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Drone posted:If I wanna get into L5R, is 4th Edition pretty much the way to go? Seems to be out of print, though I could always just get the PDF from DriveThru.
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Feb 25, 2017 21:10
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Antivehicular posted:The standard argument against the d20 is that the probability curve is linear, instead of the bell curve of multiple dice, so the results tend to be very swingy in a way that multiple dice tend to compensate for. That mean you have an equal chance of rolling a 20 as a 1, whilst on a set of two d6's you have more of a chance of rolling a 7-9. I mean it makes sense, but I suppose in HQ terms that doesn't really matter too much, as everything is resolved with a single d20 to decide stuff.
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Feb 25, 2017 21:12
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Re: L5R TCG Are they going back to a living card game where tournament winners make a decision in the metaplot narrative?
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Feb 25, 2017 21:13
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Yawgmoth posted:4e is the way to go right now. FFG has the license and I think they're supposed to be announcing something this year, but we don't really know what. I'm in a discord channel for it now, I could PM you a link if you want it. Seems to be a decent place for talking about the game and finding a group. Sure. I'm really interested in the game but on the other hand I'm also really bad at games that do Serious Roleplay, and it always seems like L5R is definitely one of those.
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Feb 25, 2017 21:14
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Josef bugman posted:That mean you have an equal chance of rolling a 20 as a 1, whilst on a set of two d6's you have more of a chance of rolling a 7-9. If you squint at it, the mechanic is more 2d20, since there's always an opposed d20.
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Feb 25, 2017 21:18
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Drone posted:Sure. I'm really interested in the game but on the other hand I'm also really bad at games that do Serious Roleplay, and it always seems like L5R is definitely one of those. I highly recommend the One Shot L5R actual play as a model. http://oneshotpodcast.com/podcasts/one-shot/92-legend-of-five-rings-rings-part-1/
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Feb 25, 2017 21:18
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Helical Nightmares posted:Re: L5R TCG It's a LCG and thats all anyone knows atm.
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Feb 25, 2017 21:23
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On any given roll, it doesn't mathematically matter what kind of dice you're rolling, assuming your percentage chance of success is same. If you need an 11+ on a d20, needing 11+ on 3d6 is exactly the same. The difference is how chances change in the two methods. In a d20 system, if you have +1, then that's always a 5% difference in your odds. In a bell curve system, the amount your odds change depends on where on the curve you are. If you previously needed an 11+ on 3d6, then getting a +1 to your roll (because of increased stats, or modifier, or whatever), your odds improve by 12.5%, but if you previously needed an 18+ on 3d6, then getting +1 only makes you about 1.5% more likely to succeed. One interesting side effect of a 3d6 system is that it means you have different priorities depending on how skilled you are. If you're really low skilled, getting a bonus isn't going to help much at all unless you get a BIG bonus, so you're best off finding something else entirely to do. If you're middle skilled, then each point of bonus is a big boost to your chances, so you look around for any circumstantial bonus you can find. If you're highly skilled, then penalties no longer actually hurt your chances much, so you can start showing off by taking penalties to succeed in a cool way or in a tougher situation. One of the nice things about a d20 system is that when you're designing stuff for the game, you always know exactly how valuable +1 is. It's always 5% chance, no matter how skilled the PC is (unless you've let your unbounded math get out of control and you're getting target numbers of less than 1 or greater than 20. Don't do that.) The real problem is that you roll too few times. In combat, you might roll dozens of times, and you'll have bunches of fights, so over time that 5% means 5% more successes, which means ~5% more damage. But in non-combat contexts, you generally roll once. There's not enough samples for a +5% chance to actually visibly give you 5% more goodness. You either succeed or fail, full stop, and that 5% only matters, well, 5% of the time. This problem, by the way, exists in any system with really binary task resolution. The other thing about d20 is when you're comparing two characters, especially if a contested roll means both characters roll d20 + stat. 2d20 has HUGE variation[*], which completely drowns out the actual stats of the characters. If you see people bitching about the initiative system in Darkest Dungeon (the videogame, not the RPG), this is the phenomenon they're bitching about. The actual D&D-based d20 system is dumb because it doesn't mechanically distinguish between times when you roll 1d20 and times when you roll 2d20. [*] A common misconception I've seen is that 2dX is less swingy than 1dX. Rolling more dice of the same size is always more swingy. The 3d6 bell curve works because the sum is a smaller range than the 1d20 it's replacing.
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Feb 25, 2017 21:29
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Haystack posted:If you squint at it, the mechanic is more 2d20, since there's always an opposed d20. Oh yeah, doy.
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Feb 25, 2017 21:29
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Josef bugman posted:That mean you have an equal chance of rolling a 20 as a 1, whilst on a set of two d6's you have more of a chance of rolling a 7-9. I'm not familiar with the HeroQuest resolution mechanic (have the game but have never sat down with the system in-depth), but yeah, basically. In the d20 system, characters always have a flat 5% chance to critically succeed and a 5% chance to critically fail, regardless of anything else; the math is also set up such that even PCs who are diegetically very competent are often as likely to fail as to succeed, compared to a bell-curve dice system which will tend to produce more average results over time and thus allow competent (high-stat) PCs to succeed relatively consistently. (Take 10/20 sort of mitigate this, but they're not very interesting.) Additionally, d20 doesn't have a robust fail-forward system by RAW, so low dice rolls tend to stall a campaign or produce narratively uninteresting results more often than not. Think of every D&D game you've been in where someone blew Spot/Listen/Perception and missed something important, stalling progress out, or fights that are just "you miss the goblin" over and over because suddenly nobody can roll above a 6.
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Feb 25, 2017 21:30
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gradenko_2000 posted:You're not wrong, but it's maybe an issue that people "use" D&D for so much more than dungeon crawling. That's 100% where the issue lies, as far as I'm concerned. People are so used to "D&D" being synonymous with "role-playing game" that they frequently try to hammer a square peg into a round hole by using it for stuff it really isn't suited to.
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Feb 25, 2017 21:44
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Antivehicular posted:I'm not familiar with the HeroQuest resolution mechanic (have the game but have never sat down with the system in-depth), but yeah, basically. In the d20 system, characters always have a flat 5% chance to critically succeed and a 5% chance to critically fail, regardless of anything else; the math is also set up such that even PCs who are diegetically very competent are often as likely to fail as to succeed, compared to a bell-curve dice system which will tend to produce more average results over time and thus allow competent (high-stat) PCs to succeed relatively consistently. (Take 10/20 sort of mitigate this, but they're not very interesting.) Additionally, d20 doesn't have a robust fail-forward system by RAW, so low dice rolls tend to stall a campaign or produce narratively uninteresting results more often than not. Think of every D&D game you've been in where someone blew Spot/Listen/Perception and missed something important, stalling progress out, or fights that are just "you miss the goblin" over and over because suddenly nobody can roll above a 6. I suppose it is a bit different because masteries don't really make that happen. Everything becomes a success or failure with a tie being really unlikely. HQ has Masteries (represented in HQ Glorantha by a little W like rune) which bumps up the result by one. So if you crit fail, if you have one of those you merely fail.
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Feb 25, 2017 21:50
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D&D's popularity is kind of annoying because I'd like to do some tabletop work that I can slap up on my website as a sort of Here's Why You Should Hire Me To Write For You, but I can't abide with WotC for ethical reasons, and Pathfinder suffers from the same 3.x problem of "none of the numbers really mean anything, you might as well just throw random poo poo together and maybe make sure a 7th level wizard can one-shot/bypass your encounters entirely so nobody gets stuck" when it comes to adventure design. I was looking at 13th Age for a bit, and also a few official Fate books, but it'd be nice to settle on a decent, solid, non-obscure system that I can write stuff for without feeling morally opposed to doing so. Which is why anything by White Wolf is out of the question now.
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Feb 25, 2017 23:03
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Yeah everybody in the industry who an outsider might have heard of at this point is bad except for maybe Evil Hat. I say we burn it all to the ground and build a new better hobby on top of the ashes.
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Feb 25, 2017 23:09
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Fuego Fish posted:I was looking at 13th Age for a bit, and also a few official Fate books, but it'd be nice to settle on a decent, solid, non-obscure system that I can write stuff for without feeling morally opposed to doing so. Which is why anything by White Wolf is out of the question now. We could try and make HQ popular... Yeah I know. But PBTA seems to be pretty good as well!
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Feb 25, 2017 23:14
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Kwyndig posted:Yeah everybody in the industry who an outsider might have heard of at this point is bad except for maybe Evil Hat. I'd settle for a time machine back to pre-Gygax and divert the course of history. Maybe push a few people down the stairs while we're there, eliminate a few nuisances from the modern day era. Josef bugman posted:We could try and make HQ popular... One of the problems with PBTA, and I mean "problem" in the loosest possible sense here, is that it's very driven by the creativity of the group. People suggest things, make up backstories, it's all part and parcel of the system itself. That makes it a bit of a poo poo to write stuff for because you need to always entertain the possibility of one of the players going "actually, no."
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Feb 25, 2017 23:25
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Fuego Fish posted:One of the problems with PBTA, and I mean "problem" in the loosest possible sense here, is that it's very driven by the creativity of the group. People suggest things, make up backstories, it's all part and parcel of the system itself. That makes it a bit of a poo poo to write stuff for because you need to always entertain the possibility of one of the players going "actually, no." True, but the ability to go "isn't this all a bit daft, wouldn't we rather be blowing something up" be a good option for Tabletop stuff?
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Feb 25, 2017 23:28
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Yawgmoth posted:The game's strategy is mostly "pop your encounter, then use at-wills until you have a reason to get your encounter back and use it again, then at-will until enemies are dead" which isn't much of a strategy at all. This is kind of like saying that Vampire's strategy is mostly "use your disciplines".
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Feb 25, 2017 23:47
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Ferrinus posted:This is kind of like saying that Vampire's strategy is mostly "use your disciplines".
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Feb 25, 2017 23:52
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Drone posted:Sure. I'm really interested in the game but on the other hand I'm also really bad at games that do Serious Roleplay, and it always seems like L5R is definitely one of those. L5R is as serious as you make it. I mean, yes - the core game books and everything tend to paint a very serious picture, but that isn't entirely reflected in the mechanics, and you can totally run it differently as you see fit. Just note that doing so might alter certain character priorities and make some schools better or worse then others, as a good amount of L5R balance is built into the setting rather then the rules. Courtiers will probably take a hit to their usefulness if you don't want there to be much or any court stuff, for example, and shugenja become way more powerful when they're no longer expected to uphold vague amounts of pacifism. Likewise, it becomes much easier to min/max bushi when they no longer need to worry about having a baseline of social skills.
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Feb 25, 2017 23:53
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Yawgmoth posted:This would be true if Vampire's character generation was "pick Celerity or Vigor, that is your Discipline. You can Go Real Fast or Be Real Strong 1/encounter. You can also pick Resilience as a Discipline but it sucks and you'll be pretty much useless." That would be true regardless of Vampire's character generation mechanics because of the incredible amount of work a phrase like "use your powers" does. What you haven't done and won't do is use specific examples tying your vague complaints to anything actually written down in a game book.
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Feb 25, 2017 23:56
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Josef bugman posted:True, but the ability to go "isn't this all a bit daft, wouldn't we rather be blowing something up" be a good option for Tabletop stuff? Oh it's great to play, that's what I'm saying, it's just difficult to write for. If your adventure/setting hinges on the idea that something is X, and a player says it's Y, then the whole thing collapses. Sure, you can say "GM you gotta enforce this poo poo" but that's taking away from the draw of the system.
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Feb 25, 2017 23:57
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Ferrinus posted:That would be true regardless of Vampire's character generation mechanics because of the incredible amount of work a phrase like "use your powers" does. What you haven't done and won't do is use specific examples tying your vague complaints to anything actually written down in a game book.
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Feb 26, 2017 00:09
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Fuego Fish posted:D&D's popularity is kind of annoying because I'd like to do some tabletop work that I can slap up on my website as a sort of Here's Why You Should Hire Me To Write For You, but I can't abide with WotC for ethical reasons, and Pathfinder suffers from the same 3.x problem of "none of the numbers really mean anything, you might as well just throw random poo poo together and maybe make sure a 7th level wizard can one-shot/bypass your encounters entirely so nobody gets stuck" when it comes to adventure design. Call of Cthulhu? It's popular and not owned by shitheads. Along the same lines, Glorantha material has a pretty diehard audience and is pretty underserved right now.
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Feb 26, 2017 00:12
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Yawgmoth posted:I'm not going to write a 185 page diatribe going over every lovely little thing about the lovely little system you're so involved in because writing too many words about something no one cares about is your job. If you really can't work out why "pick A or B at character creation, then do that every single combat round minus one" is the tactical level of a 3.5 D&D fighter and also boring as poo poo, then I guess you've got a lucrative career at Paizo all lined up. But your description's just wrong.
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Feb 26, 2017 00:17
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Fuego Fish posted:D&D's popularity is kind of annoying because I'd like to do some tabletop work that I can slap up on my website as a sort of Here's Why You Should Hire Me To Write For You, but I can't abide with WotC for ethical reasons, and Pathfinder suffers from the same 3.x problem of "none of the numbers really mean anything, you might as well just throw random poo poo together and maybe make sure a 7th level wizard can one-shot/bypass your encounters entirely so nobody gets stuck" when it comes to adventure design. Your best bet is poking around with an original system. It doesn't have to be something super special but it'd show 1: You're creative enough to come up with your own work. That's probably not as valued as people think it is (in general) but it looks good 2. You've got technical writing skills that are good enough to explain your own systems. It doesn't have to be a super unusual system, just something that shows a good deal of personality. That, and if you don't want to do Pathfinder stuff, and you have ethical disagreements with D&D (and I'm presuming White Wolf now) that leaves you with gently caress-all paying gigs in the industry that you don't make yourself.
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Feb 26, 2017 00:17
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Like I always say, Traveller. Or Tékumel. Or Fading Suns.
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Feb 26, 2017 00:22
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Fuego Fish posted:Oh it's great to play, that's what I'm saying, it's just difficult to write for. If your adventure/setting hinges on the idea that something is X, and a player says it's Y, then the whole thing collapses. Sure, you can say "GM you gotta enforce this poo poo" but that's taking away from the draw of the system. One hurdle I've found when running PbtA games for new gamer is that they get "analysis paralysis" when put on the spot. Seems like a good module for the system would just approach the problem by saying "Are your players stuck for ideas? Here's some stuff you can suggest to them. But if they come up with something themselves, go with that instead." PbtA modules work best not as "here's a prescribed path the adventure should go", but as a sandbox collection of ideas that the group can mine for at their whim.
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Feb 26, 2017 00:48
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Fuego Fish posted:D&D's popularity is kind of annoying because I'd like to do some tabletop work that I can slap up on my website as a sort of Here's Why You Should Hire Me To Write For You, but I can't abide with WotC for ethical reasons, and Pathfinder suffers from the same 3.x problem of "none of the numbers really mean anything, you might as well just throw random poo poo together and maybe make sure a 7th level wizard can one-shot/bypass your encounters entirely so nobody gets stuck" when it comes to adventure design. 
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Feb 26, 2017 00:50
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Ferrinus posted:But your description's just wrong.
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Feb 26, 2017 01:08
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So, if I understand thread consensus correctly in SA TG, metaplot is bad, right? But in what way exactly? Is metaplot bad when it means that you have a continuous story with a single story path that forces the GM to adapt as needed? Or is it only when a combination of factors means that you are watching railroad the tabletop rpg? Iīm asking to understand and get a better understanding of when metaplot is and isnīt bad. Or isnīt "as" bad. Because Iīm currently writing a set of connected scenarios with forced endings based on player choice which gets incorporated into later scenarios with "canon" decisions. And I want to do this right. As in...not poo poo.
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Feb 26, 2017 01:16
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Yawgmoth posted:Oh okay, I'll just go back in time and tell Past Me that my experience isn't actually happening. Yes, please do. Even at level 1, a Strike character can use more than one encounter power and has more than two at-will powers, and that's discounting the basic fact that in addition to power management you're playing on a grid and managing positioning.
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Feb 26, 2017 01:17
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It feels weird to have things simply being off limits to player characters, I think. Like you could eventually have your characters strong enough to kill gods, but if said god is an important NPC for shaping the next 2 splatbooks then it feels weird. It isn't the end of the world because you can just ignore it but I definitely see why it'd rub people the wrong way.
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Feb 26, 2017 01:19
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Haystack posted:Call of Cthulhu? It's popular and not owned by shitheads. Along the same lines, Glorantha material has a pretty diehard audience and is pretty underserved right now. Glorantha might be opening up after the kickstarter for the next edition. I don't know how Chaosium is now, I'm sure they're restructuring, but in the past they've been cool with third party and/or fan stuff.
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Feb 26, 2017 01:26
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gnome7 posted:Hi, I spent like 3 months putting this thing together and here seems like the best place to post it. Yo, this is great! Thanks for putting all this together.
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Feb 26, 2017 01:27
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Ferrinus posted:Yes, please do. Even at level 1, a Strike character can use more than one encounter power This part is only partially true, though even if a character doesn't literally have multiple encounter powers they might have ways to modify them or choices to make. Core book Classes with multiple Encounter powers at level 1: Magician Shapechanger Summoner Core book Roles with multiple Encounter powers at level 1: Leader Core book Classes with a single Encounter power that has choices associated with it, effectively making it 2+: Martial Artist Archer Buddies Core book Classes that are weird edge cases wrt how many Encounter powers they have: Bombardier (due to choices for shape of explosions) Duelist ("Duel" power is technically a second E-power but recharges) Necromancer (2nd E-power is esoteric and not designed to be used every fight) Core book Classes with nothing like that: Warlord It's weird, but yeah not as simple as "use this one power immediately and without thought, the end".
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Feb 26, 2017 01:30
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Mr.Misfit posted:So, if I understand thread consensus correctly in SA TG, metaplot is bad, right? Honestly the only way to make it not a steaming pile of Ferrinus posts is to confine it to its own adventure path type thing and even then it's rough since if you assume that all players will do either A, B, or C, they are guaranteed to choose option ╤. Every time.
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Feb 26, 2017 01:30
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I wasn't even thinking of that stuff, just the fact that everyone can and should Rally.
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Feb 26, 2017 01:32
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Mr.Misfit posted:But in what way exactly? Is metaplot bad when it means that you have a continuous story with a single story path that forces the GM to adapt as needed? I think Evil Mastermind covers it pretty well in his intro to his The Unity review. Basically, a combination of having to buy everything to understand what's going on, and having the big changes invalidate the play of any given group. And mega-railroading.
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Feb 26, 2017 01:33
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Ferrinus posted:I wasn't even thinking of that stuff, just the fact that everyone can and should Rally. That's true but if the argument is that you don't make tactical decisions then "use the same power twice ASAP" doesn't really refute that.
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Feb 26, 2017 01:38
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