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Right, I guess it would really depend on defense values vs the difference between average stopping power and damage... It's a shame this is a license game because it seems like a game that would be fun to pick up as a cheap option and optimize the math for but probably never play since the fun is very solo and math oriented. (See: the Sacred Geometry feat from Pathfinder)
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Jan 14, 2020 16:01
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Spector29 posted:Discussion Question: How many bits are too fiddly? Complication in game design costs you, as a designer, both elegance (which is abstract and thus less important) and mental energy the players could be putting towards something else (which is extremely important). Fiddly bits that are added in to make the game more complicated either need to serve tone (combat being a wild series of lethal dice rolls, for example, underscores a universe where combat is frantic and chaotic, so smart players will seek to avoid it) or serve tactical depth by giving players more options. I'm not seeing any of that from those combat rules. It's just a big pile of dice rolls for the sake of having a big pile of dice rolls. Froghammer fucked around with this message at 17:31 on Jan 14, 2020 |
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Jan 14, 2020 17:29
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A friend of mine wants to do a play by post style game but is having trouble finding a good space for it that's free, easily accessible on a phone, and isn't affiliated with Facebook. Anyone here have any ideas?
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Jan 14, 2020 18:03
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Liquid Communism posted:I've heard excellent things about Runners in the Shadows, which is a Blades in the Dark hack. The Sprawl is also good, however is more hard cyberpunk and less cyberpunk fantasy. Dang, yet another game that could have been the Fleetwood Mac RPG, cruelly something else actually.
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Jan 14, 2020 18:13
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GorfZaplen posted:A friend of mine wants to do a play by post style game but is having trouble finding a good space for it that's free, easily accessible on a phone, and isn't affiliated with Facebook. Anyone here have any ideas? Discord. Your posts typically smaller, but you can still write a grand honking epic if you really feel the need.
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Jan 14, 2020 18:24
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Gobbeldygook posted:I just downloaded the quick-start rules. To resolve "I attack the man with my sword": Hey, I remember the nineties!      Modern RPGs are so sleek and elegant.
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Jan 14, 2020 18:48
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Gosh, I wonder why RPGs were a niche hobby 30 years ago
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Jan 14, 2020 19:30
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Coolness Averted posted:In theory I always liked stuff like defense rolls. For example I thought say old storyteller's attack roll, defense roll, damage roll, soak roll was neat. But yeah in practice combat was super long and cumbersome, especially once you began wading into dice pools, multiple actions, and supernatural powers. Moriatti posted:Right, I guess it would really depend on defense values vs the difference between average stopping power and damage...
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Jan 14, 2020 19:38
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Mystic Mongol posted:Hey, I remember the nineties! I love when System Mastery does the math on poo poo like this and players have like a 5% chance of ever accomplishing anything in a given combat round.
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Jan 14, 2020 19:56
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Mystic Mongol posted:Hey, I remember the nineties!
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Jan 14, 2020 19:58
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GorfZaplen posted:A friend of mine wants to do a play by post style game but is having trouble finding a good space for it that's free, easily accessible on a phone, and isn't affiliated with Facebook. Anyone here have any ideas? Forums.somethingawful.com I'm serious. This is one of the best places on the internet for running and participating in PbP. I guess it's not free, but $10 once is pretty cheap? The issue I have with stuff like discord/slack/etc. is that they're designed for a running conversation but not so much for looking back at what someone said 5 months ago, and maybe quoting them. You can totally do that if you have conversations set to be stored, but... it's not super easy. And there's a tendency for people to all show up simultaneously and actually be playing live, rather than play-by-post; on an actual forum, there's less psychological pressure to hurry up and get a post out or you're gonna miss a conversation, kind of thing.
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Jan 14, 2020 20:02
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mango sentinel posted:I love when System Mastery does the math on poo poo like this and players have like a 5% chance of ever accomplishing anything in a given combat round.
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Jan 14, 2020 20:08
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One of the things that drives me is when it's super obvious that a game designer never tried any of their poo poo. Like the BESM game where offense and defense had nothing to do with each other so you could just stack dodge and get a 1 in 36 chance to be hit.
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Jan 14, 2020 20:19
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I think the prime suspects for "no one ever playtested this" are the 90s games that borrowed White Wolf's "Stats and Skills rated 1-5" formula, but with a different underlying die mechanic. (Never mind that White Wolf was imitating Shadowrun.) Every company had its own system for the sake of having its own system, and that formula makes the rules appear simple even if they're complicated in practice.
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Jan 14, 2020 20:23
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Halloween Jack posted:I think the prime suspects for "no one ever playtested this" are the 90s games that borrowed White Wolf's "Stats and Skills rated 1-5" formula, but with a different underlying die mechanic. (Never mind that White Wolf was imitating Shadowrun.) Every company had its own system for the sake of having its own system, and that formula makes the rules appear simple even if they're complicated in practice.
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Jan 14, 2020 20:30
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FMguru posted:Those were really good for mismatches between what the rulebook said your abilities were ("Three dots in 'Driving': You're not Mario Andretti, but you can compete (and occasionally win) at your local track") and what the system actually allowed them to do (Three dots in 'Driving': you have a 36% chance to change lanes successfully without flipping your car or setting in on fire somehow) You're not supposed to roll for things you could easily do in storyteller, only if there's a chance for failure. Like in the versions where DC was variable instead of fixed at 7 'changing lanes' would be difficulty 1 or 2. Something anyone of average dexterity (2) and no drive skill would auto succeed on. Someone with above average dex and drive could choose to auto succeed on any standard driving action. The math was broken in other ways, like some devs not knowing the way increasing the DC or the number of successes required weren't interchangeable, and since you rerolled 10s something with a high DC was more likely to gently caress you than help you since 1s were botches.
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Jan 14, 2020 20:43
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Gobbeldygook posted:I just downloaded the quick-start rules. To resolve "I attack the man with my sword": If ever there was a setting that deserved a 4e retroclone, it's The Witcher's combat system.
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Jan 14, 2020 21:06
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Gobbeldygook posted:You can download the quick-start rules, Witcher: Easy Mode, off Drive Thru RPG for free. Does it have a bestiary, because a large part of the work would be analyzing armor and dr means and modes. Edit: A 4e retroclone is tough because of bad optics making it hard to sell being combined with 4e's focus on balance making a more difficult system than the current rules light or 5e style fad.
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Jan 14, 2020 22:07
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Halloween Jack posted:I think the prime suspects for "no one ever playtested this" are the 90s games that borrowed White Wolf's "Stats and Skills rated 1-5" formula, but with a different underlying die mechanic. (Never mind that White Wolf was imitating Shadowrun.) Every company had its own system for the sake of having its own system, and that formula makes the rules appear simple even if they're complicated in practice. Oh boy, more charts! Fuckin' love charts. Earthdawn believed in the bellcurve. If you had a score of 17, the average result of any check should be 17, so players could know what their expected performance was. But instead of +1d6 -1d6 like Feng Shui, or adding to to the DC and using a D20 roll like most Dungeons and Dragons, instead every single score had you roll dice that would, on average, give you that score. For example, if you added together all your bonuses and penalties to your level and had a final attack modifier of +17, and the target number to hit the ghoul was a 17, you'd consult the following table.  So you'd pick up a d12 and 2d8, and roll them together. If the total was 17 or higher, then you hit! You may note that you only have a 40% chance to hit there because whoever built that chart didn't really understand odds, but that's the price of their innovative new system that let players understand the odds of their skill checks. Notably, if you forgot a +3 bonus in Earthdawn (something that happens all the time and in any other system is easy to add) you'd be out of luck, because no GM is going to let you look at your roll, then declare that those 2d8 should have really been a d12 and a d10 and try again.
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Jan 14, 2020 22:29
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Moriatti posted:A 4e retroclone is tough because of bad optics making it hard to sell being combined with 4e's focus on balance making a more difficult system than the current rules light or 5e style fad.  but if you're stuck being a Man-At-Arms then that section of your sheet looks like this  Seems fair.
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Jan 14, 2020 22:39
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Fiction that centers around a single Big drat Hero and his coterie of helpers/assistants/sidekicks is always hard to translate into group-play RPGs. The original TSR Indiana Jones game had the most spectacular manifestation of this issue - there was no chargen system (!) just premade characters from the movies, which meant one person got to be Indy, and everyone else ended up as Marion or Sallah or Short Round. The Buffy game (and its derivatives) is supposed to handle this very well by giving the non-central characters extra metagame goodies (more luck points and rerolls and suchlike). You can play the central character, and you have a lot of powers and abilities on your character sheet, but you have be careful because you get almost none of the "force the GM to reroll" tokens that the less-powerful characters do.
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Jan 14, 2020 22:50
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There was almost an official Highlander RPG, but I believe the company tanked before it was released. Fortunately, there are like four different Highlander homebrews for Storyteller alone.
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Jan 14, 2020 22:52
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FMguru posted:The Buffy game (and its derivatives) is supposed to handle this very well by giving the non-central characters extra metagame goodies (more luck points and rerolls and suchlike). You can play the central character, and you have a lot of powers and abilities on your character sheet, but you have be careful because you get almost none of the "force the GM to reroll" tokens that the less-powerful characters do.
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Jan 14, 2020 22:57
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What is this modern table of LIES? Step 14 originally was D20+D4 (proceeding to D20+D6 etc) and going from D12+D10 at 13 to D20+D4 at 14 was the goddamn WORST because of the abrupt increase in swinginess. (Note: Earthdawn also had all dice exploding.)
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Jan 14, 2020 23:02
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I gave up on the Witcher RPG when I saw that it had derived statistics for how far you could jump vertically and horizontally.
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Jan 14, 2020 23:19
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BinaryDoubts posted:I gave up on the Witcher RPG when I saw that it had derived statistics for how far you could jump vertically and horizontally.
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Jan 14, 2020 23:23
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My favorite measure for how 1980s a game is measuring how many pages it takes until it tells you how to calculate your carrying capacity. Lots of games of that era will let you know on page one. INTRODUCTION 1.0 Characters 1.1 Ability Scores 1.1.1 STRENGTH 1.1.1.1 Deadlift Capability 1.1.1.2 Carrying Capacity 1.1.2 AGILITY ... And so on.
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Jan 14, 2020 23:33
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BinaryDoubts posted:I gave up on the Witcher RPG when I saw that it had derived statistics for how far you could jump vertically and horizontally. Don’t all editions of D&D have that too, for both standing and running starts?
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Jan 14, 2020 23:37
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Moriatti posted:A 4e retroclone is tough because of bad optics making it hard to sell being combined with 4e's focus on balance making a more difficult system than the current rules light or 5e style fad. Almost no 4e haters are going to object to, for example, a Witcher character's At Wills being Strong Style and Fast Style, and their first and seventh level encounter powers being the ability to take a potion while their third is the ability to cast signs. It's a little more hardcoded than 4e needs to be but gets you to the right sort of combat with only a little obfuscation.
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Jan 14, 2020 23:43
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4e's gonna give you problems because it's built around the concept of a party, where the Witcher is built around being the ultimate loner gish. Like you'd start building him and just immediately stall out at defining his role. Defender probably?
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Jan 15, 2020 00:16
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use the Buffy RPG where the Slayer is overpowered but all the supporting cast have specializations and plot support abilities. or use Monster of the Week and cross out Chosen and write Witcher
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Jan 15, 2020 00:26
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Mystic Mongol posted:Oh boy, more charts! Fuckin' love charts.
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Jan 15, 2020 00:29
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Rip_Van_Winkle posted:use Monster of the Week
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Jan 15, 2020 00:34
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Mystic Mongol posted:Hey, I remember the nineties! I loving hate GURPS combat (well, most of the game's mechanics actually to be honest), and I'm a horrible horrible grog that loves Rolemaster and Hero System.
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Jan 15, 2020 00:44
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theironjef posted:4e's gonna give you problems because it's built around the concept of a party, where the Witcher is built around being the ultimate loner gish. It really isn't if you look at stuff that isn't the video games. Geralt spends most of the novels travelling in a party with a ranger, a bard, and a vampire who is also a medical doctor.
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Jan 15, 2020 00:54
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Lemon-Lime posted:It really isn't if you look at stuff that isn't the video games. Geralt spends most of the novels travelling in a party with a ranger, a bard, and a vampire who is also a medical doctor. I've actually never played the games. I was basing it on Henry Cavill's performance, which basically boiled down to 10 episodes of "I'm Boney I'm Boney, leave me aloooooooooney."
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Jan 15, 2020 00:56
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Lemon-Lime posted:It really isn't if you look at stuff that isn't the video games. Geralt spends most of the novels travelling in a party with a ranger, a bard, and a vampire who is also a medical doctor.
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Jan 15, 2020 03:40
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I have an idea tinkering in the back of my head of a game where all the players are "supporting cast" to a DMPC "Main Character". The original inspiration was BioWare games, but the problem I ran into was "why would you want to do that" and "why would you need specific rules for it when nothing stops a DM from playing Commander Shepherd right now".
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Jan 15, 2020 04:01
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Tibalt posted:I have an idea tinkering in the back of my head of a game where all the players are "supporting cast" to a DMPC "Main Character". The original inspiration was BioWare games, but the problem I ran into was "why would you want to do that" and "why would you need specific rules for it when nothing stops a DM from playing Commander Shepherd right now". Tibalt posted:why would you want to do that
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Jan 15, 2020 04:08
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thark posted:What is this modern table of LIES? I think I've outed myself as a fake Earthdawn fan because I never got to actually play, so I missed that this is the wrong table. I never got to play because people would get as far in the rules as the dice system and then hand me the book back.
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Jan 15, 2020 04:21
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