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The Bee posted:My thought: I want to train my punchman to be a better punchman, but manifesting that only through adding a +1 to my punchmanning stat sounds boring. Choosing between different techniques and abilities is way cooler, and gives more option variety. I've been idly tinkering with a system vaguely based on the one used in Shadowrun: Hong Kong. * A skill is either trained or untrained. If you're untrained, roll [stat -2]. If trained, roll [stat] * Each "skill" has a bunch of special effects * How good you are with a skill is based entirely on your number of SFX. 1 is trained, 3 is advanced, 5 is master. Some SFX require a specific level. * Special effects have cool downs periods * SFX aren't just "can do X better", they can also cover stuff like "incendiary ammo" or "modified grenade fuse". So, for example Punchman! Unless stated, all Punchman! moves deal [Body] damage * Trained Fighter: Add +1 to all Punchman! rolls (permanent) * Punch Extra Hard: Deal +1 damage (cooldown 1) * Punch Fast: Subtract 1 from enemy defence until their next action (cooldown 1) * Head Punch: Opponent takes -1 to next action (cooldown 2) * Organ punch (Advanced): Opponent takes 1 damage at start of their action for their next two turns (cooldown 3) * Groin shot (Advanced): Opponent can't use SFX next action (cooldown 3) * Brawler (Master): Subtract 1 from damage dealt to use 2 other Punchman! SFX on this strike (e.g. deal [Body -1] to apply Punch Fast and Head Punch) DigitalRaven fucked around with this message at 11:44 on Sep 29, 2017 |
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Sep 29, 2017 11:42
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Cassa posted:Not doubting it, I loved the online compendium, just wondering if there any notable changes. You'd get numbers tweaks and revisions to key word effects pretty regularly. But then you'd also get times where WotC would print flat-out better versions of old feats in a book, inflating the feat count more and making it harder for new players to figure out which ones were best.
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Sep 29, 2017 12:54
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Cassa posted:Not doubting it, I loved the online compendium, just wondering if there any notable changes. There were plenty of others, that was just off the top of my head.
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Sep 29, 2017 12:55
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4E had a fair bit of errata, but it avoided the traditional errata documents since they had the Compendium, and just included the updates in new printings/sourcebooks. They maintained documents to show when changes happened but since there were other, easier places to find the changes, they didn't become natural reference points like they had with other games/editions. Plus the rule structure meant they could accomplish a lot with in a little bit of text. Adding a keyword to or removing one from a power or item, or switching one to another (eg. burst to blast) - or by moving something under a different existing rule umbrella, so even a major errata change tended to be much less wordy. For example, there was a major change to how Implements functioned, making proficiency the only gate to using them with any implement keyworded power. This amounted to a four sentence paragraph, and two of those sentences were just explicitly restating that the change applied to multi-classing. tl;dr: 4E's got a bunch of errata, but WotC distributed it differently so it's not as in-your-face. Comrade Gorbash fucked around with this message at 13:46 on Sep 29, 2017 |
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Sep 29, 2017 13:40
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Kai Tave posted:but for the vast majority of (mostly non-magical) options there isn't an interesting path of progression to be had unless watching numbers incrementally tick upwards really does it for you. As a result, I dispute the notion that people sitting down to play Shadowrun who charop into their specialty of choice are denying themselves a rich, robust experience of character growth with their shortsighted actions, as Evil Mastermind is apparently concerned about. Instead it sounds a lot like they're skipping over a dull and tedious process that arrives at the same result whether it happens during chargen or after 20 sessions. They aren't missing out on a bunch of interesting decisions because there aren't any, you and I played a very different game it seems turning a samurai into the second decker, rigger, into a face or someone who can actually challenge astral entities during combat is meaningful imo
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Sep 29, 2017 14:00
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Cassa posted:Not doubting it, I loved the online compendium, just wondering if there any notable changes.
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Sep 29, 2017 14:08
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dwarf74 posted:Yeah, both the compendium and builder were updated whenever errata was published, including notations to tell you when updates happened to various feats or powers. It can be a bit confusing, mind you. Our group learned of the "pit fighting cleric" fix only by seeing some cards suddenly change when a player levelled up and reprinted their character.
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Sep 29, 2017 14:24
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Kai Tave posted:As a result, I dispute the notion that people sitting down to play Shadowrun who charop into their specialty of choice are denying themselves a rich, robust experience of character growth with their shortsighted actions, as Evil Mastermind is apparently concerned about. My point was that the non-gear advancement options in Shadowrun don't feel like your character is actually advancing in a noticeable way because going from a ten-die pool to an eleven-die poll isn't really much of a change when you get right down to it. This was a complaint my players had, which I agreed with.
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Sep 29, 2017 15:39
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hyphz posted:It can be a bit confusing, mind you. Our group learned of the "pit fighting cleric" fix only by seeing some cards suddenly change when a player levelled up and reprinted their character.
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Sep 29, 2017 16:48
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Evil Mastermind posted:That...wasn't what I was concerned about at all. Ah, in that case I agree entirely. This is also down to the fact that a single die in Shadowrun isn't very impactful. It's 0.33etc. of a success on average, in a system where you generally want multiple successes, especially in combat which features opposed attack/defense rolls. This is WHY dice pools in Shadowrun can wind up so high, because meaningful difference in capability only comes as a result of adding a number of dice to something instead of a +1 here and there.
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Sep 29, 2017 17:38
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https://twitter.com/Sphynxian/status/918577166190895106 it is completely unsurprising to me that, given the building thrum of abuse revelations in the wake of the Weinstein abuse charges, that another industry with a hidden history would be RPGs.
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Oct 13, 2017 10:52
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I'm waiting for the reveal that the abuse is something like underpaying contracted work rather than the sexual harassment implied by the timing. Because harassment hasn't been "unfathomable" in this industry for a long time, and the community is sadly much more comfortable with it than payment disputes. Its tradition of harassment isn't hidden, it's ignored.
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Oct 13, 2017 12:46
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Considering the thread's talking about a PFS organization volunteer I doubt it has anything to do with contract work.
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Oct 13, 2017 13:05
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Now I'd really like to see this NDA, because I'm having difficulty believing it actually says what they think it does.
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Oct 13, 2017 14:10
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moths posted:Now I'd really like to see this NDA, because I'm having difficulty believing it actually says what they think it does. Same. I could find two places that talk about an NDA on Paizo's website in connection with Pathfinder Society. Here: http://paizo.com/organizedplay/coordinators/volunteer (which doesn't provide any context about it) and here http://paizo.com/paizo/blog/v5748dyo5la9n?Official-Call-for-Paizo-Publishing-Gen-Con which while not explicit seems to be about not publicizing a prerelease copy of the core rules. An NDA for volunteers not to disclose tortious conduct by other volunteers seems unlikely and massively shady. This is a federal district court in CA, but I think it's broadly true across the US: Armstrong v. Sexson, 2007 WL 1219297, at *10 (E.D. Cal. Apr. 25, 2007) posted:“[A]ll bargains tending to stifle criminal prosecution, whether by suppressing investigation of crime or by deterring citizens from their public duty of assisting in the detection or punishment of crime, are void as against public policy.” Williston on Contracts § 15:8. See also Lachman v. Sperry-Sun Well Surveying Co., 457 F.2d 850 (10th Cir.1972) (holding that public policy would be offended by enforcement of certain nondisclosure provisions in contract where nondisclosure would likely permit a crime to be committed without detection). It talks about crime and not intentional torts but I'm assuming that the abuse @Sphynxian refers to is of a criminal nature as well.
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Oct 13, 2017 14:30
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It probably does actually say what they think it says. Whether that's enforceable is another question entirely. Unfortunately, even if the provision would likely get struck down in court, that still requires actually going through the legal process to get there. EDIT: I'm more experienced with this on the Terms of Service side of things, but I've seen and heard about it with NDAs too. It's sadly common to find provisions that are so sweeping in either abrogating corporate responsibility or restricting signatories that no judge would ever uphold them if challenged, but you have to actually go through the process of challenging them. Comrade Gorbash fucked around with this message at 14:46 on Oct 13, 2017 |
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Oct 13, 2017 14:41
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I wonder if this is something Paizo themselves are involved with, or if it's a pack of idiots running a local game group? I'm not trying to absolve Paizo, I've just seen plenty of people conflate the actions of game groups with the makers of the game they're playing. I have no idea how hands on they are with PF Society. If they're hands off and this is a result, maybe they should get hands on. In the end, I judge these kinds of things from how the companies involved react after wrongdoing is discovered. Even if Paizo is hands off, it still reflects terribly on them if they do nothing. Is an NDA a standard thing to force people volunteering to run games for a nerd club to sign? Are they using it for playtesting? Lightning Lord fucked around with this message at 15:02 on Oct 13, 2017 |
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Oct 13, 2017 14:58
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Isn't Pathfinder Society just the organized play system for Paizo? Why would it need people to sign NDAs?
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Oct 13, 2017 15:00
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In reverse order...Lightning Lord posted:Is an NDA a standard thing to force people volunteering to run games for a nerd club to sign? Are they using it for playtesting? Lightning Lord posted:I wonder if this is something Paizo themselves are involved with, or if it's a pack of idiots running a local game group? I'm not trying to absolve Paizo, I've just seen plenty of people conflate the actions of game groups with the makers of the game they're playing. I have no idea how hands on they are with PF Society. If they're hands off and this is a result, maybe they should get hands on. There are some cases where it's less fair - there's a much wider separation with other lines and the organizations connected to them. The Shadowrun living campaigns, for example, aren't really connected to the publisher and their ability to keep using the name was part of the licensing negotiations. The same for L5R and Heroes of Rokugan. Those are trickier because the current publisher inherited the connection in a way that gave them very little control. Ironically, that probably does more to shield the Shadowrun campaigns from a lovely publisher in their case. HoR, on the other hand, seems to have a reasonably cordial if not well developed relationship with FFG. That's clearly not how Paizo and PF Society relate, though. So if Paizo washes their hands of it and claim they have nothing to do with the situation, it's going to be pretty blatantly them wriggling out of something they really should be responsible for.
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Oct 13, 2017 15:12
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moths posted:I'm waiting for the reveal that the abuse is something like underpaying contracted work rather than the sexual harassment implied by the timing. It's presumably a followup to the trainwreck he discussed here. Paizo's been trying very strongly to tout their progressiveness lately, but the same time they have crossovers with Kingdom Death: Monster or trying to do eat-cheesecake-and-be-progressive-too stuff like Worldscape. Well, at least the latter's for charity. Paizo isn't of one face on these issues, and knows sexy stuff sells (I mean, I could just quote Mona on that), but they're trying to walk a rope between progressive politics and regressive genre fiction and satisfy both customer bases... somehow.
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Oct 13, 2017 15:55
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PFS is explicitly part of Paizo, and not separate or volunteer run. It’s actually lead by full-time Paizo staffers and is organized at a company level, with an extensive product line, rules support, and so on.
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Oct 13, 2017 16:17
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That's a lot more substantial than a PFS volunteer harassing, if the linked thread is the same situation--he is considerably higher up than any PFS employees or volunteers, albeit not directly employed by Paizo.
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Oct 13, 2017 16:50
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Alien Rope Burn posted:It's presumably a followup to the trainwreck he discussed here. That one was introduced as a situation in which he was a passive participant, this new one is something where the harassed party confided in him. NDA shouldn't come into this at all. This behavior ought to be covered by a PFS volunteer "code of conduct" agreement. Harassment (according to my HR department's annual trainings) is defined as unwelcomed, repeated behaviour. Sexual harassment needn't be repeated to constitute harassment. Any company that's even heard of a lawyer ought to have a harassment policy on the books, which should extend to vendors, subcontractors, volunteers, etc. I found this: quote:Code of Conduct On a local PFS group's page, it's pretty clear that their (stated) policy isn't to point at an NDA and shrug.
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Oct 13, 2017 20:01
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Yeah. Paizo, for their part, has harassment policies. Whether or not they're being implemented earnestly would be the question.
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Oct 13, 2017 21:10
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Agreed. And I don't know that Paizo is accountable until we know that they were made aware of it. It sounds to me like she was pre-silenced by another PFS volunteer's lovely (or malicious) misunderstanding of the NDA. But again, we really don't know anything about the situation. All we have is a Tweet telling us to get mad at Paizo.
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Oct 13, 2017 21:30
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moths posted:Agreed. And I don't know that Paizo is accountable until we know that they were made aware of it. At this point, the details are more about how mad to get at Paizo.
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Oct 13, 2017 21:40
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Comrade Gorbash posted:At minimum it's Paizo not exercising adequate oversight and not standing up robust policies and procedures, and with the context of other verified situations, they've had ample warning that they needed to do both. Did I miss a post? What actually happened that we know about? Edit: oh okay, I found it. If anyone else is dense like me, details are in the Twitter thread. You just have to suffer through reading a longform essay broken up into 140 character increments. Jimbozig fucked around with this message at 02:49 on Oct 14, 2017 |
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Oct 14, 2017 02:45
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Comrade Gorbash posted:In reverse order... Recall that this kind of behavior in The Camarilla (White Wolf's LARP fanclub) is a huge part of why CCP first took it over entirely, then divested themselves of it and denied the new org access to even the name.
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Oct 14, 2017 05:55
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Liquid Communism posted:Recall that this kind of behavior in The Camarilla (White Wolf's LARP fanclub) is a huge part of why CCP first took it over entirely, then divested themselves of it and denied the new org access to even the name. It was pretty much that from what I understand and that they didn't want to be bothered. CCP was very hands off and honestly just wanted the IP. The whole reason the Camarilla was owned by White Wolf in the first place was because the Camarilla tried to sue White Wolf and unsurprisingly lost. It was originally loosely affiliated with White Wolf and White Wolf had to reign them in after that incident.
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Oct 15, 2017 01:36
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RocknRollaAyatollah posted:the Camarilla tried to sue White Wolf wait what why
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Oct 15, 2017 03:34
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Red Metal posted:wait what Now, some of The Camarilla's concerns weren't totally crazy. There was an argument over whether White Wolf owned the member lists and some other documents and records that had been created entirely by the people running The Camarilla. That's an aspect worth thinking about. Fans produce things in parallel to the IP they're fans of all the time, and it's an important question as to how much ownership the IP holder can exert over that. But where The Camarilla totally lost the plot is they essentially tried to operate as a separate business from White Wolf. Even if they really had just been an appreciation society, that's shaky ground. In The Camarilla's case, it was patently obvious that it's entire existence was based on directly engaging with White Wolf's product, and even the service they provided was impossible to disentangle from White Wolf's products. Everything they had was a derivative work. On top of that they wanted to bar White Wolf from setting up a new fan club operation. So they wanted their cake and to eat it too. They wanted to make money off White Wolf's IP and prevent White Wolf from making money with the same service, and didn't want to pay White Wolf or take any direction from White Wolf while doing so. There were a couple of legitimate grievances members of The Camarilla could bring against how White Wolf handled things, but most of those had been exacerbated by the club's leadership. Those problems were never really part of the disagreement between White Wolf and the club leadership, but got held up as pretty obvious attempt to gain sympathy. In the end the whole thing was driven by greed and a sense of entitlement by The Camarilla's leadership at the time, and probably fear that White Wolf would remove them for the lovely way they'd been running things (not misplaced, but also largely their own fault). Sadly White Wolf really didn't do much to fix the legitimate problems the club had, though by accounts the leadership they put in place was less aggressively awful. Comrade Gorbash fucked around with this message at 04:30 on Oct 15, 2017 |
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Oct 15, 2017 04:28
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A little ways back discussion-wise, but I wanted to touch on the wide vs deep method for character development, since it's something I've been playing with for a while. Most of my game design work in the last couple of years has totally discarded number increases in favor of widening context. GAG's the easiest one I can point to, since it's a finished game that I've actually tested and poo poo. Damage is always the same. It always starts at 1. If you do something creative, you get +1. If you target an enemy's weakness, you get +1. So you always do 1, 2, or 3 damage. That part's kind of boring but I'll get back around to the principle of that in a second. What drives it is that those numbers never change, but the context does. A character that gets super strength or learns to control fire does the same 1, 2, or 3 damage as one without, but super strength and fire control give you new opportunities to get creative for a bonus, or be able to exploit a weakness for the other bonus. A dude with no powers has limited options; the dude with those powers can make a car into boxing gloves or use his fire on an ice-based creature or whatever. In that way, even a lot of non-combat stuff suddenly becomes incredibly potent. A flashbang or a grappling hook or telepathy aren't just bigger or smaller math, they become new tools to solving a problem ("how do I deal damage in a way I haven't done before" or "how do I take advantage of the type of monster I'm fighting"). Some abilities may add secondary effects to their damage ("enemy is blinded in addition to damage," or "this attack is considered exploiting a weakness against any undead") but the damage is always restrained to 1-3. HP works the same way. All player characters in GAG have the same base HP, but different powers change how or when they can heal, what resources they can exchange for damage mitigation, or what happens when they take damage. I'm not just trying to toot my own horn, because the problem I've ran into is that GAG's damage method is kind of boring--in the future I'm looking more into escalating dice (minimum d6 damage, d8 with a bonus, d10 with two bonuses) or take-the-best (1d10 with a regular attack, 2d10 take the highest if creative or advantageous, 3d10 take the highest if all of the above). I've gotten a lot of mileage out of the basic principle, though, because it takes math off the table. Players are still constantly looking forward and digging for new abilities to make their characters more diverse and to give them new options and to solve problems combat and otherwise (making GBS threads spider webs is suddenly useful in AND out of combat), but there's no emphasis on trying to stack numbers. If you got all the bonuses you need to do max damage, you got all the bonuses (good job). The numbers are important to the game but it's not WHAT the numbers are, it's everything AROUND the numbers that matters and gets moved around and leveled up. This is a lot of words, but my point is wide character development can work extremely well. I'm not even that good at it, because I'm sure somebody can scan through my RPG and still point out "X is better than Y", but removing the number stacking from the equation does make it infinitely easier to balance. You don't have to worry about whether or not Player 1 does 5 damage while Player 2 does 10,000, all you have to worry about is whether your telekinesis has enough of limits to balance it against super speed or whatever. You can still laser focus on character types--gun skill doesn't need to be an escalating +Number to Gun Damage. It can be "player can now bounce bullets off walls," "player can now aim dodge enemy bullets into other enemies," "player's gun bullshit now works when driving a vehicle with guns," etc. The character is still Gun Person if that's all they want to be. Sorry for the huge post, but I haven't gotten to talk game design in a while.
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Oct 15, 2017 05:35
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It's a wonderful post but I don't know if you meant to post it in the game design thread?
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Oct 15, 2017 17:52
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Golden Bee posted:It's a wonderful post but I don't know if you meant to post it in the game design thread? It's related to a discussion some pages ago with regards to RPG advancement/charop and the perverse incentives (or lack of incentives) that some games create through their mechanics.
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Oct 15, 2017 18:32
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Yeah, I was late to the What Is CharOp / Is It Bad discussion, but I'm up my own rear end enough to think I still had something to contribute two pages later.
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Oct 15, 2017 22:58
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And the shits keep on coming: https://twitter.com/delafina777/status/920489843821486080 I am shocked SHOCKED that some ancient grog turned out to be a creeper.
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Oct 18, 2017 17:24
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Yeah that's not surprising at all given his erratic behavior around his Kickstarter.
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Oct 18, 2017 17:29
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Honestly his behavior reminds me a bit of how the author SM Stirling has been known to act online--talks a reasonably progressive game (with some caveats of "but realism") and then absolutely melts down when corrected or called out on problems with his attitudes and behaviors. This is a dude who managed to get himself banned from multiple alt-history communities--like literally got himself banned from places where it is okay to say "what if the nazis won WWII."
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Oct 18, 2017 17:39
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I got ten bucks and a bottle cap collection says he's so adamant that freezing up means women want it because if he faces up to the number of women who froze up at his assaults then there's a real uncomfortable label he'd have to own.
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Oct 18, 2017 18:13
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It's not necessarily anything so sinister. Plenty of old-school liberals put ~*~the dialogue~*~ on a pedestal, which involving asking questions and playing devil's advocate, and believe that they have the right/duty to expression their opinions even on things they know nothing about. If you push back against them in the wrong way - particularly by pointing out they don't know what they're talking about - their natural response is to dig their heels in and double down. And if you block them on new media, whoo boy... I mean, it might be what you're saying. Just offering an alternative explanation. (Either way it's not cool.)
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