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juggalo baby coffin posted:imagine being someones henchman and seeing your boss warp in from an evil quest and just sighing cause you know now you have to go dildo someone with a unicorn horn again so the big man can have another ride home.
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Jul 1, 2019 06:04
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My Lovely Horse posted:Don't forget the DC 20 Arcana check or you won't know where to put it. Get a wizard degree they said, it's a job guarantee they said, thanks a lot mom You don't have this problem with shotguns. Just make a bunch more and leave'em lying around.
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Jul 1, 2019 06:07
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I'm 75% certain that the Book of Vile Darkness was Monte Cook's personal Magical Realm.
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Jul 1, 2019 06:13
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Libertad! posted:I'm 75% certain that the Book of Vile Darkness was Monte Cook's personal Magical Realm. The secret to becoming a good game designer is to realize that your torture porn has to be mechanically interesting.
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Jul 1, 2019 06:53
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juggalo baby coffin posted:do youuuu wanna know how i got these scarsssss???
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Jul 1, 2019 07:17
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Splicer posted:One of the weirder takeaways from TBoVD is that evil people really love ugly people. monsters and evil guys are very body positive. notice how all the so called 'good guy' races all look basically the same. monsters are a rainbow coalition.
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Jul 1, 2019 07:25
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Alternative (lol) interpretation: Monte Cook has Strong Opinions about those kids with their face tattoos.
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Jul 1, 2019 07:26
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I want to say BoVD also has "you're fat because you're evil!" and "you're thin because you're evil!" feats, which feel a little grody but are just filler compared to Lichloved and the Nipple Clamps of Exquisite Torment. (Also, iirc, they're just stat penalties/bonuses, because the true evil of Monte Cook is how loving boring his poo poo is.)
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Jul 1, 2019 07:31
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Joe Slowboat posted:The Time-Life illustrated coffeetable book set on ships through the ages is quite solid for illustrations (even if it's a pretty Eurocentric history of sail); a library near you might have the set? that time-life seafarer's series looks interesting, guess I'll be looking for second-hand copies. but yeah, I was mainly interested in european naval history, everything else would be too much.
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Jul 1, 2019 07:46
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Antivehicular posted:I want to say BoVD also has "you're fat because you're evil!" and "you're thin because you're evil!" feats, which feel a little grody but are just filler compared to Lichloved and the Nipple Clamps of Exquisite Torment. (Also, iirc, they're just stat penalties/bonuses, because the true evil of Monte Cook is how loving boring his poo poo is.) Yup. Being evilly thin is just +2 dex, -2 con. Being evilly fat is the opposite. Heroes of Horror has a few of the Deformity feats too, though they're at least more interesting effects. Like being evilly tall gives you an extra 5 feet of reach, loving up your own tongue evilly somehow gives you blindsense, and filing your teeth evilly gives a bite attack.
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Jul 1, 2019 09:18
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juggalo baby coffin posted:do youuuu wanna know how i got these scarsssss??? I’m shocked. Wasting a feat slot like that is truly [vile].
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Jul 1, 2019 16:43
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DalaranJ posted:I’m shocked.
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Jul 1, 2019 17:41
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Apologies if this is the wrong place to ask. I was wondering if there would happen to be a GenCon thread anywhere around that someone could point me to? This will be my first GenCon and I was hoping to get some tips/pointers from the community. edit: My bad, I found it about 30 seconds after posting.
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Jul 1, 2019 18:05
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This always struck me as my gold standard for "needless punishment feat":quote:Evil Brand Wow, a minor bonus to two skills that do nearly the same thing against a minority of subjects, most pointedly the ones you'll need the least now that you have the Mark of the Beast. Hail Satan!
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Jul 1, 2019 23:51
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Still trying to figure out what bonuses I'm getting from piercing my tongue. Besides the obvious.
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Jul 2, 2019 01:30
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Halloween Jack posted:Still trying to figure out what bonuses I'm getting from piercing my tongue. Besides the obvious. I could tell you some other things that a pierced tongue make better, but they're NSFW.
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Jul 2, 2019 03:07
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Alien Rope Burn posted:This always struck me as my gold standard for "needless punishment feat": well you see you need that feat to take some of the lovely prestige classes that are also punishments! monty cook is the master of giving lovely bonuses with a huge cost to stuff that should just be free like aesthetic changes. i'd have rolled all those deformity feats into one thing called like 'vile aspect' or something where its like 'oh your evil deeds have imbued your appearance with extra spookiness' and it gives you something worthwhile like some turn undead type thing against normies. but then i guess you'd have to think of 5 or so more feats to fill your book up with. sometimes i think they make the evil and monster themed stuff lovely on purpose because they're worried if they don't it will lead to a sudden plague of evil adventurers, which goes against their ~grand vision~ of the game. but then I remember that a lot of the good themed stuff is also complete dogshit.
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Jul 2, 2019 03:36
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juggalo baby coffin posted:monty cook is the master of giving lovely bonuses with a huge cost to stuff that should just be free like aesthetic changes. If/when I get around to writing up Invisible Sun for F&F, this is going to be a major theme. Everything in that game that seems even remotely cool is hilariously expensive, gated behind feats (excuse me, "secrets"), strictly cosmetic, unusably broken, and/or just a flat dice bonus or similarly mechanically boring. Even in the game that's supposed to be balls-out crazy surreal wizard nonsense, God forbid the PCs be cool!
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Jul 2, 2019 04:32
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juggalo baby coffin posted:i'd have rolled all those deformity feats into one thing called like 'vile aspect' or something where its like 'oh your evil deeds have imbued your appearance with extra spookiness' and it gives you something worthwhile like some turn undead type thing against normies. but then i guess you'd have to think of 5 or so more feats to fill your book up with.
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Jul 2, 2019 05:11
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Antivehicular posted:If/when I get around to writing up Invisible Sun for F&F, this is going to be a major theme. Everything in that game that seems even remotely cool is hilariously expensive, gated behind feats (excuse me, "secrets"), strictly cosmetic, unusably broken, and/or just a flat dice bonus or similarly mechanically boring. Even in the game that's supposed to be balls-out crazy surreal wizard nonsense, God forbid the PCs be cool! There's a currently ongoing F&F for Invisible Sun, so, you may not have to! We have been informed of this flaw, like how 'Fuses Nightmares to Fist' means 'gets a +2 to punch gooder'
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Jul 2, 2019 05:29
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Joe Slowboat posted:There's a currently ongoing F&F for Invisible Sun, so, you may not have to! We have been informed of this flaw, like how 'Fuses Nightmares to Fist' means 'gets a +2 to punch gooder' Yes, this is the entire loving game. "Here's this cool flavorful character option or world fact! Using it gives you +1 to some stupid roll, who gives a poo poo"
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Jul 2, 2019 06:01
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If I can be grateful to one thing Monte Cooke and 3.5 in general taught me about game design, it was the realization that I should never ever have a +2 bonus anywhere in any game I write ever. The exact number isn't really relevant, +1 or +4 are really the same. Just, if you ever fall back on "you get a +number to X roll" as the entire bonus of a feat or a move or whatever, you've failed to execute the concept well. The bar for good game design is higher than that. I feel pretty similarly about stat-replacement moves in World engine games but those usually have some kind of trigger or requirement for getting your stat switch on, so it's slightly better.
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Jul 2, 2019 08:25
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Yawgmoth posted:That's basically what they did for the Brand of the Nine Hells feat. It gives you a little bonus to some skills, and then a special extra bonus based on which archdevil you work for. And it's actually really cool poo poo, like a sword covered in green hellfire or gaining Deadpool-style fast healing. And then there's 9 upgrade feats (one for each archdevil) that give you another neat flavorful power. Kind of a shame they didn't do the same thing for the celestial rulers really; those are some of my favorite feats. see that for the deformity thing would be great, you get a bonus and an extra bonus depending on the deformity.
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Jul 2, 2019 08:41
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Right on. If you're going to hand out a bonus for something, you might as well make it a guaranteed thing. And if replacing the +2 flanking bonus with "you hit the enemy, no problemo" is too strong of an effect, then you at least do something like "if you're flanking your target, you always deal 2 damage to your target, even if you attack roll misses"
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Jul 2, 2019 08:45
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I had a lot of thoughts after my last post so I made a tweet thread entirely about why the +2 bonus is bad. https://twitter.com/Veliministriari/status/1145957463914663936
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Jul 2, 2019 09:06
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gnome7 posted:I had a lot of thoughts after my last post so I made a tweet thread entirely about why the +2 bonus is bad.
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Jul 2, 2019 09:11
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I backed a roguelike video game on Kickstarter some time ago, and a few days ago they sent out a 'this is how pyromancy works' update, which offers a better look at this sort of design. Like, you get a basic attack which has a chance of setting people on fire, and also does more damage to people on fire. You've got an aoe which sets people and places on fire, and also reduces your cooldowns based on how many people you set on fire. You've got a different AoE which does more damage, the more burning people are in the area. One which extinguishes fire, then creates an explosion based on how much fire it put out. And so on. I think tabletop RPGs could benefit from this kind of 'create a loop' design for feats and powers -- and I don't mean through system mastery, I mean through design of the powers themselves such that you can grab any 2+ and have synergy -- but there seems to be an institutional resistance to just letting players have cool stuff.
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Jul 2, 2019 14:08
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gradenko_2000 posted:Right on. If you're going to hand out a bonus for something, you might as well make it a guaranteed thing.
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Jul 2, 2019 14:17
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potatocubed posted:I backed a roguelike video game on Kickstarter some time ago, and a few days ago they sent out a 'this is how pyromancy works' update, which offers a better look at this sort of design. Yeah this rules, this is exactly the kind of thing tabletop games need to do a lot more of.
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Jul 2, 2019 14:24
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potatocubed posted:Like, you get a basic attack which has a chance of setting people on fire, and also does more damage to people on fire. You've got an aoe which sets people and places on fire, and also reduces your cooldowns based on how many people you set on fire. You've got a different AoE which does more damage, the more burning people are in the area. One which extinguishes fire, then creates an explosion based on how much fire it put out. And so on. This isn't exactly what you were describing, but this reminds me of the Fire Mage class: https://www.dandwiki.com/wiki/Fire_Mage_(3.5e_Class) Surprisingly, this came out of The Gaming Den's thinktank, as an example of what it might look like for a class to be a "spellcaster" without throwing a player into the deep end of dealing with the entire D&D spellcasting milieu, broad spell selection and all.
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Jul 2, 2019 14:31
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Looking at Evil Brand and "The symbol is unquestionable in its perversity, depicting a depravity so unthinkable..." is like... what's left that's unthinkable? I mean, I guess there's something like a devil banging a beehive, I admit I that's one I just came up with. But then a basic search turns up a guy who died humping a hornet home, so that's out. I guess when they think of "vile" like, sexfears float to the top for the average D&D writer, but seriously? The whole thing is definitely an onion of ridiculousness.gnome7 posted:If I can be grateful to one thing Monte Cooke and 3.5 in general taught me about game design, it was the realization that I should never ever have a +2 bonus anywhere in any game I write ever. There's a reason I called them "nickel bonuses" or "dime bonuses" in my Pathfinder commentaries. I felt like until you get like +3 to +5 the amount it changes a roll isn't significant enough to track - of course, the reason d20 does it that way is because it has so many bonuses that stack that it can't risk any of them being significant. I don't think +whatever is necessarily a bad mechanic but it is often the hallmark of a lazy design. Flat bonuses can be good for encouraging different roles or enabling tactics that might not otherwise be viable, for example. But they're not particularly engaging in and of themselves, and can easily lead to just doing one thing over and over thanks to optimization.
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Jul 2, 2019 15:42
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Looking at Evil Brand and "The symbol is unquestionable in its perversity, depicting a depravity so unthinkable..." is like... what's left that's unthinkable?
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Jul 2, 2019 15:48
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Antivehicular posted:Yes, this is the entire loving game. "Here's this cool flavorful character option or world fact! Using it gives you +1 to some stupid roll, who gives a poo poo" Remember that Monte is the one who wrote an essay on "Ivory Tower Game Design" as some sort of convoluted self-justification for why the 3e D&D devs allowed there to be gross inequities in feats like toughness vs natural spell, then publicly retracted it years later. And yet he still continues to follow the same wholly arbitrary process when creating feat-like PC abilities in every subsequent game he's made.
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Jul 2, 2019 15:57
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Looking at Evil Brand and "The symbol is unquestionable in its perversity, depicting a depravity so unthinkable..." is like... what's left that's unthinkable? I mean, I guess there's something like a devil banging a beehive, I admit I that's one I just came up with. But then a basic search turns up a guy who died humping a hornet home, so that's out. I guess when they think of "vile" like, sexfears float to the top for the average D&D writer, but seriously? The whole thing is definitely an onion of ridiculousness. 
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Jul 2, 2019 15:59
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I think I'll stick to The Mark of the Beast.
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Jul 2, 2019 16:07
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Nuns with Guns posted:Remember that Monte is the one who wrote an essay on "Ivory Tower Game Design" as some sort of convoluted self-justification for why the 3e D&D devs allowed there to be gross inequities in feats like toughness vs natural spell, then publicly retracted it years later. And yet he still continues to follow the same wholly arbitrary process when creating feat-like PC abilities in every subsequent game he's made. Like in Invisible Sun, one of the magic schools gets physical cards and preps spells by putting them on a sheet with a grid; spell inventory Tetris. Which sounds pretty cool, right? Except that every card is just a rectangle with the same ratios, and leveling up just effectively increases the size of the grid. All it is, is normal spell slots just looked at from a different angle, and leveling makes the relevant Numbers Go Up. If the cards were all different sizes and shapes, that'd be something. But no, that doesn't translate well to Numbers Go Up.
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Jul 2, 2019 16:24
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Mage duels where wizards desperately cast tetromino spells from their mind into their enemy's mind, trying to complete rows without making them too powerful.
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Jul 2, 2019 17:00
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I prefer the Dr Mario school of wizardry
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Jul 2, 2019 17:05
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Evil Mastermind posted:Of course he does. His entire game design style is based around "numbers go up = good". He keeps trying to do other stuff, and sometimes he has the seed of a good, different idea, but he always seems to just fall back on some obvious variation of Numbers Go Up. yeah actual wizard tetris opens up some really cool design space, and lets you do some funky stuff like different 'schools' of magic having different block shapes or even changing your grid layout/rules for filling or encouraging synergy and combos. But that'd be work and hard so  rectangles in rectangles it ishell even designing 'perks' and character stuff around "Oh sure your grid gets bigger, but you gotta give up brainspace or sanity for the extra grid, or even the standard grid could have nasty penalties for overfilling or not leaving certain spaces free. Like losing access to whole senses or the ability communicate for some extra grid space. You could have whole plot hooks about gibbering incontinent wizards storing the most powerful spells in their minds but having to basically fully lose touch with reality to do so. I always get mad talking about invisible sun because there's so many inklings that'd make cool hooks for different games with more inspired design, but instead it's just d&d with more props
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Jul 2, 2019 17:34
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Coolness Averted posted:yeah actual wizard tetris opens up some really cool design space, and lets you do some funky stuff like different 'schools' of magic having different block shapes or even changing your grid layout/rules for filling or encouraging synergy and combos. But that'd be work and hard so Spell Tetris as a concept reminds me of a couple really neat setting concepts from an OSR blog that went with the idea that a Wizard's brain is basically a dungeon in how it's structured due to the way magic works in the setting, I'll dig up some links to it when I'm not posting from my phone
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Jul 2, 2019 17:51
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