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Everyone had that campaign that devolved into managerial accounting and everyone was cool with it. I like super rules light games, but I will say Rolemaster is better than Palladium FRPG. Just the example of the dude falling off his camel, rolling massive head trauma, and dieing of thirst in the middle of a featureless plain without any intervention is reason enough for Rolemaster to exist. Palladium should have been an art book.
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Feb 16, 2018 07:49
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How did 7th Sea 2E shake out? Only somewhat related, did the genericized version of FFG's Star Wars engine fix the rocket tag problem?
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Feb 16, 2018 07:51
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Babylon Astronaut posted:Everyone had that campaign that devolved into managerial accounting and everyone was cool with it. I'm the GM who keeps coming up with cool fun things to give to the players that turn out to be wildly broken, which is pretty okay imo In 5e the thing was a slot machine that took in gold and then rolled on one of the loot tables. Each loot table had a cost associated with it. Except the prices were way way way too low. After a session or two of messing around throwing all their money into it, they discovered that rolling on the highest table cost less than the expected value you'd get from items that let you cast wish (which lets you straight up wish for a set amount of gold). Good times.
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Feb 16, 2018 07:55
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3e was just sick with it. It had this crazy specific economy laid out in the DMG, that I assumed you could just run as written. Turns out, whoever comes up with microsoft excel first will own everything in the world after only a couple years of "downtime" AKA the only time nothing was trying to kill you. Like when you take off most of a year to craft something, it's not like you're going to roll bad and get murdered.
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Feb 16, 2018 08:06
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grassy gnoll posted:How did 7th Sea 2E shake out? It's a great improvement on 7th Sea, if not massively groundbreaking. The roll system is oddly obtuse but at least cleaner. Characters are more competent from the outset. The setting is no longer a landlocked continent. A lot of the dumb metaplot was excised. The sorcery is a mixed bag - some is better, some is worse. The new nations are welcome additions. The corruption rules are awful alignment enforcement nonsense. The balance on character creation is very handwaggle. The GM advice is... solid, and a good deal better than you'd expect after Play Dirty. (There's still a little Wick chub in there, tho.) The addition of a New World analogue is welcome, but I haven't seen how well they handled the details yet. The enemy rules are delightfully simplified but the math breaks down pretty hard on high-level villains. In short, it's been much better than the previous edition, but still has some caveats.
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Feb 16, 2018 08:20
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Babylon Astronaut posted:3e was just sick with it. It had this crazy specific economy laid out in the DMG, that I assumed you could just run as written. Turns out, whoever comes up with microsoft excel first will own everything in the world after only a couple years of "downtime" AKA the only time nothing was trying to kill you. Like when you take off most of a year to craft something, it's not like you're going to roll bad and get murdered. Pretty sure Frank Trollman has written like 10 million words about this.
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Feb 16, 2018 08:51
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I'm not suprised, but jesus is that guy
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Feb 16, 2018 10:05
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Zerilan posted:Pretty sure Frank Trollman has written like 10 million words about this.
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Feb 16, 2018 15:01
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grassy gnoll posted:How did 7th Sea 2E shake out? For me, I think the system is dog poop, and it's completely taken all the wind out of my sails, as far as running it goes.
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Feb 16, 2018 15:01
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My 7th Sea review: Play Spellbound Kingdoms instead.
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Feb 16, 2018 15:37
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I don't like Rolemaster's tables or the trend in critical hit tables it seems to have inspired. But critical hit results are not a problem for me, personally, because my brain has been warped by watching a billion gory movies and I can describe 10 gruesome ways to kill someone with a halberd on a dare.
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Feb 16, 2018 15:55
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Haystack posted:My 7th Sea review: 
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Feb 16, 2018 15:58
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To be fair that's also my review for most games.
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Feb 16, 2018 16:08
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Haystack posted:To be fair that's also my review for most games. To be fair it's the most accurate review for most games.
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Feb 16, 2018 16:33
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Haystack posted:My 7th Sea review: I don't think they're really substitutes for each other.
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Feb 16, 2018 19:38
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Thanks for the responses about Rolemaster, they were interesting to read.Halloween Jack posted:I don't like Rolemaster's tables or the trend in critical hit tables it seems to have inspired. But critical hit results are not a problem for me, personally, because my brain has been warped by watching a billion gory movies and I can describe 10 gruesome ways to kill someone with a halberd on a dare. I don't think the critical result tables were meant to help describe what happened, rather they are there to make the rare roll's result random and exciting.
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Feb 16, 2018 19:46
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DocBubonic posted:Thanks for the responses about Rolemaster, they were interesting to read. Crits in RM aren't rare, though. There is often a very small sliver of results where you're just doing HP damage, between "total miss" and the weakest crits. The weakest crits are things like lightly staggering a foe or even just flailing at them ineffectively. They are extensive and detailed. You can narrate them differently, but each result is pretty unique.
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Feb 16, 2018 20:18
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Yawgmoth posted:There's also a good 10 million words about this on the gitp forum by some dude who thinks balancing around Wish and Teleportation Circle is good and makes sense. I thought that was Frank Trollman.
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Feb 16, 2018 21:18
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This doesn't even mention the insane inflation you'd see every time a party tried to spend the money they found in even a low-level dungeon.
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Feb 16, 2018 22:23
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Every D&D adventurer is Musa of Mali.
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Feb 16, 2018 22:50
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senrath posted:I thought that was Frank Trollman.
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Feb 17, 2018 01:35
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senrath posted:I thought that was Frank Trollman.
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Feb 17, 2018 01:44
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Zurui posted:This doesn't even mention the insane inflation you'd see every time a party tried to spend the money they found in even a low-level dungeon. The Nightmares Underneath, a kind of OSR thing, actually has rules for this.
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Feb 17, 2018 02:32
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NGDBSS posted:IIRC that's Emperor Tippy if they're on GitP. So not the same person, and frankly more sane in that they're not preaching their perspective as the One True Way. Yeah, from what I remember of Tippy his was less "this is how the game should be balanced" and more "if you take the rules as actually trying to represent a world here's how a handful of low level casters would make things a paradise for everyone".
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Feb 17, 2018 03:05
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rumble in the bunghole posted:People who do a lot of call of cthulu and similar: how often do you come up with new mythos-style monsters compared to using or reinterpreting the classics? Have you looked at Silent Legions by Kevin Crawford? It’s an OSR take on Cthulhu-style occult horror whose main feature is a “Build-Your-Own-Mythos” aesthetic. It lets you surprise players with your own unique cosmology. Barring that, donjon.bin.sh has some interesting fun generators for CoC as well as the usual fantasy games.
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Feb 17, 2018 03:20
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Has a game designer ever laid out good ways to make random encounter tables? Working on an exploration campaign, and it would be neat to have some help avoiding pitfalls I've seen in other adventures.
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Feb 17, 2018 03:22
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senrath posted:Yeah, from what I remember of Tippy his was less "this is how the game should be balanced" and more "if you take the rules as actually trying to represent a world here's how a handful of low level casters would make things a paradise for everyone". I would totally love to see a Fully Automated Magical Socialism setting.
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Feb 17, 2018 03:30
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PoultryGeist posted:Has a game designer ever laid out good ways to make random encounter tables? Working on an exploration campaign, and it would be neat to have some help avoiding pitfalls I've seen in other adventures. Traveller ? They've had design-a-critter and encounter table rules since day one.
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Feb 17, 2018 03:48
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Black Panther good as hell, y'all.
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Feb 17, 2018 04:00
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unseenlibrarian posted:The other thing is that a lot if not all of Rolemaster's non-combat skills had a sort of "Success with a cost" option before that terminology really existed. If you rolled a 66, you sort of got what you wanted but there's a downside. (This mostly expressed itself in the combat system with the crit charts- rolling a 66 was usually lethal or hideously maiming, even on say, critical charts for explictly non-lethal attack modes.) This is true. The target number for a "basic success" was 100, but if you got a 75 to 99, that would generally fall within a "near success" which would either get you part of what you wanted, or let you try again. You'd only get "complete failure" below 75. When it came to combat maneuvers, the success would then be graded according to percentages of success - if you wanted to jump a chasm, a result of 100 would result in you leaping your full jump distance, while progressively lower results would lead to shorter distances, and vice-versa. Alternatively, results would also reflect a percentage of time spent, such that low rolls would mean slower completion, while high rolls would mean faster completion of a task or action. And then when it came to evaluating hits and damage, you tended to get small amounts of hit-point damage even at results as low as 50, although you wouldn't get critical-hit effects until the 80s and up. Another thing I will mention about Rolemaster is that the percentile rolls are supposed to "explode" - if you get a natural 95 to 100, you're supposed to roll again and add the result to your total, and vice-versa for rolling a natural 1 to 5 and subtracting. This is how you get the very high highs and very low lows that either explode a target's head on hit, or cause you to trip over your own shoelaces and die. And finally, since RM was originally a project to create a combat system for AD&D that was "more realistic" and had critical hits, there's extensive rules for converting the game to D&D. It's long been a white whale of mine to try running a game in this manner, so that you don't have to get too involved with the rest of the character generation and skill systems.
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Feb 17, 2018 04:10
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Waffleman_ posted:Black Panther good as hell, y'all. Hell yes it is.
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Feb 17, 2018 06:08
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PoultryGeist posted:Has a game designer ever laid out good ways to make random encounter tables? Working on an exploration campaign, and it would be neat to have some help avoiding pitfalls I've seen in other adventures. Oh, I'm very interested in this. What sort of pitfalls have you seen?
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Feb 17, 2018 06:12
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PoultryGeist posted:Has a game designer ever laid out good ways to make random encounter tables? Working on an exploration campaign, and it would be neat to have some help avoiding pitfalls I've seen in other adventures. I like this setup by Martin Ralya: https://www.martinralya.com/tabletop-rpgs/dcc-rpg-wilderness-encounter-tables/ It’s pretty easily adaptable to whatever system or setup you’re doing.
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Feb 17, 2018 06:16
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Waffleman_ posted:Black Panther good as hell, y'all. It was pretty bold of them to just up and kill off the hero at the end.
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Feb 17, 2018 09:38
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So I managed to pick up the Lord of the Rings LCG from FFG at a board gaming flea market for an absolute steal (8 Euros, with the core set + the first Shadows of Mirkwood adventure pack, and in perfect condition). My husband and I have been playing steadily for the past couple weeks, and he's been loving it. He really dislikes competitive gaming, but co-op like this is right up his ally. And it helps that he likes LOTR as a property. For just casual weekend play between us (or with another couple we occasionally game with, who are also fantasy/card game nerds), should I continue with buying the Shadows of Mirkwood adventure packs to keep with a coherent "campaign" structure, or is there another recommended box for me to go with first? I like the look of a lot of the Khazad-Dum stuff since I'm a big fan of dorfs, but I've also heard a lot of people strongly recommending doing the saga expansions (Black Riders) as a next-step. Side note: I know there's an FFG Star Wars thread, but is there really no general FFG thread?
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Feb 17, 2018 15:36
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There's a general LCG thread that's for everything NOT Netrunner.
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Feb 17, 2018 16:19
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mllaneza posted:Traveller ? They've had design-a-critter and encounter table rules since day one. I’ll check them out, I’ll admit I’ve heard *about* Traveller but I’ve never looked deep into it. DalaranJ posted:Oh, I'm very interested in this. What sort of pitfalls have you seen? Well most of my experience with encounter tables has been in D&Dish games, and I’ve just noticed a fair amount of ‘nothing-nothing-nothing-Elder Dragon’ or just encounters that grind you down faster than you’re able to accomplish things/reap rewards. That said… Arivia posted:I like this setup by Martin Ralya: https://www.martinralya.com/tabletop-rpgs/dcc-rpg-wilderness-encounter-tables/ It’s pretty easily adaptable to whatever system or setup you’re doing. I read through this and its likely that some of my ‘pitfalls’ are actually more differences in design philosophy. Its still useful to read through, the distribution/bracket talk is definitely what I was worried about flubbing.
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Feb 17, 2018 16:30
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PoultryGeist posted:Well most of my experience with encounter tables has been in D&Dish games, and I’ve just noticed a fair amount of ‘nothing-nothing-nothing-Elder Dragon’ or just encounters that grind you down faster than you’re able to accomplish things/reap rewards. That said… There's a heroic goon who's doing (or completed?) an F&F of a deck of encounters in the F&F thread. You might look there for inspiration.
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Feb 17, 2018 17:48
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PoultryGeist posted:I’ll check them out, I’ll admit I’ve heard *about* Traveller but I’ve never looked deep into it. Encounter tables start from the very D&Dish conceit that 'this game is realistically simulating this completely fictional setting'. This can cause the type of problem you are seeing, which I call "Assume 183 bandits" after OD&D. One solution is to pre-roll hexes and then distribute the forces by designing a scenario, but then a big part of the reason for the table (i.e. "I can make an encounter on demand") is ruined? I would agree that the better response is building a better encounter table. (Please take this with a grain of salt since my players don't like this sort of game that much I rarely run it.) Mine would look like this: One encounter per day Roll 1d10 1. Friendly Encounter (Dr. Goblor's snake oil bazaar) 2. 'Home Team' Faction (Goblins) 3. 'Home Team' Faction (Goblins) 4. 'Away Team' Faction (Kobolds) 5. Conflict (Goblins vs Kobolds) 6. Travelers (Adventurer group of gnolls, or a questing knight with entourage) 7. Non-hostile Terrain Flavor Encounter (Herd of Wildebeests) 8. Terrain Appropriate Monster Pack (Dholes) 9. Terrain Appropriate Monster (Chimera, alligator head instead of snake) 10. Apex Predator or Migrating Monster (Red Dragon, doesn't notice party, leaves tracking hints to lair) And then for each of the 10 roll specifics on the subtable, Subtable roll 1d6 1. transporting a large chest, 8 goblins, 4 carrying chest, two scouting/pathing, two guarding 2. hunting boars, 4 goblins, half with bows, 2 pet hyenas 3. preparing insect husbandry ritual, 1 goblin shaman, 4 fire beetles 4. guard patrol, 6 goblins, half with slings, half with spears and shields, chainmail 5. repairing stonework, 4 goblins with hammers and chisels, no armor 6. hunting pack of displacer beasts, 4 'adventurer' goblins, including 1 level 2 Fighter Between sessions update used subtable entries. If you want to update the table, just tell your players what you are changing at the end of the session. Obviously, adjust the table up or down or add entries depending on what percentage of Humanoid vs Animal vs Monster encounters you desire.
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Feb 17, 2018 19:37
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Anima Beyond Fantasy is a lovely (probably) RPG that I read the rulebook for as a teenager in a bookstore once, and one of the things that always struck me about it for sounding completely unreasonable to manage was d100 roll-over meaning you'd have to do two-digit arithmetic for every single roll. And then there was a lookup table for damage based on how your roll compared to their AC and what armor they were wearing which just sounded delightful. The best part is everything was a multiple of 5 so you could have squashed it down to a d20 with no loss. I always assumed it was based on d20 systems but they had to be ~different~ but maybe it was based on Rolemaster instead.
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Feb 17, 2018 20:48
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