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I want to gush about Rolemaster for a minute. Rolemaster 2e (or to be more exact, the Finnish translation Roolimestari) was the game I started with if you don't count me and my friends' abortive attempt to play MERP after which I was sold on the promise of more charts and more realism in Rolemaster. I eventually moved to D&D 3e when it came out, sold my Rolemaster books and never looked back at it. Until this year I was at Ropecon in Helsinki. Now Ropecon has this thing where games on demand GMs get rewarded at the end of the weekend with free stuff Ropecon receives from their sponsors, and this year's theme being "Classics" they had a bunch of old RPGs there. I managed to snatch the Rolemaster box from the loot table when it was my turn to make a pick and going back to it it's just as terrible and full of charts as I remember but I love it. Like one of the things I'd forgotten about the game was the fact that under all that "realism" and pages upon pages of charts there is an underlying sense of humor. Whether it's classic fumbles like tripping on an invisible imaginary dead turtle or critical results like "Foe makes a strategic retreat from reality" it's not at all a serious game, and I like that. And even though there's a lot of rules you can see that they have been crafted very purposefully. I mean obviously it's not perfect: casters start the game ridiculously weak and pretty much the only spell that matters at level 1 is sleep (big surprise) and since the game does individual XP and most XP is to be gained for rendering foes unconscious, dealing damage or critical injuries, spellcasters only hit their stride once they start getting damaging spells. And the system for learning spells is just stupid: you spend points to learn a specific spell list, then convert that number to a percentage (5% per rank in that spell list) and then roll that percentage to see whether you learned a part of that list. Thankfully the Rolemaster Companion III which I also got from the pile has an alternate system where you learn one spell per rank purchased in the list (and it ups the costs per single spell some) which means playing a low level caster is no longer a stupid gamble. But yeah, I kinda want to run this stupid game.
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Aug 17, 2017 07:30
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I will always have a soft spot for MERP because a hobbit with a rock was the most terrifying thing in the game.
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Aug 17, 2017 07:34
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Ratpick posted:I want to gush about Rolemaster for a minute.  Rolemaster is sort of my white whale in that I first dug into it because it was infamous for being (one of) the poster-child for overly complicated RPGs, but there's actually a lot of cool design going on under the hood, and I've written a bunch about how arguably 3rd Edition D&D's problem was that it didn't emulate Rolemaster enough, rather than too much. I've still got a bunch of notes on running some kind of hybrid D&D/Rolemaster system so that you can play with the critical hit tables and the combat system without having to go through the entire cumbersome character creation process. Someday, someday, I'll get to run it.
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Aug 17, 2017 07:40
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Liquid Communism posted:I will always have a soft spot for MERP because a hobbit with a rock was the most terrifying thing in the game. Which actually has some lore accuracy to it
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Aug 17, 2017 07:49
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Another query, apart from the various Pathfinder Adventure Paths, the D&D 5th books, and the Great Pendragon Campaign, what else is there out there in there way of big, ready made campaigns?
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Aug 17, 2017 07:52
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Zeitgeist for D&D 4e
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Aug 17, 2017 08:09
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Angrymog posted:Another query, apart from the various Pathfinder Adventure Paths, the D&D 5th books, and the Great Pendragon Campaign, what else is there out there in there way of big, ready made campaigns? There were loads and loads for various kinds of D&D -- The Night Below, Temple of Elemental Evil, Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil, the GDQ series, and I'm not even scratching the surface here. I've seen a couple for the 40K RPGs, a few for various incarnations of Savage Worlds (like that one where you're supervillains fighting an alien invasion), the terrible horrible Abandon All Hope which is being dismantled in F&F at the moment, the Freiburg boxed set for 7th Sea (1st edition)... There are craptons, is what I'm saying. Are you looking for anything in particular?
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Aug 17, 2017 08:16
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I mean nothing is really as big as the Great Pendragon Campaign, that's kind of in a league of its own. There's the World's Largest Dungeon, but it super sucks.
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Aug 17, 2017 08:24
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Angrymog posted:Another query, apart from the various Pathfinder Adventure Paths, the D&D 5th books, and the Great Pendragon Campaign, what else is there out there in there way of big, ready made campaigns? Trail of Cthulhu has the Armitage Files and Eternal Lies Night's Black Agents has The Dracula Dossier (and the Zaloznhiy Quartet is maybe a smaller, more linear campaign) The Esoterrorists has Worldbreaker Call of Cthulhu has Masks of Nyarlathotep, but I don't know how "easy" it is to acquire and/or run nowadays D&D 4th Edition has The Scales of War adventure path, though AFAIK that wasn't released as a single compilation, so you have to put it together across the multiple Dungeon Magazines War of the Burning Sky was a third-party adventure path for both 3e and 4e, though I believe the 3e version is better Zeitgeist is another third-party adventure path, this time for Pathfinder, 4e, and I believe also 5e. I've heard very good things about the 4e version in this case. D&D 3rd Edition had a series of linked modules that would take you from 1 to 20 as a sort of precursor to the "adventure path" idea before it was really formalized the way Paizo did. I believe the chain is: The Sunless Citadel The Forge of Fury The Speaker in Dreams The Standing Stone Heart of Nightfang Spire Deep Horizon Lord of the Iron Fortress Bastion of Broken Souls 4e had a similar thing going on: Keep on the Shadowfell Thunderspire Labyrinth Pyramid of Shadows King of the Trollhaunt Warrens Demon Queen's Enclave Assault on Nightwyrm Fortress Death's Reach Kingdom of the Ghouls Prince of Undeath Goodman Games's Dungeon Crawl Classics line for 3e has: Castle Whiterock from level 1 to 15 Chronicle of the Fiend from level "0" to 10 Saga of the Dragon Cult from level 1 to 10 Monte Cook's Ptolus is supposed to be a setting/campaign that you can run from 1 to 20, but AFAIK there isn't a clear linear path from 1 to 20 - you're still supposed to put together events and plot-throughlines yourself using all the material I believe Shadow of the Demon Lord has its own 1 to 10 campaign by now, but Serf would know more about that The megadungeon of Rappan Athuk might be suitable for a wide range, but I'm not entirely sure if you can (or should) start it at level 1.
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Aug 17, 2017 08:28
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Kai Tave posted:I mean nothing is really as big as the Great Pendragon Campaign, that's kind of in a league of its own. There's the World's Largest Dungeon, but it super sucks. A part of me still wants to play the WLD all the way through, but... "super sucks" really covers it. Hoo boy is there a lotta bad going on there. For more games that aren't D&D, Unknown Armies 2E has a campaign-length module (To Go), although it has some railroading problems.
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Aug 17, 2017 08:33
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To Go's major flaw is less the railroady nature of the main campaign but the extremely lame conclusion that casts your PCs as the people who simply cast their vote for which one of three NPCs they want to receive phenomenal cosmic power.
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Aug 17, 2017 08:37
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I keep hearing about PF adventure paths, but never which one of those are the really good ones.
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Aug 17, 2017 08:51
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Kai Tave posted:To Go's major flaw is less the railroady nature of the main campaign but the extremely lame conclusion that casts your PCs as the people who simply cast their vote for which one of three NPCs they want to receive phenomenal cosmic power. Yeah, that's kind of what I mean by "railroady": the entire concept that, in a game that's fundamentally about antisocial characters consumed by their own obsessions, the PCs are forced to support one of three NPCs they have no particular reason to like or care about. It would be a substantially better module if it were more freeform about what the PCs can do with the Cosmic Power Football they're chasing; even if the implication is that the PCs are going to get plastered by the rest of the Occult Underground if they use the power for their own ends, surely "PCs get huge cosmic power score, use it, and get shanked, but only after scrawling their hideous ambitions all over the nature of reality" is the optimal way to end a UA campaign?
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Aug 17, 2017 08:55
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Plutonis posted:Details? it's extremely similar to the film version of valerian except instead of first contact and star wars-style aliens, it's all extremely weird transhumanism
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Aug 17, 2017 09:45
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Antivehicular posted:Yeah, that's kind of what I mean by "railroady": the entire concept that, in a game that's fundamentally about antisocial characters consumed by their own obsessions, the PCs are forced to support one of three NPCs they have no particular reason to like or care about. It would be a substantially better module if it were more freeform about what the PCs can do with the Cosmic Power Football they're chasing; even if the implication is that the PCs are going to get plastered by the rest of the Occult Underground if they use the power for their own ends, surely "PCs get huge cosmic power score, use it, and get shanked, but only after scrawling their hideous ambitions all over the nature of reality" is the optimal way to end a UA campaign? I don't even feel like you really need the "get shanked" part of the equation, at the end of To Go the PCs will have trekked across America, engaged in numerous high-stakes escapades in order to gather a kilo of pure, uncut cosmic power that has major players scrambling after it, the end result ought to be an unequivocal moment to shine (for whatever value of "shine" you care to ascribe to an Unknown Armies character). If you want to add one last twist of the knife, the way to do it would be to say only one PC gets to partake and everybody else gets a mystical consolation prize, so in a group of antisocial, obsessed characters that could wind up turning into a bloody free-for-all unless they can all come to some sort of agreement, but otherwise I'd have made it open ended enough to say sure, You Did It and now You Get To Do It Again. If a dumb rear end in a top hat can potentially ascend to the Statosphere as a made-up archetype by garbing himself in racist stereotypes and hijacking a plane, a sufficiently determined PC should be able to do one better.
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Aug 17, 2017 10:08
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Kai Tave posted:I don't even feel like you really need the "get shanked" part of the equation, at the end of To Go the PCs will have trekked across America, engaged in numerous high-stakes escapades in order to gather a kilo of pure, uncut cosmic power that has major players scrambling after it, the end result ought to be an unequivocal moment to shine (for whatever value of "shine" you care to ascribe to an Unknown Armies character). Oh, sure. I'm not saying that the PCs have to have a Pyrrhic victory -- if they can successfully get to the end of To Go, they're definitely in a position to get what they want and get away clean. I'm just saying that, if the module's justification for not letting the PCs grab the Cosmic Football is "everyone in the Occult Underground will stab them if they do/only someone with a lot of institutional backing can get this and survive," well, it's still a better and more UA-y story to let them get their moment of power and suffer for it than to have them yield that power to an NPC. (To be fair, I don't remember if that's the module's justification for not letting the PCs grab the power and run. I don't remember if the module has a justification at all, actually, besides the unstated "this is the story and we're sticking to it." A lot of UA's modules across 2E have some real problems with "this is the cool story/setpiece we wrote and we're not particularly concerned with what the PCs actually do," which is a big problem for the You Did It game line.)
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Aug 17, 2017 10:19
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I don't think we have a Spellound Kingdom thread, so I guess I'll have to ask here and hope someone who has played it in the past can help me, as I have a question about it. Help would be appreciated. The manual seems to imply that income doesn't work by history rules; that is to say, the first point you gain doesn't bring your income to 4, allowing you to roll a d4 for it. Which means that the starting noble can't really choose to improve their income with their starting building; they would need at least 4 points to have any mechanical effect, and all the available buildings only produce 1. That feels really limiting and doesn't make a ton of sense. Speaking of that, what's the starting income of a noble family supposed to be? I couldn't find it in the manual. Is it 0? paradoxGentleman fucked around with this message at 11:25 on Aug 17, 2017 |
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Aug 17, 2017 11:14
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frankenfreak posted:I keep hearing about PF adventure paths, but never which one of those are the really good ones. Rise of the Runelords, Curse of the Crimson Throne, Kingmaker, Carrion Crown, Reign of Winter are the usual highlights. In general they're all of reasonable quality; you just have to watch out for the ones with wonky systems Paizo couldn't quite pull off. Rappan Athuk's big book doesn't start at 1, instead somewhere around 3 or 5. Instead, the Rappan Athuk supplement offers some ways to start an RA campaign off at level 1. Frog God does a lot of campaign-long mega-adventures. Slumbering Tsar is the hardcore Pathfinder-only high level one. Sword of Air, the Northlands Saga, Cults of the Sundered Kingdoms, Lost City of Barakus, Stoneheart Valley. I think both the Blight and Bard's Gate have 1-10 adventures in them. There's City of the Spider Queen for 3.0 FR, that goes from 10-20. 3.5 FR had the Cormyr-Shadowdale-Anauroch trilogy that goes from 5-15 or so. There were a couple nWoD/CoD ones, one for Mage 1e, one for Vampire, one for Werewolf, and Promethean. Don't forget the line-ending Time of Judgment books for the original World of Darkness, too. There's a lot of OSR campaign-length megadungeons. Dwimmermount, Barrowmaze, Castle Gargantua, Stonehell, Anomalous Subsurface Environment. Hexcrawls would also count in the same way. There's some later takes on the mega dungeon too: Grande Temple of Jing for PF, Ruins of Felk Mor for 5e. Probably more in my collection I'm forgetting.
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Aug 17, 2017 11:41
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That is a really nice new avatar, Arivia
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Aug 17, 2017 11:44
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gradenko_2000 posted:That is a really nice new avatar, Arivia Thanks. I literally sat on a cert someone gave me for a year. I knew I wanted to do something with Sylvanas but couldn't figure out the text until I went duh, guild joke.
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Aug 17, 2017 11:51
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Age of Worms is another Paizo mega campaign for 3.5e D&D, from levels 1-20. Dunno if it was ever collected together outside of Dragon magazine
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Aug 17, 2017 12:22
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Nuns with Guns posted:Age of Worms is another Paizo mega campaign for 3.5e D&D, from levels 1-20. Dunno if it was ever collected together outside of Dragon magazine Nope. Shackled City was the only one to receive a collected edition, so Savage Tide is only available in the individual issues too.
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Aug 17, 2017 12:24
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gradenko_2000 posted:War of the Burning Sky was a third-party adventure path for both 3e and 4e, though I believe the 3e version is better quote:Zeitgeist is another third-party adventure path, this time for Pathfinder, 4e, and I believe also 5e. I've heard very good things about the 4e version in this case. quote:4e had a similar thing going on: quote:I believe Shadow of the Demon Lord has its own 1 to 10 campaign by now, but Serf would know more about that
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Aug 17, 2017 13:39
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Nuns with Guns posted:Age of Worms is another Paizo mega campaign for 3.5e D&D, from levels 1-20. Dunno if it was ever collected together outside of Dragon magazine
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Aug 17, 2017 13:54
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Yawgmoth posted:It was, and I've played it. It's pretty decent but the end is a bit lackluster since I guess whoever was in charge of making encounters forgot that most players are capable of optimization on some level. By about lv12 we were rolling initiative to see who ended the encounter, including myself playing a monk. I feel like a lot of the design decisions that we've to regard in 3e as being ... *ahem* ... stupid, comes with the assumption that the adventures are going to softball players by that much. Like, rolling 4d6-drop-lowest for stats, and taking Toughness, and being a Fighter and whatnot sounds positively droll these days, but I bet if you were that innocent and were playing these canned adventure paths, you'd be in for the fight of your life. (or at least until you sat down and read the books for more than a single stretch and actually put something together that even mildly synergizes)
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Aug 17, 2017 14:04
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Liquid Communism posted:I will always have a soft spot for MERP because a hobbit with a rock was the most terrifying thing in the game. The Holy Rock of the Shire as it was dubbed was one of the most memorable parts of the trip. (  Decipher)
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Aug 17, 2017 14:05
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gradenko_2000 posted:I feel like a lot of the design decisions that we've to regard in 3e as being ... *ahem* ... stupid, comes with the assumption that the adventures are going to softball players by that much. All of which made 3E's already-wobbly encounter math completely useless.
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Aug 17, 2017 14:14
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FMguru posted:This is a key problem with 3E - the way that a character's level tells you almost nothing about how capable they are. An adventure for 8th level characters can be either a challenge or a complete cakewalk depending on how much effort the players have put into charop. To be fair, that could happen in 4e as well
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Aug 17, 2017 14:15
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Andrast posted:To be fair, that could happen in 4e as well While I don't disagree, I daresay the range was tighter.
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Aug 17, 2017 14:19
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Yeah I think folks are misdiagnosing the problem a little. The problem isn't that crunch-heavy RPGs have the potential for mastery. The problem is making the wrong assumptions about whether you're using it or not, and a host of related RPG design problems that make correcting a lack of mastery incredibly (and unnecessarily) painful. My ideal response would be to make adventures designed for optimized characters, but you'd also need to:
- Balance classes and internal class options well enough that most people can find something strong that they like - Cultivate at atmosphere where designing good characters is both signposted and encouraged, instead of treating players like assholes for doing what the game incentivizes them to do This would take a combined effort of devs/publishers and community, and it emphatically wouldn't be a game for everyone, especially if you went the "disposable characters" route. But it'd be better at what D&D tries to do than D&D. Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 14:27 on Aug 17, 2017 |
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Aug 17, 2017 14:24
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paradoxGentleman posted:I don't think we have a Spellound Kingdom thread, so I guess I'll have to ask here and hope someone who has played it in the past can help me, as I have a question about it. Help would be appreciated. I think you're conflating some different concepts. Noble Houses don't start with an income, because an income is something that is generated by buildings - it's an explicit mechanical way of increasing Wealth Level by owning a business empire. Noble Houses, like all organisations, have a Wealth Level - this indeed does start at 0. This represents that the members of the Noble House (you and whatever NPCs you create to populate it) might have their own wealth and funds, but the house in of itself doesn't have a central treasury or bank account. You can increase its wealth level like you would increasing the wealth level for an individual, but there are limits on what organisations can do with WL (there's a section in the organisations chapter about it). Nobles (the class) start at WL4 themselves. Income generates wealth level by rolling against the doom and getting income each season, but you're right that it doesn't start at d4. That means the first few investments you make generally tick over OK but won't make you a lot of money (unless something happens in the economics of the area to make it unusually profitable). A good example might be that you would need to own a small mine, a family farm, an a market before you start generating income. You'd need some serious investments to actually get a decent return. This means, of course, that the entrenched nobility (with wealth levels) are more or less the only ones who can buy up investments, and so the only ones who earn money via income. As a player you might be looking at this and going "earning your gold by income seems like it involves a lot of investment, takes a long time and isn't that profitable." You'd be right, which is why you should go out and swash some buckles instead to earn your pennies. Or you should buy a silver mine during a silver shortage, or invest in an inn just before the coronation of a new king. Basically, it's a way of ensuring that investment is generally either a background part of the setting that you can engage with at high levels if you like, or something that comes up during cool story moments.
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Aug 17, 2017 14:42
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Antivehicular posted:Oh, sure. I'm not saying that the PCs have to have a Pyrrhic victory -- if they can successfully get to the end of To Go, they're definitely in a position to get what they want and get away clean. I'm just saying that, if the module's justification for not letting the PCs grab the Cosmic Football is "everyone in the Occult Underground will stab them if they do/only someone with a lot of institutional backing can get this and survive," well, it's still a better and more UA-y story to let them get their moment of power and suffer for it than to have them yield that power to an NPC. I think it was simpler than that - just that the "prize" for ascending is losing your PC, and exploring the world after their ascension will leave that one player either sitting out or with a ridiculous advantage.
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Aug 17, 2017 14:55
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gradenko_2000 posted:I believe Shadow of the Demon Lord has its own 1 to 10 campaign by now, but Serf would know more about that Tales of the Demon Lord has a nice adventure arc that gives you a good overview of the setting and has some interesting moments. I need to go through and make some fan-changes to it, as I think Rob got the encounter math wrong and was putting characters up against crazy challenges for their level. The Freeport Trilogy is now out, and it has much more sensible encounter design, a cool story and some neat stuff in terms of traps and surprises. It is apparently an adaptation of an existing Freeport adventure line though, so that's something to keep in mind.
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Aug 17, 2017 15:34
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Death in Freeport was one of the first (possibly the very first) 3rd-party products for D&D 3e, and formed the core for the Freeport setting, which has since been adapted to a bunch of different system. The adventure trilogy itself (Death, Terror, Madness) is a solid set of modules to take 3e characters to level ~6, though I didn't mention it because it's only that far.
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Aug 17, 2017 15:47
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apparently there is also a shadow of the demon lord in space adventure coming out that looked really neat
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Aug 17, 2017 15:53
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So is Starfinder any good? Or bad in any hilarious ways?
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Aug 17, 2017 16:16
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gradenko_2000 posted:Death in Freeport was one of the first (possibly the very first) 3rd-party products for D&D 3e, and formed the core for the Freeport setting, which has since been adapted to a bunch of different system.
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Aug 17, 2017 16:19
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hyphz posted:So is Starfinder any good? Or bad in any hilarious ways? apparently skill DCs get stupid high at high levels
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Aug 17, 2017 16:27
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Depending on how you define the word "big", 3.5 also had Red Hand of Doom which spanned 6 through 12.gradenko_2000 posted:Zeitgeist is another third-party adventure path, this time for Pathfinder, 4e, and I believe also 5e. I've heard very good things about the 4e version in this case. I played a bit in a Pathfinder version of this before that group broke up due to people moving. I liked the story, but mechanically it felt very much like 4e was the main consideration with the Pathfinder version being a kinda shoddy port (and consequently made me wish I wasn't the only one in that group that liked 4e). Fairly early on we found a wand that granted +1 to spell DCs, which is vaguely the same as a +1 wand in 4e, but a hell of a lot stronger.
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Aug 17, 2017 16:35
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I think most multi system modules suffer from a problem of really only having been built for one system to begin with, and then the other ports are just eyeballed and it's not as good
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Aug 17, 2017 16:47
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