TG Chat Thread 2017

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Wrestlepig: Feb 25, 2011; my mum says im cool; Toilet Rascal

Gonna do a roundup of some of the cooler entries I saw

FAERY QVEEN is definitely the best writing I've seen so far.

quote:

Some Gentle Knights were pricking on the plaine,
Ycladd each one with words and siluer shielde,
A part of erry story booke and game,
The Faery Qveen did quest them ne�re to yielde,
Banner makes known their hearts upon the fielde,
Each Gentle Knight chosen to represente,
Elements of themselves revealed,
Holiness, Chastity, or Justice,
Temperence, Friendship, all to be writ.

With unique elemental hearte displaied,
All Gentle Knights are bless�d with a queste,
For lo the Faery Qveen is much dismaied,
To see such creatures ravaging up in jest,
This Feary Land that she has deemed is beste,
Each Gentle Knight in turne will ride oot,
And draw upon the decke of tarot blessed,
For discovery of what comes now aboot,
Mettle of Gentle Knights will be in doubte.

Draw Cups and others will describe a threate,
Of water, emotions, friends, creation,
Draw Pentacles and Gentle Knights will get,
Problemes of earth, greed, and materiation,
Draw Swords for air, power, minde, and ration,
Draw Wands, for viality, and the soul,
Gentle Knight tastes defeat unless conception,
Of personal elemente to their goal,

All other Gentle Knights shall decide
If cards are won, or set aside.

PrankstersDillema.html] Prankster's Dilemma is really solid for a simple design

quote:

Who put a goat in the cafeteria?!?! The morning after Senior Prank Day, someone is taking the fall...

One player is the Principal, trying to catch em all. The remaining players are Students, all of whom organized a prank but don't want to be held back from graduating.

Three phases;

Pranks: Students each secretly send a text to another Student with a prank they organized and a random detail about it. Anyone who gets a text copies that text to the Principal, thus hiding the culprit but establishing a witness.

Planning: Everyone does whatever else outside of this game for the next hour+ (party, game, etc.) while Students pin down alibis and allies. When talking about anything in game, Students can ONLY communicate with other Students via texts.

Punishment: Eventually gather everyone together. The Principal tries to figure out blame, while Students try to get away with whatever they did. Players can say or do anything their character might.

After 15 mins of investigating the Principal assigns blame for all pranks. The Principal wins if they correctly blame more Students than they get wrong. Any Student who wasn't correctly blamed also wins, but ONLY if the Principal has won too.

Nakama: A card game of magical girls is probably my favorite of the many magical Girls games that popped up, it's a bit more mechanical and the novelty of cards for resolution hasn't got old for me yet

quote:

Five players, two decks of cards (no jokers.)

Four players are a magical girl team; Princess Heart/Diamond/Club/Spade. Divvy each suit to their respective player.

You are The Adversary. You get a full deck of your own.

The Princesses interact with each other in their lives, then the monster of the week attacks! Everyone shuffles their decks.

The Adversary draws one card for the monster�s Strength and unique power; Princesses must meet or exceed this to score a hit. Each Princess describes what they are doing and draws a card from their deck. Each Princess must score one hit before the monster is weakened; one more hit defeats it.

The Monster draws a second card; the suit is an attack on that Princess! She draws a card to defend herself (losing two cards if unsuccessful.) A Princess is down if she is out of cards.

Princesses recover all lost cards when a monster is defeated.

The Princesses win by defeating 13 monsters.

MONSTERS
Hearts: Recovers one hit each round.
Diamonds: Requires two Princesses to score one hit for it to count.
Clubs: Can force a Princess to discard one extra card.
Spades: Can attack two Princesses. (Resolve separately.)

There's a lot of games this year so if anyone else has seen something cool, share it

slap me and kiss me posted:

That's a very evocative prisoner's dilemma! Great job

Thanks! I think it's completely unplayable, although that's true of like half the entries. I'm a little disappointed I had to cut back on the Glyph generation as well

# ? Apr 25, 2017 00:07

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# ? May 15, 2024 00:52

Covok: May 27, 2013; Yet where is that woman now? Tell me, in what heave does she reside? None of them. Because no God bothered to listen or care. If that is what you think it means to be a God, then you and all your teachings are welcome to do as that poor women did. And vanish from these realms forever.

Dr Cheeto posted:

God, why did they kill 4e

I mean, games have a lifespan. It reached the end of its lifespan and they moved on, sane as original, 1st, 2nd, and third.

# ? Apr 25, 2017 01:03

Kwyndig: Sep 23, 2006; Heeeeeey

Actually they could have extended 4e for quite some time. But Mearls ruined that with his plans.

# ? Apr 25, 2017 01:09

Halloween Jack: Sep 12, 2003; I WILL CUT OFF BOTH OF MY ARMS BEFORE I VOTE FOR ANYONE THAT IS MORE POPULAR THAN BERNIE!!!!!

fool_of_sound posted:

There is literally nothing you can do to stop a player who wants to make a useless character, except rely on the GM to either a) humor them by giving that character contrived challenges to overcome or b) ask them to not.

I did once make the World's Worst Shadowrun Character as an exercise in "Why is this in the game???" and passed it around to my group. But I didn't play it.

(He had all the cool-but-useless gear, and the very specific skills the game required you to take to use them. So his skills were Drive: Hovercraft, Exotic Weapon: Gun Cane, Exotic Weapon: Oral Flamethrower, etc.)

# ? Apr 25, 2017 01:25

Alien Rope Burn: Dec 5, 2004; _{I wanna be a saikyo HERO!}

fool_of_sound posted:

There is literally nothing you can do to stop a player who wants to make a useless character, except rely on the GM to either a) humor them by giving that character contrived challenges to overcome or b) ask them to not.

Well, there are systems that make it harder, like Gamma World 7e, Strike, Apocalypse World and a number of its derivatives, or games that aren't built around conflict metagames like Golden Sky Stories or Hillfolk. You can always make a character that's conceptually useless, but some systems make it much harder to be mechanically useless, intentionally or accidentally.

# ? Apr 25, 2017 01:32

Kwyndig: Sep 23, 2006; Heeeeeey

Halloween Jack posted:

I did once make the World's Worst Shadowrun Character as an exercise in "Why is this in the game???" and passed it around to my group. But I didn't play it.

(He had all the cool-but-useless gear, and the very specific skills the game required you to take to use them. So his skills were Drive: Hovercraft, Exotic Weapon: Gun Cane, Exotic Weapon: Oral Flamethrower, etc.)

Oral Flamethrower was one of those pieces of cyberware that sounded cool on paper but was basically useless, like cyberlimb magnets, or eye guns.

# ? Apr 25, 2017 01:58

Halloween Jack: Sep 12, 2003; I WILL CUT OFF BOTH OF MY ARMS BEFORE I VOTE FOR ANYONE THAT IS MORE POPULAR THAN BERNIE!!!!!

Off the top of my head I can't even remember exactly which body parts could and couldn't have flamethrowers and/or laser beams and/or shotguns hidden in them.

edit: or monofilament whips

# ? Apr 25, 2017 02:06

Falstaff: Apr 27, 2008; I have a kind of alacrity in sinking.

Alien Rope Burn posted:

You can always make a character that's conceptually useless, but some systems make it much harder to be mechanically useless, intentionally or accidentally.

This reminds me of the favourite character I've ever seen played in a session of Wushu. I had a table of ten players, five of whom played thieves and five of whom were FBI agents trying to stop their heist, set in a mall that's about to undergo a simultaneous Pentex chemical "accident" that turns the majority of the shoppers into Romero-style zombies, while a werewolf pack is using that day to attack the secret Pentex lab hidden beneath the shopping mall.

One player made a clutzy nerd hacker whose only in-narrative good skill (computer hacking) was only relevant in the opening scene. Everything else about the character was portrayed to be downright incompetent - if the game was a Stallone flick then he was the character being played by Rob Schneider. All the character's actions were narrated to be hilariously counter-productive, tripping over himself and surviving werewolf/zombie attacks through dumb luck that left him in ever-more-precarious positions. Mechanically, though, he was contributing to the group's success just as much as any other character.

# ? Apr 25, 2017 02:36

DalaranJ: Apr 15, 2008; Yosuke will now die for you.

Halloween Jack posted:

Exotic Weapon: Oral Flamethrower

Er, where exactly would an oral flamethrower draw it's oxygen supply from? Because it seems like such a device might suffocate the user very quickly.

# ? Apr 25, 2017 02:36

Plutonis: Mar 25, 2011

DalaranJ posted:

Er, where exactly would an oral flamethrower draw it's oxygen supply from? Because it seems like such a device might suffocate the user very quickly.

The draconic gallbladder

# ? Apr 25, 2017 02:58

Kwyndig: Sep 23, 2006; Heeeeeey

DalaranJ posted:

Er, where exactly would an oral flamethrower draw it's oxygen supply from? Because it seems like such a device might suffocate the user very quickly.

You could actually get a portion of your lungs replaced with a high pressure oxygen tank.

# ? Apr 25, 2017 03:00

Antivehicular: Dec 30, 2011; I wanna sing one for the cars
That are right now headed silent down the highway
And it's dark and there is nobody driving And something has got to give

poo poo, can you go full Malatoran in Shadowrun and just be a cyberdragon-man? Now I want to make a sad nerd dude who cyberwared himself into his ~true dragon form~ but has to work high-stakes running just to keep up with his massive debt

# ? Apr 25, 2017 03:01

starkebn: May 18, 2004; "Oooh, got a little too serious. You okay there, little buddy?"

was it Cyberpunk 2020 with full body cyborgs as dragons or Rifts? Or both?

e: I seem to remember their brains broke and they were basically psychotic (psychopathic?) after the procedure.

# ? Apr 25, 2017 03:10

Alien Rope Burn: Dec 5, 2004; _{I wanna be a saikyo HERO!}

starkebn posted:

was it Cyberpunk 2020 with full body cyborgs as dragons or Rifts? Or both?

e: I seem to remember their brains broke and they were basically psychotic (psychopathic?) after the procedure.

Rifts has cyborgs with dragon-shaped bodies in Rifts World Book 8: Japan. They can develop random insanities depending on how long they've been in that body and how far it differs from the human norm (so quadrupeds have a harder time than bipeds, generally speaking), but it generally takes years or a decade for that kind of thing to develop.

# ? Apr 25, 2017 03:26

DalaranJ: Apr 15, 2008; Yosuke will now die for you.

Plutonis posted:

The draconic gallbladder

They probably don't tell you this until after the first operation.

# ? Apr 25, 2017 03:32

Barudak: May 7, 2007

So as standard outpatient procedure I'm going to need you to sign here saying I gave you these educational pamphlets about common side effects of the procedure titled "You Don't Have to Horde" and "Damsels Aren't Dinner" and make you do a one month checkup with your physician to make sure you don't develop post-human depression.

# ? Apr 25, 2017 04:09

Kwyndig: Sep 23, 2006; Heeeeeey

One of the later Chromebooks for Cyberpunk had animal traits available for your full cyborg conversions, and of course going full cyborg could make you go totally crazytown. No dragons as far as I can remember though.

# ? Apr 25, 2017 13:56

Evil Mastermind: Apr 28, 2008

There's also how full 'borg conversions work in Shadowrun, which is basically "we kill you, jam as much gear as we can into your corpse, then we summon your soul and bind it to your body so you're sort of a zombie".

# ? Apr 25, 2017 14:19

Serf: May 5, 2011

You never go full cyborg.

# ? Apr 25, 2017 14:24

Kwyndig: Sep 23, 2006; Heeeeeey

Evil Mastermind posted:

There's also how full 'borg conversions work in Shadowrun, which is basically "we kill you, jam as much gear as we can into your corpse, then we summon your soul and bind it to your body so you're sort of a zombie".

In, I want to say 4th edition they came up with yet another method, but as usual it was a not for PCs method. In it they just take the brain out, hook it into to a life support pod, and install it into a drone. It's not really a conversion since all that happens is you're a rigger "piloting" a drone body without an original body to jump back to, and all the examples were like tanks and stuff instead of humanoid drones. I chalk the whole thing up to some of the new SR writers not understanding how the setting was supposed to work.

As a goofy aside though, with Alpha-grade cyberware you can just barely replace a person's body with cyberware (4 limbs, torso, skull, can't remember if eyes are included) although that's just Essence costs, you can't afford it in money in chargen.

# ? Apr 25, 2017 15:25

Evil Mastermind: Apr 28, 2008

Was it Shadowrun 3e that had the sample Street Samurai character who started with .01 Essence? I remember that happening in one of the books.

# ? Apr 25, 2017 15:33

unseenlibrarian: Jun 4, 2012; There's only one thing in the mountains that leaves a track like this. The creature of legend that roams the Timberline. My people named him Sasquatch. You call him... Bigfoot.

Nah, there are humanoid drones they can be put in, but they just didn't actually have any 'default' bodies for that.

And to be fair the in-setting research' the cyborg drones were based on goes back to like, 1E and 2E books- The fiction in the decker book in 1E and the follow up to it in the threats book in 2E.

# ? Apr 25, 2017 15:33

Halloween Jack: Sep 12, 2003; I WILL CUT OFF BOTH OF MY ARMS BEFORE I VOTE FOR ANYONE THAT IS MORE POPULAR THAN BERNIE!!!!!

Cybermancy was also very much not for PCs. In fact, they made it so not-for-PCs that per the rules, there's no reason any megacorp should want to make a cyberzombie. If you don't just fall down and die because you got distracted by a bird outside the window and you forgot that you were alive and your soul remembered it's supposed to be somewhere else, you're probably going to die from cancer in a matter of months anyway.

# ? Apr 25, 2017 15:35

Kwyndig: Sep 23, 2006; Heeeeeey

Halloween Jack posted:

Cybermancy was also very much not for PCs. In fact, they made it so not-for-PCs that per the rules, there's no reason any megacorp should want to make a cyberzombie. If you don't just fall down and die because you got distracted by a bird outside the window and you forgot that you were alive and your soul remembered it's supposed to be somewhere else, you're probably going to die from cancer in a matter of months anyway.

Yeah it was way too expensive and complicated. I can see corps doing it as like a one off for research into combining certain 'ware or maybe to get intel out of a nearly corpse, but using one as a deniable operative when you could just hire a team of expendable Shadowrunners and then double cross them makes no sense.

# ? Apr 25, 2017 15:36

Evil Mastermind: Apr 28, 2008

I can see it being a case of "we can do this, but we won't know how practical it'd be to do it regularly until we do it a few times and field test it" from a corp standpoint.

# ? Apr 25, 2017 15:46

fool of sound: Oct 10, 2012

I used a cyberzombie as the main antagonist for a campaign. Basically, he was a crazed R&D department head obsessed with 'evolving' meta-humanity who turned himself into a bioware-only cyberzombie as a product of that obsession. I kinda based him on one of the self-shaper factions from Geneforge.

# ? Apr 25, 2017 16:00

Haystack: Jan 23, 2005

Or the good old fashioned "this was some exec's pet project and now the project is running on pure sunk cost and momentum"

# ? Apr 25, 2017 16:03

Evil Mastermind: Apr 28, 2008

Haystack posted:

Or the good old fashioned "this was some exec's pet project and now the project is running on pure sunk cost and momentum"

That's like half of how the Crash 2.0 happened! :v:

# ? Apr 25, 2017 16:06

Oodles: Oct 31, 2005

TG. How am I best to hook a 4 year old into board games?

I'm thinking the junior carcassone which is sort of like matching up tiles. Which she understands as she can play snap and spot the difference.

# ? Apr 25, 2017 16:05

Plutonis: Mar 25, 2011

Oodles posted:

TG. How am I best to hook a 4 year old into board games?

I'm thinking the junior carcassone which is sort of like matching up tiles. Which she understands as she can play snap and spot the difference.

don't force your kids into your hobby

# ? Apr 25, 2017 16:07

Halloween Jack: Sep 12, 2003; I WILL CUT OFF BOTH OF MY ARMS BEFORE I VOTE FOR ANYONE THAT IS MORE POPULAR THAN BERNIE!!!!!

Well that makes sense but I'm pretty sure Aztechnology does its cybermancy with the usual pack of creepy old rip-your-heart-out blood mages, and they hate getting out of bed for some senior veep's boondoggle project.

# ? Apr 25, 2017 16:14

Oodles: Oct 31, 2005

Would it trigger you less if I didn't use the word hook?

# ? Apr 25, 2017 16:15

Fuego Fish: Dec 5, 2004; By tooth and claw!

Oodles posted:

Would it trigger you less if I didn't use the word hook?

The sooner everyone puts Plutonis on ignore the sooner we don't end up with stupid-rear end posts like this.

# ? Apr 25, 2017 16:17

Kwyndig: Sep 23, 2006; Heeeeeey

You don't even have to put him on ignore, you just have to learn when he's shitposting (most of the time) versus when he's being serious (almost never).

# ? Apr 25, 2017 16:22

Oodles: Oct 31, 2005

Fuego Fish posted:

The sooner everyone puts Plutonis on ignore the sooner we don't end up with stupid-rear end posts like this.

It's my first time here. But looking at his post history I can see where you're coming from. Every forum has their challenging posters.

# ? Apr 25, 2017 16:23

WINNERSH TRIANGLE: Aug 17, 2011

Oodles posted:

It's my first time here. But looking at his post history I can see where you're coming from. Every forum has their challenging posters.

You're not helping with you're terrible 'triggering' posting either.

# ? Apr 25, 2017 16:27

Plutonis: Mar 25, 2011

Oodles posted:

trigger

Fuego Fish posted:

The sooner everyone puts Plutonis on ignore the sooner we don't end up with stupid-rear end posts like this.

# ? Apr 25, 2017 16:37

Ominous Jazz: Jun 15, 2011; Big D is chillin' over here
Wasteland style

I mean "challenging" is a really generous read but for sure, dude who's making triggered jokes.
The best way to get a child into board games is by playing them, but a four year old isn't about to be playing pathfinder with you any time soon. Pretty much anything they do until 8 is arbitrary and accidental.

# ? Apr 25, 2017 16:38