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kingcom posted:D&D is good now. I don’t know about that, and I didn’t watch too far into it, but at least the DM had the sense to start them all at third level.
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Jul 23, 2018 02:50
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Lightning Lord posted:Yeah but how easy is it to glean material useful for TOR though? Like is Ardor completely useless outside of D&D With Tolkien Names? Stuff like Ardor and, to a lesser extent, their Harad books are better suited to "here's an ~exotic foreign land~" as a twist after everyone's comfortable with core TOR. All the MERP stuff is good for foundational ideas, like the whole necromancer half-troll adventure arc in the Arnor books, and luckily it's pretty easy to convert the idea of just about anything into TOR because of how relatively light the game is. But there's no one-to-one, because as mentioned every minor and major antagonist in MERP secretly died off-screen crushed under a collapsed pile of all the magical horseshit they had stuffed in a closet.
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Jul 23, 2018 03:22
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hyphz posted:That's not the issue. Yes, you can roll dark side pips and then you have to choose to have the power succeed at a cost, but you the player still know that you could just as well have rolled light side pips, in which case that choice would be moot. You aren't having to make that moral choice because of something you're doing, it's purely because the dice came unlucky. The IC explanation is that you are trying to draw on power you don't have to influence the universe but you really want it to happen. Wielding the force as your instrument rather than working with it is a pretty common theme of how you fall to the dark side. It's not just doing bad things. In order to encourage this kind of internal conflict which star wars is flooded with, the games inherent dice system is designed to tempted the force wielder with power and success, you know like the dark side lol. remusclaw posted:I don’t know about that, and I didn’t watch too far into it, but at least the DM had the sense to start them all at third level. Hopefully he hasn't succumbed to the macho madness. kingcom fucked around with this message at 03:36 on Jul 23, 2018 |
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Jul 23, 2018 03:34
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Hostile V posted:OSR is always bad. gently caress You Joe Slowboat posted:I realize it's not what most people want out of Star Wars but I would love a SW RPG where playing a Jedi meant having Fate point-style narrative tools and re-rolls rather than the showier force powers, which you maybe get one or two of (recovering your lightsaber or compelling the weak-minded are nice) and they're not your main power at all. The problem is that for most people that want to play a Star Wars game that would be really boring LongDarkNight posted:All this arguing is great but what if people had fun playing Elfgames? WWE Superstars play D&D - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ine-ZApwF8 This looks fun fool_of_sound posted:I also more-or-less reverse engineered how to make custom archetypes! It's accurate to ALMOST all the official ones. Neat
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Jul 23, 2018 03:43
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Weirdly enough I don't actually think 'mystical martial artist with deep knowledge of the cosmos and subtle powers' is a boring concept, especially when it comes with a laser sword. Not everything is about ramping up power until things explode bigger. People seemed to like Donnie Yen in Rogue One a hell of a lot and his entire force power usage was 'not being hit by lasers just long enough to do his job' and being good at fighting with a stick. But then he's an actual martial arts and wuxia cinema veteran who was playing Star Wars Zatoichi, so clearly most people wouldnabsolutely not want to play him in an RPG I guess?
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Jul 23, 2018 05:04
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Joe Slowboat posted:Weirdly enough I don't actually think 'mystical martial artist with deep knowledge of the cosmos and subtle powers' is a boring concept, especially when it comes with a laser sword. Not everything is about ramping up power until things explode bigger. I didn't say those people were necessarily smart
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Jul 23, 2018 05:09
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kingcom posted:D&D is good now? No, but having fun is.
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Jul 23, 2018 06:11
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So, to follow up on the  directed at me earlier.I guess I should be specific: maybe EotE can do that classic pulp original trilogy poo poo, if you really buy in to the advantage system and accept that basically you should just work out how you want the game to work for it, and if you think astrogation rolls are important, and if you look past the gear system, and really plough into the supplements to avoid the lovely basic talent trees, and plot out the exact right career path and... Oh my loving God I just clawed out my own eyes. I don't want to have to do that poo poo for a good Star Wars game. I just want to play a Star Wars game and it be good.
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Jul 23, 2018 07:52
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I played with Lemon-Lime when we played FFGSW, and honestly when he made his home-brewed version of FATE with Star Wars instead, the game was a lot smoother and better for a variety of reasons. Some of the problems that I had with FFGSW was stuff that he described, but I had a few more problems besides. First of all, we played AoR, which to me seemed to be billed as the "You are actually fighting the empire here in the epic battles of Endor and Hoth!" game of the series. This particular description of the game is singularly a lie, because combat is so loving deadly and basically descends into the rocket tag analogue that the only real games that you can run with AoR are ones in which you attempt to avoid combat as much as possible, which fits in with the description of EotE much better than the AoR description. The advantage/disadvantage systems in the game are simultaneously too descriptive and not descriptive enough. While outside of combat, I found the issue was that sometimes it was difficult to reconcile a mechanical benefit with a purely narrative benefit. When you play stuff such as PbtA (which me and Lemon-Lime's group had a lot more experience with), the game usually provides you with both mechanical and narrative ways to describe the consequences of partial failures: this is especially true of Masks, where there are several moves in which some of the results can help either NPCs or PCs, even if the consequences are bad for your character. I think this lack of guidance made, at least to me, the initial dice-rolls in FFGSW interesting, but quickly they started to fall to either become samey, or un-necessarily convoluted in order to decipher the results produced by the dice. The direct comparisons that I'm making here is to the more structured, yet freeform nature of PbtA, and the complete freeform nature of FS2, which didn't require you to decipher the results of the dice in order to determine what happened, since you just made poo poo up. My main complaints are structural, because was the game meant to imply that there was a difference between failing something with one advantage, or failing something with two advantage? In the end, this seemed to reduce the results to "pass with advantage (unlikely, due to how the dice are designed), fail with advantage, pass with disadvantage and fail with disadvantage", and the dice system seemed needlessly complex if those are the results that it was attempting to achieve. What I meant by the system being too descriptive is in terms of the combat in the game. Once you actually get into combat, the system has a laundry-list of bonuses or maluses that you can cash in with advantage/disadvantage, including specific tags for your weapons that can only be activated using advantages. So once you got into combat, the system seemed to be more geared to simply cashing advantages in for mechanical advantages that had little to do with the narrative of the fight (iirc there were some items, but the mechanical bonuses or just being able to use the mechanical bonuses of your guns always seemed more enticing to me). Another issue with the combat is that it honestly felt like a game of Battlefield 1 to me. You got taken down in a couple of hits (unless you made a wookie/trandoshan build and then created your character in a way that you could literally ignore damage), and when you went down below your HP total, you'd need someone with a stimpack to bring you back to health, like the medical syringe in Battlefield (with diminishing effects the more you were stimpacked, but they were still a necessary part of any loadout due to how likely you were to be knocked down). The counter to this seemed to be "well, you aren't meant to fight, and you should only fight when you outnumber/are in an advantageous position". To me, the counter to that argument is as such: first of all, the whole spirit of AoR seems to be centered around the mythic large battles of the Star Wars universe, in which straight up fights did occur. Second, for a game that is meant to be about avoiding combat, the game has a LOT of advancement options that relate to combat, or only affect the combat aspect of the game. Thirdly, I need to explain the way that FFGSW handles critical damage and going down. The game, strangely, feature a critical hit table that requires regular dice (a strange choice, why not use the custom dice provided instead) in order to determine how badly you got hit. The critical damage table also features death, but death is only realistically possible if you get knocked down several times without healing, or get hit by specifically dangerous weapons (disruptors, I think, were especially deadly, hence their banned nature in the Empire). The whole table felt quite anachronistic: in a system that was attempting to be more narrative driven, the entire table felt completely out of place and needlessly fiddly. This brings me to another criticism that I had with the game: the entire ruleset is extremely crunchy, and especially for a group that was attempting to get into the system, the constant rules lookups slowed the pace down, especially considering that the layout of most FFG is quite bad, and this was no exception. The ruleset seemed like a badly formed attempt to marry narrative-driven games with more crunchy, old-style systems, and, at least to me, failed on both regards. Lastly, keep in mind that throughout the game in which I played and Lemon-Line GMed, I was an incessant champion of the system, and that I thought it could work, and that if we just gained more experience with the game, it would get better. But, quite honestly, it didn't. And I guess you could say that the system was just a bad match for our group, and I would agree, but I do think that RAW the game is deeply flawed, and the only way to fix it is to play in very specific ways, or fudge the rules in specific ways, or just ignore some of the chrome, the same way that people manage to play games of D&D, Shadowrun, or other RPGs in which the ruleset are more woolly simply due to the scope of them. And if your group is used to that, FFGSW is probably going to be a step up from other, older systems, and you are going to enjoy the experience, but for a group that mostly played PbtA, some FATE, FS2 and improv stuff like Downfall and Fiasco, it was kind of a failure, and the flavour and stories that I wanted from a Star Wars game was, for me, completely missing.
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Jul 23, 2018 11:19
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dwarf74 posted:Popehat is dead to me. I hate that this tired bullshit about 4e persists. The first loving page of the TAZ graphic novel takes a swing at 4e for no reason other than the person writing the introduction getting to feel smug.
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Jul 23, 2018 14:28
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BetterWeirdthanDead posted:I hate that this tired bullshit about 4e persists. The first loving page of the TAZ graphic novel takes a swing at 4e for no reason other than the person writing the introduction getting to feel smug. There's people in that thread who are apparently still annoyed that TSR removed demons and devils in 2e. lovely opinions about D&D never die, they just get old and crusty.
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Jul 23, 2018 14:35
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Slimnoid posted:There's people in that thread who are apparently still annoyed that TSR removed demons and devils in 2e. lovely opinions about D&D never die, they just get old and crusty.
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Jul 23, 2018 14:56
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I've had very similar experiences to you guys with FFGSW. It's billed as a narrative game to emulate the movies but it's basically Shadowrun In Space with a more nuanced task resolution system. It's just a game that's stuck between all its influences. If they wanted to focus on the movie emulation, they should have gone with something Fate-like. The game is a successor to WFRP3, but it excises either too much (action cards to give more context-specific things to spend symbols on, more meaningful talents since you can only have a few active at a time, careers and party sheets to "slot" the talents into) or not enough of the bits that made that system work.
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Jul 23, 2018 15:14
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Slimnoid posted:There's people in that thread who are apparently still annoyed that TSR removed demons and devils in 2e. lovely opinions about D&D never die, they just get old and crusty. Looking back, I concede that tanar'ri and ba'atezu had a bad case of Fantasy Name S'yndrome, but I'll still take that over 'type V demon'.
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Jul 23, 2018 15:15
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kingcom posted:The IC explanation is that you are trying to draw on power you don't have to influence the universe but you really want it to happen. Wielding the force as your instrument rather than working with it is a pretty common theme of how you fall to the dark side. It's not just doing bad things. In order to encourage this kind of internal conflict which star wars is flooded with, the games inherent dice system is designed to tempted the force wielder with power and success, you know like the dark side lol. This is basically I guess more of a problem of the Force "philosophy" jarring with what actually happens in the films. In the films, you fall to the dark side by taking particular actions. I don't think there's any moment in the film where someone, wounded after a battle, asks a Jedi "hey, you could have saved my rear end by using the Force there, why didn't you?" and he replies "the force wasn't with me, to push it would have turned me to the dark side". Yet that is what this mechanic expects Jedi to do, and it turn implies that a dark side user might not be someone deliberately wrathful or forceful but simply someone who's been in a jam and absolutely needed the Force one too many times.
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Jul 23, 2018 15:15
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Jeffrey of YOSPOS posted:Look I didn't play back then but it seems pretty cowardly to me!!! They just gave them different names, and dropped that in the Module Dead Gods. Also, Modron March and Dead Gods were cool modules that I really need to do a proper write-up and conversion of to 4e someday. BetterWeirdthanDead posted:I hate that this tired bullshit about 4e persists. The first loving page of the TAZ graphic novel takes a swing at 4e for no reason other than the person writing the introduction getting to feel smug. I did not buy it and probably won't, what was it?
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Jul 23, 2018 16:34
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drrockso20 posted:gently caress You You're really sensitive to people making weak digs at OSR stuff for someone who does periodic drive by shits on games you've admitted you haven't read through properly. Jeffrey of YOSPOS posted:Look I didn't play back then but it seems pretty cowardly to me!!! Technically all TSR did was rename them so that they could go "Look, we don't have demons and devils, we have schemons and schmevils!" To all the religious nuts that decided D&D was inducting kids into satansim. I guess it must have helped a bit?
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Jul 23, 2018 16:36
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The mcelroys are fucktards so i'm not surprised they have the fucktarded opinion on 4e
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Jul 23, 2018 16:38
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Plutonis posted:The mcelroys are fucktards so i'm not surprised they have the fucktarded opinion on 4e the middle one complained about not having all the cool powers fighters got in 4e and independently discovered linear fighters quadratic wizards, which was funny as hell
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Jul 23, 2018 16:42
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ImpactVector posted:I've had very similar experiences to you guys with FFGSW. It's billed as a narrative game to emulate the movies but it's basically Shadowrun In Space with a more nuanced task resolution system.
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Jul 23, 2018 16:49
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Slimnoid posted:There's people in that thread who are apparently still annoyed that TSR removed demons and devils in 2e. lovely opinions about D&D never die, they just get old and crusty. Weirdly, I think the Blood War and the whole demon/devil split is one of the cooler bits of D&D.
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Jul 23, 2018 17:07
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Lemon-Lime posted:Weirdly, I think the Blood War and the whole demon/devil split is one of the cooler bits of D&D. It wasn't cool until Planescape though, in 1st ed and the early part of 2nd they were just the high-level badds with slightly different alignments and arrangements of limbs.
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Jul 23, 2018 17:15
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FMguru posted:I've watched several iterations of the cycle At least the new video game gives me material to work with on running a game of a clan of Grazelanders, so I can at least distance myself somewhat from the same Sartarite poo poo over and over and over, and can instead play a cantankerous group of Solar tribesmen.
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Jul 23, 2018 17:17
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Plutonis posted:The mcelroys are fucktards so i'm not surprised they have the fucktarded opinion on 4e
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Jul 23, 2018 17:33
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Nuns with Guns posted:You're really sensitive to people making weak digs at OSR stuff for someone who does periodic drive by shits on games you've admitted you haven't read through properly. Yeah, I like you Dr Rockso but you really need to play more games. I get that people have bailed on you for a game being Not D&D but still Also just because Kevin Crawford and DCC are good doesn't mean you have to have a snit if someone cracks a joke about the OSR Nuns with Guns posted:Technically all TSR did was rename them so that they could go "Look, we don't have demons and devils, we have schemons and schmevils!" To all the religious nuts that decided D&D was inducting kids into satansim. I guess it must have helped a bit? Also WotC did this in the late 90s in Magic by getting rid of demons and using Horrors instead. That was around the time of the panic about Harry Potter I think These kinds of moves never really work though, and there's always something else around the corner that'll make these people mad Lemon-Lime posted:Weirdly, I think the Blood War and the whole demon/devil split is one of the cooler bits of D&D. Baatezu and tanar'ri work well as the name they call themselves, especially for devils You summon one and they present you a contract and you go "Wait a minute, are you a devil?" and the weird abomination who's offering you unbelievable riches and power if you only agree to sign on the dotted line is all "Moi? Surely not, I am a baatezu, old bean" Lightning Lord fucked around with this message at 17:45 on Jul 23, 2018 |
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Jul 23, 2018 17:41
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Them being called baatezu and tanar'ri also just generally makes them seem more like unique civilisations rather than just biblical bad guys, which is good for something that's an element of a fantasy setting.
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Jul 23, 2018 17:45
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Also for when you just run into one in Sigil and they aren't loving poo poo up immediately.
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Jul 23, 2018 17:48
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Nuns with Guns posted:You're really sensitive to people making weak digs at OSR stuff for someone who does periodic drive by shits on games you've admitted you haven't read through properly.
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Jul 23, 2018 18:00
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The new names are really dumb and while "demons" and "devils" are a little bland they're at least a step up from Attack of the Paperback Novel Apostrophes.
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Jul 23, 2018 18:01
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:The new names are really dumb and while "demons" and "devils" are a little bland they're at least a step up from Attack of the Paperback Novel Apostrophes. Baatezu and tanar'ri are extremely light versions of A'po'stro'phe names, like read some Wheel of Time (better yet, don't) But I agree that they don't work as substitutes, like I said they're what they call themselves. I do remember people being up their own rear end about it in the 90s and early 2000s, like getting mad if you called them demons. Usually went along with insisting that yugoloths are the Batmen of D&D in terms of always having a plan and winning Lightning Lord fucked around with this message at 18:07 on Jul 23, 2018 |
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Jul 23, 2018 18:04
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Remind me again what the difference between 4e and 5e is, insomuch as it matters for edition pissmatches?
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Jul 23, 2018 19:36
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Moriatti posted:I did not buy it and probably won't, what was it? The person writing the intro says “I’ve played every edition of D&D (except 4th edition).” which clearly isn’t every edition of the game. It’s like how Scott Kurtz loved 4e but specifically avoided mentioning it in Table Titans. Griffin at least acknowledges playing 4e, and but understands that it’s not the most entertaining to listen to during a podcast. They switched to PbtA because 5e was getting in the way, too.
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Jul 23, 2018 19:39
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Pollyanna posted:Remind me again what the difference between 4e and 5e is, insomuch as it matters for edition pissmatches? 4e gave powers to everyone. People complained that it turned the game into WoW. That's the main one, at least.
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Jul 23, 2018 19:40
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Pollyanna posted:Remind me again what the difference between 4e and 5e is, insomuch as it matters for edition pissmatches? 4e was more balanced, had a bigger focus on discrete "powers" that were used in combat and was way more tactical when it came to combat right out of the box
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Jul 23, 2018 19:41
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From the last time the question was asked:Lemon-Lime posted:[4E] is a competently designed, well-balanced, clearly-presented (with good, consistent keywording and layout) evolution of the D&D "formula" that focuses on the things you're meant to use D&D for (class-based characters with customisation options engaging in party-based tactical combat with a side of non-combat mechanics), one which makes a real effort to make every character option equally worth picking and to give every character equal means to participate in the game. 5e rolls all that back in order to produce something that borrows the worst ideas from 3.x and AD&D2, then goes out of its way to deliberately present it in the worst way possible (using ~natural language~) because the idea of a game being clearly-written and designed by people who know what they're doing is anathema to grogs. Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 20:15 on Jul 23, 2018 |
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Jul 23, 2018 19:56
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Anyone want to sell me on Mutant Year Zero? Its in the bundle of holding and I might give it a shot.
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Jul 23, 2018 20:02
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5e was also written as a mearlsy-mouthed apology to awful people for everything that 4e did well. It was like the idiot behind 4e Essentials got to design a whole edition ... because that's exactly what happened.
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Jul 23, 2018 20:22
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moths posted:5e was also written as a mearlsy-mouthed apology to awful people for everything that 4e did well. ??!!?!?!?!?!!?
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Jul 23, 2018 20:41
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It seems to generally be considered bad form to express the opinion that there are already 5 or 6 editions of the game that meet their expectations. Something something not supported.
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Jul 23, 2018 20:43
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With the OSR going on, I'm pretty sure AD&D1e has more support than 5e.
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Jul 23, 2018 20:48
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