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Splicer posted:Are we at the 4.5 wishlist part of the cycle again? Because if so, cutting down on the number of combat powers you pick up is a big one. As well as building "OK so here's this power but for paragon/epic tier" into the powers themselves instead of having three different powers per power. Slimnoid posted:Mostly the same for me, but I'd go further by removing feats entirely (gently caress'em) and remove a lot of dailies off magic items. Really trim the fat off it.
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May 5, 2020 07:23
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Joe Slowboat posted:Hey, I’m trying to help an internet friend find a low-crunch system for playing a bunch of Greek-ish mythological heroes bouncing around like the Argonauts but with kinda high comedy action adventure style. I actually made a BitD hack for exactly this, since blade characters are ridiculously tanky. I replaced stress thematically with the favour of the gods, and if Zeus was helping out his offspring too much (overindulging), Poseidon would get grumpy and cause trouble. I'd be happy to share if you're interested!
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May 5, 2020 07:44
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Captain Theron posted:I actually made a BitD hack for exactly this, since blade characters are ridiculously tanky. I replaced stress thematically with the favour of the gods, and if Zeus was helping out his offspring too much (overindulging), Poseidon would get grumpy and cause trouble. I'd be happy to share if you're interested! Sure! That would be great, though the friend in question may have started already.
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May 5, 2020 07:51
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theironjef posted:I don't think think this story reads the way you thought it was going to. e: For a little more context the GM and the Wizard were the only really experienced players, so a lot of it was a culture clash between the wizard playing the system as it actually works vs the rest of us going "Yes but what if this barn is a monster in disguise" and "I'll solo the troll, it's OK I've got a big sword, please stop summoning badgers to help." e2: typing this up reminded me that we had a rogue who would steal part of every loot haul and OOC say we couldn't do anything about it because we didn't see it happen IC, and a true neutral character who interpreted that to mean having no opinions on anything Splicer fucked around with this message at 11:58 on May 5, 2020 |
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May 5, 2020 11:39
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Splicer posted:and a true neutral character who interpreted that to mean having no opinions on anything 
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May 5, 2020 14:43
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Leperflesh posted:They were punishing the player for what his chosen character class's mechanics strongly pushed him to do: turn a one-time-use item into an anytime-we-need-it spell. Why would you want your party member to do that? Why would you want a player to use their character class's mechanics? gently caress that guy! Because they're playing a wizard and do not deserve any respect.
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May 5, 2020 15:37
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Joe Slowboat posted:Sure! That would be great, though the friend in question may have started already. https://drive.google.com/open?id=1XrqUyJXlL6LvzTFZ95Iq4-cgKWEPns5s
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May 5, 2020 15:44
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Humbug Scoolbus posted:Because they're playing a wizard and do not deserve any respect. "Punishment" is a bad tool for a DM to use, because leisure time shouldn't resemble a particularly bad job, EXCEPT when talking about D&D Wizards, who are all clearly begging for a swirlie.
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May 5, 2020 15:44
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That is every bad first D&D experience. The one player who knows the system playing an overpowered class? The thief stealing from the party? The fighter thinking they could do poo poo? Someone being an idiot about alignment? All the classics.
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May 5, 2020 18:31
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Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:How crunchy do you want to go, and what kind of cyberpunk do you want: corporations and urban decay and grey legality, like Shadowrun (which, if crunch is your problem, bad news, though Shadowrun: Anarchy is rules-lighter), or "it's the future and it just kind of sucks," which could span a ton of things, even something like Fragged Empire? I'm not familiar with Worlds of Android, but it looks like it supports limited spacefaring and is heavy on corporation bullshit, and if you reskin the race options (or restrict which ones people have access to), you could probably get your way there with a rules-y-but-not-too-dense-or-fiddly setup. Honestly I'm still trying to find a good system to use for Cyberpunk stuff that is of my preferred crunch level and I still have yet to find anything that fits particularly well Slimnoid posted:Gamma World 7e relegated dailies to items, which were supposed to be consumed regularly as you'd keep finding more of them and were meant to cycle through stuff as you burned through them. One-use items seem a better place for the dailies concept. Yeah that game did a lot of things right, and probably makes the best base if one wanted to try to do an actually good* "4.5" or "4e Version 2" *I like Strike! but it probably diverges a bit too far to really count here dwarf74 posted:Apropos of nothing, here's the basic format I came up with. It worked wonderfully, and imo it's as clean as is possible for 4e, but still Neat
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May 5, 2020 18:56
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Iron Jef doing Smallville? Why yes, that sounds delightful.
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May 5, 2020 19:34
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Splicer posted:a true neutral character who interpreted that to mean having no opinions on anything I'm not sure if I'm more annoyed by people with that interpretation, or the ones who think that true neutral means they can eat babies as long as they also donate to charity.
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May 5, 2020 19:36
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senrath posted:I'm not sure if I'm more annoyed by people with that interpretation, or the ones who think that true neutral means they can eat babies as long as they also donate to charity.
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May 5, 2020 20:28
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Captain Theron posted:Here you go, hopefully it is of some use, even if only to show that there are more options than 5e Thanks! I’ll put it in front of them.
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May 5, 2020 20:47
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senrath posted:I'm not sure if I'm more annoyed by people with that interpretation, or the ones who think that true neutral means they can eat babies as long as they also donate to charity. Imagine Desert Bus for Charity, but instead of playing a lovely video game every $100 donated means they eat another baby. Truly, the most neutral thing in the world. I am 100% stealing this idea next time I play DnD.
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May 5, 2020 21:57
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Humbug Scoolbus posted:Because they're playing a wizard and do not deserve any respect. Back in the pre-world-wide-web days, most of us didn't really understand that the game was unbalanced, or even that game balance was a thing to strive for, and certainly not that it was imbalanced in favor of wizards, you know, the guy who gets a single casting of Magic Missile per day and then has to make do with just a dagger, no armor, and fewer hit points than a house cat. We were pre-traumatized by trying over and over to roll a bard in AD&D, or realizing that our elf was simply never going to level up because of how many XP that class needed to level up. So making the guy trying to turn scrolls into reusable spells feel bad would be like yelling at the ranger for spending time in between adventures trying to make some more arrows so they'll stop running out after the second encounter.
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May 5, 2020 22:08
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bbcisdabomb posted:Imagine Desert Bus for Charity, but instead of playing a lovely video game every $100 donated means they eat another baby. Truly, the most neutral thing in the world.
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May 5, 2020 22:12
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Leperflesh posted:Back in the pre-world-wide-web days, most of us didn't really understand that the game was unbalanced, or even that game balance was a thing to strive for, and certainly not that it was imbalanced in favor of wizards, you know, the guy who gets a single casting of Magic Missile per day and then has to make do with just a dagger, no armor, and fewer hit points than a house cat. My group back in the 70s absolutely knew the game was unbalanced and we were cool with it because it was a game; not art or brain surgery and busting on other players was part of that. As long as everybody was having fun nobody really cared. I generally still don't play spellcasters because I enjoy fighters more.
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May 6, 2020 00:01
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The fact that it's a game is why games should make at least an attempt at balance.
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May 6, 2020 00:09
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Jimbozig posted:That is every bad first D&D experience. It's missing sex weirdos
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May 6, 2020 00:30
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senrath posted:I'm not sure if I'm more annoyed by people with that interpretation, or the ones who think that true neutral means they can eat babies as long as they also donate to charity. If there was any single bit of legacy that 2nd edition could really be said to have it would be that whoever wrote the alignment descriptions in that one book hosed over what everyone thought about alignments for the rest of time. True Neutral got described as "Will change sides mid battle because one side is losing too much." Chaotic Neutral's stupid "Would jump off a bridge on the flip of a coin" was born there.
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May 6, 2020 01:53
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The whole description of how one party member of each alignment handles the big battle they fight and the treasure sharing after is godawful.
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May 6, 2020 02:22
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"Hey man, I'm just playing my alignment."
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May 6, 2020 03:14
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Coolness Averted posted:It's missing sex weirdos Aww god dammit
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May 6, 2020 12:26
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Splicer posted:If you can't spot the sex weirdo you are the sex weirdo
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May 6, 2020 14:27
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 New blog post for The Next Project (my D&D-inspired RPG) is now live!Last post talked the new setup for class customization, and how those options are linked to Power Sources (Arcane, Divine, Martial, Primal, Shadow) In this new post, we're outlining which classes have access to each power source, and how that impacts the broader designs, going forward. I also talk a bit about the timeframe I'm thinking of for getting a new draft of the rules cranked out. As always, if you have any ideas/comments/suggestions, all somethingawful forum goons are welcome to join the TNP Discord server, so feel free to hit me up over there if you'd like 
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May 6, 2020 16:07
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Night10194 posted:The fact that it's a game is why games should make at least an attempt at balance. The wargames that inspired the rules parts of D&D - the stuff Gygax did, basically - were about simulating actual battles, not finding balance. The "balance" was that typically you'd play out the game and then switch sides and play it out again, to see if this time the army with the severe disadvantage could do a bit better. The family boardgames I was playing before I started playing D&D were poo poo for balance and rules in general, too. There might have been discussions in game magazines about balance, but I didn't get or read game magazines. It just wasn't a thing I considered as a teenager or even in my early 20s really. Fairness was considered, but that's not quite the same thing; it was clear to even 18-year-old Leper that rolling for stats was "unfair" because someone got to have a better character than someone else. So we switched to other methods, typically. Homebrew and rules adjustments were extremely normal for most RPGers in the early to mid 80s, I'm sure. But "balance" in the sense that every player's character ought to be in a very closely confined band of power and capability, across different game situations? That had never been in the game before and I, and my friends, didn't think to question why not or whether such a thing was possible. We simply understood that it was better to be an AD&D bard than to be an AD&D thief, fudged our rolls or got our dumb 5-HP thief killed, and then rolled up a new guy when we could. That was just the way we assumed RPGs worked. The fiction touchstones we referenced worked the same way, usually there was a protagonist and then supporting characters. If you played Monopoly, someone got the green block and someone was stuck with poo poo, and the guy with the good property won the game, that's the game. Humbug Scoolbus posted:My group back in the 70s absolutely knew the game was unbalanced and we were cool with it because it was a game; not art or brain surgery and busting on other players was part of that. As long as everybody was having fun nobody really cared. I generally still don't play spellcasters because I enjoy fighters more. I suspect you're 10 or 20 years older than me. Did you figure out the imbalance in the game just as a group, or did you pick up stuff like in game magazine letters and editorial pages, or what? I'm curious I guess, because this is so different from my experience, but I first played D&D as a ~12 year old in ~1987.
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May 6, 2020 18:51
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Hi chat thread i just wanted to pop in and see what's good since I saw the RPG Philosophy thread and went "neat" and was reminded TG is a pretty okay place. How has the preliminary read on Flying Circus been? I picked it up and started flipping through it but it's unlikely I'll get the chance to play any time soon. Good? Bad?
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May 6, 2020 21:37
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While the game isn't without its flaws (many of which we're hoping to see fixes for in the upcoming 1.1 release), the game is Very Crunchy but Very Good. It's a solid representation of WWI-era air combat reflavored with a magical background and some interesting twists. The moves are clearly triggered, evocative, and follow naturally from one to the other. I really enjoy the quantum-state design and stress mechanics. We have a thread by Erika herself if you want to know more.
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May 6, 2020 21:53
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Zounds, there WAS a thread! I coulda sworn I looked and didn't find one. I like Crunchy, and also Very Good, so that's quite favorable. I'll check it out.
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May 6, 2020 21:57
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I picked up Flying Circus last night while high, and reading it makes me feel like I'm reading Exalted. (It's nothing like Exalted.) I don't think I want to play Flying Circus, but I really, really want to want to play Flying Circus.
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May 6, 2020 23:04
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I'd love to play Flying Circus but I'm definitely not fluent enough in the crunch (or how air combat works) to run it. I'm trying to implement some macros and stuff in Astral as a way of getting my head around how some of the moves work in practice.
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May 7, 2020 00:18
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Yeah, right now I'm simultaneously intrigued and intimidated by Flying Circus. "Want to want to play" is a good descriptor.
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May 7, 2020 02:06
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Has anyone played Torchbearer? My brother was talking about it and I've never heard of it before.
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May 7, 2020 04:15
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I'm a total Torchbearer stan. It's all about doing gritty dungeon-delving fantasy vietnam stuff but with a system that doesn't make that a clunky mess. My go to description is "would you like to play The Things They Carried but with goblins?" It's pretty divisive, but I think everyone who doesn't like it mostly admits that they might have problems in the execution, it's most just not wanting to do what the game is shooting for. If that's the kind of game you're looking for, it does exactly what it says it's going to do. And it's not gross-rear end OSR/LotFP/Carcosa poo poo.
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May 7, 2020 04:53
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I ran a campaign and several one offs. Loved it but it's laser-focused on a specific narrative - the mechanics fall over rapidly if you want to start doing town adventures or settling down or anything like that. On the other hand for episodic dungeon crawling in the deep it's great. I used the various TB adventures, Stonehell, and a stack of one-page dungeons from those competitions as dungeon resources and maps as treasure.
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May 7, 2020 04:58
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https://itch.io/s/28456/plagueworld-2020-bundle The Eldritch Tomb's home state of Arkansas has extended the state of emergency for 45 more days. Thus, PLAGUEWORLD 2020 is extended for 45 more days. Good chance to grab two full games and a li'l adventure written by one whole me!
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May 7, 2020 06:52
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Antivehicular posted:Yeah, right now I'm simultaneously intrigued and intimidated by Flying Circus. "Want to want to play" is a good descriptor. CitizenKeen posted:I picked up Flying Circus last night while high, and reading it makes me feel like I'm reading Exalted. (It's nothing like Exalted.) I don't think I want to play Flying Circus, but I really, really want to want to play Flying Circus. BinaryDoubts posted:I'd love to play Flying Circus but I'm definitely not fluent enough in the crunch (or how air combat works) to run it. I'm trying to implement some macros and stuff in Astral as a way of getting my head around how some of the moves work in practice. This sort of stuff really makes me want to put together an actual play so I can show how it works in action...
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May 7, 2020 07:12
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There's also my weird side-gig that started as a joke and is now just Indie Games the Quarantine Away : https://discord.com/channels/703804704328777789/703804704328777793 (This isn't actually a self plug because if anything I'm looking for other people to mod this. I have no desire for power and just made this to run one game and now there's like 4 and growing.)
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May 7, 2020 07:16
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open_sketchbook posted:This sort of stuff really makes me want to put together an actual play so I can show how it works in action... I'd appreciate this! I've been reading the PbP that's being run in the Game Room right now, and it's good stuff, but having a more hand-hold-y version that goes through the mechanics directly would be extremely useful for me. I don't tend to intuitively grasp crunchy systems well.
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May 7, 2020 07:37
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