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Pope Guilty posted:Which game has a mediocre system that serves only as an excuse to sell it as a game rather than as an art book? Eoris Essence?
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Sep 8, 2017 23:13
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Uhhhh Exalted 3E had bad art and good mechanics
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Sep 8, 2017 23:14
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I bought Dragonomicon for 3.5 and even though I never used the poo poo on it it had some insanely sweet loving drawings of dragons
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Sep 8, 2017 23:16
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Evil Mastermind posted:It's kinda depressing to think that the Dark Souls "git gud" mindset is that old. This is dumb. Dark Souls doesn't make you fill out forms for an hour when your character dies, you just go back to the last checkpoint and try again. e: If anything I'd like to see a game where character creation and the penalties for dying are tuned such that running killer GM creatures and traps is perfectly acceptable design. Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 23:34 on Sep 8, 2017 |
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Sep 8, 2017 23:31
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:e: If anything I'd like to see a game where character creation and the penalties for dying are tuned such that running killer GM creatures and traps is perfectly acceptable design.
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Sep 8, 2017 23:38
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LuiCypher posted:There are probably way too many RPGs that fall into that category. Certainly not many Apoc Engine games, though. Broken World?
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Sep 8, 2017 23:42
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:
Isn't this strait up what Dungeon Crawl Classics is all about?
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Sep 9, 2017 00:26
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Magnusth posted:Broken World? Yeah, that is some good art. I was mainly thinking of World Wide Wrestling and certain parts of The Sprawl (like the playbooks), because they really use a lot of that black-and-white art that's not... great, but it can never be as bad as Cyberpunk 2020 3e art. For those who forgot: 
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Sep 9, 2017 00:49
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:e: If anything I'd like to see a game where character creation and the penalties for dying are tuned such that running killer GM creatures and traps is perfectly acceptable design. You might say that certain Lamentations of the Flame Princess modules have a lot of penalties for just living, so running killer GM creatures and traps is perfectly acceptable design because that means you can stop playing it a lot sooner.
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Sep 9, 2017 00:52
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LuiCypher posted:You might say that certain Lamentations of the Flame Princess modules have a lot of penalties for just living, so running killer GM creatures and traps is perfectly acceptable design because that means you can stop playing it a lot sooner. Lamentations of the Flame Princess is a penalty for living.
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Sep 9, 2017 00:54
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:e: If anything I'd like to see a game where character creation and the penalties for dying are tuned such that running killer GM creatures and traps is perfectly acceptable design. Fragged Aeternum (an upcoming Fragged Empire expansion) is based on the Soulsborne series of games and even touts that PC deaths and TPKs are not only expected, but encouraged, since PCs are immortal anyway.
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Sep 9, 2017 01:16
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LuiCypher posted:Yeah, that is some good art. I was mainly thinking of World Wide Wrestling and certain parts of The Sprawl (like the playbooks), because they really use a lot of that black-and-white art that's not... great, but it can never be as bad as Cyberpunk 2020 3e art. Holy poo poo, how did this happen?
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Sep 9, 2017 01:17
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Plutonis posted:Uhhhh Exalted 3E had bad art and good mechanics However "delayed for years and subject to feature creep" would describe both Cuphead and Ex3, so I'll allow it.
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Sep 9, 2017 01:42
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LuiCypher posted:Yeah, that is some good art. I was mainly thinking of World Wide Wrestling and certain parts of The Sprawl (like the playbooks), because they really use a lot of that black-and-white art that's not... great, but it can never be as bad as Cyberpunk 2020 3e art.
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Sep 9, 2017 02:26
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Haystack posted:Isn't this strait up what Dungeon Crawl Classics is all about? Yes
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Sep 9, 2017 02:29
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:e: If anything I'd like to see a game where character creation and the penalties for dying are tuned such that running killer GM creatures and traps is perfectly acceptable design. You can play Basic D&D exactly like that, with a player's next character showing up as soon as they finish making it, which should mean "within the next 5 minutes of real time". What my old group does with high-lethality one or two session games is to use BECMI basic, and have the dungeon only accept <n_players> PCs at a time (a wizard made it like that). There's a pile of pregen characters (single sided A5 sheets) face down on the table. Everyone grabs the first one off the pile and writes a name on it. If your PC dies, you grab the next one off the pile and enter the dungeon. Players lose if the pregen pile runs out before they beat the end boss. Optional rule: When your PC dies, finish your beer. Edit: You gain xp as soon as a fight is over or a treasure is looted, and level up on the spot when your number reaches the threshold. I would love something with that exact setup (kick door, players rush in, replacements/reinforcements wait outside) with modern design that retained Basic's simplicity. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 03:52 on Sep 9, 2017 |
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Sep 9, 2017 03:47
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I was gonna say, Basic's where it's at. Torchbearer is probably closest to what you're talking about. It's more complicated than Basic in some ways, I suppose, but it also abstracts everything that Basic would have you measure out.
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Sep 9, 2017 03:50
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I love torchbearer, but I can't see it doing the same kind of "Frank Fighter the Fourth was eaten by carrion crawlers after Resurrection Joe the cleric failed to save him, can his replacement Fhalfling the Female Halfling do any better?" thing that Basic does.
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Sep 9, 2017 03:57
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Serf posted:I've always thought of cursed items as like things that get used in some horrible way and then become cursed because of it. Like maybe someone kills their brother with a sword and now that sword is cursed. the deadly needle was used in so many fashion crimes it developed a sinister sentience of its own.
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Sep 9, 2017 03:57
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:This is dumb. Dark Souls doesn't make you fill out forms for an hour when your character dies, you just go back to the last checkpoint and try again. To bring this back to Gygax, it did work back in the day because making a character was 3d6 down-the-line with no modifiers and details, so you could make a new character in about 5 minutes once you got the process down. AlphaDog's experience with Basic D&D mirrors this: there are actually stat modifiers to be derived by the time you get to Basic, but they're all standardized, and stat generation is still 3d6-down-the-line, and there still aren't any feats or skills and poo poo. And while AD&D was complex enough that making a character took considerably longer, Tomb of Horrors came with a bunch of pregen characters, so you can/should run with those. AlphaDog posted:What my old group does with high-lethality one or two session games is to use BECMI basic, and have the dungeon only accept <n_players> PCs at a time (a wizard made it like that). There's a pile of pregen characters (single sided A5 sheets) face down on the table. Everyone grabs the first one off the pile and writes a name on it. If your PC dies, you grab the next one off the pile and enter the dungeon. Players lose if the pregen pile runs out before they beat the end boss. "You lose once you lose too many heroes" is the Darkest Dungeon loss condition and it's kinda cool that your group kinda got to the same conclusion probably before DD was a twinkle in the devs's eye.
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Sep 9, 2017 04:03
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gradenko_2000 posted:To bring this back to Gygax, it did work back in the day because making a character was 3d6 down-the-line with no modifiers and details, so you could make a new character in about 5 minutes once you got the process down. Character creation in AD&D (1st ed, PHB only) doesn't take that much longer than Basic when you've got the hang of it. 10-20 minutes maybe. Compared to 3rd ed and later there's not many choices to make - You just go "I'm gonna be <class>", then make your rolls, arrange your numbers, pick a complementary race, and pick equipment (which is where the time sink usually is for a 1st level character). If the DM says "an adventurer's pack has <stuff>, you get that plus your armor and weapons", that knocks off a significant amount of time. Or yeah, use pregens. But yeah, that's how that very lethal kind of play works - where there's practically no time/effort penalty to losing a PC. If people are legit taking 1-2 hours to make a PC, then gently caress no it won't work. gradenko_2000 posted:"You lose once you lose too many heroes" is the Darkest Dungeon loss condition and it's kinda cool that your group kinda got to the same conclusion probably before DD was a twinkle in the devs's eye. Yeah, there needs to be a point at which the players collectively lose in that kind of game because otherwise the most effective thing is the Zap Brannigan "wave after wave of my own men" thing, which is fun once. e: Again, talking about a few sessions of raiding the one dungeon that has an ending. It's a very specific kind of play, and it doesn't transfer to the thing with a group of heroes going on a series of continuing adventures. It kind of developed out of my very early D&D experience, where given that I was a kid and had only the red box and no way of getting books on my own, level 3 characters would retire after they made it to the end of whatever adventure they were currently on. Point is, nothing I'm talking about should be taken as meaning "it'd be fun to drop a level 1 character into an ongoing game full of level 10 dudes", "it'd be cool and good to no-warning kill someone's level 8 PC that they've played for a year", or "this style of play will work in all versions of D&D". Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 04:51 on Sep 9, 2017 |
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Sep 9, 2017 04:21
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Degenesis is a really goddamn pretty book.
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Sep 9, 2017 04:28
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Halloween Jack posted:I'm sure there were and are people enjoying that kind of play, but it was never a majority. More often people essentially run AD&D as Basic with a race/class split and treating half the book as optional add-ons. Honestly i'm pretty sure that this was a mistake on his part even. If i recall he'd played so much with one static group for so long he had to keep upping the challenge as they gained knowledge of all his tricks and he just didn't back down from it when running the convention game.
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Sep 9, 2017 04:52
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The problem was always that someone who learned to play RPGs via that adversarial DM stuff that Gygax sort of organically came to was hell to play with in any other sort of game, and in fact in general, since mastery of that style was basically learning to avoid doing anything and try to wheedle other people into dying instead. Ain't a person in the thread that hasn't sat at a table with some guy that would spend 10 minutes laying out endless layered contigency defenses (10 foot pole, floating off the ground, averting my eyes, throw a chicken at it, throw flour in the air, blah blah blah) before opening some innocuous goddamn chest. And it's not like they're being original. It's 10 minutes of call and response they learned from someone that dates back to 1977. Might as well have to stop the game and play Freebird whenever a chest is encountered for all the actual originality that is on display during those poo poo shows.
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Sep 9, 2017 06:36
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Slimnoid posted:Fragged Aeternum (an upcoming Fragged Empire expansion) is based on the Soulsborne series of games and even touts that PC deaths and TPKs are not only expected, but encouraged, since PCs are immortal anyway. Yeah. I always had a notion for a dungeon / underworld sort of game where when people die, they just become ghosts and can help the party out in other ways until they get back to the town where they can be returned to their bodies. You know, like Ghostwalk, only good?
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Sep 9, 2017 11:22
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[quote="theironjef" post="476218679"] Ain't a person in the thread that hasn't sat at a table with some guy that would spend 10 minutes laying out endless layered contigency defenses (10 foot pole, floating off the ground, averting my eyes, throw a chicken at it, throw flour in the air, blah blah blah) before opening some innocuous goddamn chest. And it's not like they're being original. It's 10 minutes of call and response they learned from someone that dates back to 1977. Might as well have to stop the game and play Freebird whenever a chest is encountered for all the actual originality that is on display during those poo poo shows. I have read more than a few sandbox forum campaign threads where the PCs roleplay for about six pages, set off into the wilderness, and are all killed by giant crabs or whatever. They then congratulate each other, make new characters, roleplay for six pages, and are killed by giant crabs again. It's like, cool, but who has time for that? Gonna be dead of old page before a character gets past 4th level...
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Sep 9, 2017 13:58
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dwarf74 posted:When one dude vanishes completely and the other sticks around, I'd say this is an unlikely assertion. He didn't stick around. He gave the Kickstarter over to the Savage Mojo people and went back to college. Plutonis posted:I bought Dragonomicon for 3.5 and even though I never used the poo poo on it it had some insanely sweet loving drawings of dragons Todd Lockwood can draw some excellent dragons. He's also the dude who drew the Niv-Mizzet card art. Nuns with Guns fucked around with this message at 15:41 on Sep 9, 2017 |
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Sep 9, 2017 15:01
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I got a number of books for $1 each at a flea market recently, and was delighted to be reminded this cover exists: It makes me wonder about so many questions, though. Did SJ Games actually commission this? Did they get a preexisting piece of art? Ice cream isn't poison for aliens, I hope?
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Sep 9, 2017 15:21
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Elfgames posted:Honestly i'm pretty sure that this was a mistake on his part even. If i recall he'd played so much with one static group for so long he had to keep upping the challenge as they gained knowledge of all his tricks and he just didn't back down from it when running the convention game. Like, the answer to players listening at every door and prodding everything with a stick is not killer ear worms, but a simple perception roll. And the answer to an overpowered piece of gear is not a rust monster, but just saying "I made that too powerful. Let's scale it back."
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Sep 9, 2017 15:42
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gradenko_2000 posted:To bring this back to Gygax, it did work back in the day because making a character was 3d6 down-the-line with no modifiers and details, so you could make a new character in about 5 minutes once you got the process down. I thought System Mastery found that no published version of D&D, not even first, used 3d6 down the line. Or is this even older than that?
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Sep 9, 2017 15:42
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Halloween Jack posted:There's tons of stuff in early D&D that is the product of an arms race between the DM and "player skill," that's best resolved by just having clear rules and adult communication. The problem is that leads straight to the "action abstraction" arguments. If there's a pressure plate poking it with a stick should find it. Poking everywhere in front of me with a stick, hard, should preemptively find that. So if I roll low on Perception did my character not think to do that, although the player did?
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Sep 9, 2017 15:46
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hyphz posted:I thought System Mastery found that no published version of D&D, not even first, used 3d6 down the line. Or is this even older than that? 1st edition AD&D doesn't. Original Dungeons and Dragons and Basic do.
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Sep 9, 2017 15:49
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Alien Rope Burn posted:I got a number of books for $1 each at a flea market recently, and was delighted to be reminded this cover exists: It's a piece ubiquitous fantasy artist Michael Whelan originally made for the cover of an Alan Dean Foster paperback. I assume it was commissioned by Del Rey/Random House.  The guy in the center is Whelan.
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Sep 9, 2017 16:02
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hyphz posted:The problem is that leads straight to the "action abstraction" arguments. If there's a pressure plate poking it with a stick should find it. Poking everywhere in front of me with a stick, hard, should preemptively find that. So if I roll low on Perception did my character not think to do that, although the player did?
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Sep 9, 2017 16:08
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Now I want a RPG sourcebook with that Dune cover illustration that got reused for The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch.
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Sep 9, 2017 16:42
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I mean, Bruce Pennington still licenses out his old work.
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Sep 9, 2017 16:59
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hyphz posted:The problem is that leads straight to the "action abstraction" arguments. If there's a pressure plate poking it with a stick should find it. Poking everywhere in front of me with a stick, hard, should preemptively find that. So if I roll low on Perception did my character not think to do that, although the player did?
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Sep 9, 2017 19:00
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Is Mousguard a good game for kids who've never played a tabletop RPG? Ages 6 - 11. Or would No thank you Evil be a better starting point?
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Sep 9, 2017 19:08
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Mouse Guard is good. You can even show the kids the comics first to get them into it. Kids 6-10 should be able to get it. Kids are generally pretty good at learning game rules, I've found. I don't know anything about NTYE.
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Sep 9, 2017 19:16
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is there any rpg out there where traps contribute to rather than detract from the game I'm curious because they're so ubiquitous and so consistently bad. even modernish crpgs have them turn up
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Sep 9, 2017 19:29
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