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Libertad! posted:Kind of reminds me how the few V5 fans which shown up in the World of Darkness thread had with but one or two exceptions some really toxic and regressive views. I guess some of it is just nerds being horrible combined with that innate newbie instinct to use open roleplaying games to exercise your most childish Id impulses because things like "maturely communicating" are barely given any space in tabletop rulebook guides, but you get some doozies sometimes. Kurieg posted:Was that the same guy who... I can't remember the exact specifics but I think it was something like him wanting a custom spell that used his female warlock's unborn baby as a spell component? And him just not understanding why everyone thought that was profoundly weird and gross? I don't thiiiink so? It was this post just a few days ago: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3877675&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=288#post501150536 theironjef posted:I have to get my "Dumb idiot surprised everyone else isn't also a dumb idiot" stories somewhere! I just want to make a call now to split the cat piss thread into "Actual Cat Piss Thread" and "Boring monthly reports on your Deathwatch game that I'm sure is going fine." I need more concentrated schadenfreude. Mods help out a guy. There used to be separate "good story" and "bad story" threads. If I remember right, the bad story thread was more active but near the end was kind of switching between people who thought they could lie as cleverly as 50 Foot Ant and mind melting  stories, so the two threads were merged to try and inject some lighthearted stuff in-between the catpiss. Then the thread slowly morphed into an outlet for frustrated fantasy novelists to post their game recaps with great flourish because I guess that's more fun than trying to replicate 50 Foot Ant stories over and over.
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Jan 4, 2020 02:07
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Nuns with Guns posted:There used to be separate "good story" and "bad story" threads. If I remember right, the bad story thread was more active but near the end was kind of switching between people who thought they could lie as cleverly as 50 Foot Ant and mind melting I thought it was more that the two different threads weren't really getting a lot of posts so it got combined?
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Jan 4, 2020 02:10
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I'll chime in to say that I went to that thread looking for cat piss and got boring game recaps and was sorely disappointed. Reading recaps of someone else's RPG is like listening to someone tell you about the dream they had.
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Jan 4, 2020 02:14
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Enola Gay-For-Pay posted:I'll chime in to say that I went to that thread looking for cat piss and got boring game recaps and was sorely disappointed. Dreams are finite in length.
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Jan 4, 2020 02:24
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Leraika posted:how about those Traditional Games, guys Talking about movies is a traditional game. The winner is whoever talks about the best movie.
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Jan 4, 2020 02:26
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golden bubble posted:Is it possible to make a good cooperative space combat system that works with multiple players for an RPG, or should you break out Space Alert instead? This is a much more interesting question than anything that's been asked in the previous page and I would like an answer too! It definitely feels like it ought to be something that's possible, because Space Alert is a cooperative space combat system that works with multiple players, but every time I've tried to see someone actually implement a space combat system it's been garbage. I think the main problem is that in regular mini combat you have far more tactical configurations: there's a mini for each player, so there's a lot of potential for repositioning and finding new places to be. In space combat, there's just one mini for the whole party, so there's less potential for coming up with cool tactical ways to position it. Also, the terrain in space is way less interesting, and terrain always seems to be what makes combat interesting. It feels like one thing that would go part of the way would be to have most combat take place via fighters which hold one player each, with the terrain being the (much larger) hull of your ship or an enemy ship. Or to make it about players running from one room on the ship to another to make sure that stations stay manned while also putting out fires and fixing overloaded electronics.
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Jan 4, 2020 02:30
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Heliotrope posted:I thought it was more that the two different threads weren't really getting a lot of posts so it got combined? Neither thread was super active, as far as I remember, and I'm honestly kind of surprised at how the current thread has sustained momentum for so long. I guess it's another one of those side-effects of the rush in D&D popularity and people realizing they liked recaps of tabletop game sessions?
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Jan 4, 2020 02:47
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Whybird posted:This is a much more interesting question than anything that's been asked in the previous page and I would like an answer too! This has largely been my thought on group space combat as well. When all the players are effectively confined to the space of a single unit, a lot of the usual options for exploring interesting tactical combat goes out the window because you lose things like individual positioning, and consequently most of the time it boils down to going around the table and rolling dice one after the other. I think recreating the dynamics of Space Alert could be interesting, but I also feel like it would be kind of hard to do in an RPG. Plus Space Alert is going for a very deliberate feel of quickly unraveling chaos and hilarious fuckups, while I think most games with spaceship combat that people would want to emulate are going for something a bit more competent.
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Jan 4, 2020 03:54
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Kai Tave posted:This has largely been my thought on group space combat as well. When all the players are effectively confined to the space of a single unit, a lot of the usual options for exploring interesting tactical combat goes out the window because you lose things like individual positioning, and consequently most of the time it boils down to going around the table and rolling dice one after the other. I think recreating the dynamics of Space Alert could be interesting, but I also feel like it would be kind of hard to do in an RPG. Plus Space Alert is going for a very deliberate feel of quickly unraveling chaos and hilarious fuckups, while I think most games with spaceship combat that people would want to emulate are going for something a bit more competent. Clearly we need a Paranoia space adaptation.
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Jan 4, 2020 04:01
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I wonder if there's potential to modify something like Captain Sonar for starship combat. It seems like there might be a way to use the mechanisms for starship combat.
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Jan 4, 2020 04:18
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golden bubble posted:How would you stat up undead Star Destroyers in the Star Wars FFG RPG? What about in Traveler?
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Jan 4, 2020 04:21
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Bruceski posted:Clearly we need a Paranoia space adaptation. Space Alert or a similar kind of framework would absolutely work wonders for Paranoia-on-a-spaceship gameplay. Vlaada Chvatil is responsible for both Space Alert and Galaxy Trucker which are both games that leverage that kind of madcap realtime chaos to good effect, and there's probably a really neat RPG you could put together using similar concepts though I think to really work well you'd want to bring some of the tactile gameplay into things as well. For something like Star Wars where everyone is aboard a single ship, let's say, I'm a bit less sure what to look at for inspiration, though. Even in the movies themselves, there isn't really a ton of coordinated group starship action, there are a couple instances of one person flying and one person manning the guns but then you have stuff like Han Solo flying through the asteroid field and that's just him doing stuff, Chewie ambiguously co-piloting, and everyone else sitting and commenting as it happens. I dunno! Left to my own devices, I would probably not run a lot of "you are five scoundrels on a single ship" gameplay where in-depth tactical starship combat is a major occurrence.
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Jan 4, 2020 04:21
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If you give spaceships things like stealth, instant jump, different armor and shield packages, selections of weapons that include light speed (lasers), guided powered (missiles) and unguided inertial (bullets), and make all of these A) both limited and conditional and B) directly responsive to player abilities and actions, you can start to create interesting tactical space combat. Think "we can fire the bullets even while we're stealthed, although as soon as we do, we give away the position we just fired from, or we can fire the lasers, but we have to unstealth to do that, but they never miss, but they use a bunch of power, which we can re-route from shields or batteries, which perform better or worse depending on your skill rolls" kinds of decisions that the group can make; and then also the enemies maybe can sneak up on you, but you can maybe detect them, in a limited or complete way, depending on what you do with sensors, how fast you're going relative to them, whether they occlude any objects (if they fly in front of the nearby star compared to you you get a bonus to see them?) etc. For terrain, the classic is the asteroid field (of a density that does not exist in our solar system even within, say, Saturn's rings) but you can also go with shipyards, heavily trafficked space-lanes full of civilian ships, dangerous star types, accretion disks, junkyards, nearby black holes, gravitational anomalies... all the poo poo that comes up in star trek and star wars episodes basically. To me the biggest challenge is if you attempt to recreate realistic (or even just "realistic-ish feeling"") newtonian-physics maneuvering. Games like Full Thrust get into a fair amount of detail doing that and it's involved, fiddly, and still makes a lot of compromises just to be playable. Even if you just have the one player ship and only two or three or four enemy ships, you pretty much have to spend time figuring relative velocity, thrust to mass ratio, etc. And, of course, "realistically" space combat should take place at extreme distances unless there's some heavy constraint that forced the ships to be near one another, because a computer from the 1970s is capable of providing a targeting solution that hits the enemy 100% of the time with a laser beam from tens or hundreds of thousands of kilometers away, with virtually no attenuation due to the vacuum of space, provided it is fed your own and your target's relative positions, velocities, and accelerations, which are things you can calculate near instantly if you can directly observe something as big as a space ship from as nearby as merely tens or hundreds of thousands of kilometers. Unless you basically say "everyone has armor that makes lightspeed weapons useless" you are left with contriving situations for every single combat in which you just can't or didn't see the enemy until they were close. So I'd say you can either grab a space combat boardgame like X-Wing, Full Thrust, etc. and be ready to deal with all of the baggage those games bring with them, or - and this is my recommendation for a RPG - don't really try to do "tactical combat" in space in an RPG. Theater of the mind stuff where you're describing an intense fight in fairly abstract terms, the characters have to deal with space ship functions, communications, the morale of crew, etc. using the mechanics already in the game, and then you just decide the outcome of the fight based on their success and the odds against them, ideally picking something that moves the plot forward in a satisfying way.
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Jan 4, 2020 04:25
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My take: Just say that "dark matter" was finally discovered and is everywhere. It interacts with your skip drive or ion engines or w/e based on concentration. There's your terrain.
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Jan 4, 2020 04:31
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Kurieg posted:Was that the same guy who... I can't remember the exact specifics but I think it was something like him wanting a custom spell that used his female warlock's unborn baby as a spell component? And him just not understanding why everyone thought that was profoundly weird and gross? Jim Halpert staring into the camera forever, until the world goes black around him.
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Jan 4, 2020 04:53
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:DC superhero movies are, appropriately, the 4E in this analogy. Late, but, 
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Jan 4, 2020 05:02
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You know what, that could work. Ignore all the terrain in space, the only terrain that matters is the layout of your spaceship. The gameplay would borrow from the Kitchen Rush board game, but every character is a 30 second sand time and they can only make ability checks for their location (cockpit, engines, forward guns, etc) every time the sand timer runs out. Of course, the ship is large, so moving to a different location is an action, but only so many people can fit in the corridors at a time. Everything outside of ship just consists of objectives thrown at the players from the GM. So the players need to make a missile lock check and a missile loading check to beat each of the evil empire's fighters while still managing to make two navigation checks and three engine checks to escape. Every 3 minutes, all the evil fighters still around inflict damage on the ship in the form of debuffs. And of course new things can show up in the middle of combat if the GM planned for it.
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Jan 4, 2020 05:04
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Leperflesh posted:If you give spaceships things like stealth, instant jump, different armor and shield packages, selections of weapons that include light speed (lasers), guided powered (missiles) and unguided inertial (bullets), and make all of these A) both limited and conditional and B) directly responsive to player abilities and actions, you can start to create interesting tactical space combat. Think "we can fire the bullets even while we're stealthed, although as soon as we do, we give away the position we just fired from, or we can fire the lasers, but we have to unstealth to do that, but they never miss, but they use a bunch of power, which we can re-route from shields or batteries, which perform better or worse depending on your skill rolls" kinds of decisions that the group can make; and then also the enemies maybe can sneak up on you, but you can maybe detect them, in a limited or complete way, depending on what you do with sensors, how fast you're going relative to them, whether they occlude any objects (if they fly in front of the nearby star compared to you you get a bonus to see them?) etc. All of this sort of thing allows for interesting tactical space combat on a ship-to-ship level, but not on a character-to-character level. The group is making decisions about what to collectively do and their individual actions are either meaningless or at best a fairly neutered "I roll to shoot with our lasers (because I have the best attack bonus with lasers and we've decided as a group to fire the lasers) while you roll to improve the crew's morale (because you have the best leadership and we've decided as a group to improve morale)". Nobody has the opportunity to expose or shield their individual character from risk, manage individual resources, play off one another's significant tactical choices, etc. If the resolution mechanic for space combat is "play it out as a game of X-Wing" and everyone's 100% on-board with the complexity and baggage of a boardgame-like space combat minigame, the overriding problem is that the party only control a single ship, which doesn't give five players anywhere near enough interesting stuff to do (and even if it did, it kind of forces everyone to agree on what they're doing because their tactical situation is inherently shared). For a one player game, sure. Honestly, the only solution I can think of to this is to either make it like Battlestar Galactica where everyone gets their own individual fighter craft, or make it like... well, Space Alert, where all the significant stuff happens on board your own ship with fires, boarding parties, rerouting power, having to be in specific locations at specific times, etc. a computing pun fucked around with this message at 05:16 on Jan 4, 2020 |
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Jan 4, 2020 05:10
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Fly mechs instead, everyone gets a giant robot or can be the battleship bunny if they want.
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Jan 4, 2020 05:13
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Just use 4e, reskin it to be ships instead of people (species = species that made the ship, class = general type of ship). Everyone gets their own ship and you fly in a little fleet. Then: "Tactical, what's our status?" "Shields are at 17% captain, but I've rerouted a surge from Stellar Dynamics that should give us a boost." "By god, the Vercingetorix is a pugnacious little ship, isn't she? But I don't think pluck and ablative shielding are going to impress the Xartex. I need options to complete this mission. Bridge to engineering, what have you got?" "Sir by inverting this ion flux I can temporarily create a micro-singularity. I believe this gravity well, with us as the vertex, will create a pull strong enough to hold the Xartex fighters in place while the Endeavor sets up the polaron cannon!" "Make it so chief. Ensign, open a broadband frequency, all channels. Tell the Xartex to Come and Get It."
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Jan 4, 2020 05:20
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Fragged Empire has ship combat and it looked serviceable, I have no idea if it's actually fun or not though because neither I nor my group had the patience to learn it.
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Jan 4, 2020 05:21
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Nessus posted:Fly mechs instead, everyone gets a giant robot or can be the battleship bunny if they want. Yeah Lancer's pretty cool that way (and is ostensibly receiving Bridge Crew rules down the line). theironjef posted:Just use 4e, reskin it to be ships instead of people (species = species that made the ship, class = general type of ship). Everyone gets their own ship and you fly in a little fleet. Then: This is the second time you've posted this but it's still just as good. Basically yes, I think that "everyone has their own ship" is, if not remarkably innovative, a strong foundation to work on.
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Jan 4, 2020 05:26
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Yeah well, last time the thread moved on to Redwall or something then died with December. It's a good idea (and it wasn't mine, I think it was DrRockso). I really like it because 4e has such good tactical field design that it just translates 1 to 1. Difficult terrain? Ion Cloud. Impassable? Ship wreckage? Zone that pulls you 2 squares towards the center if you end your action there? Gravity well. I'm thinking about doing a few races and classes as reskins just to see what works.
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Jan 4, 2020 05:30
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just go ahead and make the whole ship be a voltron
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Jan 4, 2020 05:31
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Dawgstar posted:Jim Halpert staring into the camera forever, until the world goes black around him. Yeah, thread response was "What the gently caress is wrong with you". It was the same poster who got mad that we weren't onboard with his plan to sell lizardman penises to some peasant farmers as an aphrodisiac.
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Jan 4, 2020 05:36
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golden bubble posted:How would you stat up undead Star Destroyers in the Star Wars FFG RPG?
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Jan 4, 2020 11:44
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theironjef posted:Just use 4e, reskin it to be ships instead of people (species = species that made the ship, class = general type of ship). Everyone gets their own ship and you fly in a little fleet. Then: yeah this, if you want a main ship then there's your leader and then the various other ships are different versions of like fighter class ships
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Jan 4, 2020 13:04
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Zereth posted:first you need to define what an undead spaceship is G-g-g-ghost ships are a well established piece of real-world folklore. There's absolutely no way any spacefaring civilisation doesn't have its own spooky stories about the Space Marie Celeste or the Flying Space Dutchman.
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Jan 4, 2020 13:18
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Zereth posted:first you need to define what an undead spaceship is Homeworld Cataclysm's Beast. A hive-mind composed of biorganic circuitry that takes over ships by restructuring its crew into parts to subvert and override subsystems until the vessel is under its control. Ship is further augmented to become more durable, and can fire beams that convey more of its basic structure to subvert other ships. Assimilated parts are intact enough to serve as useful sources of intelligence.
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Jan 4, 2020 13:24
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Leperflesh posted:If you give spaceships things like stealth, instant jump, different armor and shield packages, selections of weapons that include light speed (lasers), guided powered (missiles) and unguided inertial (bullets), and make all of these A) both limited and conditional and B) directly responsive to player abilities and actions, you can start to create interesting tactical space combat. Think "we can fire the bullets even while we're stealthed, although as soon as we do, we give away the position we just fired from, or we can fire the lasers, but we have to unstealth to do that, but they never miss, but they use a bunch of power, which we can re-route from shields or batteries, which perform better or worse depending on your skill rolls" kinds of decisions that the group can make; and then also the enemies maybe can sneak up on you, but you can maybe detect them, in a limited or complete way, depending on what you do with sensors, how fast you're going relative to them, whether they occlude any objects (if they fly in front of the nearby star compared to you you get a bonus to see them?) etc. Just go full Weber and bullshit up some reasons so space combat is inherently Tall Ships and effectively 2d. Whybird posted:G-g-g-ghost ships are a well established piece of real-world folklore. There's absolutely no way any spacefaring civilisation doesn't have its own spooky stories about the Space Marie Celeste or the Flying Space Dutchman. Ahem. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w34fSnJNP-4 Liquid Communism fucked around with this message at 13:51 on Jan 4, 2020 |
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Jan 4, 2020 13:49
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Very surprised there’s been no mention of Battlestations as a group space combat game.
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Jan 4, 2020 14:12
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hyphz posted:Very surprised there’s been no mention of Battlestations as a group space combat game. I got the first edition a long time ago and ran into the problem that you have to roll to accelerate. Like, it's a skill check and if you fail, the ship doesn't speed up but you also somehow get an Out of Control modifier. Same for turning, you can fail to turn the ship, stay in a straight line, but still be going Out of Control which makes further actions more difficult. I know there's been a revision, did they fix this?
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Jan 4, 2020 18:59
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Say what one will about filk (my guilty pleasure), the end of Dawson's Christian is genuinely chilling in a spooky campfire ghost story way, and if I ever get a chance to use that scene in a game I'm going to do it.
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Jan 4, 2020 19:17
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Kestral posted:Say what one will about filk (my guilty pleasure), the end of Dawson's Christian is genuinely chilling in a spooky campfire ghost story way, and if I ever get a chance to use that scene in a game I'm going to do it. The aesthetic of that whole collection (including the crackle and distortion from the tape) is everything I'd want from a sci fi game.
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Jan 4, 2020 20:09
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Zereth posted:first you need to define what an undead spaceship is The crew are all dead but the ships's pseudointelligence is still active. It's been on for for long enough without updating or servicing that it's... weird. E: of course it's not like they've got free will or anything. Scientists assure us that's impossible with a PI. They're just running routines like "defensive pattern C" or "fighting withdrawal A" that are supposed to keep wounded or temporarily disabled crew safe in combat situations until help arrives or control is re-established. Obviously, Fleet have the override codes to make a ship doing that stand down, and will send a technical recovery vessel to do so if you report it. And that's all you'll hear, officially. Unofficially, and not entirely secretly, TRV crews are known as Necromancers. Kestral posted:Say what one will about filk (my guilty pleasure), the end of Dawson's Christian is genuinely chilling in a spooky campfire ghost story way, and if I ever get a chance to use that scene in a game I'm going to do it. Yeah I don't usually do scifi games but this would be an amazing opening. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 23:52 on Jan 4, 2020 |
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Jan 4, 2020 22:27
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Whybird posted:G-g-g-ghost ships are a well established piece of real-world folklore. There's absolutely no way any spacefaring civilisation doesn't have its own spooky stories about the Space Marie Celeste or the Flying Space Dutchman. Argas posted:Homeworld Cataclysm's Beast. Elector_Nerdlingen posted:The crew are all dead but the ships's pseudointelligence is still active. It's been on for for long enough without updating or servicing that it's... weird.
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Jan 5, 2020 04:01
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well sure, they're all different monster ships, they just all take extra holy damage
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Jan 5, 2020 05:16
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theironjef posted:Yeah well, last time the thread moved on to Redwall or something then died with December. It's a good idea (and it wasn't mine, I think it was DrRockso). I really like it because 4e has such good tactical field design that it just translates 1 to 1. Difficult terrain? Ion Cloud. Impassable? Ship wreckage? Zone that pulls you 2 squares towards the center if you end your action there? Gravity well. I'm thinking about doing a few races and classes as reskins just to see what works. Yeah, as long as you do 1 player = 1 ship then all kinds of stuff works with reskinning and light modding. Like with Strike's vehicles expansion, I had spaceships in mind and added modified Roles and some special rules and it works very well. It's meant as a thing you do occasionally, so if you want to make it the core of a campaign you would probably want to hack in spaceship Classes to go with the Roles, or if not that then at least some separate equipment loadouts or something. But since the original question was how to do something where all the players are on one ship, I think you have to start by looking at games like Space Team and seeing what can be done from there. Then ask questions like: Is there a way to make it turn-based? Is there a way to make it dependent on character skill instead of solely player skill while keeping it interesting? Is there room for a captain role who gives commands while still giving other roles choices in the execution?
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Jan 5, 2020 05:25
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Stars Without Number has the everybody all in a spaceship thing with you being the head of a department if the characters don't have a suitable skill for the particular roles.
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Jan 5, 2020 05:42
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Mors Rattus posted:well sure, they're all different monster ships, they just all take extra holy damage I read a story a while back that was in this vein. Humanity died out en masse to a weaponized plauge, but their free-willed AI children continue to operate their ships as flying shrines, which are very definitely haunted.
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Jan 5, 2020 05:44
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