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Why the hell would anyone need an SRD to make a ripoff of BRP? People have been doing it for literally decades. And it's not a great system. Besides UA, I can't off the top of my head think of a percentile system that meets the goals of being functional and interesting to use. (I'm sure they're out there, just nothing comes to mind.) BRP is kinda clunky as a consequence of being designed in 1980 to replace D&D with something "rational" and "scientific." That notion is why systems designed around that time (namely Palladium) rename "Strength" to something unbearably dorky like "Physical Exertion Capacity (PEC)." Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 14:57 on Mar 27, 2020 |
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Mar 27, 2020 14:54
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Lunchmeat Larry posted:I have a few questions to put to the floor - not sure if there are specific threads I've missed, sorry, pretty new to this dusty side of the forum/internet in general.
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Mar 27, 2020 15:01
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It's weird. I like running mini-campaigns, I like it a lot, but I've never gotten into one-shots. I prefer 3-4 shots, like a game with one solid arc and just enough time to really get into character and develop a little.
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Mar 27, 2020 15:14
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grassy gnoll posted:I would just like to play, period. Me too.  I just don't want to be stuck playing D&D anymore. I've talked up other games, but time has kept us from actually getting together for anything else.
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Mar 27, 2020 16:04
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I'm glad I have group that will at least try anything I bring in front of them
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Mar 27, 2020 16:09
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Night10194 posted:It's weird. I like running mini-campaigns, I like it a lot, but I've never gotten into one-shots. I prefer 3-4 shots, like a game with one solid arc and just enough time to really get into character and develop a little.
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Mar 27, 2020 16:18
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Lunchmeat Larry posted:Also I'm trying to get my head around roll20 itself and it's... a bit overwhelming/unintuitive. I don't have a clue what I'm doing with macros, find it a bit hard to picture what the players will see/be able to do, and am just a bit confused as to how it all... Works, turn by turn. The wiki isn't great and I'm not sure what assets I need or how to set it all up with them. I'm completely lost as to running combat and making sure it's orderly and turn-based. Just getting a bit of stage fright I guess, I'm picturing trying it and it turning out to be a disaster where I spend the whole time making everyone wait for 15 minutes to look up wikis and fiddle with menus. If you want to keep it fairly rules-light and freeform, you're overthinking this. Macros are extremely useful if you're running a crunchier game, but you can absolutely get by with just rolling individual dice. For example I'm playing D&D 4e on roll20 right now and I'm the only person in my group who makes extensive use of macros. Two people don't use them at all—they just roll their d20+attack/skill and then roll their damage dice separately. If you want to treat roll20 as just a chatbox, a whiteboard, and a pile of dice, well, that's basically what a table is, yeah? It works the same way. Having said that, I've been able to figure out what I need from the wiki, Google, and experimentation, so I don't know if there's a great tutorial out there. I would suggest starting simple, though, and branching out into the more advanced capabilities after learning the basics and only once you feel you need them.
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Mar 27, 2020 16:24
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Agent Rush posted:Me too. I don't like only playing D&D and I don't like being stuck indoors and I don't like that trying to play anything else online has exactly the same problems
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Mar 27, 2020 16:24
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Splicer posted:When I say something is suitable for one shots I tend to mean "Quick and easy prep, no real advancement mechanics", which is technically not accurate but I don't think there's a term for it. I was mostly just musing on it because I feel like running one of those again and plan to talk to my group about it tonight.
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Mar 27, 2020 16:41
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TK_Nyarlathotep posted:That or the time he got into a fight with our local con's Vampire LARP group that was so catastrophic it resulted in a complete restructuring of the convention and an internal memo to never invite him back. You can't just like, not tell this story.
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Mar 27, 2020 16:44
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Yawgmoth posted:It is stupid and bad design, but "play this game only in the way I would or suffer" is peak John "earn your fun" Wick. You should never be forced to choose between being mechanically functional and mechanically interesting, but man did AEC have a fetish for punishing people who wanted to do anything interesting with their character. It's possible that he's playing a character and working us, but it doesn't matter; he's still responsible for the stupid poo poo he advocates and claims to have done, constantly, for years now.
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Mar 27, 2020 16:48
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This is pretty cool. Massif Press is giving away Lancer PDF keys to those who donate to Coronavirus relief. The donation required is $25. https://twitter.com/Lancer_RPG/status/1242502852523655169 https://www.forbes.com/sites/robwieland/2020/03/25/donate-to-coronavirus-relief-to-get-anime-mech-action/#5ac447ce3b7e
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Mar 27, 2020 16:55
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Mystic Mongol posted:They're not very cool.
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Mar 27, 2020 17:28
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Halloween Jack posted:That's being too kind to Wick; he doesn't want the players to play a particular way and earn their fun. He just wants to gently caress with them, in an environment where he has total control over everything anyway. Yeah, I'm fine with 'earn your fun' sometimes if everyone's on board, but I always make sure the fun actually happens after the earning. There is a lot of fun in going from zero to hero, but you need to actually do the hero part at the end of it. In general I despise the view of GMing that puts GMing as a position of power or authority; I think it's a subset of adversarial GMing that doesn't necessarily revolve around 'I killed the PCs' but often includes it, and usually makes things less fun for everyone.
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Mar 27, 2020 17:48
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TK_Nyarlathotep posted:Seeing John Wick on Facebook doing a victory lap on how owned nerds were because he daringly suggested Star War Rebel Bad Guys and Empire Good Guys in his stupid GM book was, I think, the last straw for me even contemplating tolerating his vicarious presence any more. Zurui posted:You can't just like, not tell this story. Oh good, I was hoping I wasn't the only one who didn't want this to slide past unquestioned.
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Mar 27, 2020 17:51
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Yawgmoth posted:That's extremely not true in 4e. In 4e you get a school ability at every rank (unless you're a shugenja) and most of them are in fact very interesting, or at least useful, to what your school is supposed to be doing. Notably, just about every bushi school gives "attack as a simple action" at rank 3 so if you aren't making a beeline for R3 as a bushi you are straight up crippling yourself. Shugenja don't get new school techs but the do get new spells and can only learn spells of their rank or lower, so not ranking up is a great way to stay at 0xp level power while everyone else grows. Yeah, but in 4E you gain Insight any time you level up your skills or the paired stats that make up a Ring so it's not a problem.
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Mar 27, 2020 18:16
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MonsieurChoc posted:Yeah, but in 4E you gain Insight any time you level up your skills or the paired stats that make up a Ring so it's not a problem. You get insight in 2018 from any expenditure of exp, you just get more from taking skills and techniques from your recommended list. Notably, you never get double credit for spending on raw stats, so nobody is going to hit 100% maximum possible insight without playing a super weak character. Most people will fall somewhere between 60% to 80%, and that probably means getting your next school rank maybe one session earlier or later than anyone else at the table. It's not perfect, but it's also not a big deal, and it does quietly encourage PCs to learn the skills their school considers important, which gives a bunch of otherwise pretty samey classes some distinction from one another.
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Mar 27, 2020 18:49
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Zurui posted:You can't just like, not tell this story. Lemniscate Blue posted:Oh good, I was hoping I wasn't the only one who didn't want this to slide past unquestioned. There isn't HORRIBLY much to tell that wasn't in the initial post - basically he got it in his head that the Vampire LARP was taking players away from his Houses of the Blooded LARP (it wasn't) and snapped when he found a toy spider ring in a convention hall (ask any former AEG staffer, Wick is VIOLENTLY arachnophobic). He took himself and his tough guy buddies to the building where the Vampires were, they had a verbal tussle that ended with a flipped table and a torn banner, then Wick, his entourage, and the Vampire LARPers all left the con for the weekend. The next time I heard from the con, the ENTIRE ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURE had been rearranged and for the first time in like 4-5 years, Wick wasn't on the guest list. Furthermore, none of the "new" managers (read: old con staff who got a promotion) had anything nice to say about him. It was highly bizarre. Halloween Jack posted:That's being too kind to Wick; he doesn't want the players to play a particular way and earn their fun. He just wants to gently caress with them, in an environment where he has total control over everything anyway. A friend of mine once described Wick as "the kind of person who approaches every social encounter like they're the dom in a BDSM relationship and the whole planet should feel lucky to be his sub".
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Mar 27, 2020 22:12
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MonsieurChoc posted:Yeah, but in 4E you gain Insight any time you level up your skills or the paired stats that make up a Ring so it's not a problem.
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Mar 27, 2020 22:27
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TK_Nyarlathotep posted:A friend of mine once described Wick as "the kind of person who approaches every social encounter like they're the dom in a BDSM relationship and the whole planet should feel lucky to be his sub". This is a whole hell of a lot. And also makes every John Wick TTRPG kinda sleazy, or at least, moreso than they already were.
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Mar 27, 2020 22:33
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TK_Nyarlathotep posted:A friend of mine once described Wick as "the kind of person who approaches every social encounter like they're the dom in a BDSM relationship and the whole planet should feel lucky to be his sub".
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Mar 28, 2020 00:19
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Osprey free ebooks extravaganza  First off, free fantasy wargame Frostgrave. Rules for solo and cooperative play included!  https://ospreypublishing.com/blog/free_frostgrave_ebook_2020?fbclid=IwAR1CNKPjF1LP69ZUOZUcx8uyExHlcM6hN2WJL-GCJKNx6zuuOPFIxPNeg8s Secondly, Osprey is giving away 5 free ebooks each week for 4 weeks! https://ospreypublishing.com/blog/Free_eBooks_week_1/ This week's bounty      
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Mar 28, 2020 01:53
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So hey! Remember my kids' 5e D&D game? We did a Zoom videoconference game with them tonight and it went pretty well! It's like herding cats much of the time, since the kids don't quite understand spotlight sharing yet and everyone wants to be the front-person for everything. And in case you are wondering, it takes about 3-4 sessions for a game to mostly be about in-jokes than whatever is going on in the adventure. 
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Mar 28, 2020 02:14
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Lemon-Lime posted:$20 is cheap for a corebook. So I caved and bought Dishonored; it added enough to my cart to get the 40%-off code working. It's not great, but I have enough love for the setting and the good bits of the underlying system that I'd still play it. Have a F&F
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Mar 28, 2020 14:26
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DigitalRaven posted:So I caved and bought Dishonored; it added enough to my cart to get the 40%-off code working. It's not great, but I have enough love for the setting and the good bits of the underlying system that I'd still play it. Have a F&F Thanks for your sacrifice. Shame it isn't very good, but that's not surprising. 
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Mar 28, 2020 14:38
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Well, I can't say I had high hopes in the first place for a straight adaptation of a pretty focused single-player video game. Kind of weird that a relative powerhouse like Modiphius can't afford good editing, but c'est la RPGs.
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Mar 28, 2020 14:57
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They do just kind of crank poo poo out constantly so I can't say I'm too surprised.
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Mar 28, 2020 15:40
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it's weird because their conan and star trek games are really fuckin good at nailing the setting and making things feel like an episode of those materials and all.
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Mar 28, 2020 16:02
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Bringing this in from F&F, since this reply ended up over half the length of the review...Night10194 posted:I wonder why editing is consistently such a problem for RPG books? I suppose they tend to be very long technical documents, so it can be difficult to do. So that's part of it. Roleplaying games are very long technical documents. That's the nature of any particularly involved game. Writers and particularly line developers are frequently not technical writers. Technical writing is a skill quite separate from most other kinds of writing, and not one possessed by many people interested in writing roleplaying games. Mostly, that's because actually trained/talented technical writers make a whole shitload more cash than RPG writers. I've seen people argue that the lack of clarity in RPGs is because RPG writers are "frustrated novelists", with the suggestion that STEM education would naturally lead to better mechanical writing, but that's bollocks. Technical writing isn't the same as "writing for a STEM field". I'm a mathematician by background*, I've never done any technical writing as part of that. Anyway. RPGs are long (just the mechanics on some games I've worked on were >75K words; that's 3/4 of a typical novel) technical documents written by people who are, by and large, not technical writers. That's one part of what makes line editing hard. As a developer/line editor, that's just the start of the problem. First, there's frequently little oversight. Where books have more than one developer listed, frequently that means different parts were developed by different people, not that these people both did a development pass on the whole manuscript and cross-checked one another. It's almost better to be a lone developer, because then you're definitely reading everything. Any errors - and every book has errors - are just on you. If you're lucky, you'll find them before ink goes on paper. As a developer, it's your job to make sure everything fits together - that the setting bits have the same tone, that the same writing style is used throughout, and that the mechanics all hang together. This last one is a doozy, because long technical document. For any game with a significant number of moving parts, keeping them all in your head is next to impossible. Keeping track and cross-referencing is hard, because RPG publishing almost universally relies on loving Word documents, rather than much better suited tools like Scrivener or Ulysses (or even LaTeX, though that's my inner mathmo coming out). We don't use loving woodcuts to print books any more, but by requiring Word we might as well. I have notebooks filled up with scribbles and mind maps and entity relationship diagrams from when I was doing a development pass on WtF 2e. It's easy as a reader to pick up on flaws. It's much, much harder to do as a developer. As a reader, you can dip in and cherry-pick. As a developer, you're trying to tie three quarters of a novel together with what amounts to scotch tape and dental floss, while also ensuring that all the setting material and writing style and everything loving else comes together - and bearing in mind that the setting stuff is frequently enmeshed with the rules material** that's even harder, as each section ties in to exponentially more. The more you work on making sure the book is tight and self-consistent, the longer it takes. Frequently, especially with licensed games or larger companies, you're working to deadlines that mean you just plain don't have time to do that. And anyone who says "set better deadlines" clearly hasn't done anything like this, because nobody higher up the chain will accept a suitable development timeline, because Book X only took Y weeks and you're asking for three times as long! Explaining that Book X was borderline incoherent doesn't hold any water, because Book X sold and that's what matters. Taking longer on the development does make a better game but that does not correlate to higher sales so there's often no appetite from the publishers to do so.*** Most of the time, developers are not paid anywhere near enough for doing this poo poo. That's why I say two developers won't cross-check, most companies won't pay for that. Once the developer has assembled the book, it goes to editors, who do copy editing (which is why I prefer developer/editor as a title split, even though line editor/copy editor is more accurate). They're there to pick up typos and unclear phrasing and the like. It's not their job to make sure that everything mechanical fits together; that's a different skill set. They're also barely paid enough to do copy-editing. But apart from the copy editor, there is frequently no real oversight. Nobody goes through the developed manuscript that gets sent off to layout to make sure everything works. At best you get a lot of playtesting, but often that isn't done totally hands-off. If you can give the manuscript to people who've nothing to do with the game and say "go at it" for a few months, you'll get useful feedback. But usually that doesn't happen because a) you don't have the luxury of not doing anything for a few months while you wait for feedback, b) you need lots of groups, to cover different assumptions and playstyles, c) frequently all of these people will need to be under NDA****. Frequently playtesting is done by the friends and family of the people working on the book, who internally paper over the cracks as they run, or (if a player) explain things on the fly and forget why they needed to do so. Anyway. That's 1250 words or so on why most RPGs have lovely editing. * I'm not saying this to claim that I'm some kind of amazing designed (I'll leave people to read my games and make their own minds up). I've made some hilariously bad mathematical errors. One of my games had, as its resolution, 2d6+stat vs a static target number. To paraphrase, my first version had "If you roll under, you fail. If you roll over you succeed." If you equaled the TN? ERROR: RESULT NOT FOUND. ** You can separate it some, and that makes it easier, but go too far and you get backlash. I love Fragged Empire, but it's a reference rather than a teaching aide, and that means it takes real work to learn the game. D&D4e's presentation is lovely, but a lot of games that include an actual setting need to tie their mechanics in to that rather than being able to say "it's D&D", which isn't so much a game setting as a range of Extruded Generic Fantasy Product Paste. Yes, please. I'd like three thousand books of Soylent Beige, er, I mean Forgotten Realms. *** Onyx Path, particularly in the early days, had a much stronger culture of "it's done when it's done", which let people like Dave, Travis, Rose, and myself put a lot more work into getting things right. On the flip-side, it lead to a lot of delays and a lot of fan annoyance even with non-kickstarted books, and that (along with the aforementioned lack of oversight) directly enabled much of Holden and Mørke's utter loving bullshit. I haven't worked with OPP in a while; I've heard through the grapevine that things have become a lot tighter since I left but I don't know what that entails. **** Which I personally hate, but if you're working on a licensed game you likely have no choice. Hell, the licence may not even allow external playtesting...
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Mar 28, 2020 16:18
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That's super-interesting to read, as someone with a background in publishing/copy-editing layout. I worked for a number of years for a large financial certification textbook company, whose products are---stop me if you've heard this one---large tomes of varying sets of arcane rules that need to be followed precisely (often with little overlap from book to book), have systems predicated upon each piece functioning precisely as written, and whose numbers in examples need to be perfect or else none of it makes sense to the reader, and will in practice fall apart if it wasn't outlined clearly---and other people beyond your direct readers WILL be checking their work later. And we had a department of min-6 max-12 people (even in the depths of the 2008 recession and on), annual deadlines we started working against 6 months in advance, a dedicated line-writer/developer for each separate product/set of books, all having this as a full-time position, subjecting each book in a series to multiple editing passes through the entire team at once and validating every change made to every page with both printed and digital copies to verify, and we still had to crunch to hit deadlines half the time without loving anything up. Which really puts seeing (page XX) in a given PDF in perspective now. even if InDesign has handy ToC and indexing tools god drat it
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Mar 28, 2020 17:00
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Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:even if InDesign has handy ToC and indexing tools god drat it loving seriously, man. There's no excuse for broken bookmarks or a non-linked ToC these days, and yet!
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Mar 28, 2020 17:10
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As DR said, most of the time you're stitching together a bunch of Word documents, most of which are barely able to follow a very simple formatting template. OPP is much better at indexing than their past incarnation, but I suspect that's because they just give someone the time to comb through the doc a bunch and build an index mostly by hand. And a lot of this has to do with nearly all RPGs being a shoestring operation from the jump. If someone with the Real Big Boy Professional Skills is involved, it's because they happen to want to do it. No one's shelling out the money (or, often, allowing the time table) to make books professionally better, especially when they'll buy Mage 20 regardless. ToC/bookmarks, though, there's really no excuse to have lovely ones nowadays. They're so easy. That Old Tree fucked around with this message at 18:40 on Mar 28, 2020 |
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Mar 28, 2020 18:36
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The other thing about editing is that the quality or lack thereof doesn't actually affect sales. You could see this most clearly in the 1990s, when World of Darkness books were massive sellers despite having almost comically slipshod editing (page XXs, useless ToCs and indices, unreadable layouts, etc.). There's literally no material reward for putting an RPG book through proper multiple pass editing, or going through the effort to generate a proper table of contents and make sure that all the links go the right place. You'll sell the same number of copies whether you do that, or just run spellcheck and figure "eh, good enough".
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Mar 28, 2020 18:41
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DigitalRaven posted:I've seen people argue that the lack of clarity in RPGs is because RPG writers are "frustrated novelists", with the suggestion that STEM education would naturally lead to better mechanical writing, but that's bollocks. Technical writing isn't the same as "writing for a STEM field". I'm a mathematician by background*, I've never done any technical writing as part of that. I can confirm that most programmers cannot write clear embedded doc to save their lives. Also, many avoid theory courses because that would mean having to write concise proofs.
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Mar 28, 2020 18:45
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DigitalRaven posted:Lots of insightful Even with all that, minor errors still crop up. And that's to say nothing of the occasional little minefields dropped in by earlier authors that we have to write around so as not to introduce further canon clashes. tl;dr - even setting aside writing for rules clarity it's a hell of a lot harder than it looks.
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Mar 28, 2020 18:45
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Obligatum VII posted:I can confirm that most programmers cannot write clear embedded doc to save their lives. Also, many avoid theory courses because that would mean having to write concise proofs.
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Mar 28, 2020 18:50
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Ilor posted:Jesus, this is so true. gently caress, getting people to use consistent coding styles is harder than it should be. Like, every IDE in the world has an "expand tabs to spaces" setting, so why do I keep opening your code only to find the indents all screwed up? It's not rocket science and yet people just can't seem to do it right. Oh, oh, what about people who decide, in this day and ages, to abbreviate literally all variable names into complete incoherence to anyone but them (and only them this week or month. Them next year won't know either)? Or, even worse, the actual incarnate demons that use variable names completely unrelated to their usage, whether that is things like "a" and "b" for things that are not simple parameters in short and obvious functions, or people who decide to be "cute" with their naming schemes.
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Mar 28, 2020 19:11
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DigitalRaven posted:Writers and particularly line developers are frequently not technical writers. Technical writing is a skill quite separate from most other kinds of writing, and not one possessed by many people interested in writing roleplaying games. Mostly, that's because actually trained/talented technical writers make a whole shitload more cash than RPG writers. This is very true. One of my oldest friends is a tech writer, and she would probably have a heart attack if I told her the general rates for an RPG writer.
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Mar 28, 2020 19:22
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Ilor posted:every IDE in the world has an "expand tabs to spaces" setting Well I know atleast one IDE does that by literally replacing tabs with spaces (and vice versa) in the code, so anyone that wanted to use it (or use different tab spacings) would cause almost every line to be tagged as "changed". 
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Mar 28, 2020 20:00
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sexpig by night posted:it's weird because their conan and star trek games are really fuckin good at nailing the setting and making things feel like an episode of those materials and all. Because for both Conan and Star Trek, you can do the same thing as Conan or the Enterprise bridge crew without going against theme and setting. Conan is just an experienced adventurer and frequently runs with people who are equally experienced, and the only difference between the Enterprise and every other Federation ship is that the Enterprise has a prestigious history and sometimes has cutting-edge tech. In both cases, the things you would do in those settings as someone who isn't Conan or the Enterprise bridge crew can easily be the same things that the protagonists of the source material do. This just isn't the case for Dishonored, because Dishonored is a series of video games where the player character is a single super special person with super special powers, and the setting doesn't have years of novels/TV shows with a rich enough background to allow characters that aren't that to exist with any actual definition. Basically, people with Outsider powers are the Dishonored equivalent of Jedi in OT games - they get the cool magic powers that everyone wants, but you can't have all 4-5 characters in the party have those cool magic powers because those people being very rare is important to the setting that your game is supposed to be trying to emulate. As with Jedi, there's several solutions to the problem:
Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 20:58 on Mar 28, 2020 |
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Mar 28, 2020 20:43
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