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https://twitter.com/aurelianrabbit/status/895799203846275072
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Aug 11, 2017 15:32
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Aug 11, 2017 15:44
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potatocubed posted:Having run Chuubo, I'd say that while I found the book very clear it felt an awful lot like I was still missing a huge chunk of information and that information was someone's entire life. Like, poring over Nobilis and Hitherby Dragons* helped me understand Chuubo in the sense that it helped me understand Jenna's outlook and approach to writing games, and I felt like the more I knew about that the more I could see of the big picture that Chuubo was giving me a letterbox into. Covok posted:I heard his game was full of plus one magical items, that he had too costly boost the party to deal with the ridiculous enemies he was making that had hundreds of HP and were near impossible to hit, and he had added some kind of D100 table of random things to happen when you use a spell. ImpactVector posted:Gamma World owns, though it's getting kind of rare. It comes with a pile of player+monster pogs and a bunch of the cards it uses for abilities/gear. It's almost as if TSR knew how to design a modern game, and deliberately held off when it came to D&D because they were scared they'd make baby cry.
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Aug 11, 2017 15:57
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Halloween Jack posted:Gamma World is neat because while D&D stayed stuck in the late 70s for most of its lifespan, contemporary editions of Gamma World generally mirrored contemporary trends in game design. In the case of 7e, they were actually ahead of the curve. Every time someone says "uhhh D&D 4e would have been a lot more acceptable if only it just wasn't called Dungeons and Dragons", I want to smack them upside the head with the Gamma World 7e box.
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Aug 11, 2017 16:01
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That's actually true. David "Zeb" Cook has talked about how he had ideas for many more modern mechanics for 2e (ascending AC, for one) but the design team held back on using them for fear of player backlash. It's worth remembering that one of Gygax's original Greyhawk campaign players (Skip Williams) was a major part of the rules team for D&D until 4e. The conservativism was STRONG.
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Aug 11, 2017 16:02
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gradenko_2000 posted:Every time someone says "uhhh D&D 4e would have been a lot more acceptable if only it just wasn't called Dungeons and Dragons", I want to smack them upside the head with the Gamma World 7e box. Gamma World would have been better if they'd printed more copies. Man, I miss when WotC actually had an RPG R&D department instead of two freelancers and a well worn copy of 3.5.
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Aug 11, 2017 16:06
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Jimbozig posted:I know this has already been answered, but I want to emphasize just how wrong this is. Fragged is super loving trad when it comes to the non-combat stuff. You have skills and roll against target numbers chosen by the GM, plus they can give you a bonus/penalty for RP, and the results are pass/fail with no fail forward elements at all. There are some "strong hit" effects you can choose which act basically like a critical success system. Looking at just the skills system, Fragged is essentially akin to a d20 game from 15 years ago. Interestingly, this is actually something a couple of my players are excited about with Fragged. We've been playing games where you invent your own skills/traits a lot, like 13th Age (and currently Strike!), which a couple of them have a hard time with. It's a paradigm I personally like a whole lot, especially in its Strike! incarnation (because of the ability to learn new skills by getting a critical success on something you aren't trained in), but I can understand sort of feeling a lot of pressure right away with that kind of thing. But in Fragged, you just pick skills from a list. The game tells you what kind of skills are applicable to the kind of game it's designed for and you just pick the ones you're good at. It definitely doesn't codify any sort of failing forward, but I'm really of the opinion that "fail forward" just kind of follows naturally from "don't even bother rolling if there isn't an interesting narrative consequence for both success and failure" so there's not much need to codify it if you're playing by that principle. It certainly doesn't hurt, though. I'm interested in how Strong Hits can play into creating a pseudo-"partial success" system. The basic Strong Hit options that everyone gets don't really help with that--the only one that applies to normal skills, Effort, just lets you re-roll a die for a chance to turn failure into success--but there are other options you can get from traits that don't require you to succeed on the roll to still do something. I'm not going to house rule a game I haven't even run yet, but long-term, depending on how it plays, I might end up adding in a new Strong Hit option called "Partial Success" for normal skills: if one of your dice is a 6 but you don't succeed at the roll, you can either gamble on a re-roll and try to succeed, or take a consolation prize. But I want to see how everything plays out as written first.
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Aug 11, 2017 16:21
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Arivia posted:That's actually true. David "Zeb" Cook has talked about how he had ideas for many more modern mechanics for 2e (ascending AC, for one) but the design team held back on using them for fear of player backlash. It's worth remembering that one of Gygax's original Greyhawk campaign players (Skip Williams) was a major part of the rules team for D&D until 4e. The conservativism was STRONG. I'm not gonna rehash the Quicken Spell story again because I know you've heard that a bunch of times from me already, but it's still my favorite bit of trivia about Skip Williams.
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Aug 11, 2017 16:24
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Jimbozig posted:I know this has already been answered, but I want to emphasize just how wrong this is. Fragged is super loving trad when it comes to the non-combat stuff. You have skills and roll against target numbers chosen by the GM, plus they can give you a bonus/penalty for RP, and the results are pass/fail with no fail forward elements at all. There are some "strong hit" effects you can choose which act basically like a critical success system. Looking at just the skills system, Fragged is essentially akin to a d20 game from 15 years ago. Yeah, I think I got a poor second hand description so all I knew was d6 bell current resolution and strong hit sounded like degrees of success. Honestly hearing it's closer to a d20 system (but with a bell curve) makes it more appealing to me. gradenko_2000 posted:I'm not gonna rehash the Quicken Spell story again because I know you've heard that a bunch of times from me already, but it's still my favorite bit of trivia about Skip Williams. I haven't. 
mango sentinel fucked around with this message at 16:37 on Aug 11, 2017 |
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Aug 11, 2017 16:30
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Kwyndig posted:Gamma World would have been better if they'd printed more copies. There's a lonely brand new copy that's been sitting at my FLGS for like three years. One of these days someone will grab it. Me, I've got the whole set and Drivethru was polite enough to print me a copy of every card they ever made for it for 20 dollars. The future is rad. Jimbozig posted:Kits are my biggest regret in Strike! I didn't present them in a way that motivates players to use them or explains why you might want to use them, and as a result everyone skips them. Which is fine, I wanted them to be optional and not for every game. But I was certainly hoping for more uptake then they have seen. I think they are mechanically sound - they aren't broken or anything. But they don't justify their presence. My biggest concern when holding them up in our design space was that a bunch of them have a bunch of combat-related effects and skill descriptions, for the purpose of having simultaneous combat models in the game. Basically so that DMs could make the call of "this combat isn't as important and will be handled through your skills." This concept sounds awesome, but since the kits and tactical system are wholly discrete, a problem arises where I feel compelled to remodel the kits to match the classes so that players feel like "I took this archer and then this kit that vaguely resembles the archer." My first thought at that point was "Okay, excise the combat aspects of the kits, no one wants to play non-tactical combat, the whole point of using Strike! to write Blimpleggers is the cool tactical combat model." But there's too many and they're too ingrained. Which isn't a bug! It's just the natural interaction between two optional game chunks. I am very much digging ARB's concept of parallel noncombat feat trees though, that's a good idea. theironjef fucked around with this message at 16:42 on Aug 11, 2017 |
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Aug 11, 2017 16:34
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As a player, getting to make up my own skills is really cool and fun which is one really appealing thing about 13th Age and Strike. As a designer, there's a lot of fun to be had in designing skill lists and trying to build a list of actions that fit with the theme of your game, which is really cool in systems like Fate, Cortex and even D&D type games if you're looking at doing some hacking.
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Aug 11, 2017 16:35
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Harrow posted:Interestingly, this is actually something a couple of my players are excited about with Fragged. We've been playing games where you invent your own skills/traits a lot, like 13th Age (and currently Strike!), which a couple of them have a hard time with. It's a paradigm I personally like a whole lot, especially in its Strike! incarnation (because of the ability to learn new skills by getting a critical success on something you aren't trained in), but I can understand sort of feeling a lot of pressure right away with that kind of thing.
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Aug 11, 2017 16:36
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theironjef posted:
What's the quality like?
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Aug 11, 2017 16:37
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Serf posted:As a player, getting to make up my own skills is really cool and fun which is one really appealing thing about 13th Age and Strike. As a designer, there's a lot of fun to be had in designing skill lists and trying to build a list of actions that fit with the theme of your game, which is really cool in systems like Fate, Cortex and even D&D type games if you're looking at doing some hacking. I really like getting to make up my own skills. I've only gotten to actually play a system like that once--a friend ran a 13th Age game a couple years back--but I had a really good time making up my character's skills and it helped a lot in figuring out who he was. Some of my players enjoy that process, too. A couple of them had a really hard time doing so in our current Strike! game, unfortunately. My girlfriend still has an empty skill slot on her Strike! character's sheet because she couldn't think of something to put there and felt really bad about it. Another player just picked one of the example backgrounds in the book and took all those skills and tricks, and they've turned out not to really be appropriate for the space-traveling bounty hunter thing we're doing. I've made it clear to everyone they're free to have a total do-over on that kind of thing once they're more comfortable with the system, at least. Next time I run Strike!, I might come up with an example skill list that's appropriate to the setting we're in just in case someone's paralyzed by choice again. I probably should've done that this time, really.
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Aug 11, 2017 16:39
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Harrow posted:But in Fragged, you just pick skills from a list. The game tells you what kind of skills are applicable to the kind of game it's designed for and you just pick the ones you're good at. One of the hangups I had when I was first reading Rolemaster was the skill list. They had climbing, swimming, riding, disarm traps, pick locks, stalk & hide, perception, and ambush. I kept thinking, "where's the diplomacy skill? where's the knowledge skills?", and then I realized that, if you were using this to play Dungeons & Dragons with, then you wouldn't need any of that, because any kind of social interaction, or really any kind of activity outside of combat would be handled by talking through it and maaaybe the DM rolling a die and pulling something out of their rear end, just the way it was done back in the 70s and 80s before even the AD&D skill proficiencies system was developed. (they eventually did add a bunch of "non-combat" skills to Rolemaster through splatbooks, but I think the reaction from players at the time was that the game was much worse-off for it, since it drastically increased the size of a character's book-keeping without adding more skill points, which were competing with combat skills) I guess my point is that I learned the lesson that the skill list should be tailored to what the game is about and what the players should be doing, and in that context it's completely understandable that Rolemaster doesn't have a "diplomacy" skill since it's more about attacking Orcs and looking up on the chart how far their arm flies off. Countblanc posted:I get this, yeah. I've mentioned it before but rules/charts actually help some kinds of new players rather than intimidating then like we generally assume. When I've taught rules light games (or even just Strike's noncombat stuff like you mentioned) I sometimes see people get really anxious because it isn't totally clear what their boundaries are. I don't really have a solution to this but it's a phenomenon I see somewhat often with people who don't have a real breadth of experience to draw from. I've had an experience where I tried to use the One Unique Thing concept from 13th Age, and one of the players immediately said "I want to be an Undead, so that when I die, I can just come back, which means I can't die" - the other players immediately twigged upon this as being "overpowered", and I wasn't sure how to handle telling the player that the OUT wasn't supposed to have specific "mechanical" rewards without shutting down his whole idea.
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Aug 11, 2017 16:40
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mango sentinel posted:What's the quality like? I also have a number of the original cards (because I have all the box sets and half a booster box I found in the dusty corner of a sports cards store), and the reprints are virtually indistinguishable from the originals.
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Aug 11, 2017 16:43
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theironjef posted:Me, I've got the whole set and Drivethru was polite enough to print me a copy of every card they ever made for it for 20 dollars. The future is rad.  
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Aug 11, 2017 16:43
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mango sentinel posted:Yeah, I think I got a poor second hand description so all I knew was d6 bell current resolution and strong hit sounded like degrees of success. Honestly hearing it's closer to a d20 system (but with a bell curve) makes it more appealing to me. I wrote a review of it you should read!
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Aug 11, 2017 16:44
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ImpactVector posted:Wait what? The only real downside of the game was the random packs of cards and no easy way to weed duplicates out of your pile or figure out if you have a full set. Here's the link: http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/161308/DD-Gamma-World-RPG-Booster-Cards-GW7e?src=hottest_filtered. Might be my favorite DTRPG purchase ever.
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Aug 11, 2017 16:45
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gradenko_2000 posted:I guess my point is that I learned the lesson that the skill list should be tailored to what the game is about and what the players should be doing, and in that context it's completely understandable that Rolemaster doesn't have a "diplomacy" skill since it's more about attacking Orcs and looking up on the chart how far their arm flies off. Yeah, I really like that sort of thing. It took me a while to come around to that. When I was a young GM, I was pretty heavily seduced by D&D (specifically 3.Pathfinder) and thought that it was supposed to model every aspect of roleplaying, period. I didn't really have the experience to tell a player who grabs, say, Appraise and Diplomacy in a purely dungeon-crawling game that they're probably not going to get a lot of use out of those skills given the game we're going to be playing. It just never occurred to me that would be a useful thing to do. It's also why I had such hang-ups about D&D 4e before I actually played it: it was the first edition of D&D that I'd personally read that tried to be about something specific, rather than some catch-all physics engine for all fantasy roleplaying ever. When I say Fragged Empire has a skill list suited to the kind of game it is, I don't really mean to say its skill list is particularly narrow, either. The game is designed for open-ended, exploration-based campaigns that are largely about your group of PCs trying to make their way in the world, so it has a pretty wide array of skill types. But it's also the kind of game where, should a player decide they want to be the face, with Leadership, Culture, Wealth, Conversation, and Psychology as their skills, even if everyone else is focused around physical skills and hacking and the kinds of things that'd be useful in a "dungeon" environment, the face is still probably going to find those skills valuable. It's helped out by Fragged doing something that a lot of other skill-based (rather than class-based) games don't do: it totally separates your "primary" skills from your combat and vehicle skills. Everyone gets 6 primary skills, 2 combat skills, and 2 vehicle system skills, no matter who you are. You're never going to end up making a totally combat-incapable character because you spent all your skill points on talking.
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Aug 11, 2017 16:50
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Harrow posted:I really like getting to make up my own skills. I've only gotten to actually play a system like that once--a friend ran a 13th Age game a couple years back--but I had a really good time making up my character's skills and it helped a lot in figuring out who he was. Some of my players enjoy that process, too. A couple of them had a really hard time doing so in our current Strike! game, unfortunately. My girlfriend still has an empty skill slot on her Strike! character's sheet because she couldn't think of something to put there and felt really bad about it. Another player just picked one of the example backgrounds in the book and took all those skills and tricks, and they've turned out not to really be appropriate for the space-traveling bounty hunter thing we're doing. I've made it clear to everyone they're free to have a total do-over on that kind of thing once they're more comfortable with the system, at least. I did this in both my Strike games through the Origins and Backgrounds. I created a bunch of them and gave them skills that I thought would be appropriate for the game as examples and guidelines.
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Aug 11, 2017 16:52
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Serf posted:I did this in both my Strike games through the Origins and Backgrounds. I created a bunch of them and gave them skills that I thought would be appropriate for the game as examples and guidelines. Yeah, I'll definitely do that next time. I put a ton of prep into this one before we got started and for some reason that's one thing that totally slipped my mind as something that might be valuable.
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Aug 11, 2017 16:53
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theironjef posted:I also have a number of the original cards (because I have all the box sets and half a booster box I found in the dusty corner of a sports cards store), and the reprints are virtually indistinguishable from the originals. And now that I look at the PDF samples, it looks like the cards are numbered, so I could check to see what I have. And I'll have to go through them anyway to pull out the original set and the 10 Legion of Gold cards... saved... for now.E: Still, thanks for the info. The card situation was my one Gamma-related regret. Now I can make sure I have a full set.
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Aug 11, 2017 17:14
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dwarf74 posted:But I can add Powers and Motherfucking Perils to the list, avalon hill's foray into the boxed set rpg world. http://powersandperils.org Almost a perfect example of a fantasy heartbreaker. There actually was a lot of very cool stuff inside the game, but good luck finding it or extracting it.
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Aug 11, 2017 17:18
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Cassa posted:Why is it bad handwavium for the skill guy to use his skills to punch above his weight and take out evil speedster? And in fact, this speaks to a much bigger and more widespread problem. Most games have far more detailed rules for combat than they do for using skills. Players go for combat stuff because they know combat will definitely happen eventually, and the stakes are life and death. But will you ever use that History skill? This problem is exacerbated in games with a long list of very specific skills. Let's say you're using a system like FUDGE/FATE. Jeff explains to Bob how Batman is tricking Flash into running facefirst into a wall. Batman rolls his Deceit skill and inflicts Stress as if he were using a weapon. Fine. OTOH, say you're in the Mutants & Masterminds game I was in, where a player wanted to defeat a villain by collapsing a building on him. Not only did the player have to justify it by saying he had a weapon that could destroy a support beam, the GM wanted to make sure that the explosive batarang (or whatever it was) actually had enough power to defeat the pillar's toughness. Then he determined the difficulty of dodging a collapsing building. Then when the villain failed, he actually Googled the weight of 4 stories worth of bricks and looked the weight up on a table to determine the damage and gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress Ahem. Uh, and in conclusion, superhero games should use a relatively loose, narrative system.
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Aug 11, 2017 17:20
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Just to return the favor re: Gamma World love, if you want to go full nerd you could also get a set of origin and power cards printed: Old RPG Geek thread Artscow POD link It's not super cheap for a full set, but they run sales pretty often. Looks like they're doing a 35% off everything promo right now. And I really like drawing origins from a deck instead of rolling for some reason (which also prevents duplicates).
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Aug 11, 2017 17:36
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While I was moving to a new place, I found out that I have a copy of weapons of the Gods. I know that weapons the gods was remade into legend of the wulin when the license ran out. Anyone know what the difference is between the two games? I'm definitely not going to rebuy it, but I am curious if anything significant changed. Also, this game has some really loving nice art. But it does it a poo poo job telling you what the setting is. The lore sheet idea is an interesting way of handling knowledge, but it doesn't do a good job of telling someone who knows nothing about the comic what the setting is about.
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Aug 11, 2017 17:53
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Halloween Jack posted:Uh, and in conclusion, superhero games should use a relatively loose, narrative system. Check out Prowlers and Paragons. It's a super rules light, narrative system and I've fallen in love with it.
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Aug 11, 2017 18:00
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I don't eat bread because I'm on a W&W nocarb diet so I'm beyond good and evil
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Aug 11, 2017 18:03
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Halloween Jack posted:Why do people just fuckin' love huge tables of Wacky Magic Spell Failures? They're bad, people. The entire concept is inspired by one page of a Jack Vance story and they're just bad. As far as return on investment is concerned, the ratio of "funny stories you'll tell later" to "annoying slog and game-derailing bullshit" is absurdly low. I'll only defend it in one instance, and even then I'm going to caveat it and say that it really isn't much of a defense. You are, for the most part, correct about Wacky Magic Spell Failures Table. It works in the 40k RPGs because it's justifiable both on the fluff level (psykers do have a nasty habit of shorting out) and loosely on the balance level (psykers have no limit on the number of 'spells' they cast). Sure, you can use your psyker powers with no chance of random poo poo happening but it's generally not as efficient as using them unfettered, where there's a bit of a risk for failure/random poo poo occurring. Psychic Phenomena(Bad Table)/Perils of the Warp (Really Bad Table) act as negative reinforcement for psyker characters - be careful of playing with fire, lest you get burned. The problem with it becomes threefold though. One is that one of the possible, however improbable, side effects is summoning a daemon prince who is basically going to TPK. Everybody burns their Fate Points, lives another day, and treats the psyker character with extreme caution. Players might tell stories about this in the future, but it'll generally be to give the psyker player a hard time. Two is that it makes Psyker characters relatively newbie-unfriendly. Starting out, everybody is afraid of rolling on the Big Bad Random Tables and so they reluctantly use their powers when the reality is that players actually have a fair amount of control over the randomness. You don't have to trigger a roll on the Wacky Random Table unless you want to risk it or you deliberately make that roll (by pushing your powers beyond their limit). Three is that as players get more powerful, you can really mitigate the side effects in a big way. Rite of Sanctioning, for instance, allows you to select which Psychic Phenomena occurs so the player can choose a relatively harmless one that does no damage to them. Higher-level players get access to Warp Lock, which basically allows them to spend a Fate Point and take some unsoakable damage to prevent a Perils roll, which is where the really bad poo poo occurs. It has generated some interesting stories when I played 40k RPGs, though. For instance, in one Black Crusade game an enemy Inquisitor tried to use his psyker powers (enemy psykers are subject to the same rules, unless there's a special exception)... only to roll Perils, and then they rolled Daemonic Possession. *cue LaffTrax* Needless to say, we wound up with a pretty neat ally. LuiCypher fucked around with this message at 18:07 on Aug 11, 2017 |
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Aug 11, 2017 18:05
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theironjef posted:My first thought at that point was "Okay, excise the combat aspects of the kits, no one wants to play non-tactical combat, the whole point of using Strike! to write Blimpleggers is the cool tactical combat model." But there's too many and they're too ingrained. Which isn't a bug! It's just the natural interaction between two optional game chunks. I am very much digging ARB's concept of parallel noncombat feat trees though, that's a good idea. I'm generally of the idea these days that if you're going to have combat be the traditional tactical subgame it is that the stats for combat and noncombat should be separated into different advancements, particularly if it's expected that all PCs are competent in combat in one sense or another. It's not something you see too often, though, but it's something, say, any martial arts-themed game should do in my mind. Even if it doesn't necessarily make "sense", Jack Burton can run around bumbling and quipping his way into victory even if his character isn't a martial arts master. Halloween Jack posted:OTOH, say you're in the Mutants & Masterminds game I was in, where a player wanted to defeat a villain by collapsing a building on him. Not only did the player have to justify it by saying he had a weapon that could destroy a support beam, the GM wanted to make sure that the explosive batarang (or whatever it was) actually had enough power to defeat the pillar's toughness. Then he determined the difficulty of dodging a collapsing building. Then when the villain failed, he actually Googled the weight of 4 stories worth of bricks and looked the weight up on a table to determine the damage and gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress I admit I have never seen M&M ran that way. The right way, I would say, would be to be like, "Okay, spend a Hero Point, do you want to boost your damage or do a power stunt to do an area effect the villain can't dodge, or what?" Trying to do it all mechanically like that is a huge headache and not at all how the game's supposed to be run. (I mean, I've seen Steve Kenson run games multiple times and I'm fairly certain he wouldn't be down with that.)
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Aug 11, 2017 19:03
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gradenko_2000 posted:I'm not gonna rehash the Quicken Spell story again because I know you've heard that a bunch of times from me already, but it's still my favorite bit of trivia about Skip Williams.
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Aug 11, 2017 19:04
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Yawgmoth posted:Tell me this story (here or skype whatever) because I've not heard it and Skip Williams is like #3 on my "game devs I'd like to bludgeon with a cosh" list. After a bit of Googling it seems that there was a massive flamewar on the D&D forums involving Skip Williams over whether or not Sorcerers could use the Quicken Spell feat. Skip interpretation: The rules say that a Sorcerer takes a full action to cast a metamagic spell. A Quickened spell is a metamagic spell regardless of what effect that metamagic has, so it takes a full round to cast, overriding Quicken. Other interpretation: The rules say that a Sorcerer takes a full action to cast a metamagic spell that would normally take a standard action to cast. Quicken Spell states that a spell can be cast as a free action if it would otherwise cast in a full round or less. So there are two interpretations: * A quickened spell would "normally" take a free action to cast (not a standard action) so the full action modification does not apply and the spell can be cast as a free action. * The spell would "normally", without Quicken, take a standard action to cast. Then the sorcerer's modification makes it a full action, but this does not prevent Quicken working because Quicken still works on full round spells. So Quicken then makes it a free action. This apparently took up 5 threads on the D&D forums and ended with the originator of the argument getting banned at the same time Skip was laid off. hyphz fucked around with this message at 20:07 on Aug 11, 2017 |
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Aug 11, 2017 20:04
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Does anyone apply "fail forward" to combat in games with rolls for attacks? Not making the player roll a skill check if there isn't narrative value on both sides of the outcome seems mainstream in this thread, but what do people put in terms of narrative advancement on the "miss" side of an attack roll? Generally the PCs are going to beat the wandering monster, so would it be better to just skip the rolls and maybe assess some damage or resource usage based on CR? (I don't believe that it would be better, but I don't know why, so I'm looking for some help figuring it out.)
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Aug 11, 2017 20:11
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The consequence of missing in combat is that the enemy lives another turn / isn't CC'd / whatever. If that isn't bad enough by itself, the enemy probably wasn't dangerous enough to justify existing in the first place. Or you could go for the braver option design-wise, and excise to-hit rolls entirely. 
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Aug 11, 2017 20:13
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Strike has Miss tokens which aren't really fail forward but have a similar effect.
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Aug 11, 2017 20:14
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The person in question was Frank Trollman, the most immersive designer of verisimilitude alive, and I have to share select quotes because it's too good:Frank Trollman posted:OK, I was kicked out from the WotC board because Skip Williams was let go during the shift to 3.5 (which at that time was a two man show of Ed Stark and Andy Collins). That's probably not very helpful, so I'll go into some more history on that. Trollman is or was quite vociferous when arguing about, well, anything, so this is just his side of the story. But I believe it.
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Aug 11, 2017 20:17
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Well, broken clocks and all that. Ceterum autem censeo Trollman esse delendum.
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Aug 11, 2017 20:20
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I don't believe that he didn't sockpuppet at least one of those threads.
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Aug 11, 2017 20:23
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| # ? May 30, 2024 00:31 |
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Subjunctive posted:Does anyone apply "fail forward" to combat in games with rolls for attacks? Not making the player roll a skill check if there isn't narrative value on both sides of the outcome seems mainstream in this thread, but what do people put in terms of narrative advancement on the "miss" side of an attack roll? Damage on a miss.
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Aug 11, 2017 20:23
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