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Lightning Lord posted:Do any of y'all really recoil like Dracula presented with a cross when someone you know says "Let's play D&D" or something? No, because I can play Dungeons and Dragons: 4th Edition by Wizards of the Coast, gamer.
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Apr 14, 2017 01:17
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Countblanc posted:No, because I can play Dungeons and Dragons: 4th Edition by Wizards of the Coast, gamer.
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Apr 14, 2017 01:20
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To Find a King And Kill Him With a Guillotine  Countblanc posted:No, because I can play Dungeons and Dragons: 4th Edition by Wizards of the Coast, gamer. Is that really D&D though? 
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Apr 14, 2017 01:20
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I play D&D as a subversive, trying to change the system from within.
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Apr 14, 2017 01:24
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gradenko_2000 posted:I play D&D as a subversive, trying to change the system from within. No no man, i get it, wizards are pretty cool. But you know what would make it even cooler? *looks around nervously before dropping voice to a conspiratorial whisper* Reskinning.
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Apr 14, 2017 01:50
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Nuns with Guns posted:Really, the problem is rooted in regressive assholes retreating to simulationism/verisimilitude to defend awful things in the games they play. Like all the stereotypes around "gritty" medieval fantasy games. And then that leads to stuff like idiots saying Blue Rose is unrealistic because it's full of pansies who would get nerd stomped by real medieval warriors, or who say it should turn into a fascist deertatorship. The narritivist/gamist divide is completely arbitrary and seems more centered around what social groups you roll with on the internet than any unifying design goals. Wanting more or less mechanical subsystems in a game doesn't have any inherent political ideology behind it.
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Apr 14, 2017 02:01
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Ewen Cluney posted:It's kind of amazing seeing some people grapple with Japanese TRPGs, because (although there is that one guy who's huge into indie RPGs and has made Japanese translations of some) Japanese TRPG designers have mostly done what they've done without much influence from Western RPGs newer than GURPS, and they've arrived at using scene framing and whatnot independently. People who are just trying to make fun RPGs and have never heard Ron Edwards do in fact sometimes make non-traditional games, because the divide was arbitrary in the first place. I dig all the art for classic RPGs like Runequest and Call of Cthulhu that sprung out of the Japanese tabletop scene, like seeing anime Glorantha is pretty rad. Also is the joke that that person is you?
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Apr 14, 2017 02:18
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Lightning Lord posted:I dig all the art for classic RPGs like Runequest and Call of Cthulhu that sprung out of the Japanese tabletop scene, like seeing anime Glorantha is pretty rad. Since it's translating English-language indies into Japanese, it's more of a Reverse Ewen situation, which in my imagination comes with a goatee and a font of endless malice.
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Apr 14, 2017 02:30
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Ewen Cluney posted:It's kind of amazing seeing some people grapple with Japanese TRPGs, because (although there is that one guy who's huge into indie RPGs and has made Japanese translations of some) Japanese TRPG designers have mostly done what they've done without much influence from Western RPGs newer than GURPS, and they've arrived at using scene framing and whatnot independently. People who are just trying to make fun RPGs and have never heard Ron Edwards do in fact sometimes make non-traditional games, because the divide was arbitrary in the first place. Yeah it's funny to look at the kind of convergent evolution of TBZ's aiki-> kiai-> karma cycle and the cycle of Fate points and stuff like that
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Apr 14, 2017 03:32
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Convergent evolution can be seen in many species, as can living fossils such as the long thought extinct Chainmailicanth
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Apr 14, 2017 03:35
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Lightning Lord posted:Do any of y'all really recoil like Dracula presented with a cross when someone you know says "Let's play D&D" or something? I'm gonna crosspost something real quick: Countblanc posted:While it's less of an issue here due to the fairly vibrant Play by Post culture for some games, saying "everyone should just play their ideal game" is something of a logistical impossibility for many. If I want to play 4e or Strike my options irl currently basically do not exist, similar for when I have the itch to try something like Chuubo's or Fellowship. I can either play Pathfinder/3.5e, 5e, or if I'm lucky, some White Wolf titles. Back at my old scene I was able to at least play 4e because I had enough friends with whom I had built faith in my gaming tastes to convince to try it despite all of them hearing it was awful, but since moving it's not even an option. because this basically sums up my own situation. To add to this, I'm not so starved for hot elfgame action that I've got to have it no matter what, and between a ton of good-to-great board games and video games readily available I'm not exactly starved for options for frittering away my time while I wait for the inevitability of death and the oblivion which consumes all things. So much like if I go to a board game meetup and someone says "Hey, let's play a game of 20 player Munchkin!" my response is likely to be a polite no thank you, and if that means that I'm putting myself out of the evening's group activity then, well, I'll go find something else to do. I mean, understand that I'm tacitly drawing a line here between "a game group" and "a group of friends that happens to play games." If I have a social circle that's super fuckin rad and awesome and I enjoy hanging out with them a ton then I'm a lot more likely to go along with things if one of them wants to play a game that I personally think is lackluster than I would be if it's some group of loose, casual acquaintances picked up at the FLGS because they're looking for one more and then it turns out that they only play a heavily houseruled Pathfinder using the GM's 50-page list of modifiers for extra realism, but by the same token if I have a really tight-knit and close circle of friends then I like to think that they'd be more willing to go along with it if I said "actually there's this game called Fellowship that I'd really like to try."
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Apr 14, 2017 03:36
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Yes, no gaming is better than bad gaming is an old axiom. My comment was mostly a facetious question, btw  Myself a friend of mine really really really really really wants to play 5e and she's fun and cool and so are the other people who'd play, so I'm gonna run it because I'm confident none of us would run into it's issues, instead of lecturing her about grognardism.
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Apr 14, 2017 03:40
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Lightning Lord posted:Do any of y'all really recoil like Dracula presented with a cross when someone you know says "Let's play D&D" or something? No, I hold them down and press a copy of Apocalypse World on their forehead while yelling "THE POWER OF VINCENT COMPELS YOU!"
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Apr 14, 2017 03:42
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Lightning Lord posted:Yes, no gaming is better than bad gaming is an old axiom. My comment was mostly a facetious question, btw Yeah, I wasn't really taking your comment as some kind of personal attack, but I've legit seen people who couldn't wrap their heads around the idea of not even "no gaming is bad gaming" but just "maybe if a game's not doing it for you your friends can keep playing it and you can hang out with them in other ways, it's cool."
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Apr 14, 2017 03:44
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Kai Tave posted:Yeah, I wasn't really taking your comment as some kind of personal attack, but I've legit seen people who couldn't wrap their heads around the idea of not even "no gaming is bad gaming" but just "maybe if a game's not doing it for you your friends can keep playing it and you can hang out with them in other ways, it's cool." 5e's presentation is really compelling, I've been reading the corebooks and the art is pretty good with a couple of cool pieces, the writing is breezy and conversational and the mechanics on first read seem good enough. I can see why a lot of people are confused by someone who qualifies it as "bad gaming", it probably seems contrarian.
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Apr 14, 2017 03:47
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Evil Mastermind posted:No, I hold them down and press a copy of Apocalypse World on their forehead while yelling "THE POWER OF VINCENT COMPELS YOU!" I managed to cure a leper doing that once.
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Apr 14, 2017 03:49
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Lightning Lord posted:5e's presentation is really compelling, I've been reading the corebooks and the art is pretty good, the writing is breezy and conversational and the mechanics on first read seem good enough. I can see why a lot of people are confused by someone who qualifies it as "bad gaming", it probably seems contrarian. 5e's rules are at times not clear enough, and those times are really bad for first time players. Experienced groups won't have issues, but as an introduction to the hobby it's bad.
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Apr 14, 2017 03:51
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Lightning Lord posted:5e's presentation is really compelling, I've been reading the corebooks and the art is pretty good, the writing is breezy and conversational and the mechanics on first read seem good enough. I can see why a lot of people are confused by someone who qualifies it as "bad gaming", it probably seems contrarian. Well the flipside to this is that I also don't go around trying to proselytize people away from 5E or Pathfinder or whatever because A). I know that being That Guy is obnoxious, don't, and B). I know that most people who don't post on dying website subforums dedicated to traditional tabletop games largely don't give a poo poo about any of that anyway. To date nobody has ever approached me and asked "so what are your opinions on roleplaying game design?" so I'm taking that as a sign from the universe that nobody's interested in my dumb opinions which is why I choose to inflict them upon people here instead.
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Apr 14, 2017 03:55
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Kwyndig posted:5e's rules are at times not clear enough, and those times are really bad for first time players. Experienced groups won't have issues, but as an introduction to the hobby it's bad. They're bad when they come up, but they might not come up immediately and if the group is new they definitely won't notice those gaps in the rules on their first read while taking a dump. That's why conversational rules texts are so problematic, they're easy or even fun to read but it isn't until you need to answer your friend's question about Line of Sight that you realize what a mess they are. And even then a lot of people just assume that it's how things have to be (if they think about mechanics at all) since how in the world is Jenny Gamereader supposed to know that the one-off indie books that occupy some dusty shelf of her local game store are actually worth looking at when no one she plays with has heard of them?
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Apr 14, 2017 03:55
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Kwyndig posted:5e's rules are at times not clear enough, and those times are really bad for first time players. Experienced groups won't have issues, but as an introduction to the hobby it's bad. I'm just saying I understand why people would react negatively to "lol 5e is a poo poo game, play something that you have to Print on Demand instead!" it sounds like the guy who talks poo poo on popular, fun movies and pesters his friends to watch a movie they think is gonna be a TOTALLY BORING arthouse flick instead, whether they're right or wrong. Lightning Lord fucked around with this message at 05:18 on Apr 14, 2017 |
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Apr 14, 2017 03:58
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gradenko_2000 posted:I play D&D as a subversive, trying to change the system from within. The wizard's spellbook will never dismantle the wizard's tower.
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Apr 14, 2017 05:21
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Falstaff posted:The wizard's spellbook will never dismantle the wizard's tower. Gradenko plays a pretty mean Transmute Rock to Mud Transmutation [Earth] Level: Drd 5, Sor/Wiz 5 Components: V, S, M/DF Casting time: 1 standard action Range: Medium (100 ft. + 10 ft./level) Area: Up to two 10-ft. cubes/level (S) Duration: Permanent Saving Throw: See text Spell Resistance: No
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Apr 14, 2017 05:49
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I'm the GM who made the encounter with the rock exactly 151 feet away that the druid/sorcerer/wizard caaaaan't quite reach due to the range of the spell being only 150 feet.
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Apr 14, 2017 06:00
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I had a weird experience thanks to the D&D scare where was set to get a set of the rulebooks for a birthday, and then my mom saw all the scare stories and that was the end of that. By the time I had the freedom to embrace D&D on my own, it had already become the game that old guys play to me - not helped by the fact I knew at least three AD&D GMs by that point, two of which were literal greybeards. It always feels kind of weird how that turned out with how initially excited I was. I didn't get into it until 3e, and that was mainly because I discovered Planescape at the same time and really wanted to run it, and got sucked in deep. I burnt out on it by the time Pathfinder came out and haven't really played it since. D&D 4e always felt too restrictive, and I haven't seriously played D&D since. I've played a lot of Fantasy Craft, though. I actually know a number of Pathfinder / 5e games but I'm just not that interested. Not say I wouldn't play in one, but I don't feel a need to leap at it.
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Apr 14, 2017 06:35
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Leperflesh posted:I'm the GM who made the encounter with the rock exactly 151 feet away that the druid/sorcerer/wizard caaaaan't quite reach due to the range of the spell being only 150 feet. Was there ever an official/written adventure where poo poo was 11 feet away because of 10 foot poles?
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Apr 14, 2017 06:40
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gradenko_2000 posted:Was there ever an official/written adventure where poo poo was 11 feet away because of 10 foot poles? Wasn't that something Steve Jackson put in one of the OGL Munchkin books?
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Apr 14, 2017 07:02
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Leperflesh posted:I'm the GM who made the encounter with the rock exactly 151 feet away that the druid/sorcerer/wizard caaaaan't quite reach due to the range of the spell being only 150 feet. [puts on his robe and munchkin hat] When a spell is "Wiz 5" it actually means it's a 5th level spell, which requires a 9th level caster. (Because Jesus Christ, Dungeons & Dragons, what the gently caress are you even doing?) In other words, the tower is comfortably within the 190' range. On the other hand, a range of "medium (100 + 10/level) is a 3e style of notation and verboten in 5e. On the other other hand, assuming for a moment the spell's range was really 150 feet, only the spell's point of origin must be within range. With an area of "cube", the point of origin is a point stuck to the outer edge of the cube (see PHB p. 204). So the spell can reach 150 feet and there create a bunch of cubes, which project outward, jutting out of the spell's maximum range by 9 feet, which should be plenty to destroy the supporting walls of a tower. [/puts on his robe and munchkin hat] (For the love of god, somebody send help.)
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Apr 14, 2017 13:00
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Alien Rope Burn posted:I've played a lot of Fantasy Craft, though. Such a great game. What a different gaming world we might be living in now if they had managed to beat Pathfinder to market instead of showing up marginally later. Pretty glad I barely decided on not pre-ordering Spellbound. What a mess.  At least the Crafty guys are pretty open and realistic about it now.
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Apr 14, 2017 13:28
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Lord_Hambrose posted:Such a great game. What a different gaming world we might be living in now if they had managed to beat Pathfinder to market instead of showing up marginally later. I just wrapped up my Fantasy Craft campaign. It's imo the best implementation of d20 mechanics I've seen for fantasy gaming. It's too bad Spellbound is never coming out.
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Apr 14, 2017 14:36
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Is that still not out?
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Apr 14, 2017 14:44
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Lightning Lord posted:I dig all the art for classic RPGs like Runequest and Call of Cthulhu that sprung out of the Japanese tabletop scene, like seeing anime Glorantha is pretty rad. Hilariously the guy who runs the felis.jp blog (@feltk on Twitter) has considerably more Western tastes than I do, though he's a huge fan of PbtA games apparently.
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Apr 14, 2017 15:40
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Ewen Cluney posted:Oh yeah, Japanese adaptations of Western RPGs (and other tabletop games like Battletech) tend to have pretty impressive new art. (Whereas D&D 3e and 4e were pretty much perfect Japanese-language replicas of the English-language books.) The shadowrun japanese art is so pretty and cool... Marry me chinese orc girl!!! http://imgur.com/a/FCsII
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Apr 14, 2017 15:42
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Speaking of Blue Rose, is that ever coming out?
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Apr 14, 2017 18:56
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Sage Genesis posted:[puts on his robe and munchkin hat] See, I played enough 3rd edition to have known all of that stuff. Fortunately, it's now been long enough since the last time I played 3rd edition, that I'd forgotten all that stuff! It's a perfect example of some of the most egregious faults with 3rd edition D&D. Nonsensical spell levels. A spell that could be a total encounter-ender or problem-solver being available to everyone who can cast spells... but a spell few would bother to memorize until they can cast a lot of level 5 spells, because it's unlikely on any given day to be useful. Spell effects that require the use of a highly detailed encounter map (which adds to the GM's prep burden) but which likely end the encounter (thus wasting most of the time the GM spent preparing). Spells with ranges precisely calculated, but far larger than most encounters ever deal with (even in outdoor adventures, how many times has your 3rd edition party engaged an enemy from more than say 60 feet away?). Maximum range that isn't actually the maximum range of the spell's effects. Spells whose actual descriptions are wholly inadequate to understand the in-game exact adjudication and effects, requiring either system mastery or (especially if the spell isn't frequently used in the game) pausing everything to look up rules just to make sure it's being done right. And let's not even get into the metamagic possibilities here. I'm not attacking you, Sage Genesis, I'm just using this as a case study. I know a lot of the complaints about 4e when it came out were supposedly because it nerfed spellcasters or turned spellcasting into something more like World of Warcraft. But I look at this loving mess and think holy poo poo, why would a player playing a spellcaster, or especially a GM dealing with one, put up with this crap? I certainly did, but only when I didn't know there was a better way.
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Apr 14, 2017 19:12
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Oh gosh and Stone to Mud, at least in some versions, isn't permitted to work on "worked stone" so it actually won't take down Gradenko's tower. I wonder how many players conveniently forgot that limitation when using the spell to drop the ceiling onto an entire encounter, open their way into an enemy structure, etc.
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Apr 14, 2017 19:15
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Actually, the maximum range is the maximum range. Any area of a spell that would extend past the listed max range just doesn't happen. The rest of the complaints are valid, though.
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Apr 14, 2017 19:16
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4E powers are basically moves in a very abstract, constrained game board. 3E spells, on the other hand, are very much intended as things you can use to affect the game world. The delineation between combat and non-combat isn't as strict, and many of them are meant to pull double or triple duty or more -- they're combat powers, they're NPC powers, they're environmental hazards (hi, Permanency), they're large-scale or siege weapons (relevant if you're running Birthright or the like), they're professional tools (hella wizard spells that convert or shape matter in various ways, for instance, and "clerics selling healing in exchange for temple donations" is explicitly called out in the corebooks IIRC) and so on and so on. 3E doesn't do this especially well but it's something that was absolutely lost in the transition to 4E. It's something that made me bristle a little at the complete dismissal of 3E here, until I realized that Mage: The Awakening was a thing, anyways. 
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Apr 14, 2017 19:20
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FordCQC posted:Speaking of Blue Rose, is that ever coming out? Yeah, it came out a few months ago.
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Apr 14, 2017 19:28
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FordCQC posted:Speaking of Blue Rose, is that ever coming out? The PDF is out (on Green Ronin's site and DTRPG), but the preorder books are still being printed.
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Apr 14, 2017 19:31
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Actually it's really good to distinguish between combat powers and noncombat powers, because that allows a GM to prepare a good challenge that isn't either deadly (because the players didn't prepare the right spell) or trivial (because they prepared and used a spell in a way the GM didn't anticipate). And 4e had rituals, which at least had the potential for the non-combat/permanance sort of activities you're talking about. But yes, of course the game removed some of the extremely powerful noncombat magic, because it utterly overshadowed what non-magic-using characters had access to. Your fighter has to raise millions of gold pieces and engage with the stronghold builder's guidebook? LOL I just cast a spell and had magic build my wizard tower in a few minutes. Oh, you're planning a conventional siege of the enemy fortress? LOL I just cast a spell, their walls are falling down/I teleported us all inside/I remotely killed the enemy commander/etc. Literally https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFuMpYTyRjw I think your selection of Mage: The Awakening is perfect; if you just want to play a game where the wizards get to alter reality while the chumps with swords and crossbows get hosed, it's good to pick a game that acknowledges and embraces that as a reality of the setting.
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Apr 14, 2017 19:34
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