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Elector_Nerdlingen posted:Yeah, i should probably give it another go, it's been over a decade since I tried it.
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Apr 22, 2020 16:44
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What games are you guys managing to still play in person with your family/spouse/roommates/whoever in quarantine? My wife and I have started playing entirely too much Machi Koro and getting absolutely vicious towards each other in dominoes.
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Apr 22, 2020 17:14
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Elector_Nerdlingen posted:Yeah, i should probably give it another go, it's been over a decade since I tried it. Depends on the time setting you want. If you want to go 1920's, skip to the 1930s and play Caleb Stokes' The Wives of March. It is pay what you want and I just ran it this Saturday for a couple friends. Took me 6 hours because there are 12 very detailed investigative nodes. It also features a non-standard Mythos threat (ie not Cthulhu or Dimensional Shamblers or the like). https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/120072/The-Wives-of-March?term=wives+of+ If you want to play Call of Cthulhu in the Modern Day, look no further than Delta Green. The quickstart guide Need to Know is also pay what you want. https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/175760/Delta-Green-Need-to-Know One of the best adventures is The Last Equation. This also features a non-standard Mythos threat, but it is firmly embedded in Lovecraft's writings because it deals with the concept that any "true" knowledge of the universe is unnerving and toxic. The Last Equation is $5. https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/90062/Delta-Green-The-Last-Equation
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Apr 22, 2020 17:15
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My Lovely Horse posted:Every narrative that deals in genre tropes of adventure and/or suspense should do that once. Invoke all the usual cliffhangers, feature all the usual indicators, and there are just perfectly reasonable explanations every time. Like that one Tintin album that spent 60 pages on some jewels not getting stolen. Unknown Armies 2E has a module like this. The PCs head up to a small Minnesota town on rumors of a sasquatch, who turns out to be a hairy recluse who likes to wander around naked in the woods. There's a ton of small-town intrigue in the module, and none of it has anything to do with the Occult Underground or the supernatural.
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Apr 22, 2020 17:18
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The CoC core book I own for 5th edition actually suggests putting at least one adventure like that in each campaign just to keep the world from devolving entirely into 'every weird thing is monsters'. Players might enjoy it turning out to be Old Farmer Willis trying to scare people away from the old mill for once, after all.
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Apr 22, 2020 17:44
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food court bailiff posted:What games are you guys managing to still play in person with your family/spouse/roommates/whoever in quarantine? My wife and I have started playing entirely too much Machi Koro and getting absolutely vicious towards each other in dominoes. I made a contactless purchase from my game parlor last Friday and got us Stuffed Fables. If you haven't played it or heard of it the game is an adorable dungeon crawler where the players are stuffed animals fighting the evil monsters from under the bed. Once we finish it up I plan to gift it to my friend to play with his wife and kids. There's only 7 story missions but there are some variations depending on how you do
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Apr 22, 2020 18:26
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The opposite end of the "mostly supernatural, occasionally mundane" extreme is Principia Malefex, where of the three sample adventures in the core book one is utterly mundane, one looks supernatural but isn't, and one has a supernatural thing going on but explicitly frames this as something that the player affected can't meaningfully interact with. The adventures released for it follow a similar pattern. It's a fun technique to pull in a campaign where you are mostly facing supernatural poo poo, but Malefex seemed to advocate taking it to the point where it felt like a bait-and-switch where you were promised a supernatural horror game but got Eastenders with added occultism. The latter of which would be an interesting idea for a game, but the system was kind of terrible. I did a review here if people want to read more about it (there seems to be vanishingly little discussion of it online).
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Apr 22, 2020 18:30
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UnCO3 posted:
 Following on from this I've just released Dirty Papers, a revised and expanded version of my finalist entry into the 2019 200 Word RPG Challenge last October. It's a game about archaeology, academic power politics, and exploring of strange places where people used to live; I've doubled the wordcount to revise it for readability, give examples in the text, and add some new rules for longer-term play. It's in the Quiet Year/Microscope/Dialect-ish mould of world-building-like games where character action takes a backseat to the process of playing—in this case, identifying and interpreting artefacts, arguing with people (or talking over those lower in the pecking order) and (subjectively) judging the people who used to live in the ruins you now explore. Here are some comments I received from the anonymous reviewers of the 2019 200WRPGC when the game was selected as a finalist: quote:I cannot think of a single other game that really discusses the research and publication process of academia and the predatory way it is proposed ... I can think of how cathartic stabbing the system in the back would be ... Step 3 is such a distressing distillation of reality, it is wonderful. quote:World building via imaginary archeology seems quite novel. It could apply to many settings: distant planets, lost civilizations, post-apocalyptic ... The seniority mechanic is quite fun, as it would start conversation as "expert" argumentation ... In the end you built a world without really realizing.
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Apr 22, 2020 18:44
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Anybody know anything about Torchbearer 2nd Edition? I'm looking at the Kickstarter and imagining what my life could be like a year from now.
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Apr 22, 2020 19:56
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Splicer posted:For a while now I've been thinking there could be a market for a short story collection where about half of the time it's people freaking out over nothing and the other half of the time it's ghosts. One of the rules variants for BSG actually is not stacking the deck to guarantee cylons/having extra cards so you can technically wind up with 1 or 0 of them. The variant was added along with the hidden agendas humanity cards and character death. The goal behind the design was you'd cycle characters by executing folks sabotaging or playing suboptimally thinking they were hidden cylons, and to strengthen the "stay hidden and sabotage the game" strategy, since the optimal cylon strategy was to reveal very early. It's fun in theory to see the extra paranoia, but it really sucked if you wound up the only cylon, especially if you were placed on team toaster after it was clear your side couldn't win.
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Apr 22, 2020 19:58
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PerniciousKnid posted:Anybody know anything about Torchbearer 2nd Edition? I'm looking at the Kickstarter and imagining what my life could be like a year from now. It looks to be a solid expansion and revision of the original game (which is probably the best take on "survivalist dungeon crawling" in existence). The books are pretty much guaranteed to be beautiful if Luke Crane's previous work is any indication and I'm on the fence about backing it.
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Apr 22, 2020 20:16
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I have had some good times in CoC, and some good deaths. But it's absolutely true that if the greeblies come out in CoC, you done hosed up and had best run.
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Apr 22, 2020 20:22
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PerniciousKnid posted:Anybody know anything about Torchbearer 2nd Edition? I'm looking at the Kickstarter and imagining what my life could be like a year from now. Dare ye enter Luke Crane's magical realm? Torchbearer is Mouse Guard, but harder and with fiddlier equipment. This is intentional. If you want a game actually designed to be Fantasy Vietnam, Torchbearer is a good choice. I personally can't stand it and I would rather stick sharp objects through my eardrums than watch Crane jerk himself off with Wizardly Prose instead of communicating with the backers of his project like a normal human. YMMV.
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Apr 22, 2020 21:09
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Since we are discussing Call of Cthulhu adventures, I have to recommend Stealing Cthulhu for all aspiring Cthulhu Keepers out there. Too many Cthulhu adventures begin with the trope of a murder or end up in the samey cycle of killing cultists, reciting rituals and putting a Great Old One to bed. Graham Walmsley helps you break that cycle...by stealing from and remixing Lovecraft himself. quote:Stealing Cthulhu is my guide to Lovecraftian storytelling for roleplaying games. Its central idea is: by stealing, adapting and combining Lovecraft’s ideas, you can create scenarios that seem new and horrific. It includes Cthulhu Dark, my rules-light system for Cthulhu gaming. Twelve well spent bucks at DriveThru. https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/106251/Stealing-Cthulhu
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Apr 22, 2020 22:17
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grassy gnoll posted:Dare ye enter Luke Crane's magical realm? He's not using wizard speak. He did that one time years ago. This is like being mad that Vincent Baker puts rules for rape in every one of his games. (He doesn't. He did it once, years ago.)
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Apr 22, 2020 23:01
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grassy gnoll posted:watch Crane jerk himself off with Wizardly Prose instead of communicating with the backers of his project like a normal human. I've never backed a Kickstarter before but this seals the deal.. Edit: actually rules are very important when roleplaying rape.
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Apr 22, 2020 23:37
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I nominally agree with you, but that was possibly the single worst analogy to give. What the hell. A much better point is that Luke Crane isn't actually (to my knowledge) an author on either version of Torchbearer and while it's adapted from Burning Wheel it's mostly done by Thor Olavsrud, and if he does do any of the writing there's none of his wizard-speak in it. I'm not gonna say it's the clearest book I've ever read, but it's certainly not trying to be opaque. It takes more reading than I'd prefer cause it's quite complex, but there's nothing about the writing or the system that's actually fighting you, it just can take a re-read to fully get all the moving parts together in your head. Also, yeah, I totally understand people who bounce off of Torchbearer hard. I love it with all my black, wrinkled heart, but it has its goal in mind and is just going whole hog on doing just that thing. If you don't want that thing or don't like how it does it, you won't be a fan. But it's trying to do what it sets out to do, and if that's what you want, it does the living poo poo out of it.
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Apr 22, 2020 23:40
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Jimbozig posted:He's not using wizard speak. He did that one time years ago. This is like being mad that Vincent Baker puts rules for rape in every one of his games. (He doesn't. He did it once, years ago.)
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Apr 22, 2020 23:44
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Xiahou Dun posted:I nominally agree with you, but that was possibly the single worst analogy to give. What the hell. Edit: And as I posted this, right above me appears a post right on point. I totally get why you're still mad about it, and it's okay to still be mad and not support his stuff. I get it. I've stopped patronizing businesses for less. Jimbozig fucked around with this message at 23:48 on Apr 22, 2020 |
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Apr 22, 2020 23:45
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Jimbozig posted:The Vincent Baker thing is a thing that some people are still mad about, and I understand why they are mad and I think it's okay for them to be mad, even though I myself am not mad about it. But to act like it's an ongoing thing instead of a thing that he did once is just dishonest. (And of course the conflict of interest in him running Kickstarters on a corner of the platform he is in charge of curating is ongoing.)
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Apr 22, 2020 23:48
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I just hope the rules are more clear, especially if they're based on Mouse Guard.
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Apr 22, 2020 23:53
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Now I look at the Kickstarter I note that whilst, indeed, most of it is not in Wizard Speak, there is this poo poo:quote:And lastly, we present to you the biggest challenge of this project: We seek allied adventurers and other brave souls to join our band and assist us on this great quest. If you can carry a pack, heft a spear or bear a torch as part of our adventuring band, then we welcome you on our quest. We are in dire need of such friends.
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Apr 22, 2020 23:54
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Warthur posted:Perhaps the wizard speech thing is the sort of thing where doing it just once is enough to make you a huge jackass even if you never do it again. Like the "You gently caress one sheep..." joke. It's fine for you to feel that way. Just like it's fine for people to feel that way about Baker and the first edition of Poison'd. Warthur posted:Now I look at the Kickstarter I note that whilst, indeed, most of it is not in Wizard Speak, there is this poo poo: Or maybe not! I don't know, but to me the thing you quoted seems pretty innocuous and metaphors like that are ubiquitous in fantasy-themed kickstarters.
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Apr 23, 2020 00:06
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Jimbozig posted:It's fine for you to feel that way. Just like it's fine for people to feel that way about Baker and the first edition of Poison'd. Can someone elaborate on this? I only know Baker from AW and The King is Dead.
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Apr 23, 2020 00:09
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Poison'd is a game about pirates. Not "Pirates of the Caribbean" pirates, but awful, nasty, murdering criminals on the high seas during the Age of Sail, where even in the British Navy buggery was "A Thing (tm)". As such, it deals with some extremely adult themes. You also know going in that your characters are terrible human beings who will likely get exactly what they deserve and die kicking at the end of a rope. I know mine did.
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Apr 23, 2020 00:31
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Jimbozig posted:He's not using wizard speak. He did that one time years ago. This is like being mad that Vincent Baker puts rules for rape in every one of his games. (He doesn't. He did it once, years ago.) Luke Crane literally cannot stop obfuscating what good elements are in his games with terrible, unintuitive writing and intentionally bad layouts for the sake of ~vision~. He does it on games where he's only the layout artist, let alone his own products on his employer's website on which he has editorial control.
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Apr 23, 2020 00:33
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Zurui posted:Can someone elaborate on this? I only know Baker from AW and The King is Dead. Poison'd is a game where you play a crew of pirates whose captain has just died from being poisoned by an assassin sent by the king. One of the stats you have is Devil, which is based on how many sins you've committed - rape being one of them. There's also Brutality, which is based on terrible things that you've gone through - again, rape being one of them. In play, if you commit a new sin or suffer through a hardship you haven't gone through before, you increase those stats by 1. There's no rules for specifically doing it, but it can easily come up in play. I believe that's what Jimbozig means.
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Apr 23, 2020 00:34
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grassy gnoll posted:Luke Crane literally cannot stop obfuscating what good elements are in his games with terrible, unintuitive writing and intentionally bad layouts for the sake of ~vision~. He does it on games where he's only the layout artist, let alone his own products on his employer's website on which he has editorial control.
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Apr 23, 2020 00:35
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Jimbozig posted:The Vincent Baker thing is a thing that some people are still mad about, and I understand why they are mad and I think it's okay for them to be mad, even though I myself am not mad about it. But to act like it's an ongoing thing instead of a thing that he did once is just dishonest. It's still a terrible example if you wanted to paint anyone in a positive light. I get the abstract merits of the comparison, but the connotations are just awful. (I love Vincent Baker but I certainly wouldn't use that as a good example on his part.) Warthur posted:Now I look at the Kickstarter I note that whilst, indeed, most of it is not in Wizard Speak, there is this poo poo: I'm not exactly a Luke Crane stan, but I find his games kind of cool and I'm not monstrously offended by his writing (it's a bit purple but that's a common failing in this hobby). With that in mind, it doesn't seem any worse than like the copy for the Frosthaven Kickstarter, as a random example? It's lovely writing, I'll give you that freely, and I get how you're reading it as an echo of past wrong-doing, but it really just reads to me like lovely, hyperbolic prose. That, again, I don't know if Luke Crane actually wrote. Did he? I'm not gonna die on the hill of defending Luke Crane cause while I like some of his games he does seem plenty pretentious and I can understand why it turns people off, but on the other hand I don't understand really hating him. Yeah, he was totally a jerk to you. He very well might be a jerk in general. But he's just a jerk and not an actual monster (that I know of, loving hell who knows these days), so I don't understand having a grudge against him. My neighbor's a total loving jerk who once called me a "commie Jew", but I just think he's an rear end in a top hat and don't do anything about it cause he's just a weird old man.
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Apr 23, 2020 00:36
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Jimbozig posted:I mean, it might be about you. But it might also be that he's been on the receiving end of some trolls, or that he's seen some bad trolling in his time at Kickstarter. It might even be that he had a misunderstanding with you in the first place because he had been having a bad time with people being much ruder than you and lumped you in with them unfairly. Which is, of course, excellent behaviour for a Kickstarter project owner, the sort of good example you would expect of a Kickstarter employee doing their own project on the platform. (Or, maybe, it's precisely the opposite thing.) Do you have any thoughts on the conflict of interest issue or do you want to keep framing this like it's solely about the wizard speak?
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Apr 23, 2020 00:48
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Warthur posted:The original refund wasn't even about me! He was very definitely just mass-refunding people simply for questioning him. I had the poor judgement of querying this behaviour and since he was right in the middle of being a high speed turboasshole, he caught me up in that. I'm kind of confused how it's a conflict of interest in any way that matters? Like... ultimately the money has to come from users and he has no way to make that happen just because of his position at Kickstarter really? Like, I suppose he could mark it as a "Project We Love" to give it more prominence, but it's already a brand that has prominence and engagement so the algorithm does its own thing with it and he hasn't marked it as such a project. Like... what is he doing that's unfair in your mind?
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Apr 23, 2020 01:37
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Heliotrope posted:Poison'd is a game where you play a crew of pirates whose captain has just died from being poisoned by an assassin sent by the king. One of the stats you have is Devil, which is based on how many sins you've committed - rape being one of them. There's also Brutality, which is based on terrible things that you've gone through - again, rape being one of them. In play, if you commit a new sin or suffer through a hardship you haven't gone through before, you increase those stats by 1. There's no rules for specifically doing it, but it can easily come up in play. I believe that's what Jimbozig means. And at least in the original, it was explicitly in the text as a thing your character might do or have done to them. And people were mad about that, and it's not hard to see why.
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Apr 23, 2020 02:02
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Sarx posted:I'm kind of confused how it's a conflict of interest in any way that matters? Like... ultimately the money has to come from users and he has no way to make that happen just because of his position at Kickstarter really? Like, I suppose he could mark it as a "Project We Love" to give it more prominence, but it's already a brand that has prominence and engagement so the algorithm does its own thing with it and he hasn't marked it as such a project. Like... what is he doing that's unfair in your mind?
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Apr 23, 2020 02:15
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Helical Nightmares posted:Depends on the time setting you want. Sounds cool. I'll see if I can sell that to a group when one of my current games wraps up. I have no problem with horror or mythos games generally, Delta Green is great, it's CoC I've repeatedly bounced off and I'm prepared to believe that this has a lot to do with the baggage that players (self included) bring to that game specifically. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 03:00 on Apr 23, 2020 |
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Apr 23, 2020 02:58
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In the final days of a Torchbearer campaign right now, and I can say that the game sits squarely in the middle (for me) between "respect" and "fun". As in, I respect the hell out of the game, and I don't particularly enjoy it.
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Apr 23, 2020 03:49
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Helical Nightmares posted:Since we are discussing Call of Cthulhu adventures, I have to recommend Stealing Cthulhu for all aspiring Cthulhu Keepers out there. Can you explain a little more of this? I actually think lovecraft is kinda a poo poo writer, so I'm curious to know what's being stolen here.
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Apr 23, 2020 03:53
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CitizenKeen posted:In the final days of a Torchbearer campaign right now, and I can say that the game sits squarely in the middle (for me) between "respect" and "fun". As in, I respect the hell out of the game, and I don't particularly enjoy it. It's totally a niche inside of a niche inside of a niche genre. I'll defend the game to hell and back cause I love it, but if you don't want what it's selling you will have a very bad time. If you want to talk about how its mechanics could better serve its intention we can talk (I have criticisms!), but if the argument is not liking that style of play I kind of just have to shrug. (I'm not even one of those OSR Fantasy frikken Vietnam The Things They Carried But With Orcs guys and I just like the system and the kind of play it leads to. I think about it the same way I think about The Descent which is one of my favorite movies ; yeah, I love it but I know it's not for everyone, we can talk about it and critique it both as an example of executing its genre and how that genre isn't for everyone, it's a fertile topic.)
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Apr 23, 2020 03:59
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Elector_Nerdlingen posted:Spirit Of The Century: ramped an (anachronistic, yes) kettenkrad into a zeppelin and did not stick the landing. Yeah, it honestly bummed me out.
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Apr 23, 2020 04:07
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On favorite-PC-deaths chat, my group has a science-fantasy setting we’ve revisited at different points in its timeline, some of which are substantially after the time of the original campaign. My original character was the gentle, pacifistic voice of reason for his older brother (and fellow PC), a well-meaning but hot-headed and aggressive warrior who eventually pulls a Genghis Khan and imposes a new world order on the setting, becoming functionally immortal in the process. Although we haven’t seen it happen on-screen, we know that my brother eventually leaves our homeworld in self-imposed exile, departing on the first starship to escape the planet and go in search of the other lost colonies of Earth. By this time my gentle-souled pacifist has passed away, but my brother has preserved his mind in the crystalline matrix of that first ship, so that he can always have the one person who understands him and loves him unconditionally by his side, forever. I find this both incredibly sweet and heartwarming, and powerfully disturbing, which kind of sums up that whole campaign.
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Apr 23, 2020 07:37
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mango sentinel posted:Can you explain a little more of this? I actually think lovecraft is kinda a poo poo writer, so I'm curious to know what's being stolen here. Essentially it's more about story structure, inexplicable-ness, and changing the way the PCs interact with the story in ways that AREN'T Call of Cthulhu bog standard. There's also a lot of elements of changing and removing the familiar, focusing your game on one element/creature/thing, and completely altering the mythos itself in very exciting ways. I honestly recommend it even if you DON'T like Lovecraft himself because the ideas are so applicable I once used them to write a short story with zero RPG elements. It's good stuff!
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Apr 23, 2020 09:32
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