice, well behaved probability curve. Roll-and-keep dice pools give a nice, well behaved probability curve. Roll-and-keep using exploding dice gives you that rollercoaster. edit: Although, if you look at a graph of the odds of getting at least X target value, you get an almost gaussian distribution, which could be really useful, but ONLY IF the key numbers are exposed to the player, which would probably be way more clumsy and confusing than it's worth. Tendales fucked around with this message at 22:13 on Jan 24, 2017 |
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Jan 24, 2017 22:09
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Railing Kill posted:The first game of 7th Sea I ever played had a veteran player with NA for the Vilskap knack. Vilskap is a knack in the Viking rune magic that chucks lightning. The character was also min-maxed as gently caress, so could easily hit 30+ on every to-hit roll with lightning. He could do little else and I think had no civil (i.e. non-combat) skills. The rest of us were playing The Three Musketeers. That guy was playing a fire/lightning bender from Avatar. Although it did get pretty funny when the player started leaning into his min-maxing and trying to solve every problem with lightning. 
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Jan 24, 2017 22:24
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The only system with exploding dice that are sensible is Spellbound Kingdoms, because it's 'take the higher' instead of 'add them together.' You get all the fuzzy feelings of exploding five times and rolling a 19 on a d4 without the tremendously hosed maths. Honourable second place goes to Double Cross for the entire game revolving around rolling enormous dice pools and fishing for explosions so you can get wacko high numbers. Everyone in that game resurrects instantly until they get over 100% corruption though, so the enormous ultra-crits don't actually vaporise people until a few rounds in.
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Jan 24, 2017 22:39
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Yeah, for a game you want a 'normal' or gaussian distribution, most of your rolls are in the middle, highs and lows are minimized but possible. This makes it easy for players to figure out which actions they can attempt with a reasonable degree of success, and which ones they have to burn resources on if they really want to win. Which is one of the things that annoy the poo poo out of me in d20 games, because they're always single die for task resolution. A single die is always flat unless there's something off about the die, any number is no more likely to come up than any other number, which adds too much randomness. The higher the range on the die, the worse it is (like a d6 isn't bad, a d12 is pushing it). They try to mitigate it with modifiers and stuff, and then immediately break it again with things like "a 1 is an automatic failure, a 20 is an automatic hit", well shithead, you just baked a floor of a 5% failure chance into your game regardless of character skill. It gets worse when dumbasses add 'critical miss' rules, so now it's a 5% chance that something really lovely will happen like you'll blow your hand off or something. A 5% chance of total failure is not really normal when you consider someone who fights a hydra for breakfast before proceeding to kick down a door and get into an epic battle with a dragon over the fate of an entire country. People whine "my verisimilitude!" and then fail to notice that the world's best fighter still has a 5% chance to miss a stationary object in their favorite rules system, or that a literally untrained peasant child has a 5% chance to throw a rock well enough to hit God as long as He's in range. It's cargo cult game design, they literally just do it because that's what they've seen be successful and if they copy it they think maybe they'll be successful too.
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Jan 24, 2017 22:59
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Bad dice mechanics? As luck would have it, I'm doing a F&F writeup* of Polaris RPG, which features this handy chart on how to convert your d20+modifiers roll into a d10 roll: *writeup is nowhere near dice mechanics yet
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Jan 24, 2017 23:16
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To recap… 1 – Our Eldritch Knight is in the service of the Queen of Air and Darkness of the Feywild. Her grandmother is in service to the Cult of Az, dedicated to bringing about the destruction of the world. Aligned with her grandmother are a race of evil elves (Sidh) known as the Ancellyn, who want to destroy the world out of a sense of vengeance. The Ancellyn are preparing for war, a war that will see them march alongside an army of devils and fallen angels. 2 – The Queen of Air and Darkness has ordered Tellisyn, our Eldritch Knight, to be at a set of standing stones at the northern most tip of Ancellyon before midnight of the Spring Equinox. If she arrives there in time, she can open a portal that will allow the armies of the Feywild into Tanicus to defeat and wipe out the Ancellyn before they can link up with the Cult of Az. 3 – During our journey to the standing stones, our party hitched a ride with a Storm Giant in her flying castle, only to be attacked by a Black Dragonborn warrior from our past as well as the Revenant that is sworn to kill our Favored Soul… ** This time out, the Revenant is crafty and the Black Dragonborn shows good tactics. The Revenant dives right for the Paladin who’s moved to cover our Favored Soul while the Dragonborn uses his Emerald Drake to knock our Barbarian off the edge of the castle, and it takes a Dexterity save for him not to go plummeting two miles to the ground. The rest of the Drakes split into two groups – one harasses the rest of the party to keep away from the Revenant while the other makes a beeline around the outside of the castle for the control room. My Sorcerer Dimension Doors across the castle just in time to make a save against the Drake’s breath weapon while the Storm Giant who is piloting the castle takes full damage. She is barely managing to keep the castle aloft as the Drake swoops back around the kill, however I manage to get a Banish off and spend the rest of the combat helping her stay on her feet to keep the castle in the air. The Revenant and the Paladin are Alpha Striking each other, throwing every single high damage ability they can into the fray. The Monk and her Water Elemental, Bubbles, are working at a team to Engulf/Drown one Drake while the Rogue and Eldritch Knight are trying to take down another. The Black Dragonborn’s Drake is swooping back and forth, strafing the courtyard and whittling away at our HP. The whole time this is happening, our Barbarian has decided to utilize one of our favorite magical items. It’s a small amethyst spider that attached to any surface. Once affixed, it can’t be moved, budged, or knocked off. The spider can “spin” 500 feet of silk rope as well, making it a great descending tool as well as a solid anchor for anyone who isn’t so good at climbing. Like our Barbarian. So as he’s dangling for dear life, he smacks the spider against the side of the castle, ties the rope around his waist.…and swings off. And keeps swinging. And swinging. And swinging. Like a pendulum. And the next time the Black Dragonborn come swooping past, Skeever is on the downswing and manages to crack him square in the breastplate. He ends up knocking the Dragonborn off of the Drake. The Drake manages to save the Dragonborn from falling to its doom, but by that point Skeever has just finished the upswing and on the next downswing slams his axe right into the Drake’s snout, causing it to flee in pain no matter how much the Dragonborn is screaming at it to get back in the fight. By this point, it’s just a matter of teaming up on each Drake one at a time while the Paladin and the Revenant have their “My God’s Dick is Bigger Than Your God’s Dick, Even Though Both Our Gods are Goddesses” fight. Both fights end at the same time as the Paladin sends the Revenant back to whatever plane it came from while the last Drake ends up drowning inside Bubbles. Ever see a Drake drown in the air? It’s…not pretty. The castle is damaged and the Storm Giant is too wounded to continue to pilot it, so she does her best to land us as smoothly and safely as she can (only 2d6 points of damage on a failed Dex save) as far inside Ancellyon as possible. We’re still a week out from the standing stones, so we grab our gear and head on out. ** We’re sticking as close to the mountains as we can, sleeping by day and moving by night. It’s during one of these nights that we end up making camp on a high ridgeline in a dense copse of trees. Upon waking and getting ready to move out, one of us looks out over the ridgeline…and sees thousands and thousands of torches, tents, and most importantly legions of Ancellyn soldiers. They’re setting up camp for the night, however it’s obvious that the army is marching north. And there’s only one thing to the north – the standing stones. So now it’s a race, with the added bonus of avoiding Ancellyn scouts and outriders. Luckily, some of the Sidh from the portion of the continent opposite of the peninsula decided to send a scout unit when they heard rumblings of the Ancellyn mobilizing their army. We run into/get captured by/meet up with (depending on who you ask) this unit of scouts. Since Ancellyon used to be part of the mainland before it became a peninsula during the Worldquake, there are tons of Sidh ruins scattered about, which mean secret tunnels that the Sidh still have mapped. The bad news is that taking the tunnels will get us just outside the standing stones a few hours before midnight. While we’re travelling underground, Tellisyn explains to the Sidh scouts that the armies of the Feywild can’t tell the difference between humans and Sidh, friend and foe. To them, anything in front of them is an enemy. Our party is marked so that the Feywild forces will know we’re friendly, but we need to come up with some kind of marking or symbol that the scouts can wear so the Feywild don’t massacre them. We determine that the best course of action is to tie a strip of cloth around the upper right arms of each scout. Where are we going to find enough cloth to outfit an army of 500 scouts? Well…turns out that our Portable Hole has a bundle of cloth in it that could be torn up and sewn into strips. The bundle of cloth is a roll of purple linen from Abeforth’s Apothecary, the magical store that’s “sponsoring” my Sorcerer. Oh, and Skeever has enough gold thread to sew a circular “A” into the middle of each strip of cloth as an added level of identification and protection. So when the Feywild come pouring through the portal, it will be the logo of Abeforth’s Apothecary that will keep the Sidh safe from harm. But Skeever can’t help but stress to the Sidh that it’s not just the symbol of Abeforth’s…it’s also the symbol of the Lightning Lord, ensure that he will protect them from the ravages of the Feywild. ** So, when you think standing stones, you may think of this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAXzzHM8zLw But when Tanicus thinks standing stones, we’re talking about a series of stone monoliths and circles covering nearly thirty square miles. A series of stone monoliths and circles that’s being heavily patrolled by a Ancellyn rapid reaction force. Time is running out, but before we walk through the outer circles our party is stopped by what we can only describe as a Forest Golem and company.    The Forest Golem has been told by the Ancient Guardian that only the worthy may pass. The Ancellyn “proved” that they were worthy because they kept interlopers out of the circles for hundreds of years. In order for us to pass, the member of our party who was most “unworthy” would have to convince them that we meant the circle no harm. At the word “unworthy,” Tellisyn, our Eldritch Knight/Warlock stepped up. This whole plot kicked off because her grandmother and cousins are trying to bring about the end of the world and she’s the only one in her family with any sort of goodness in her. Of course, her ideas of “goodness” ends up making the Goddess of Vengeance smile… I wish I had written specific stuff down because the player and DM went at it for fifteen minutes along the lines of “if you’re asking me to be all smiles, rainbows, and making promises that things are going to be OK, you’re asking the wrong person. Because if we don’t get to the center of these standing stones by midnight the entire world is going to end, including your standing stones. Which means if you say ‘no’ and don’t let us pass, these standing stones are just monuments waiting to fall and anyone that’s guarding them is already dead. Which means I will have no problem burning this entire forest down and walking over the ashes while stomping on your bones, because if you say ‘no’ you’ve doomed the world to death.” It was…a unique way of convincing the Forest Golem to let us pass, but let us pass he did. The monolith the Forest Golem had been guarding had a series of sigils and carvings that were catching the moonlight and focusing it, leading us through the maze of trees and stones towards the center of the stones.  We evaded three Ancellyn patrols along the way to the standing stones. Two of those were by dice rolls, and the third by some clever roleplaying by our Rogue Cullus. He botched a Hide roll and an Investigation roll while the rest of us passed with flying colors. So he’s out in the middle of the clearing when an Ancellyn scout rolls up on him. The conversation goes a bit like this… quote:Ancellyn Scout: Hey! Stop right there! Now, something interesting happens on the way to the standing stones. We come across a final patrol, but this one is led by a half-woman, half-devil who is marching along with two...what we can only call Devilstitch Golems.  There's no way to get around them and still have time to get to the circle, so we're preparing for a fight when Catira, the Goddess of Vengeance, decides to "bless" our party with a message. Put simply, the half-woman/half-devil has a part to play with the ultimate fate of the world, much like how OUR party has a major part to play with the ultimate fate of the world. So, we can't kill her. In fact, we HAVE to tell her that she has a part in the ultimate fate of the word before letting her go, as our party has "proven to be the perfect messengers of vengeance." So there's only one thing we can do - an Alpha Strike, and in two rounds we absolutely obliterate the rest of the patrol after dropping every single high-end damage spell we can. On one hand, everything goes down HARD. On the other hand, we just dropped all our high-end spells and we're not even at the circle yet. The half-woman/half-devil is...amused by the turn of events, but not so amused when we tell her that a goddess has Her eye on her. We convince her to run, and she does just that. ** The moon is high in the sky by the time we get to the proper circle standing stones. The circle is surrounded by trees caught in all four seasons – a naked tree covered in snow sitting next to a tree bursting with green leaves. When we try to walk through the circle however, a magical barrier bounces us back while a beam of white light shoots into the sky. Yep, it’s an alarm… …and here comes the Ancient Guardian himself. A loving Jabberwocky. 
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Jan 25, 2017 00:42
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 I never realize how much I need more of these stories until I see an update and remember that I need more
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Jan 25, 2017 00:57
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Godlike has some pretty hosed up mechanics. It uses d10's, but instead of having difficulties to hit with each die like White Wolf, or target numbers like 7th Sea, it has both "width" and "height." Width is the most number of-a-kind you can put together. Height is the number on those dice. So, 3 9's is 3W and 9H. Usually only height matters, as that governs the extent of success, while width measures the finesse or speed of success. Lifting a barbell, for example, might require a pair or more of, say, 7's. The pair is just so you can do it (2W is a common requirement for checks, regardles sof height), but the height is what's measuring how well you can lift. Having 4 7's just means you can lift it faster, which may or may not matter. If you were in a footrace, you'd want more width than height, and having a higher number would just mean you'd make it look better. A 3W 1H running check would look ugly as hell and you'd be winded at the end of it, but you'd beat someone with 1W and 10H who didn't break a sweat but was slow as death. So the whole system is about making pairs or better, and trying to make those pairs as high as possible. That's goofy enough, but the system also has "Hard Dice" and "Wiggle Dice." HD are always 10's. WD can be set to any value, after the rest of a die pool is rolled. You can only get these dice through super powers (the game is a WW2 game set in an alternate history where superpowered "talents" emerge starting in 1936). Wiggle dice I don't mind as much because they add a tactical element to a lot of rolls and they're so expensive that you can't cheese them. Hard dice as cheaper, and because of the way combat works can lead to auto-kills easily. The system has area-sensitive damage boxes, which are based on the height of an attack roll. Each number, 1-10, hits a different part of the body, so when you decide what pair to keep from an attack roll, you're picking where you hit your opponent. 1 hits a leg, 4 hits and arm, etc. 10's are head shots, and everyone has 4 boxes on their head. Take 4 HD in any damage power and you can automatically kill any opponent. "My power is pyromancy, and I have 4 HD in that power. I only set people's heads on fire, and they die instantly." That would be ok if there were a reliable counter to the powers, but there isn't. Theoretically there is, as there is a system in place to bid Willpower to make powers work... but almost every printed power has the "robust" quality that makes it immune to bidding. I really like Godlike, mostly because it has a fantastic story and an... interesting system. But I've found it unplayable without some major house rules. Get rid of the robust quality, and consider barring or severely restricting Hard Dice, for a start.
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Jan 25, 2017 01:00
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Our Barbarian yelled "TIME TO TIP THE SCALES!" and tipped over a giant magical bowl thing that was being used for a ritual.
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Jan 25, 2017 01:08
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That width/height mechanic is Greg Stolze's "One Roll Engine." It's used in "A Dirty World" as well. I'm sort of "meh" on it; it always seems to work better in the examples than it does in actual play. For the most part, your dice pools have to be pretty big before you start seeing anything beyond 1 or 2 width with any regularity. It means failure is actually pretty common. In a noir setting that's fine, but it definitely needs ... something to make it work out better in play.
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Jan 25, 2017 06:36
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I think a lot of people know this by now, but Stolze made ORE as a reaction to work he did with White Wolf after he had realized that there was no design rhyme-or-reason for WOD's dice mechanics. Perhaps the in-practice/in-game results leave something to be desired (I have never played an ORE game), but the idea was definitely to make a dice mechanic that he very clearly understood, and could make very clearly understood to the players.
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Jan 25, 2017 07:31
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Ilor posted:That width/height mechanic is Greg Stolze's "One Roll Engine." It's used in "A Dirty World" as well. I'm sort of "meh" on it; it always seems to work better in the examples than it does in actual play. For the most part, your dice pools have to be pretty big before you start seeing anything beyond 1 or 2 width with any regularity. It means failure is actually pretty common. In a noir setting that's fine, but it definitely needs ... something to make it work out better in play. I just looked at my copy of Godlike and it is co-authored by Stolze. Good call. But that's exactly what happens. The examples make it sound tidy, but it never goes that way in practice. Every time I've run Godlike or played it, the GM has to fudge the rules to allow for success a little more easily, or at least flexibly. The existence of Hard Dice and Wiggle Dice make success (i.e. a pair or better, regardless of height) a bit easier, but those only pertain to super powers (which can include an attribute in which you are superhumanly talented). That helps, but it doesn't fix the problem on its own. It's an interesting idea, but it doesn't actually do its job of facilitating a game particularly well. gradenko_2000 posted:I think a lot of people know this by now, but Stolze made ORE as a reaction to work he did with White Wolf after he had realized that there was no design rhyme-or-reason for WOD's dice mechanics. Perhaps the in-practice/in-game results leave something to be desired (I have never played an ORE game), but the idea was definitely to make a dice mechanic that he very clearly understood, and could make very clearly understood to the players. How close is the One Roll Engine to New World of Darkness, as opposed to Old World of Darkness? Because NWoD uses one roll to resolve most things, including combat actions. I'm just wondering if his designs inspired that, or vice-versa.
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Jan 25, 2017 12:23
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I think it would work fine if you typically tripled the number of dice being rolled. That would mean a much higher likelihood of getting results that have some variance in both height and width. But that starts to get into "fistfuls of dice" territory.
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Jan 25, 2017 12:49
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Ilor posted:I think it would work fine if you typically tripled the number of dice being rolled. That would mean a much higher likelihood of getting results that have some variance in both height and width. But that starts to get into "fistfuls of dice" territory. Yeah. I don't mind the idea behind the system (to get more than one type of result out of one roll), but it needs major fixes to function. I don't even mind rolling fistfuls of dice for a game like Godlike, since it's a superhero game. The number of dice might get unwieldy, and the math of the character sheet wouldn't be quite a simple, but ti would work. The system isn't the reason I like Godlike anyway. The story is fantastic, and there's about 40 or so NPCs threaded into a retelling of WW2. The tone is less like technicolor comic book superheroes with WW2 thrown in, and more like gritty WW2 with superheroes thrown in. I like it because I'm a history nerd, and because it lets me play a superhero game that isn't in the same tone as most. I don't mind glossy, technicolor superhero stuff, but there's already plenty of those games out there. This one is different enough to be worth trying to fix.
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Jan 25, 2017 13:16
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Legends of the Wulin does a similar thing, where you are rolling 7d10 and looking for pairs or better; the width is the tens digit and height is the ones, so if you rolled 3 9s you have a 39 and are trying to beat a target number. But in that game you also have joss points (which can be spent to add to your rolls or remove dice from opponents' rolls) and the river (which can be used to store unneeded sets until they are needed) so you definitely have a good amount of both dice and potential manipulation when you need it.
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Jan 25, 2017 15:12
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Possibly unsurprisingly, Legends of the Wulin is a successor of a system that started as an ORE game before going its own way at some point early in development. (Weapons of the Gods) Another game that started as ORE until someone branched off to make a their own version? Cthulhutech. Which shows what happens when someone looks at ORE and has no idea how math works.
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Jan 25, 2017 15:25
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Cthulhutech is so sad because the elevator pitch is kinda-sorta cool but then you look at the system and see that you can both crit succeed and crit fail in the same roll. Then you read the fluff and it's got a ton of creepy  poo poo.
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Jan 25, 2017 15:36
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Reign has the only variant of ORE that I think actually works. Instead of Wiggle Dice and Hard Dice, there are Master Dice and Expert Dice. You can only get a maximum of one special die per pool by any means - you may never, ever roll more than one ED or MD. MD are just Wiggle Dice and ED are Wiggle Dice but you declare before you roll. MD guarantees a pair of your choice and ED means you can called shot without penalty, or out of combat you only need to roll a single 10 instead of a pair. Doesn't increase your chances of success, just increases the chances that when you do it, it'll be good. Hard Dice are such a mechanical clusterfuck.
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Jan 25, 2017 16:09
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Big Eyes Small Mouth is a broken system. I have a fun story of the one time a PC died in BESM, ever. You see, PCs are so absurdly busted in BESM that the only thing that can kill them is another PC. I was in a game once where the DM was almost able to kill off a player before the campaign was forced to end (college gaming has a hard end limit on campaigns). This was about five years ago now, so this is just what I remember. Our party of five was: Arch, the 'quintessential anime protagonist,' whose whole gimmick was that he was stupid, but had high body and soul stats. He was the big fighter of the group, and tended to focus on swords Kay, the healer/diplomatic face of the party. She tended to be hot tempered when it was just the party, but always put her best face on whenever we had to deal with people. She wasn't weak, though, as we tended to go up against the paranormal, her exorcism attack tended to be used quite a bit. Alex, the battle mage, who called herself the artillery of the party. Basically, if she saw it, she could roast it. Fun job. "Marc," the hidden prince of the Aerinal region (Real name Marcos XIV), who was fleeing for his life from the evil king, who he was prophecized to kill. He had a gun as his weapon, but didn't kill unless he had no choice. and finally we had me, MAG-E, the android battle-maid (the template was fun), owned by Marc I put forth a character who was min-maxed for maid, because doing that in the last campaign was a lot of fun. I was also the team hacker. So, during the campaign, I tended to stay in the background, silent unless explicitly asked a question. When combat came, I was generally hidden, and when it was time to hack doors, that's when I'd do stuff. Otherwise, I mostly just played straight man in jokes during the rest stops. Then we got to Castle Aerinal, and nobody paid attention to me when I stayed to the back as we entered the castle, as I tended to do that, claiming "an android's place is to follow." The party entered the castle prepared for a major fight, and were nervous when the entrance hall was empty. We were expecting a fight, but hadn't gotten one. The DM asked everyone to roll an observation check, and nobody really rolled that high. I rolled a 9, but the highest besides me rolled a 5, and neither were apparently good enough to see what was happening. I bit my thumb... ...and the DM asked Arch to roll defense, at a -2 penalty for ambush. He didn't roll high enough to stop the attack. MAG-E had betrayed the team, and shot Dawnbringer right out of Arch's hands. Turns out I wasn't owned by Marc, but by his father, and I was programmed to kill everyone but Marc should they ever set foot in Castle Aerinal. What ensued for the rest of the session (3 hours) was a massive battle between the three Androids, (MAG-E was joined by her identical "twin sisters" CAR-E and AIM-E, played by the DM) and the party, where I was OoC taunting them the whole time. In the end, I had gotten a lucky shot in at Arch (a crit), knocking him out, before Marc killed (shut down) AIM-E. CAR-E knocked him out, and Alex used up the last of her magic to kill CAR-E, while Kay grabbed Dawnbringer (a feat that she and Arch's player had hashed out with the GM beforehand, and that I hadn't known could happen) and cut off MAG-E's head. Afterwards, they had a confrontation with Marcos XIII, Marc killed him, and became the new king, but after the campaign, the rest of the players thanked me and the DM for a fun climactic battle. It was the last campaign I did in college, because all the good DMs graduated (or dropped out) that semester. Senerio fucked around with this message at 17:05 on Jan 25, 2017 |
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Jan 25, 2017 17:00
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So before I go any further, what do you guys think is going on in the campaign based solely on the picture below?
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Jan 25, 2017 19:29
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CobiWann posted:So before I go any further, what do you guys think is going on in the campaign based solely on the picture below? Pazuzu Pazuzu
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Jan 25, 2017 19:30
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As a battle where an earth elemental is suplexing a water elemental rages, the villains attempt to negotiate with Quad-Hawk for his supply of gross-rear end oreos.
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Jan 25, 2017 19:55
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Yawgmoth posted:Cthulhutech is so sad because the elevator pitch is kinda-sorta cool but then you look at the system and see that you can both crit succeed and crit fail in the same roll. Then you read the fluff and it's got a ton of creepy Age of Rebellion's dice mechanic allows crit success (or 'Triumph') and crit fail (or 'Despair') to happen in the same roll, although they manage to make it badass instead of stupid. The way it's handled, positive critical effects or negative critical effects (or lesser positive/negative effects, referred to as Advantage and Threat) happen independently of whether or not the roll succeeded. This means that you can roll to do something, succeed at doing what you intended to do, but also have to deal with an unplanned negative consequence (example: you shoot the guy, he dies, but your weapon just ran out of ammo). It also means you can fail to do what you're trying to do and still get a positive benefit out of the attempt (example: you shoot the guy, you miss, but you suppress him, penalizing any attacks he tries to make). Of course, the way they accomplish this is with dice pools which require six different kinds of proprietary custom dice, which is kind of a pain in the rear end.
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Jan 25, 2017 20:31
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Mister Bates posted:Of course, the way they accomplish this is with dice pools which require six different kinds of proprietary custom dice, which is kind of a pain in the rear end. Yeah, that sounds stupid. It really sounds like somebody on the team went "well, we don't people to be able to pirate the game easily, include some physical components" and then some other wonk decided "dice, gamers like dice right?" and the rest of the team, who actually were gamers, just nodded along without thinking and slapped together a resolution mechanic where are all the numbers are replaced by pretty symbols to further obfuscate things.
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Jan 25, 2017 20:52
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The way I dealt with it was by just taking some spare regular dice I had and drawing on them with a Sharpie, because gently caress spending a bunch of money on proprietary dice when the game books themselves are also extortionately expensive. Then even that got annoying, and I just switched to using a computer program. Stupid though it is, it's still pretty drat fun in actual play.
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Jan 25, 2017 21:34
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Kwyndig posted:Yeah, that sounds stupid. It really sounds like somebody on the team went "well, we don't people to be able to pirate the game easily, include some physical components" and then some other wonk decided "dice, gamers like dice right?" and the rest of the team, who actually were gamers, just nodded along without thinking and slapped together a resolution mechanic where are all the numbers are replaced by pretty symbols to further obfuscate things. 
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Jan 25, 2017 22:17
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Yeah the FFG Star Wars system is actually pretty rad. Yes, the custom dice/symbols are a PITA, but they released an app that rolls and tabulates it all for you if you don't want to mess with physical dice. But the thing I really like about it is that it gives you the ability to add "...and..." or "...but..." to any success or failure. As in, "you succeed in shooting the stormtrooper, and as he falls he shoots the stormtrooper next to him." Or "you successfully hack the console to open the blast doors, but there's a squad of stormtroopers on the other side of it! Oh, poo poo!" From a storytelling perspective, the concept of adding either positive or negative consequences to either success or failure is super cool.
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Jan 25, 2017 23:19
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