TG Chat Thread 2017

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Traditional Games > TG Chat Thread 2017

NorgLyle: Sep 20, 2002; Do you think I posted to this forum because I value your companionship?

Evil Mastermind posted:

Oh lord yes. One of the worst adventures ever written.

Believe it or not, Lost Colony didn't have an ending. Deadlands Classic and HoE did, but LC just stopped after one supplement.

Waitaminute...

quote:

Deadlands starts when a vengeful indian shaman named Raven, angry at the white men who killed off his entire tribe, conducts a dark ritual that blasts open a portal to Hell (or, as it's refered to in-game, the Hunting Grounds) during the Battle of Little Big Horn. . . . Part of the effects of the Reckoning was to prolong the battle between the North and the South; in Deadlands continuity the war would continue for at least another 20 years.

History. How does it work?

(For those of you who aren't Americans, the Battle of Little Big Horn took place more than a decade after the end of the Civil War. Broadly speaking, the cause of the battle was the United States forcible expansion into the Black Hills in the Dakota Territory which had been promised to the Lakota but wouldn't you know it there was gold in them thar hills. It would be highly questionable whether the United States would have had the resources to dispatch cavalry to the area to push the tribes out and onto reservation land, let alone even sign the Fort Laramie treaty, had they been busy fighting the Confederacy in an insanely protracted war.)

# ? Jun 12, 2017 21:53

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# ? May 14, 2024 12:31

slap me and kiss me: Apr 1, 2008; You best protect ya neck

Anniversary posted:

Looking into this. I found the previous editions a little difficult to follow so not sure if I'll be able to provide any worthwhile feedback.

Looking forward to your thoughts. If you stumble into unclear sections, please let me know! I tried really hard to clean up a bunch of the confusion (esp. around the combat system) for this draft, and I don't want to stop until it's all eliminated.

# ? Jun 12, 2017 21:53

Plutonis: Mar 25, 2011

Can't believe someone made a historical error in the game where someone opens a portal to hell

# ? Jun 12, 2017 21:58

Angrymog: Jan 30, 2012; Really Madcats

My Lovely Horse posted:

You guys get these teabags that claim to taste of blueberry pie or strawberry cheesecake, or is that a German thing? Cause showing up to the tea ceremony with those would have to be, I don't even know, would you even still allow a roll?

Fruit teas are certainly a thing in the UK, but they're fruity rather than pretending to be cakes.

# ? Jun 12, 2017 21:58

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

Len posted:

The hell were all the fun games from 2001-2007 when I was in high school and had all the time?

Oh boy, what a question.

The time frame you're talking about covers the D20 boom and bust. There were plenty of neat non-D20 games published during that time, but would you hear about them? The Internet was a thing, but if your experience was like mine, you were much less likely to hear about a game that might interest you back then. Plus, you might have found some established game lines intimidating to get into, considering the trend toward metaplot.

(Oh, and good loving luck finding a group to play anything non-D20 with you. I got into D&D 3 only because my options were D&D, WoD, or nothing.)

Not to mention that a lot of products from that era have good writing, but rules that are serviceable and unexciting at best. Exalted, the World of Darkness dying and rising from the dead, lots of books from Guardians of Order and Eden Studios, content for established games like Call of Cthulhu, too many to name, really. But if I'm being honest, very very little that rises to my gold standard of having both a well-written setting and mechanics that are actually fun to engage with, rather than merely doing what's required and getting out of the way.

This was also the era when the indie/Forge scene really blossomed and produced a number of notable games. It wasn't until later that designers would take lessons learned from those games and incorporate them into somewhat more conventional RPGs designed for familiar genres, long-term play, character power growth, etc.

# ? Jun 12, 2017 22:00

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

I will not take this anti-beholder slander lightly. They aren't more complicated than your average spellcaster, have a cool lovecraft-light dark fantasy feel that suits D&D perfectly and are incredible centrepieces for dungeons.

# ? Jun 12, 2017 22:11

Rip_Van_Winkle: Jul 21, 2011; "When life gives you ghosts, you make ghost-robots"

I think this is a philosophy we can all aspire to.

Anniversary posted:

Fair enough, thanks for the info. (To continue the derail: how do you like metal compared to gourd? If you have PMs feel free to just PM.)

The metal ones are super easy to clean/maintain but they don't have the seasoning effect of the wooden ones or actual gourds. The wooden ones are a nice medium between the two. Don't wash wooden gourds, they're like cast iron pans. Just rinse them and let them dry. Plus the wood is usually easier to handle since the metal tends to get real hot. The only real upside to metal/glass is that they tend to be more durable.

e: TG chat: I owned a set of 3.0 books, never used them, but my first actual RPG was the Serenity one that used some ruleset involving die sizes. Don't remember what it was. Then we moved on to the Star Wars Saga Edition books, then finally to 3.5 proper later on.

e2: lmao i forgot my copy of the 3.5 DMG is signed by 3 of the 4 members of mutemath god i was a fuckin dork

Rip_Van_Winkle fucked around with this message at 22:28 on Jun 12, 2017

# ? Jun 12, 2017 22:19

Arivia: Mar 17, 2011

Actually there was one mid-2000s game with a lot of indie RPG references. Paranoia XP repeatedly mentioned the Forge as inspiration and brought a lot of stuff from My Life With Master, etc into the Paranoia framework.

It felt really far ahead of its time and like a breath of fresh air back then.

# ? Jun 12, 2017 22:25

Evil Mastermind: Apr 28, 2008

NorgLyle posted:

Waitaminute...
History. How does it work?

(For those of you who aren't Americans, the Battle of Little Big Horn took place more than a decade after the end of the Civil War. Broadly speaking, the cause of the battle was the United States forcible expansion into the Black Hills in the Dakota Territory which had been promised to the Lakota but wouldn't you know it there was gold in them thar hills. It would be highly questionable whether the United States would have had the resources to dispatch cavalry to the area to push the tribes out and onto reservation land, let alone even sign the Fort Laramie treaty, had they been busy fighting the Confederacy in an insanely protracted war.)

...*goes back and actually checks the books*

Oh goddammit, I remembered wrong. It wasn't Little Big Horn, it was the Battle of Gettysburg. And I can't go back and fix it. Dammit!

That was my mistake, not the book's. Sorry!

# ? Jun 12, 2017 22:41

Anniversary: Sep 12, 2011; I AM A SHIT-FESTIVAL

slap me and kiss me posted:

Looking forward to your thoughts. If you stumble into unclear sections, please let me know! I tried really hard to clean up a bunch of the confusion (esp. around the combat system) for this draft, and I don't want to stop until it's all eliminated.

I will try to not do to you what I accidentally did to Cartoon Violence and actually provide some feedback, though it will likely be of limited use.

Here goes:

So far I'm digging the lore.

Attack < Counter < Interrupt is fluid enough.

Could maybe do with an example of how edge works?

P.12 mentions ability scores.

P.18 mentions a shadow - this feels like it should be flavor but its in the effect (unless DMs are meant to write down shaded areas? I know I'm just being picky with this one.)

A Right Cudgeling seems real good. Like real good.

Initiative is an interesting system.

I'm actually still pretty confused about combat, but I'll check the GM stuff to see if that helps...

It does, for some reason I thought there was more to an engagement than the ACI system.

Seems interesting. Do you have any playtest logs?

# ? Jun 12, 2017 22:59

slap me and kiss me: Apr 1, 2008; You best protect ya neck

Thanks! Good catches on p 12 & 18 - all fixed up.

What in the player packet's combat explanation did you find poorly explained, and what in the GM helped clarify stuff?

I don't have any logs, but I am running a playtest on the forums - https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3746580

# ? Jun 13, 2017 00:13

Anniversary: Sep 12, 2011; I AM A SHIT-FESTIVAL

slap me and kiss me posted:

Thanks! Good catches on p 12 & 18 - all fixed up.

What in the player packet's combat explanation did you find poorly explained, and what in the GM helped clarify stuff?

I don't have any logs, but I am running a playtest on the forums - https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3746580

For some reason it seemed like the encounter target could respond with non-Counter/Interrupt effects, but the GM stuff made that clearer. I imagine with a closer reading it wouldn't have been an issue.

Also it seems really, really easy to just run out of powers due to the initiative and recovery system? Especially with enemies auto recovering everything every round?

There's also a sentence at the end of the intro lore where I think the grammar is a little off, but it was so minor I didn't make a note of what exactly it was.

# ? Jun 13, 2017 00:18

slap me and kiss me: Apr 1, 2008; You best protect ya neck

You're right, power management is absolutely critical; part of combat is for sure figuring out when to go balls to the wall and when to conserve powers.

Heroes can refresh extra powers by spending points from their Refresh Pool (which they earn through roleplaying the virtues and flaws they make up during character creation) to pick a specific power they want to get back, or by spending a standard action (of which they have two each round) to refresh an additional power.

# ? Jun 13, 2017 00:27

Len: Jan 21, 2008; Pouches, bandages, shoulderpad, cyber-eye...

Bitchin'!

Halloween Jack posted:

Oh boy, what a question.

The time frame you're talking about covers the D20 boom and bust. There were plenty of neat non-D20 games published during that time, but would you hear about them? The Internet was a thing, but if your experience was like mine, you were much less likely to hear about a game that might interest you back then. Plus, you might have found some established game lines intimidating to get into, considering the trend toward metaplot.

(Oh, and good loving luck finding a group to play anything non-D20 with you. I got into D&D 3 only because my options were D&D, WoD, or nothing.)

Not to mention that a lot of products from that era have good writing, but rules that are serviceable and unexciting at best. Exalted, the World of Darkness dying and rising from the dead, lots of books from Guardians of Order and Eden Studios, content for established games like Call of Cthulhu, too many to name, really. But if I'm being honest, very very little that rises to my gold standard of having both a well-written setting and mechanics that are actually fun to engage with, rather than merely doing what's required and getting out of the way.

This was also the era when the indie/Forge scene really blossomed and produced a number of notable games. It wasn't until later that designers would take lessons learned from those games and incorporate them into somewhat more conventional RPGs designed for familiar genres, long-term play, character power growth, etc.

I knew Call of Cthulhu existed but only as a D20 game at that time and thanks to the Hunter the Reckoning videogames I knew of WoD but all the game stores and book stores around me did D&D. Kids these days don't know how lucky they have it with print on demand and Kickstarter.

# ? Jun 13, 2017 02:53

remusclaw: Dec 8, 2009

Until I joined the Army and got myself a computer the only RPG's I had ever seen in the wild was D&D and WEG Star Wars. When I was gifted some AD&D 1st edition books at Christmas one year I noticed that there was some rules that were different in the those books but just used the stuff I liked with my second edition game, thinking that they were just optional rules.

# ? Jun 13, 2017 02:57

Nuns with Guns: Jul 23, 2010; It's fine.
Don't worry about it.

Len posted:

I knew Call of Cthulhu existed but only as a D20 game at that time and thanks to the Hunter the Reckoning videogames I knew of WoD but all the game stores and book stores around me did D&D. Kids these days don't know how lucky they have it with print on demand and Kickstarter.

POD, Kickstarter, and Patreon really do allow more indie games to flourish than ever before. Streaming/Podcasting RPGs becoming bigger helps a ton, too. There was a surprising spike in people interested in Mouse Guard on roll20 after the website did a game master series about it.

# ? Jun 13, 2017 03:42

Serf: May 5, 2011

the whole reason i got into tabletop games in earnest was because of that penny arcade podcast where they introduced you to 4e. very helpful as someone who had never run a game before but wanted to. it was basically a guide on how to make the whole thing work.

# ? Jun 13, 2017 03:47

Evil Mastermind: Apr 28, 2008

Serf posted:

the whole reason i got into tabletop games in earnest was because of that penny arcade podcast where they introduced you to 4e. very helpful as someone who had never run a game before but wanted to. it was basically a guide on how to make the whole thing work.

One of the players in my Wednesday group got back into gaming after not playing since like 2e because of that podcast.

# ? Jun 13, 2017 03:51

gradenko_2000: Oct 5, 2010; HELL SERPENT; Lipstick Apathy

I was dispossessed of the idea that "you can't roleplay in 4e!" long before I even knew what edition warrring was or even knew how to play D&D, because I listened to the Crit Juice podcast back in I think 2013 and they were doing things like the Warlock blasting the roof off a grain silo so that they could escape vertically, the Fighter using his shield to surf on the wave of a city-block-sized Gelatinous Cube, and the Rogue using their Shadowstep to effortlessly catch a rose thrown by The Princess.

I've lost track of them since, but last I checked I think they even went back to 4e after specifically trying out 5e.

# ? Jun 13, 2017 04:45

Banana Man: Oct 2, 2015; mm time 2 gargle piss and shit

See I wish I would have heard that and/or played AW before playing 4e cause I was stuck in 3e mindset and couldn't figure out how to play the game meaningfully outside of combat.

# ? Jun 13, 2017 04:54

Reene: Aug 26, 2005

The only thing you can't do as well in 4e roleplay-wise is play hilariously cruel pranks on your party members by exploiting certain spells.

(My PC's personal sidequest in 5e last week was to slip away from the party every once in awhile, use her Disguise Self at-will to look like our gruff orcish fighter, then walk around casting Friends on people then vanishing just before it wore off. I'm planting seeds for later, you see.)

# ? Jun 13, 2017 06:16

Tuxedo Catfish: Mar 17, 2007; You've got guts! Come to my village, I'll buy you lunch.

NorgLyle posted:

Illithid are interesting and have an interesting narrative flavor they can add to games.

Beholders, on the other hand, are floating balls of lies. They're the most game-y monster that has somehow survived through the various edition shifts long after most other garbage like the Catoblepas have long since gone 'extinct'. 'It's a hovering sphere that fires all kinds spell effects at high level adventurers (Because even in 1975 on some level we realized that spells were bullshit and one of the few ways to single die roll gently caress over even a Lord or High Priest)'.

a) gently caress you, the Catoblepas is awesome, goofy monsters in general are awesome :colbert:

b) it is also not a game-original monster, it's from Pliny the Elder's Natural History

# ? Jun 13, 2017 08:06

Nuns with Guns: Jul 23, 2010; It's fine.
Don't worry about it.

Reene posted:

The only thing you can't do as well in 4e roleplay-wise is play hilariously cruel pranks on your party members by exploiting certain spells.

(My PC's personal sidequest in 5e last week was to slip away from the party every once in awhile, use her Disguise Self at-will to look like our gruff orcish fighter, then walk around casting Friends on people then vanishing just before it wore off. I'm planting seeds for later, you see.)

In an old 3.5 game I ran one of the PCs dissed one of the caster PCs, so the caster gave him an ear full of Ghost Sound parrot squawks for 60 seconds.

Tuxedo Catfish posted:

a) gently caress you, the Catoblepas is awesome, goofy monsters in general are awesome

b) it is also not a game-original monster, it's from Pliny the Elder's Natural History

The catoblepas is also in 3e and 4e so it's survived edition changes just fine. Don't know if it's been reintroduced to 5e yet but it wouldn't be surprising. It had the best cute-ugly art in 3e, too.

# ? Jun 13, 2017 12:27

Serf: May 5, 2011

cat - oh - BLEE - pas

# ? Jun 13, 2017 12:31

dwarf74: Sep 2, 2012; Buglord

Okay, so I'm adding this to my list of "helpful sites for game prep." A cool fantasy city generator.

https://watabou.itch.io/medieval-fantasy-city-generator

example output:

# ? Jun 13, 2017 15:22

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Feh, there's only one fantasy city map anyone ever needs:

# ? Jun 13, 2017 15:49

Plutonis: Mar 25, 2011

"City5" Conflagration

# ? Jun 13, 2017 15:57

Subjunctive: Sep 12, 2006; ✨sparkle and shine✨

dwarf74 posted:

Okay, so I'm adding this to my list of "helpful sites for game prep." A cool fantasy city generator.

https://watabou.itch.io/medieval-fantasy-city-generator

It's interesting, but it doesn't seem to ever have any residential areas, just merchant/craftsmen/temple/gate/castle. Hmm hmm.

# ? Jun 13, 2017 16:32

Pope Guilty: Nov 6, 2006; The human animal is a beautiful and terrible creature, capable of limitless compassion and unfathomable cruelty.

I was obsessed with the idea of D&D but my parents and school officials somehow bought into the Satanic Panic even well into the 1990's. I got real sick of hearing about how RPGs promoted an inability to tell fantasy from reality from people who literally believed in witches (not, like, Wiccans, but in the 1980's "the conspiracy wants to sacrifice your babies" kind of sense). Eventually my brother bought WEG D6 Star Wars and it was quickly established that a) this is basically just D&D with different trappings and b) oh, I guess this isn't a tool of the devil after all.

Sadly the local school officials weren't so quick on the uptake and I remember getting called down to the office because I'd left my copy of Call of Cthulhu in the copier while running off sheets for the game I was running at lunch and the vice principal wanted to have a talk about Satanism in our public school.

# ? Jun 13, 2017 16:55

Plutonis: Mar 25, 2011

Pope Guilty posted:

I was obsessed with the idea of D&D but my parents and school officials somehow bought into the Satanic Panic even well into the 1990's. I got real sick of hearing about how RPGs promoted an inability to tell fantasy from reality from people who literally believed in witches (not, like, Wiccans, but in the 1980's "the conspiracy wants to sacrifice your babies" kind of sense). Eventually my brother bought WEG D6 Star Wars and it was quickly established that a) this is basically just D&D with different trappings and b) oh, I guess this isn't a tool of the devil after all.

Sadly the local school officials weren't so quick on the uptake and I remember getting called down to the office because I'd left my copy of Call of Cthulhu in the copier while running off sheets for the game I was running at lunch and the vice principal wanted to have a talk about Satanism in our public school.

When I was 14 i got really obsessed with the concept of “dungeons and dragons ” and tried to channel it constantly, until my thought process got really bizarre and i would repeat things like “roll for damage” and “i love critting skill checks” in my head for hours, and i would get really paranoid, start seeing things in the corners of my eyes etc, basically prodromal schizophrenia.

# ? Jun 13, 2017 17:07

Len: Jan 21, 2008; Pouches, bandages, shoulderpad, cyber-eye...

Bitchin'!

My 7th grade homeroom teacher blamed D&D on my depression and dislike of everyone in my homeroom. Couldn't be they were all awful people it had to be D&D. She sent a letter home and everything.

# ? Jun 13, 2017 17:11

gradenko_2000: Oct 5, 2010; HELL SERPENT; Lipstick Apathy

Plutonis posted:

When I was 14 i got really obsessed with the concept of “dungeons and dragons ” and tried to channel it constantly, until my thought process got really bizarre and i would repeat things like “roll for damage” and “i love critting skill checks” in my head for hours, and i would get really paranoid, start seeing things in the corners of my eyes etc, basically prodromal schizophrenia.

I'm permabanned roleplayer orcstomper58

# ? Jun 13, 2017 17:27