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PrinnySquadron posted:Are the Ars Magica bundles worth picking up? I know nothing about the system but I'm vaguely interested. Yes! 5th edition Ars is a solid game and together those bundles include a ton of good stuff. If you like wizards, medieval weirdness and backstabby politics all coated with really solid mechanics don't hesitate to give them a shot.
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# ? Aug 23, 2017 12:21 |
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# ? Jun 3, 2024 21:41 |
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Lichtenstein posted:There's nothing to hack really, just ignore the fluff and run whatever setting/tone you'd run in D&D with it. Just ignore sanity for the most part and keep it as a gimmick for particular spooky scary dungeon. You have identified a feature as if it were a bug.
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# ? Aug 23, 2017 12:24 |
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Lichtenstein posted:Honestly, if anything needs hacking for tonal purposes, it's the loving mech pilot class sneaked in between all the fantasy stuff.
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# ? Aug 23, 2017 12:45 |
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Serf posted:You have identified a feature as if it were a bug. I mean, it's cool on its own, but it feels a bit weird to be sneaked right there in corebook amid all the Serious Grimdark (and occasional poop jokes) Get TPK by Wild Boars not-Warhammer stuff. Feels like something that ought to be in the space supplement or something.
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# ? Aug 23, 2017 13:05 |
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Lichtenstein posted:I mean, it's cool on its own, but it feels a bit weird to be sneaked right there in corebook amid all the Serious Grimdark (and occasional poop jokes) Get TPK by Wild Boars not-Warhammer stuff. Feels like something that ought to be in the space supplement or something. There's also an entire tradition of magic devoted to creating technological objects, up to and including a suit of Iron Man power armor (which was used to great effect by one of my players in my last game). It feels like that's a little quirk to the world that gives the game a little more uniqueness than others like it.
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# ? Aug 23, 2017 13:08 |
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One of the corebook races is clockwork robots powered by lost souls, even. (Who ironically may not be a good choice for the giant robot because they can be too big to fit in the cockpit.)
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# ? Aug 23, 2017 13:41 |
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Evil Mastermind posted:I'm guessing it's these. I have a set myself and they're really nice. That's exactly them! Thank you, I was having a terrible time by googling descriptions. Antivehicular posted:Glad to hear TimeWatch is good. The adventure for it in Pelgrane's Free RPG Day publication looks like fun, so I'll have to check out the full game now. That adventure (Font of Knowledge) was what he ran. It was an absolute blast - great adventure, great system, great table of players. Kevin Kulp also runs an amazingly good con game; if you ever have a chance to play in one of his games you should leap at the opportunity. One of the players came up with a very unorthodox solution to the problem and he rolled with it like a boss. Xiahou Dun posted:Not trying to shut you down on this line of conversation, but I don't think anyone has been arguing against horror gaming conceptually. Like, I am full on reviled against that grimdark lovely OSR poo poo but all about some horror gaming where everyone wants to be creeped the gently caress out. (Within limits. Gross gore porn and rape is at the very best super lazy, "that's the best you can do?", and then all of the actual, real objective crap. Hey! Guys! Maybe try tension instead!). Like I think this is more implementation than conceptual, especially vis a vis genre. I may have (probably) got a little carried away, but there was a bit of that cropping up! From stuff like "horror is a lovely collaborative game genre" and a few other posts. Cascade Jones, sorry you had bad experiences with horror games. I'd also say they're on of the hardest genres to get right, and if it's not your thing to begin with, then yeah, better to steer clear. As for the cards, maybe email the designers? If you don't talk to colorblind people on the regular it's easier to forget that red/green is a bad scheme for most of them. I feel like you could do a pretty visually distinct version even with a mostly black side versus a mostly white side.
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# ? Aug 23, 2017 14:45 |
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Nuns with Guns posted:It's high profile because it's from Monte Cooke Games. The game is a heavily watered-down Cypher system, which is honestly an improvement on that side. I'd be shocked if it's ever played as intended, with age categories and "increasing complexity" because playing at "lower complexities" actually makes the game harder. It leans heavily on the GM making everything up because a lot of the equipment has no set mechanics behind it. The powers and archetypes that do have rules are really unbalanced against one another. Archetypes sometimes have powers that don't even use their primary stat. There's a great review of it in the F&F archive. For all the humph I wrote about NTYE, I followed a Facebook group on it and it seems it's having some fantastic results. There's people who've been hugely inspired by it and it's gotten their children into reading and imagination play much more. There's even one claim that an 8-year-old girl was so keen on it that she ran the game for her brother and parents, with her own adventure - a simple one, sure, but I just find that heartwarming. Oh, and she felt one of the archetypes didn't match the character someone wanted to play so she GM fiated their stats. (I did post some "rebalancing" ideas to the group as well, mind you, which some people openly admitted they stole..)
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# ? Aug 23, 2017 14:49 |
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Although, now that I think about it, the best RPG I've ever seen for little kids is Kinderdice, a nanogame that some cool dad whipped up based on a game his kids invented.
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# ? Aug 23, 2017 15:17 |
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I've got the PbP urge again, but I'm undecided on what to run. Lend me a hand and vote what's in your heart
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# ? Aug 23, 2017 15:49 |
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Haystack posted:Although, now that I think about it, the best RPG I've ever seen for little kids is Kinderdice, a nanogame that some cool dad whipped up based on a game his kids invented. Fails (seriously though that's awesome)
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# ? Aug 23, 2017 15:52 |
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Ars Magica is good.
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# ? Aug 23, 2017 15:53 |
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Rand Brittain posted:Ars Magica is good. I'm joining a game next week and I'm making a fat portuguese wizard
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# ? Aug 23, 2017 15:56 |
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Plutonis posted:I'm joining a game next week and I'm making a fat portuguese wizard in my last game I was a big jolly fat Frankish wizard and it was the best. Fat wizards best wizards
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# ? Aug 23, 2017 16:05 |
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Now that I'm thinking about it: Why are we all surprised that the piss-wizard module about Oompa-Loompa gang rape won a Gold Ennie?
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# ? Aug 23, 2017 16:26 |
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LuiCypher posted:Now that I'm thinking about it: I'm not surprised a "psychosexual romp" won, just one with such a specific and unusual fetish.
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# ? Aug 23, 2017 16:31 |
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just further proof that we live in the piss tape is real timeline
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# ? Aug 23, 2017 16:32 |
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Serf posted:just further proof that we live in the piss tape is real timeline Shadowrun scenario: retrieve the piss tape EDIT: Whoever got me this avatar either had to have been from CSPAM or here, so thank you, mysterious benefactor. gradenko_2000 fucked around with this message at 16:39 on Aug 23, 2017 |
# ? Aug 23, 2017 16:36 |
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gradenko_2000 posted:Shadowrun scenario: retrieve the piss tape Well, there's tonight's session sorted out then!
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# ? Aug 23, 2017 16:37 |
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isn't there an unknown armies adept type who would get a pretty big charge out of the piss tape?
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# ? Aug 23, 2017 16:40 |
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Fuego Fish posted:I've got the PbP urge again, but I'm undecided on what to run. Lend me a hand and vote what's in your heart Got some good votes on this so far, but I fear I forgot to put "lovely adaptation of a 1970s kids movie only with tons of racism and sexism" in the options so I'm missing out on that sweet BitC demographic.
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# ? Aug 23, 2017 16:58 |
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The Goonies hunt for the treasure of Nathan Bedford Forrest
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# ? Aug 23, 2017 17:05 |
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There's a kickstarter ending soon for Paladin: Warrior of Charlemagne which is a Pendragon hack so if you want to play as a cute pinkhaired anime crossdresser while the rest of your table makes serious historically based characters, well, hop up!
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# ? Aug 23, 2017 17:19 |
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ProfessorCirno posted:Yo I'm just saying, "actually we should have stories about rape, it's super dramatic and fitting" was literally motherfucking Desborough’s thing. Tuxedo Catfish posted:I'm not kidding by the way guys, I have a problem where I try to write Alien and it comes out as Scooby Doo instead.
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# ? Aug 23, 2017 17:49 |
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Plutonis posted:There's a kickstarter ending soon for Paladin: Warrior of Charlemagne which is a Pendragon hack so if you want to play as a cute pinkhaired anime crossdresser while the rest of your table makes serious historically based characters, well, hop up! I basically can't think of anything I want to do more than that, but I doubt I'd get to play Pendragon anyway and I'm firmly in the "buy it only if you'd play it" camp
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# ? Aug 23, 2017 18:00 |
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Countblanc posted:I basically can't think of anything I want to do more than that, but I doubt I'd get to play Pendragon anyway and I'm firmly in the "buy it only if you'd play it" camp 'Ridiculous anime stereotypes rampage through high-minded historical drama' sounds like a good time.
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# ? Aug 23, 2017 19:58 |
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Helical Nightmares posted:To an extent "the majority of OSR is poo poo" would be a better statement or "I really don't like OSR because the majority of their products are poo poo." Frankly I wouldn't disagree with either of those statements from my own experience, but it's disingenuous to write off the entire field. gradenko_2000 posted:There's an old essay from Ron Edwards where he goes into the very early history of D&D, talking about things like the Judges Guild supplement, Warlock, the Arduin Grimoire, all that, and his overall point was that these things were descriptive, not prescriptive, of play. That is, people played D&D however they understood it, and made up a bunch of stuff along the way, and essentially documented the stuff that they made up when they published poo poo like critical hit tables and vast city records and new NPCs. Here is A Thing about the OSR: it's a child of the D20 boom. Not only in that it couldn't exist without the OGL, but the movement coincided with the rise of easy online publishing. Imagine if White Wolf had made Storyteller free-to-use in the 90s and DriveThruRPG was a thing. You'd see roughly 10 times as many crappy White Wolf imitators as there actually were; everybody who wrote house rules for Zombie: The Shambling would've "published" a "game." A lot of the dross in the OSR comes from people who seem to just want to be able to say they wrote a game. It's not just about using old rules, nor nostalgia; they want to turn back the clock on game design so that they can pretend writing house rules for AD&D is innovation. So there are a bunch of "games" that are just copypastes of AD&D1e with different layout, a few things cut out, a few house rules pasted in. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 21:31 on Aug 23, 2017 |
# ? Aug 23, 2017 21:23 |
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# ? Aug 23, 2017 23:38 |
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PrinnySquadron posted:Are the Ars Magica bundles worth picking up? I know nothing about the system but I'm vaguely interested. It is the best game I will never get to play. The books are worthwhile reading.
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# ? Aug 24, 2017 00:36 |
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ZeroCount fucked around with this message at 02:05 on Aug 24, 2017 |
# ? Aug 24, 2017 01:46 |
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hyphz posted:For all the humph I wrote about NTYE, I followed a Facebook group on it and it seems it's having some fantastic results. There's people who've been hugely inspired by it and it's gotten their children into reading and imagination play much more. There's even one claim that an 8-year-old girl was so keen on it that she ran the game for her brother and parents, with her own adventure - a simple one, sure, but I just find that heartwarming. Oh, and she felt one of the archetypes didn't match the character someone wanted to play so she GM fiated their stats. (I did post some "rebalancing" ideas to the group as well, mind you, which some people openly admitted they stole..) I do appreciate that it's about the only game from a sorta major publisher that is explicitly for kids, which is a great way to feed their imaginations and also encourage them to act in front of people without being uncomfortable. I wish it didn't fall into the same MCG-isms of dropping failings of the system at the feet of the GM to handwaive. Costume Fairy Adventures would be so much more fun to run with kids, or heck someone could even grab the rules for something simple like Magical Burst, rip all all the grim Madoka-elements and make a great superhero game for kids. Plutonis posted:There's a kickstarter ending soon for Paladin: Warrior of Charlemagne which is a Pendragon hack so if you want to play as a cute pinkhaired anime crossdresser while the rest of your table makes serious historically based characters, well, hop up! I had no idea historical Franks were weeaboos Nuns with Guns fucked around with this message at 01:54 on Aug 24, 2017 |
# ? Aug 24, 2017 01:51 |
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Might as well have guided them to a hulk of turds.
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# ? Aug 24, 2017 02:48 |
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If I'm not mistaken, Hero Kids is also targeted at young players, though my impression is that it's still very much D&D-ish, just with "simpler mechanics" And then there's also Dagger for Kids, which is an OSR-based "for-kids" game, which ends up being hilariously unsuited for the purpose because everything uses d6's, so of course a level 1 character has d6 HP and all damage is a d6 roll. Hope you enjoy dying in one hit!
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# ? Aug 24, 2017 02:52 |
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gradenko_2000 posted:If I'm not mistaken, Hero Kids is also targeted at young players, though my impression is that it's still very much D&D-ish, just with "simpler mechanics" Kids have to learn early that life is nasty, brutish, and short
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# ? Aug 24, 2017 03:37 |
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Nuns with Guns posted:I had no idea historical Franks were weeaboos
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# ? Aug 24, 2017 03:40 |
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Wow drat, history really is more interesting than what they teach in school
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# ? Aug 24, 2017 03:57 |
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Greetings from C-SPAM. One of our threads had some chat yesterday about a TG problem I have.Squizzle posted:i really want a system designed for pbp/pbem or some other way of connecting distributed players who have trouble organizing a stable meeting time gradenko_2000 posted:Discord chat Squizzle posted:also would be fine, as long as it was schedule-agnostic loquacius posted:same Squizzle posted:its such an obv niche for elfgames, esp because so much of the tg industry orbits around internet forums that have both grognard conversation and pbp poo poo Why hasn't anyone solved this loving problem, tradgoons?
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# ? Aug 24, 2017 04:14 |
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Squizzle posted:Why hasn't anyone solved this loving problem, tradgoons? Because nobody's paying me/somebody else to make a feature complete pbp game. Put money on the table and I'll figure it out. But seriously, it's because the focus remains on live gaming in the design space. I (and a lot of others) have considered dedicated asynchronous rulesets but they're a lot of work to get right and it's always just been easier to work out scheduling, put up with existing pbp, or just not game at all. The closest thing we've got to asynchronous games right now is diceless systems like Chuubo's or Golden Sky Stories.
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# ? Aug 24, 2017 04:22 |
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well there's two answers: 1) that system does exist, it's just called freeform roleplaying and thousands and thousands of people do it every day. 2) i don't actually know what you'd want in this system that isnt provided by current offerings short of actual digital tools created by the industry itself which, as someone pointed out to me a few pages ago, isn't really viable since no one has any gat dang money to hire programmers or other tech-savvy people.
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# ? Aug 24, 2017 04:23 |
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# ? Jun 3, 2024 21:41 |
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diceless is certainly an option, but there is no shortage of die rollers or ways to enforce die rolls through things like discord apps, irc bots, or forums code. you mention D&D specifically so i assume you want a system with some amount of crunch to it, what does current D&D (or whatever your favorite edition/spin-off) lack that you think would make the system better tailored to a pbp environment*? better rules for GM-less resolution? *other than digital tools for the previously stated reason
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# ? Aug 24, 2017 04:26 |