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Things seem to have calmed down somewhat, but I still want to show some appreciation for this thread: Thank you all for all those entries about all those games. Almost everything I learned about the hobby outside of the big systems I know from here, and all those viewpoints from the smaller games and the discussions about what works and what doesn't legit made me a better GM. (Not to mention my group plays a homebrew system right know that wouldn't be the same without all the insight of this thread.) You all rock.
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Jun 27, 2020 07:07
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ESOTERIC ENTERPRISES PART 3: BASE RULES I assure you, they’re quite base. This section starts by explaining some of the stuff that just landed on your character sheet in the last chapter. First, your ability scores. Esoteric Enterprises, Page 34 posted:You have six attributes; strength, dexterity, constitution, intelligence, wisdom, and charisma. Each attribute starts with a rating between 3 and 18, with 3 being barely functional (3 dexterity is hardly able to move), and 18 being the peak of mortal capability. Attributes may fall below this value, or rise higher, based on events in play. FLESH AND GRIT You know how people debate whether HP in RPGs is “meat points” vs “not getting hit points”? Flesh is meat points and Grit is not getting hit points. Most damage targets your Grit first. When you run out of Grit, the damage rolls over to Flesh. When you run out of that, you start taking Horrible Wounds. Grit recovers quickly, as long as you have a single point of it you can get the whole pile back with just a ten minute rest. Flesh is slower to heal. You can recover it with magical healing or medical care from a doctor, but absent that it returns at a rate between one and three per day, depending on the conditions you find yourself in. Remember when I said the game made some positive changes from Lamentations? This is one of them. Good mechanic. TIME Going to let the game take point on this one, because this is important distinction. Esoteric Enterprises, Page 34 posted:During combat, time is measured in combat rounds, each lasting six seconds. During exploration over the course of the day, time is measured in exploration turns, each ten minutes long. Rounds vs turns. Remember it! DOING THINGS Where the game explains its core mechanics. We start with an admonition to not use dice rolls for anything and everything, reserving them only for cases where the result is both uncertain and interesting. Wherever possible, let the players get away with things by coming up with clever plans and describing their actions in a way that makes sense given the situation, rather than having to roll every time. I broadly agree with these instructions. Keep them in mind when you see how the game uses its own systems later. Now on to the mechanics themselves.  SKILLS Skills are rolled on a D6 versus a static target number equal to the skill value of the character attempting them. If you’ve got a 2 in 6 in Athletics, you succeed if you roll a 1 or 2. If you’ve got a 0 in 6 in a skill, you roll 2D6 and have to get 1 on both. If you’ve got a 6 in 6 in a skill, you roll 2D6 and can only fail if you roll 6 on both. This means that the average character will have a truly miserable chance to do anything that requires a skill roll. That’s fine if the rules let you find alternate solutions, right? Right.... Anyway, you’ve got these skills here:
The book doesn’t instruct you on whether characters are all supposed to be making their own skill rolls, or whether you’re supposed to take the highest, lowest, etc. There are cases where it’s obvious, like Drive is the person driving the car. Does everyone in a room get a Perception test to notice something? Does everyone need to roll Stealth to hide? There are examples that get addressed later on a case-by-case basis, but no general rule. SAVING THROWS Ah, saving throws. Roll a D20 and get over the number on your sheet for the thing the DM tells you to save against. The numbers get lower as you level up. Let’s let the game explain what each of the saves do. Esoteric Enterprises, Page 37 posted:Saves against stunning are used to resist things that prevent the character from being able to act due to overwhelming stimulus. Electric shocks, extreme cold, crippling pain, and sudden terror are good examples of the sort of thing that a Save vs Stunning might resist. They are modified by Constitution. ATTRIBUTE ROLLS What? Esoteric Enterprises, Page 37 posted:Attribute rolls are a catch-all system for when an action comes down to chance but isn‘t covered by a skill roll, a save, or attacking. Using the attribute which most fits the task in hand, roll a d20; if the result is equal to or less than the attribute, the task succeeds. ATTACK ROLLS Roll a D20 and add your STR modifier for hand to hand fighting, or your DEX modifier for ranged attacks. If you get equal or better than the target’s armor class (AC) you hit and deal damage. Easy. Let’s stop for a second and count the different resolution mechanics we’ve just been taught. How do I…
Four different systems. Some of them roll-over, some roll-under. Game designers, please, don’t do this! Modern incarnations of the D20 system are far from perfect, but there’s a certain appeal to using the same die-plus-modifier-versus-target-number system for everything. Alright, enough kvetching (for now), here’s something I actually like. ENCUMBRANCE This section starts with a descriptive text taken straight out of Lamentations. Esoteric Enterprises, Page 38 posted:Ideally, players would calculate the weight of all gear they carry and compare this to a weight limit to determine how much they can carry. In practice, nobody ever does this, so a simplified system is offered.  Punitive? Yes, absolutely. But it forces actual tradeoffs between better items that weigh more, and stuff that weighs less but gets the job done. The skill penalties mean your already garbage athletics and stealth are going to be nonexistent at the first encumbrance level. Which is overly strict, but those means nobody has to worry about those movement rates on the left. Which don’t really have any effect on gameplay because the dungeons the game’s generator creates aren’t built using a consistent ground scale anyway. Could this system be further fine tuned? Yes, absolutely. But I’ve been consistently surprised at how seriously the players take it, and how well they self police (because I’m sure as hell not auditing their inventories). GAINING EXPERIENCE How do I stop being a fragile Level 1 shitkid with a 5 in 6 chance to trip over my own dick? By leveling up. How do I level up? By collecting experience points. How do I collect experience points? By getting paid, son. 1 XP for 1 dollar, or whatever the base unit of currency is in your country. The game uses treasure-for-XP, which a lot of games in this genre do. You’re a criminal and you’re here to get paid, everything else is ancillary. XP is divided equally among the party, which is a natural balancing mechanism as old as D&D itself. The fewer people you bring, the tougher things will be, but the bigger your share. The XP advancement tables for the classes are copied from Lamentations, which are taken from some version of basic D&D. The difference is that the original game combined these advancement tables with extremely generous treasure tables. Esoteric Enterprises is much stingier, but still uses the same XP numbers. The result is advancement is absolutely glacial by rules-as-written. I think this might be deliberate, since a lot of grog gamers think the first level experience is the best part of the game. Which might be true, but then why have the huge tables of levels nobody will ever reach? I think it comes down to the mechanical part of the game not really being a huge focus for the author. Just port it over from Lamentations and call it good. We’ve got random tables to fill out, dammit! I like the treasure for XP model. It reinforces the game’s themes and takes the focus off killing things (though the game has a robust body looting system). The downside is that, combined with the game’s lethality, the players will pass on things that look dangerous and not immediately profitable. Which is smart, but not always a ton of fun. HORRIBLE WOUNDS OSR type games will now generally replace death at 0 HP with a death and dismemberment result at 0 HP. You look at the table and see what awful thing happened to your character. Stops you from getting oneshot by the first monster, applies more interesting consequences than just “make a new character” and encourages you to stop adventuring when you get into the danger zone.  Esoteric Enterprises has six horrible wounds tables for you to roll on when you get to 0 Flesh, based on the type of damage that did the deed. There’s ballistics, ripping, bludgeoning, burning, shocking and poisoning tables. All full of results ranging from temporary to permanent injury, to delayed death, to guaranteed delayed death, to instant death. How do the tables work in practice? They’re a mixed bag, with a couple problems that prevent them from living up to their full potential. First of all, take a look at this line here for how to use the table Esoteric Enterprises, Page 41 posted:When damage reduces you to 0 flesh or less, or you take any damage when you already had no flesh, look at the exact amount of damage dealt and get a result from the list below. It doesn't matter how far 'into the negatives' you are, just look at the result of the dice. Second, maybe a third of the table results inflict the “bleeding out” condition. What does this mean? Esoteric Enterprises, Page 41 posted:A character who starts bleeding out can survive for as many rounds as they have hit-dice, adjusted by their Constitution modifier. For example, a first level character (who therefore has two hit dice) with +2 constitution bleeds to death in 4 rounds. I like the horrible wounds tables. I think they’re both flavorful and an interesting way to soften the impact of rolling a character with like 3 total HP. But these two problems stop them living up to their full potential. ACTIVITIES AND PROBLEMS I’ll throw this section in since we can breeze through most of it and hit the highlights. Characters take no penalties for ageing until they reach 80, then everything except Charisma is halved. Ability score damage can be healed by anything that heals Flesh, though the player must choose to forego the Flesh healing in exchange for recovering the same number of ability score points. There’s also stuff that can permanently reduce your scores. Items break whenever the DM feels it makes sense, but the most likely circumstance is when the character rolls a critical failure while trying to do something. It’s more likely for equipment to be damaged than to break, with further damage causing it to stop working. We’ll meet some monsters, dungeon hazards and magic later that also damage equipment. Cave ins deal 2D6 damage and may require a Save vs Hazards to avoid being trapped in the rubble. Climbing difficult things takes an Athletics roll. Something I didn’t notice when I first read this section is that you actually get a second Athletics roll to avoid falling if you fail the first, softening the blow somewhat. Disguise is usually a matter of having the right costume and acting like you belong there. You only have to roll Charm under close inspection or when entering a secure area. Locked doors can be opened by picking them or forcing them open. Interestingly, Technology is the lockpicking skill in Esoteric Enterprises, rather than Stealth. Forcing a door open uses Vandalism, with bonuses depending on the method applied. If you try to Vandalize a door and fail, you can only try again with a higher Vandalism score, or with tools that do more damage (upgrading from your hands to a crowbar, and from a crowbar to a breaching charge). Electricity deals between 1 and 3D6 damage, and if you fail a Save vs Stunning you get stuck to the source of the damage and shocked again next round, and so on. Falling deals 1D6 damage for every 10 feet. This was higher in my head, but I think I’m confusing it with the falling rules for Delta Green (which are some of the deadliest rules in the game, next to car accidents) Taking fire damage requires a Save vs Hazards. Failure means you catch fire, and have to make another Save to avoid the fire getting worse, increasing from a D4 up to a D8 per turn. You’re supposed to roll for breakage every three hours to see if the batteries in the flashlights go out, reflecting how grog games always want you to track torches in the dungeon. If you get stuck in complete darkness with no way to see, you get a -3 penalty to all your D20 rolls, a -1 penalty to all your skills, and you essentially treat all failures as critical failures. There’s a lot of debate in OSR games about what actually happens when you run out of light, whether you have to painstakingly narrate the players feeling their way along the walls, whether you just kill them instantly (eaten by a grue). I think this numeric penalty is a good compromise, since it strongly discourages adventuring in the dark without being a total pain in the rear end to adjudicate. Hacking computers takes a Technology roll. The book encourages the DM to call for additional Technology rolls for different steps of the process. This is what the Alexandrian calls “rolling for failure” - when the guy with the already-obscure skill has to keep rolling it and rolling it because the DM considers each step of the task worthy of its own mechanical interaction, until they inevitably fail. On the other hand, the only people attempting to hack anything will probably be 6 in 6 Technology criminals, who have a 35/36 chance of success. The game has no sanity system, damage to the integrity of the mind is reflected by damage to the mental ability scores, which may be recoverable or permanent. There’s a paragraph about what happens if a character gets permanently transformed, such as by a magical disease like lycanthropy or vampirism. If you get transformed into an unintelligent animal, game over. If you become something intelligent, you change your character class to Spook and gain whatever powers and traits the thing you transformed into has. Narcotics inflict temporary penalties to your mental ability scores, and you risk getting addicted if you regularly use them and fail a Save vs Poison. Why would you use narcotics? Painkillers instantly restore one hit die of grit per dose, and hallucinogens give you a +3 to your Save vs Magic. Later we’ll encounter some magical drugs that have more interesting properties. Poison and Disease do bad things when you fail a Save vs Poison, getting progressively worse on failed saves and going away after you make enough successful ones. We’ll encounter some interesting diseases later on when we hit the DM section. Swimming is easy unless you’re heavily encumbered or in rough waters, then you need to make an Athletics test. Fail that, and you need to make another Athletics test with a penalty. The penalties get progressively worse. You get CON/2 rounds of air in your lungs before you start taking D6 damage to flesh per-round from drowning. Torture inflicts temporary CHA damage, with the victim breaking and “answering” the question once they hit 0. Weird that they use Charisma as the attribute that resists interrogation, rather than Wisdom, which is the “willpower” stat everywhere else in the game. The book tells us that finding traps is an exercise in critical thinking and smart play, rather than rolling dice. A nice thought, except the rules text has already told us Perception is for locating traps, and will later give us an example of play where it’s used for locating traps. Disarming traps is done with the Technology skill, or by obvious stuff like ripping the power cable out of a gun turret.  What’s my overall read on the rules in Esoteric Enterprises? There are too many skills, too many saving throw categories, too many different resolution mechanics, and too much stuff just ported over from Lamentations. The game tells you to use your brain instead of your character sheet, then sets up a million special cases where you have to roll a specific skill to accomplish something. It can’t decide if it wants to be Basic D&D or World of Darkness. When I finish the review, I’ll go into the way I run the game, and the changes I’ve made to mitigate these problems. Join me next time, when we take a look at combat and downtime, along with whatever else I can fit in the post.
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Jun 27, 2020 18:39
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 The Outer Planes: The Nine Hells and Acheron The Nine Hells (Lawful Evil) tend to dominate mortal perceptions of the Lower Planes; their terrains are specifically hellish, the devils that live here tend to menace other planes in a broader and more organized fashion, and its infrastructure is much greater than that of planes belonging to the demons and daemons. Most of the plane’s inhabitants are lawful evil devils, but they do share levels with several lawful evil deities and monsters (some of which share names to deliberately cause confusion or reroute petitions). As a rule, any arch-devil that controls a significant chunk of a level counts as a Lesser Power, while the arch-devil dominating an entire level counts as a Great Power. All of them tend to follow one of three factions dominated by a leader and vague political platform; Asmodeus represents the status quo as the plane’s rough overlord, Baalzebul acts as an ambitious counterweight and Mephistopheles presents himself as a moderate. Of course, all of them actually just want power for themselves, but their struggle reflects the underlying paradox of power among devils; each firmly believes themself the best fit to rule the Nine Hells, but none of them trust each other enough to get the plane organized under any kind of hierarchy. They rarely pose any real threat to another plane, whatever its location, because they always prioritize ruling their home plane.  Each level/hell of the titular Nine Hells contains a deeply unpleasant environment stretching out infinitely, inhabited by a variety of devils ruled directly by archdevil Lesser Powers under the indirect control of a single Greater Power that dominates the level. While level rulers tend to be too powerful to challenge, their subordinates can be and are overthrown frequently and it’s at least theoretically possible to take over an entire level. Said Greater Powers tend to jealously control information flow to petitioners on the Prime Material Planes; if each had their way, their followers would think they controlled Hell on their own. They still have to deal with information leaks. The natives of a given level ignore that level’s environmental hazards, but not sources of similar damage; a devil on a hot plane won’t take heat damage from its surroundings but can be injured by fireballs and will take penalties if they go to another hot plane. Between that and the fact that portals between levels tend to be found at the bottom of ravines and either open up onto heavily defended mountaintops or half a mile in the air (  for mortal visitors), invasions mounted into other levels rarely succeed. That doesn’t stop them from fighting or attempting to attack Prime Materials with similar results, which leaves the Nine Hells riddled with passages into and out of many of those realms.
Once again, no Baatezu anything here, just devils. This will pay off in two updates.  This is supposed to be the Nine Hells, I think, but Acheron doesn’t have an illustration so this will have to do. Acheron (Lawful Evil) is the deadest of the Outer Planes; it has no native life, few permanent denizens, and visitors mostly interested in settling their differences before moving on. If forces from any two organizations want to fight it out, they usually send their soldiers here to duke it out. Aside from collections of souls who died fighting pointless wars (who gather into legions and try to destroy each other), it’s only if two sides can’t settle their arguments that anyone takes up permanent residence here; you can find the goblin and Orcish pantheons going at it on one of the largest blocks in Avalas. Speaking of which:
That was a boring plane. Oh well, now we’re done with the alignment planes outside of the one representing neutrality. Next time we both cover that and learn that Magic-Users in Vegas can use second-level spells. Counter: 47
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Jun 27, 2020 23:23
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2e Acheron is mostly updated by having some actual stuff going on, as well as a very few natives. It's still mostly a plane of pointless strife, however. 2e Baator mostly reshuffles the levels' themes a bit, and, of course, the Baatezu and Tanar'ri suddenly get the Blood War to distract them from trying to conquer the rest of reality.
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Jun 27, 2020 23:30
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Falconier111 posted:[*]Nessus requires even more
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Jun 27, 2020 23:31
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ESOTERIC ENTERPRISES PART 4: ENCOUNTERS, COMBAT, DOWNTIME AND MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS In 2020, I posted this: four. My most accomplished review yet. COMBAT AND ENCOUNTERS Remember when I said last post that whether everyone rolls skills or just one person is decided on a case by case basis throughout the book? Esoteric Enterprises, Page 52 posted:These rules refer to a party leader whose stats are used for various checks. This character will typically be the one coordinating their team-mates actions or else the one at the front of the marching order. It does not imply that the leader has any authority over the other PCs, merely that they’re taking point. SURPRISE The first thing to do when an encounter happens (random encounters and when/why they happen will be covered later) is check for surprise. The DM rolls Perception once for each side, using whichever character in the group’s skill is highest. If one side succeeds and the other fails, the winner detects the loser but the loser doesn’t detect the winner. The winner can decide if they want to avoid the encounter, hide, set an ambush, etc. If both sides succeed, they both become aware of the others’ presence. If they both fail, they run into each other and are both surprised. Since the game’s base perception score for both players and NPCs is 1 in 6, expect a lot of people to run into each other unexpectedly. Welcome to the Occult Underworld. There’s a paragraph on engagement distances. If you surprise the other guy, you have a chance to choose the engagement range, or creep closer using Stealth. If you both run into each other, the engagement distance is randomly determined if you’re above ground, or in the same room if you’re underground. REACTION ROLLS If it’s not immediately obvious how a group of NPCs you encounter would feel about the players, or what they would do, the DM rolls a D6 and adds/subtracts the party leader’s Charisma modifier. If the players are aware of the encounter and consciously trying to make a good impression, someone can make a Charm roll to add a positive modifier to the roll.  I like reaction rolls. I think they’re a good design and people misunderstand what they’re for. They exist so that every random encounter doesn’t immediately result in a gunfight, and the players don’t automatically get wiped when they encounter 2D6 elite cultists with machine guns or whatever. However, most games either use a larger die, or use 2D6 or something to generate the reaction roll. And they usually have a wider range of results than just hostile/unsure/friendly (though often the more granular results boil down to the same thing). Using a D6 means that if someone has good Charisma and a good charm score, it can be impossible to fail a reaction roll. That doesn’t mean you never get into fights, the reaction roll is only supposed to be used if it’s not obvious how the NPCs feel about the players. What I found is that reaction rolls were important early in the campaign, when the group was running into all the factions for the first time. They fell out of use later on, when they’d made friends and enemies in the underworld. Still, a use for your 6 in 6 Charm criminal. Make friends with all the creepy animals and gross wizards in the basement. INITIATIVE But let’s say the reaction roll went badly, or the dungeon dogs were hungry, or you started shooting before the death knight opened its mouth. The game uses group initiative, so roll a D6 and add the party leader’s DEX mod. Note that this makes the selection of the party leader an interesting choice, since both their DEX and CHA modifiers are used to determine outcomes for the party. Whoever rolled higher - the players or the monsters - goes first. Then the other side goes. I don’t like group initiative. It usually makes the first round of combat a curb stomp, which some people think is a feature but I don’t find very interesting. It also creates a specific out-of-character problem where I ask “ok did everyone go?”, hear no responses, and then start to narrate what the monsters do, only to have a player shout “WAIT! I haven’t gone yet”. Repeat depending on how many players weren’t listening. THINGS THAT CAN BE DONE IN A ROUND Combat is pretty simple. The action economy lets you move and do something, draw an item and do something, or just do something. Attacking is a D20+Modifiers roll versus the target’s armor class. In addition to the basic attack action, the game gives you a suite of combat maneuvers to choose from, which trade penalties for bonuses. Esoteric Enterprises, Page 54 posted:Go for the Kill There’s an action called covering fire, where you hold your action, but make a ranged attack against any target who moves in the open on their turn. You can target as many enemies in this fashion as you have hit-dice, so 2 for first level characters. Normally you need an automatic rifle to do covering fire, but Bodyguards and Mercenaries can do it with any firearm. Blast attacks don’t require a roll-to-hit, everyone in the radius just makes a Save vs Hazards to avoid damage. This makes grenades and flamethrowers a great choice for characters with garbage attributes. Wrestling is a quick and easy opposed D20+STR test, with some assorted modifiers for special circumstances. The winner can immobilize the loser or disarm them. If multiple people wrestle one person, roll for all of them and take the highest roll against the target’s one roll, applying a +1 per person. Wrestling rules because it ignores AC. Don’t bother trying to hit an armored target with your weapon, grapple them and kill them once they’re immobilized and helpless. Just like in real life. COMPLICATIONS IN COMBAT If you roll a 1 when using a firearm, it’s out of ammunition. You can’t use it again unless you have spare ammunition in your inventory. A lot of games have narrative ammunition rules and I think that’s a good shift, away from counting bullets. Cover gives either +3 or +6 versus ranged attacks, depending on how protective it is. This means that gunfights between two sides in cover get bogged down in ineffectual shooting pretty quickly. I’ve had this happen in-game and I consider it a feature rather than a bug. Don’t try to shoot someone behind cover, that’s what grenades are for. Shooting into melee gives you a -3 to your roll to hit. This encourages everyone to carry a hand-weapon so that they aren’t totally useless when the fighting gets close up. Finally, a very important rule that I’m going to bold: If you hit someone with a surprise attack, either from a failed Perception roll or from Stealth, the damage you deal ignores Grit and goes straight to Flesh. Why is this an important rule? Humans in Esoteric Enterprises never get more than a single die of Flesh. That means that an ambush is usually instantly lethal for the players, or for any human enemies they fight, no matter how powerful they are. On the other hand, there are also enemies that are all Flesh and no Grit, like Flesh Hulks and Shoggoths, which are totally pointless to ambush. Every player character in the game is a single failed Perception roll away from instant death. This is what I meant when I said earlier that the game is disingenuous, when it insists that you’re not supposed to be rolling skills all the time.  MORALE When NPCs take a beating, they roll morale. They do this when they lose half their numbers, or when a single tough NPC is reduced to half HP. They also might check morale when something scary they’re not used to happens, like when cavemen hear a gunshot for the first time, or when normal people see dangerous magic. Some things never check morale, like zombies or golems. A morale check is a D6, plus the party leader’s Charisma modifier.  Again, this is the kind of thing most games in the genre do with 2D6. If the player leading the party has a +2 Charisma modifier, it’s impossible for the enemy to pass morale. Player characters never have to check morale, it’s up to them if they want to keep fighting hopeless battles. FLEEING AND PURSUIT When someone wants to run away, you transition from the combat rules to the pursuit rules. First, everyone in hand to hand combat with a fleeing character gets a free attack against them. Then the actual pursuit begins. In the game’s own words, the first step is to eyeball whether one side is obviously faster than the other, making the pursuit a foregone conclusion. This would be a good use for those movement speeds we saw on the encumbrance table in the last section. Except for one problem: none of the NPCs or monsters in the book have movement speeds listed. So what happens when neither side has an obvious advantage? You make an Athletics roll. You roll your 1 in 6 chance to get away, and the other guy rolls his 1 in 6 (most NPCs don’t have an Athletics score) chance to catch you. This makes running away a comedy of errors, as one side stumbles and trips running away and the other side stumbles and trips trying to catch them. I do not like the pursuit rules. The free attack and the D6 roll versus your lovely Athletics score mean running away is a great way to get attacked over and over and fail to escape. This annoys me because the game’s player advice section specifically tells you to run away when a fight looks unwinnable. If standing and fighting requires a die roll, and running away requires an even less likely die roll, the players are going to stand and fight. (And note that this is yet another case where the game demands that you roll your lovely skill, which you were supposed to find a galaxy brain solution and avoid rolling) The funny thing is that this section is significantly dumbed down from the Lamentations rules, which had a robust system based on movement speed and the players enacting capers in order to fool or inconvenience their pursuers and get away.  DOWNTIME Downtime is used for two main purposes: recovering HP and shopping for items. Spellcasters might also use it to scribe scrolls or do other magical stuff, and Doctors might use it to do weird science. RESOURCES Every character in Esoteric Enterprises has a Resource Level. By default, that’s equal to the character’s level. Social traits bought at chargen can increase the resource level further, and Spooks don’t get additional resources from leveling up.  This… seems like something that should have been included in the chargen section. Anyway, the dollar amounts are a shorthand for what/how much stuff you can buy before you have to worry about impacting your budget. The game uses an abstracted wealth system, rather than counting dollars and cents. None of the items in the gear list have prices. If the players get a huge haul from a job, they might get a temporary boost to their resources score, but that’s it. I like abstracted wealth systems, most of the time. In this case, I think it was the wrong choice. We’re already counting dollars and cents for XP purposes, counting them for spending purposes isn’t a profound hardship. And I have another beef with how you actually use your resource level to acquire items. BUYING THINGS This section starts off by admonishing you that you don’t need game mechanics to buy basic stuff like food, or the internet connection in your house. Cool. Then we get into the mechanics for actually purchasing items. If you want to buy something, you first need to make a Contacts roll in order to find someone selling it. If you pass the Contacts roll, you then roll a D10 versus your resources level to see if you can afford it, trying to roll equal or lower. First of all, we’ve added yet ANOTHER resolution mechanic to the pile, D10 roll under. Couldn’t we just have had resource levels stop at 6? Second, how likely is the average first level character to be able to buy something? 1 in 6 in contacts times 1 in 10 in resources. A 1.7% chance to buy an item. Any item at all, be it a gas mask, a handful of caltrops, an automatic rifle, a grimoire or a pair of gloves. But wait. Esoteric Enterprises, Page 57 posted:With even a low Resources score, mundane equipment like spray-paint, cable-ties and so on can be purchased as well. The gear list does not have a tag “mundane item”. Thematically, I think I understand why the author set up the rules this way. You’re a hobo wizard who spends every spare nickel on cheap wine and magical child support payments. You’re lucky if you can scrape up enough money for a hotel stay, let alone a book of spells. In practice, these mechanics are extremely discouraging for the players. They risk their lives for money in the occult underworld, then the game tells them they don’t actually have the ability to spend that money on items. Until they hit level 2, all the cash they collected is worth jack poo poo after it becomes XP. You can also make Contacts and Resources rolls to find information, get clandestine medical treatment to cure horrible wounds, or get favors done. All with the same stellar chance of success as purchasing a pack of cigarettes. Unless that counts as a mundane item? There’s no way to be sure.  Whatever. Time to talk about a good mechanic. MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS This is the Doctor class’ other special ability. They can do two types of experimental medicine: Trivial and Risky. Either way, it takes a day of downtime and access to a laboratory, making that a good social advantage to pick if you roll a Doctor. Trivial medicine is mostly used to treat poison, disease, and the long term effects of horrible wounds. It takes a Medicine roll, meaning a doctor with a +1 INT modifier has a 35/36 chance to succeed. There’s a throwaway line about how you can transplant body parts, but a given body part harvested from a corpse has a random chance of being compatible with any given person. Which leads to doctors obsessively collecting body parts to maximize the likelihood of a match. But you didn’t become a doctor to reattach normal human limbs. You became a doctor so you could give people night vision by harvesting a fairy prince’s corneas, or acid spit by cutting up a dungeon dragon’s digestive glands. Risky medicine uses a Save vs Machines to determine whether the crazy procedure you’re undertaking succeeds, fails, or succeeds with horrible side effects. The Doctor’s save vs machines is pretty good, and is further improved by a good INT score, but there’s still a chance of repercussions here. The book is light on details about how exactly this should all work, but provides a list of sample consequences for failure. Esoteric Enterprises, Page 59 posted:• Organs being grafted in fail to take hold, and rapidly turn gangrenous. The area where the graft was going becomes useless; inconvenient for a leg, but potentially lethal (Save vs Poison or die, perhaps) when it’s the chest cavity or brain. Highlights from experimental medicine in my first campaign:
 Glad I could end this segment on a high note. Next post, we’ll go over the special powers available to the Spook class. Yup, we’re still working our way through chargen options. See you there. mellonbread fucked around with this message at 23:42 on Sep 23, 2021 |
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Jun 28, 2020 05:10
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mellonbread posted:The book doesn’t instruct you on whether characters are all supposed to be making their own skill rolls, or whether you’re supposed to take the highest, lowest, etc. There are cases where it’s obvious, like Drive is the person driving the car. Does everyone in a room get a Perception test to notice something? Does everyone need to roll Stealth to hide? There are examples that get addressed later on a case-by-case basis, but no general rule. I wish more games accounted for players being able to "lead" others at an action, like, say, Stealth, because having only one guy good at sneaking tends to mean that sneaking is almost always out unless you want to split the party a lot. Having some sort of explicit mechanics for leading/instructing others and thus letting them borrow your skill check(perhaps at an appropriate penalty) would be good, maybe even have it be something you could invest in being better at. Also, sometimes giving everyone a check at a thing makes it incredibly hard to gauge the probabilities. Like, I can effortlessly tell what the odds are of one guy rolling a D20 vs TN 15. But when four people are making the roll simultaneously and they all have somewhat different TN's, it's hard to adjust said TN's appropriately. On the other hand, if you go too hard on the "just the best guy rolls," then you end up with a situation where the more min/maxed party members are LITERALLY the only ones allowed to do things, and everyone else is just there for flavour text.
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Jun 28, 2020 08:39
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PurpleXVI posted:I wish more games accounted for players being able to "lead" others at an action, like, say, Stealth, because having only one guy good at sneaking tends to mean that sneaking is almost always out unless you want to split the party a lot. Having some sort of explicit mechanics for leading/instructing others and thus letting them borrow your skill check(perhaps at an appropriate penalty) would be good, maybe even have it be something you could invest in being better at. In theory you can negate the last issue by spreading skills out between characters in an organized manner, but nobody wants to do that so  The Outer Planes: the Plane of Concordant Opposition; Appendices 1-4 The Plane of Concordant Opposition may not even be an Outer Plane; it links up to the rest of them, sure, but it has no clear alignment and no dominant theme outside of neutrality. Which I guess actually is in alignment, so there you go. When you visit Concordant Opposition, you don’t see things as they actually are (relatively speaking); instead, everything has a different aesthetic for every visitor on different visits laid over the same key elements. The first time you enter the plane that aesthetic resembles the environment you most strongly identify with writ large – a trapper sees an endless mountain range, a shepherd sees rolling hills filled with illusory livestock that never thin out no matter how far they travel, a modron sees the spaces of Nirvana packed with gears beyond reasonable expectation – but it never looks the same the next time they enter and it doesn’t look the same even to people in the same party. You find the only exceptions in areas where gods or pantheons hold sway; they look however they want them to. And the plane is packed full of gods. Any deities that don’t identify with any alignment or hold themselves above petty alignment disputes make their homes here; the entire Celtic Pantheon, the Norns, the gods of lizardmen and mermen, and a whole jumble of human gods from other pantheons live here. The only god worth singling out is Bes, the Egyptian god of luck (and other things), because he’s very similar to the dwarven god of luck and no one’s ever seen them at the same party.  However, the plane sees a lot more divine visitors than just that, drawn to it as a neutral (  ) meeting ground – and not just because all causes of damage and healing have the minimum possible effect, or because of its portals, featureless, floating white circles that take users to the plane of their choice with a thought (the destination is decided by majority vote and majority chaotic groups have a chance of popping out in adjacent or opposite planes). See, unlike most planes, Concordant Opposition has a definite center, an endless spire shooting out of the ground; the closer you get to the spire, the less magic of any kind works. At 1000 miles out (where the portals sit), the very strongest spells lose their potency as ninth level/equivalent magic stops working; illusions of all kinds fail within 700 miles, poisons all stop working after 500, summoning doesn’t work after 400, and Power powers start to fade until chemical reactions stop a hundred miles away from the spire. No one’s ever gotten closer than that. Outer Planes notables like the place because you can head to about 200 miles out and hold markets or peace conferences there; while you can’t use magic of any kind, the natural toughness of divinities persists and magical items keep their opponents once removed from the area.The greatest tragedy of this plane? No Sigil. No barmy sods getting bobbed for their jink or berks telling Mercykillers to pike off before feeding the wyrm here. I know we’ve talked about the changes to Planescape over the years in the thread, but I promise these elements will all come home in the next post. The chapter ends with a brief section on other possible outer planes (they might exist, make them up if you want, there’s plenty to use here if you don’t) and, more importantly, a truly amazing picture of a genie. Look at this mystical motherfucker!  The book has four appendices, the first of which is the most interesting because it tells us how to make Prime Material Planes! The book presumes you know how your campaign’s Prime Material works, so it focuses on how to reach others and what you find when you get there. Travel between Prime Materials tends to be treacherous and requires a lot of to do safely. We’ve covered the details elsewhere. Once you get there, the book uses three factors to describe what a given Prime Material looks like, each ranked from 10 to -10 (with 0 describing the average DnD world):
 To create a Prime Material, you either pick the factors or role for each with a d10 and a D4 (evens mean positive, odds mean negative). Of course, without any kind of curve that means alternate Prime Materials tend to be highly inhospitable to visitors, but you take what you can get. The book describes 20th century Earth as 5,-4,5, which amusingly enough implies the readers of this thread can use magic if we try hard and believe in ourselves. The section ends with rules on how classes and races work in various Prime Materials (in negative Magical Factors inherently magical creatures save versus death or explode). Appendix 2 includes information on how to represent elementals and other creatures from the Inner Planes; they have immunities to the conditions they encounter on their home planes, come in different sizes, and have more varied aesthetics on the Elemental Planes then in the various paras and quasis. Also you get info on how to spin treasure tables for the main planes. Appendix 3 lists stats and info on Outer Planes creatures, especially the various einherjar (spirit warriors) and archons you might encounter, while appendix 4 details the relative abilities of Greater, Lesser, and Demi-Powers. While they vary a lot in the number, frequency, and breadth of their powers, suffice to say that they use magic like 20th, 15th, and 10th level spellcaster’s, respectively. The rest is just their spell lists. And that’s it. You get a subject index, a spell index, and the back cover. With all this stuff wrapped up, next post will be a review, evaluation, and final analysis of the Manual of the Planes. Final Count: 48
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Jun 28, 2020 18:53
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ESOTERIC ENTERPRISES PART 5: SPOOKS & THEIR POWERS It’s not a chapter about archaic racial slurs and CIA agents. It’s a list of supernatural origins and special powers for the game's monster character class.  At first level, a Spook gets a supernatural origin that gives them a set of special strengths and weaknesses. Then they get a single monstrous power. This powers may be randomly rolled, or selected by the player. Each power is tagged with a few “themes”. Each time the Spook levels up, they gain a new power, but the power chosen must share at least one theme with at least one of their existing powers. ORIGINS There are eight origins to choose from. Each comes with a D10 table of example powers for that origin, but the rules say you can combine any power with any origin if the DM is cool with it. Human Variant You get a free feat at first level. Wait no, poo poo, gently caress. You’re a human with a weird bloodline, strange mutation or other source of innate power. You get no special strengths or weaknesses, your base hit die is lowered to a D4 (the normal Spook gets a D6 HD) and your resources level increases normally as you level, like every other class. Construct You’re an artificial being. You might be a robot, a golem or some other animate object. You’re immune to poison and disease, don’t need to eat or breathe, don’t take damage from cold, and can’t bleed out. But you also can’t heal Flesh points via Medicine, and you always fail saves vs mind controlling effects because you were built to obey commands. Fairies You’re a magical creature created from the dreams of humanity. Maybe nice dreams, but probably not. You’re immune to poison and disease, don’t need to eat or drink, but take double damage from cold iron. The Ghostly You’re a ghost. You can’t interact with physical objects, except magic ones, or by using magic. You know infomorphs in Eclipse Phase? It’s like that. Not great. I’ve never seen anyone play a ghost. The Living “subterranean morlocks, aquatic piscine undines, yeti, bigfoot, animals living among humans in disguise or one of any number of similar creatures” with “no special rules traits”. Not sure why this is a category. Maybe so you could roll on a D8 instead of a D7 for your origin? Minerals Rock people from deep beneath the earth’s surface. Immune to poison, cold, suffocation disease and bleeding. Take double damage from electricity, which damages the delicate crystal matrices of their silicon brains. Move as though they were one encumbrance level slower than they actually are. Plants Dryads, fungus people, swamp things, etc. Immune to bleeding and suffocation, and produce enough oxygen for one other person. Take double damage from fire. The Undead Zombies, revanents, ghouls, vampires, etc. Immune to suffocation, cold, poison and disease. Take double damage from Holy or Blessed weapons. Can’t recover HP from Medicine, can’t recover more than 1 Flesh at a time from any source. I like most of these origins. If this wasn’t a grog race-as-class game, I’d want these to be templates any class could take - like a Mineral Mercenary or a Ghoul Mystic.  MONSTROUS POWERS There are a lot of these, so I’m going to hit the ones that seem most interesting, and skip over predictable stuff like talking to animals or breathing underwater. Achilles Heel Take half damage from normal sources, but bonus damage versus one specific thing. Ambush Surgeon If your attack deals damage to Flesh through a sneak attack, the target takes extra damage and begins Bleeding Out. See how THEY like it. Animal Shape You can transform into an animal and back whenever you want. Animate Body Parts Animate chunks of bodies, up to the size of a human arm. You can animate an infinite amount as long as you maintain your concentration. Blood Drinking Feed on living targets to restore your HP and make them Bleed Out Creature of the Night Get bonuses to all your rolls in darkness, and penalties in the light. I think this would have worked better as an origin package, since it’s a bit of a double edged sword. Deepen Shadows Boost the entire team’s Stealth by 1 Detach Body Parts Rip pieces of yourself off, control them remotely and reattach them. Face Thief Take on the physical appearance of anyone you’ve touched. Flesh Sculptor THE FLESH IS FLUID! IT CAN BE CHANGED, RESHAPED, REMADE! Also, it gives you a +2 to Medicine. Fluid Form Change your shape, fit into any space water can fit through, wrestle slightly better. Gullet Storage You’re a pelican. Hope it was worth taking this as your one power. Haunter Heal every time you scare someone, and give enemies a penalty to morale. Healing Stigmata Heal other people by transferring the damage to yourself. You can do the same with horrible wounds. Wonder how long you last doing that. Hoard Your resources level increases normally instead of staying at 1. You know, like if you took the human origin. I’m including this to show how lame some of these “powers” are. Hypnotism Reprogram people to do what you want with a long conversation and a Charm roll. Imbue Power Temporarily give something/something else one of your Spook powers. Don’t take this at level 1, obviously. Immune to… There’s one of these for fire and one for electricity. Inhuman Beauty Get +1 to Charm and reaction rolls. I’m including this to show how lame some of these “powers” are. Intoxicating Blood Like hypnotism, but you feed people your blood to activate it. Leech Vitality Inflict the Fatigued condition when you deal damage to an enemy’s Flesh. Fatigued is one of those things that sucks for a player character but means nothing to an NPC, since it governs healing grit from sleeping. Mad Insight Boosts Forensics and Translation, and lets you use the Visual Calculus skill from Disco Elysium. Would be great if this game was a murder mystery game, instead of a murder… game. Magical Prodigy +1 to your chance to read scrolls and activate blessings given by Mystics. You still can’t cast spells yourself. Memory Worm Erase yourself from the memory of people who encounter you. Poltergeist Lets a ghost interact with the physical world. Putrefy Destroy living tissue through necrosis. Deals constant damage to grappled targets. Rusting Touch You’re a rust monster. You can delete people’s items by hitting them. Shadow Tentacle You can create a tentacle that slaps people around and manipulates objects. It has 1 HP and dies if anyone shines light on it. Silent Gives bonuses to stealth when sound is a factor, as opposed to the one that just gives straight bonuses to stealth. Smell Magic Detect magic, but with your nose. Vanish Turn invisible. Only gives a +2 to Stealth, putting it roughly on par with the other abilities that also do that. War Form Turn into something that does more damage than your regular form, but lacks fine dexterity and the power of speech. Webs You can shoot webs.  How do I feel about the Spook abilities? I think most of them are useless, or at best not enough to build a character around. I skipped a lot that just give you a breath attack or claws or teeth or other stuff that’s mechanically less useful than just carrying a gun. There are a few that could be super interesting, and a whole lot that might be cool if you combine them. By rules as written, you’re going to be level one for a long, long time. Better pick something good at first level. I’ve had a few Spook characters in my two campaigns of Esoteric Enterprises, and only a couple who ever made it past level one. Not because the rest died in droves, it's an open table and a lot of people only ever do one session. Both of my successful Spooks took the fairy origin package. One took memory worm and some movement powers, the other took ambush surgeon and a couple stealth abilities. Both were fun characters who contributed a lot to the group. Up next: Spellcasting, Miscasting, basic Cults and the Spell List (if I can fit it all in the same post!) PurpleXVI posted:I wish more games accounted for players being able to "lead" others at an action, like, say, Stealth, because having only one guy good at sneaking tends to mean that sneaking is almost always out unless you want to split the party a lot. Having some sort of explicit mechanics for leading/instructing others and thus letting them borrow your skill check(perhaps at an appropriate penalty) would be good, maybe even have it be something you could invest in being better at. (I do think having the stealthiest character scout ahead is an interesting solution to the possibility of an ambush. By having a picket who detects encounters before they detect you, the players can potentially negate the number one source of instant death in the game) PurpleXVI posted:Also, sometimes giving everyone a check at a thing makes it incredibly hard to gauge the probabilities. Like, I can effortlessly tell what the odds are of one guy rolling a D20 vs TN 15. But when four people are making the roll simultaneously and they all have somewhat different TN's, it's hard to adjust said TN's appropriately. On the other hand, if you go too hard on the "just the best guy rolls," then you end up with a situation where the more min/maxed party members are LITERALLY the only ones allowed to do things, and everyone else is just there for flavour text. In all seriousness, I think this also comes back to role protection as a design goal. Specific characters being good at specific things that everyone else isn't allowed to do is considered acceptable and even desirable by the people who write this genre of game. (Except then, the spell list includes stuff that lets magic users stomp all over other class' niches. Maybe it's not role protection at all, maybe the skill system is something else the designer just ported over from Lamentations and called good) When I run the game (I'll post my houserules and link play reports and so on at the end) I'm a lot more generous with the skills than the book recommends. I don't find it exciting when players immediately discount things as an option because they think they'll immediately fail.
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Jun 28, 2020 18:54
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Conclusion Format I’d like to call the layout “clean”, but mostly it’s just empty. No border art, no color, no layout tricks, just two columns of text with the occasional picture or chart through the whole book. It does the job well enough, there’s nothing wrong with it, it’s just not what I’m used to. The sheer quantity of text can get overwhelming, especially since the type is small and close together and art is thin on the ground. Speaking of which, the art isn’t as rare as I thought when I started the review, but the book has a nasty habit of throwing down diagrams and art interchangeably, which makes parsing everything a little bit more tiring, plus the uneven spread of illustrations leaves an uneven impression in a reader’s mind; certain planes stick out unfairly because they get more art while important ones without visual aids can drown in the complexity of their writing. Writing Speaking of which, aside from frequent dropped mechanics and unclear references, I’d say the writing holds together pretty well. It suffers from mixing fluff and crunch where the two don’t belong, but it rarely obscures anything; the fluff tends to get the point across without overstaying its welcome, while the crunch (when not immersed in the fluff) gets in, gets its business done, and gets out with great efficiency. It ain’t Tolstoy, but it is readable and comprehensible. The big issue is the editing, because so many bits of crunch throughout the book lack the context you need to use them right. Like, I don’t mean the information got buried in the fluff like sometimes happens, it is that they are in the first place. I noted several points throughout the book in the review where some rule ambiguity can lead to unclear results or require DM intervention. It’s not like it breaks the book, it’s just annoying. Also, I appreciate how they include headers in the corners of the pages that tell you exactly where you are. It's a nice touch, especially in a physical book, but even in a PDF it helps you orient yourself if you hamfist page down and end up somewhere else in the document. Side note, according to the book, it’s not Dungeons & Dragons, it’s not AD&D, it’s “the AD&D game®”. They use that specific phrasing any time it comes up. I find that amusing, though I’m not sure why. Contents And all that said… Grubb, buddy, I love you, I love your work, but you managed to write something completely useless and pass it off as a proper supplement. He warned us in the introduction that he prioritized connecting the dots and providing infrastructure over exploring everything in depth, but that backfired and left the book without nearly enough adventure hooks or specific locations or interesting characters for the average DM to make use of. And it’s a shame, because the end result, while overcomplicated, has so much flavor to it; there are so many interesting places to explore and things to encounter scattered throughout this book. But it’s hard to structure and adventure or campaign around anything in it without anything to latch onto. And speaking of structuring adventures: throughout this review, I’ve used to mark occasions where a party has to rely on their magic-user (or cleric or druid, sometimes) to survive. Granted, I’ve played fast and loose with criteria, and in reality a mixture of guides and magic items can probably negate a lot of it. But the sheer variety of conditions adventurers are likely to encounter plus the ways magic items tend to lose potency the further away from your Prime Material you get plus the way clerics and druids lose the ability to access their powers if they’re too far out equals an environment where your Wizard is by far the most important party member. Everyone else becomes auxiliary. Depending on how your group’s dynamics shake out, you’ll likely end up with either a socially dominant wizard escorted by peons or a put upon wizard who does nothing except keep the rest of the party alive, neither of which keeps everybody happy. I can't say that makes the book BAD, just unbalanced, and it puts a lot of onus on the DM to keep everybody happy. On top of having to generate things from scratch just to run a campaign in the Planes. I’ve mentioned this before and I want to reiterate: I think this book started life as an internal reference document in TSR. Between the tone, the lack of ornamentation, and the paucity of hooks, it reads like it was designed to help adventure designers within the company keep their work lined up with the rest of their product. From there, the higher-ups decided to publish it, had the book edited and be-art-ed, and presented it as a brand-new sourcebook. It would explain a lot about the form that the Manual of the Planes took. But I suppose that’s impossible to know unless Grubb or something drops by the thread to tell us. But then, I wasn’t expecting Autochthonia’s editor to do the same so So that’s the book. But that’s not where we and the review, because the most interesting things about this book exist entirely separate from it (gently caress you deconstructionism). Context This book was published in 1984. That same year, a social worker named Kathleen MacFarlane went before Congress to testify that children across the United States were being secretly abused by organized Satanist cults; she helped stoke the flames of a moral panic that soon swept across the United States and then into the rest of the world. This Satanic Panic targeted a wide variety of industries, organizations, and even individuals (some attacked by the movement eventually committed suicide) before burning out when the public grew bored of endless witchhunts and investigators failed to turn up any evidence to back their claims up with and keep the outrage going. Dungeons & Dragons was hit especially hard, given its association with magic, demonic creatures, and socially-awkward nerds that made easy targets for those afraid of outsiders and misfits. D&D weathered the storm, of course – it’s not like people are still playing its descendants – but the successors to the Manual of the Planes underwent a lot of censorship to try and avert criticism; historical gods vanished, daemons, devils, and demons had their names changed, and by the time Planescape proper developed the whole thing looked wildly different from its predecessor. But the proto-Planescape in the Manual of the Planes is dry and uninteresting compared to its successor. Planescape added almost every iconic elements of the setting during or after the Satanic Panic, including Sigil, the Blood War, and all sorts of specific elements of the type that the Manual of the Planes disdained. People still page through Planescape books today, but they rarely look at the Manual of the Planes. I can’t speak to how much of a role the Panic played into Planescape’s development in anything other than general terms; I wasn’t alive at that point, it’s not like I saw it go down. But to me that dichotomy between the two versions feels like a reaction to pressure that turned a lump of coal into a diamond; that desire to avoid political weakness led to a richer product. I strongly invite any readers who saw it happen or know more about Planescape to tell me how I am or are not wrong; let me know in your post if you want me to include it in here and I’ll add it. In and of itself, the Manual of the Planes isn’t that interesting. It’s got a lot of upsides, but it fell flat on its face when it came to leveraging them. I think the most interesting thing about it is the way in which it failed to impact his legacy – the stuff other writers chose to leave out and how the setting evolved from its origins. Cythereal (I think it was you?), if you still intend to review the 3.5 version, I’d love to see how this all looks further down the line, after the development builds off this book’s successors. That was a really confused way to put that but I think it was clear enough to work. That said, thank you all for joining me on this journey through elemental animals, , and culturally insensitive portrayals of other people’s religions. Tomorrow I’ll start reviewing a PbtA hack about magical girls.
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Jun 29, 2020 01:00
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The original Manual of the Planes was one of my first AD&D supplements (mostly for the Astral Dreadnought on the cover), and while I have a soft spot for it... well, the only really interesting thing in it is a reference to the 'Demiplane of Imprisonment' that implies both Lovecraftian bullshit and Ravenloft. It's like the Wilderness/Dungeoneer's Survival Guides, only with explicit need for .
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Jun 29, 2020 01:32
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In 2nd ed Planescape the "Concordant Opposition" becomes the Outlands and has a bit more going for it, including some actual realms(like Ilsensine's, located there not because Ilsensine is Neutral, but because Ilsensine is beyond alignment to the point of being an enemy of all existence. There's in fact a very evocative 2e adventure about this... which I should absolutely review), the various gatetowns leading to the planes from the Outlands being quite detailed(in retrospect it seems odd that portals BETWEEN the planes don't also often have gatetowns, you'd figure they'd be natural trade hubs and the like, or fortresses if the alignments are very opposed). One of the big notable things, and also terrible decisions, was that Planescape's Outlands have their own variant of planar creature, the Rilmani and their job... is to make sure that nothing changes. Like literally their job is to travel the world, even the Primes, and find people about to change things and then just annihilate them. The Outlands also stopped having quite as much of the whole subjective nature, became more of an objectively defined place, though at least in the fandom it was still considered to be a somewhat weird place. The official lore is that the farther out you get in the Outlands, like if you walk past the Gatetowns and just keep going out, the weirder the plane gets. And it hints that there may be gates to unknown planes out there. Also one thing I've seen as common fan-canon is that while you lose spell level access while approaching the Spire, you gain them while heading into the Hinterlands beyond the gate towns, allowing spells of 10th level and upwards to be used. Of course few to no such spells are officially statted in AD&D in any supplements. They also removed the "too close to the Spire and everything ends"-effect and the Spire only affects arcane and divine magic and powers that replicate them.
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Jun 29, 2020 01:59
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ESOTERIC ENTERPRISES PART 6: MAGIC In this section, we’ll cover the basic spellcasting rules, specific rules for Occultists and Mystics, cults, and miscast tables.  GENERAL SPELLCASTING This section is pretty slim. There’s a paragraph about how writing scrolls uses magical reagents that have to be randomly determined, a paragraph about identifying spells other people cast (just eyeball it), and an admonishment that characters who aren’t Occultists or Mystics can’t cast spells, only activate blessings and read scrolls (with a Translation roll, so good luck with that).  OCCULTIST SPELLCASTING This section starts with a refresher on the basic concept of casting a spell from a spell slot, but also mentions that you can fill a spell slot with a higher level spell than the spell slot (eg put a level 3 spell in a level 1 slot) if you’re prepared to roll a Save vs Magic and risk rolling on a deadly miscast table. If an Occultist finds a spellbook in the wild, they can transcribe the spells from that book into their own personal grimoire for memorization/casting. Doing so requires a Translation roll, and if you fail that there’s a deadly miscast table. Do you see a trend here? Transcribing the spell also takes downtime and magical reagents, which are randomly determined on a Occultists can cast spells experimentally. Casting experimentally lets you do things like reverse a spell’s effect (enlarge becomes shrink, hold portal becomes knock, etc), change a spell’s area of effect, change the targeting conditions, affect the spell’s range, etc. When you cast experimentally, you roll a Save vs Magic. What happens if you fail? Can you say “deadly miscast table”? We get a more detailed description of how creating scrolls (prepackaged, single use spells) works. It takes a random magical reagent for each level of the spell being scribed to the scroll. There are also rules for creating entirely new spells. These essentially combine the rules for casting experimentally with the rules for transcribing new spells to your spellbook. Two rolls, two deadly miscast tables. So with all these deadly miscast tables floating around, why did I say in the character creation chapter that the Occultist was better than the Mystic in every way? Because the Occultist only rolls for miscast spells if they go outside the window of stuff they can reliably do without rolling. The Mystic can’t do ANYTHING without rolling.  MYSTIC SPELLS Mystics get a set spell list determined by what god they worship - either randomly generated by rolling spells during chargen, or chosen from a list of premade gods that appears later in the book. They can’t learn new spells from spellbooks, only by leveling up and getting more from their deity. Mystics don’t use spell slots. They can access their entire inventory of spells at any time as many times as they want. But each time they try to cast a spell, they have to roll Charm. If they succeed, the spell goes off. If not, they roll on a miscast table to see what happens instead. The base charm is 1/6 and the Mystic doesn’t get a bonus to it. Mystics can also cast experimentally, which suggests that maybe the experimental casting rules should have gone under the general spellcasting rules explanation rather than the Occultist rules explanation. But hey, are you tired of rolling your Charm skill and failing to cast any spells? Do you want to give someone else the ability to roll their Charm skill and fail to cast spells? Esoteric Enterprises, Page 74 posted:When the rite is completed, the mystic chooses a spell which their patron has granted them. The recipient of the blessing gains the ability to cast this spell once as if they were a mystic, requiring a successful Charm skill roll to do so. They do not need a holy symbol to do this. They cannot use experimental magic when casting in this way; the spell is cast exactly as normal. I am angry. ANGRY ABOUT MYSTICS. Let’s digress for a second into the next section of the Mystic rules, which is actually pretty cool and flavorful, and I’d like a lot if it wasn’t married to a class that sucked.  CULTS Mystics worship mysterious patrons that give them magic powers, right? So here are a handful of pre-built gods to choose from, if you don’t want to make your own or roll randomly. Each comes with a spell list, which replaces the first spell of each level you get (so you get one predetermined level 1 spell and roll for the other, then when you get your first level 2 spell it’s predetermined, etc). Non Mystics can choose to worship the same god as a Mystic in their party. This gives them a bonus to Charm rolls when activating blessings from that god’s followers, but renders them unable to use blessings from other gods. I’ve never seen a player cast a blessing, but it’s a nice touch from a flavor perspective. So what are our choices for gods? Esoteric Enterprises, Page 75 posted:Anassa But I promised you deadly miscast tables, so let’s see some deadly miscast tables!  MISCAST TABLES There are a lot of these. One for each type of spellcasting failure, and one cascading table that the other tables can send you to. They all use a D20. I’m going to give you three of them verbatim, because I think an undiluted dose of this book’s peculiar flavor will show you why I keep complaining about it, but also why it’s interesting enough to write up in the first place. First, the Fragility of mortal Minds. You roll on this one when the Occultist fails a Save vs Magic while casting a spell that’s too high for the spell slot it was memorized in The Fragility of Mortal Minds posted:1 Pressure builds in the magician’s cranium. They take d6 damage to Flesh. If this drops them to 0, their skull explodes, killing them and dealing another d6 damage to those nearby as shards of skull hit them (a Save vs Hazards negates this damage). The Fickle Whims of the Divine, for when the Mystic fails their Charm roll to cast a spell. If you are an Mystic you will roll on this table almost every time you cast a spell, so pay attention. The Fickle Whims of the Divine posted:1 The patron demands a sacrifice of blood; d4 flesh points either from the Mystic or other willing supplicants. The blood does not need to be drawn out all at once. When the sacrifice has been offered, the spell will take effect. And finally, the table you roll on when you roll badly on the other tables: And Hell Shall Follow. And Hell Shall Follow posted:1 A channel to the hungering Void between the stars opens up at the magicians feet. It’s an empty hole, black and sucking in everything. Save vs Hazards to avoid falling in. Everybody within ten feet loses a point of flesh every round. Everybody within one hundred feet loses a point of flesh every turn. Everybody within a thousand feet loses a point of flesh every day. The Void is there forever now. The area will start to spawn Paradox Beasts. Cultists of the Void start making pilgrimages to the area. There are four other tables I’m not reproducing here, each with twenty more possible results (all including one that sends you to the Hell Shall Follow table).
What do I think of them? They’re flavorful and some of them inflict interesting consequences for dangerous activities, while others end the game for the whole group because you had the temerity to read from a scroll, or cast a spell as a Mystic. All of the tables are too complex, too verbose, and there are too drat many of them. This isn’t a terrible thing, it’s not like you constantly have to reference this section of the book. Besides the Fickle Whims of the Divine, you’ll be rolling on them pretty rarely, meaning the more outlandish results are unlikely to come up. The reason why the Mystic table is so awful in practice is that most of the results gate you from being able to cast the spell until you do something inane and time consuming. So you can cast a spell after spending a turn doing some nonsense, but wait: so can the Occultist, by spending a turn casting a spell from their spellbook without memorization! I think you could fix this pretty easily by having the spell go off, and THEN charging the mystic the toll afterwards as penance. We’ll cover the spell list itself next post, which will finish off the player section of the book entirely.
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Jun 29, 2020 04:09
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Esoteric Enterprises has a lot of issues, but it's got so much heart I can't not overlook them. Oh god Emmy put that away there's blood everywhere where did you even get it, etc.
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Jun 29, 2020 10:20
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What is it with these Modern Occult games and making spellcasting as dogshit useless as possible? It A) completely undermines the idea that arcane threats are a danger and B) it makes it completely unrewarding for the players to engage with the subsystem at all.
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Jun 29, 2020 11:02
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PurpleXVI posted:What is it with these Modern Occult games and making spellcasting as dogshit useless as possible? It A) completely undermines the idea that arcane threats are a danger and B) it makes it completely unrewarding for the players to engage with the subsystem at all. I also suppose there's some kind of realism situation here; "if magic was easy, the world wouldn't be recognizable!"
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Jun 29, 2020 11:34
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Nessus posted:I would probably blame mindless aping of Mage: the Ascension and Unknown Armies. However, as flawed as those games may be, their magic systems being difficult had a reason, it wasn't just hard like a basic subject at a Catholic university. Also, the allure of over-the-top crit failure tables means OSR devs often look for opportunities to shove them in, and a miscast table has great potential for cartoonish results given how heavily they associate magic with overwhelming, potentially game-breaking power (see: DnD wizards). Realism helps them justify it.
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Jun 29, 2020 13:15
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ESOTERIC ENTERPRISES PART 7: SPELL LIST The Esoteric Enterprises spell list is a mixture of Basic D&D standbys, spells from Basic awkwardly hacked into a present-day setting, and new spells. There’s a single spell list for both Mystics and Occultists, no Cleric/Magic User divide. There are twenty spells at each level from 1 to 4, and twelve spells at each level from 5 to 8. I’m going to cover the highlights of this list since there are lots and lots of spells, and their descriptions aren’t as interesting as the big miscast tables in the last post. The game has all the spells you’d expect from a D&D clone. Invisibility, Fireball, Hold Portal, you get the picture.   RANK 1 Bleeding Curse Cut yourself for D4 damage, and a target within line of sight begins bleeding out. This is confusing because it uses the term “bleeding out” but the term bleeding out already has a specific meaning in the rules - instant death in rounds equal to HD plus con modifier. This spell specifically doesn’t do that. Instead, the target loses 1 point of HP from flesh per round. Which is small damage but actually pretty powerful, because human opponents never get more than a single die of flesh. Cure Wounds There’s no cleric spell list so this one’s just in the pile with everything else. Heals D6 damage to Flesh. Doesn’t restore Grit, but you can restore Grit by resting ten minutes anyway. Rather than go up if you cast it in a higher level spell slot, the HP healed increases by 1 per level of the caster. Expect a lot of spells to work this way. Freeze the Very Air Create objects from the moisture in the air. Takes longer in hot conditions, like the guy from the Incredibles. Doesn’t say how large the object can be - if you could make a bridge or a wall. Either way, whatever you make is brittle and has a 1 in 6 chance to break if handled roughly. Sleep Roll 2D8, that’s how many hit-dice worth of creatures can be affected with a single casting. They make a Save vs Magic or fall asleep. Then you run away, or you sneak up and bash their brains out. Loud noise or rough handling wakes them up, so be careful. This is a classic for a reason, and widely considered the most powerful Level 1 spell in Basic. Turn Away Undead A Cleric-specific ability converted to a general use magic spell. Roll D6 and add your caster level. That many hit-dice worth of undead beings fail morale and flee. Sentient undead get a Save vs Stunning to resist. RANK 2 Guess Password Gives you a 50% chance to guess someone’s password. After three failed attempts, you’re locked out. Remember a couple posts ago, when I said that some spells in the spell list were just duplicates of other people’s skills? This one is Technology. Why is this Level 2? Erase Data Creates an intelligent electromagnetic pulse that removes information from digital storage media. Yet another Level 2 spell that just duplicates the function of the Technology skill. Know Guilt Lets you know what someone feels bad about. Another ability that would be great if this was an investigative game. Potentially lends itself to creative uses I can’t think of right now. Doesn’t work on beings that have no shame. Techspeak Interrogate machines by giving them a magic mouth, forcing them to answer questions accurately about anything they know. Sentient machines get a save to avoid revealing their secrets. A reskin of the Level 1 spell Bookspeak, which does the same for books. Waking Dreams Removes the target’s need for sleep. Not that useful in its own right, but it also makes the target automatically fail saves vs mind control or illusions. And Waking Dreams itself can’t be saved against, making it a good debuff to apply to a hostile target before zapping them with something else.  RANK 3 Become the Sanctum Designate an area in which the caster will never again require food, water, or air. Subsequent castings let the caster spy on anything occurring within the sanctum by astrally projecting. Strikes me as a bit useless, unless you also give the sanctum some protection against detection/penetration against hostile NPCs. Then it would be a cool way to set up a base of operations in the underworld. Flay Instantly deal D12 damage to a single target’s Flesh. Plus an additional target per caster level. Remember that the average human has between 1 and 10 Flesh. A powerful and very scary spell. Howl of the Moon Paint the target with animal blood to make them into a killing machine Slightly increases their Athletics, Perception, to-hit and damage. Overall a thematically interesting spell that’s pretty underwhelming for Level 3. Octopus Flesh Turn your bones into rubber. Gives you 6 in 6 Athletics to slither around, and a +1 to Wrestling. Again, cool, but not really Rank 3 material. Senescence Ages the target with no saving throw. The kind of thing that really sucks to get hit with as a player, and has almost no mechanical impact when you use it on an NPC.  RANK 4 Dopethrone Get high, ignore negative modifiers from drugs, see into the future far enough to ignore the consequences of stupid mistakes by retroactively deciding not to do them. Host the Ophidian Sage Summon a little snake creature inside your body and feed it blood in exchange for information. “ It answers questions truthfully, but its knowledge is limited. It knows everything the PCs would know if they picked up on every clue, and always drew exactly the correct conclusions” Parasitic Infestation Fills the target’s body with gross bugs. Like Bleeding Curse, but deals D4 damage to Flesh per round instead of 1. Save Against Poison to negate the damage each turn. Remote Operation Operate a machine or piece of technology remotely. You know, like the Technology skill elts you do. Spoof Identity Assume the online and legal identity of a chosen victim. Again, this is what the Technology skill is supposed to do. Except this time it’s a Rank 4 Spell. Rank 4! A spell you get at Level 7! RANK 5 This level is almost entirely D&D spells RANK 6 Same  RANK 7 Animate Artwork Draw something and then bring it to life, giving it the stats of the genuine article. Or worse than the real thing, if you don’t take your time to draw it right. Or you could just animate someone else’s painting. Flatten Sweetie, it’s time for your Rank 7 Wizard flattening. It turns you two dimensional, allowing you to slide under doors. It also triples the damage you take from physical attacks. Essentially it’s like mist form, but worse in every way. Paradoxical Revelation Speak a great secret of the universe that banishes anything not native to the material world, nukes low HD beings out of existence and paralyzes higher level ones. Remote Surveillance Enchant an item that lets you see through the eyes and senses of anyone who carries it. We’re at Rank 7, and we’re still using magic spells to do what the Technology skill did at level 1. Sculpt Flesh You know all that experimental medicine stuff that the Doctor does at first level? You get a spell that does that. At Rank 7. RANK 8 Anti-Technological Shell Create a temporary area of effect where anything more complex than bronze age technology doesn’t work. Call Down the Void Deal massive Charisma damage to everything in an area of effect by opening a portal to another world. Anything reduced to 0 Charisma is deleted from existence. Anything that survives is reduced to a soulless husk. The blast area is rendered hostile to life and deals continuing damage to anyone who remains inside it. Mind Blank Makes your mind completely invisible to detection and control, from both magical and technological means. Time Stop Stop time for everyone else, giving yourself a few seconds to do whatever you want while they stand there totally defenseless and unaware. This is a D&D standby, I call it out here because there are a LOT of NPCs and monsters we’ll run into later who have it in their back pocket. Zombie Plague You know that example consequence of failing experimental medicine, like the Doctor does at level 1? Here’s a highest-rank-in-the-game spell that also does that.  What’s my overall read on the Esoteric Enterprises spell list? Most of the additions it makes are just… not that interesting. They’re either duplicates of things other classes can already do with their skills, or they’re seriously underpowered given their level requirements. There’s not much here that really captures the grimy weirdness of something like Unknown Armies’ postmodern magic. There are a few exceptions to this. Bleeding Curse and Parasitic Infestation are cool because they deal small amounts of damage, but do so directly to Flesh, making them extremely dangerous. Dopethrone is great, and Flay is absolutely terrifying. But for the most part, the spells the players really want are the ones from the D&D list. Cure Wounds, Sleep, Invisibility, Silence, Fireball. So what’s the good news? We’re finished with the player facing rules. The next section is all DM facing, and it’s where I gradually stop saying “this is bad” and start saying “this is why I keep coming back to this game”. 90s Cringe Rock posted:Esoteric Enterprises has a lot of issues, but it's got so much heart I can't not overlook them. Oh god Emmy put that away there's blood everywhere where did you even get it, etc. PurpleXVI posted:What is it with these Modern Occult games and making spellcasting as dogshit useless as possible? It A) completely undermines the idea that arcane threats are a danger and B) it makes it completely unrewarding for the players to engage with the subsystem at all. Nessus posted:I would probably blame mindless aping of Mage: the Ascension and Unknown Armies. However, as flawed as those games may be, their magic systems being difficult had a reason, it wasn't just hard like a basic subject at a Catholic university. Falconier111 posted:Also, the allure of over-the-top crit failure tables means OSR devs often look for opportunities to shove them in, and a miscast table has great potential for cartoonish results given how heavily they associate magic with overwhelming, potentially game-breaking power (see: DnD wizards). Realism helps them justify it. The trouble is that most of the mystic miscasts are "no you can't do it". The Occultist miscasts remind me of Discworld. Magic can "do anything", but if you use it for more than pushing the lunch trolley, you tear open a portal to the Dungeon Dimensions that does 20D6 damage to everyone in the Unseen University.
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Jun 29, 2020 18:02
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I'm reminded of the cast/miscast in Ctech, where it's 'you cast a spell to make people heal slightly faster' versus 'you miscast to rip a screaming tear in the world and your entire party dies instantly'. gently caress cthulhutech!
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Jun 29, 2020 18:17
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Y'all ready for something completely different from Esoteric Enterprises? Here's Glitter Hearts. I have no personal connection to magical girl shows. While the magical girl tropes I’ve absorbed through cultural osmosis (and watching the first few episodes of Madoka before it loving traumatized me) have given me a basic understanding of how the genre works, it’s never been enough to make me sit down and watch any of the classics. So I’m not sure why Glitter Hearts caught my attention as I scrolled through the BLM twitch bundle looking for games to read. But when I cracked open the book and saw the opening section, I knew I had to talk about it.  I’ll start out by saying that I really like the layout, writing style, and overall look of the book. The art helps set the tone, the text is clear and readable with plenty of lists and subsections to break it up, and the writing is friendly and casual without being unclear. I actually like prose a bit more flowery than most people seem to prefer, but the writing has the sort of tone-setting style and vocabulary I’m looking for without it getting wordy or unclear. It’s a pleasure to read. My only complaint is that I wish there was more art, but then my ideal RPG book would be an illuminated manuscript, so take that as you like. Glitter Hearts works off the Powered by the Apocalypse rule set. Other people in this thread have explained how that system works far better than I ever could, so I advise you check the archives and read up on Apocalypse World to get an idea of how it works in practice. I’ll proceed assuming you already know what playbooks, moves, etc. are. Funnily enough, the game doesn’t borrow all the terminology PbtA games provide, nor does it cleave to traditional RPG terminology in general – but I’m getting ahead of myself. I honestly think you don’t need to read those reviews to understand what I’m writing about – to see what I mean – but if you have the time and interest I recommend taking a peek first.  No art in this section, so instead here’s what the text looks like (taken from the next section). The book skips the traditional “what is an RPG” section, as well as the assorted introductions and mood setting pieces that accompany them, by fusing all of it into one chapter. They don’t even explain what an RPG is, they just talk about the game in general terms. I can’t tell whether they’re assuming anyone reading Glitter Hearts already knows what an RPG is or just don’t think explaining it is necessary. Or they just don’t care, but I think it’s the second, the rules are pretty self-contained. We get a bunch of detail on the base assumptions under a game of Glitter Hearts, but it hints heavily at the most important idea, the concept that fuels the game, in ways that will be elaborated upon later in the book. While ostensibly about playing magical girls, you can use it to play Sentai (i.e. Power Rangers) without changing the rules or for certain kinds of superheros or even Transformers with fluff changes and the occasional house rolled mechanic. You’re not playing a genre, you are playing a theme. The book even lays out four tenets for both GMs and players.
The list of precepts for the GM builds on those concepts. Most of them will be familiar to anyone who’s read another * World game, but we have a few new ones:
 And what the border art looks like. Something this chapter only indirectly touches upon but becomes clear as you go through the book is that… you know how I said Glitter Hearts is about playing a theme? If you go too far from that theme, the game starts to break down. There’s plenty of room to question some of the underlying assumptions of these genres but answering those questions with “gently caress you” puts the system into jeopardy. The game is not about putting your characters in the sort of danger they might realistically face and these situations; I’m not sure there’s a way for player characters to die without their player’s express permission. If characters are too afraid to form connections because they might lose the other half of their relationship, the resulting effects make them more likely to bite it. While the supernatural half of the game threatening the ordinary part is entirely within theme, if it goes too far, if their cover is blown and the mundane world tries to interact with their transformed states, a lot of assumptions that holds the system together break apart. The two kinds of playbook each focus on a style of play and forcing one to take over for the other leaves players without useful moves to make. Glitter Hearts can take quite a bit of stress, but it asks players to follow a previously-established theme and concept instead of deciding the overall tone of the campaign for themselves. Many players will react to this by hissing and making the sign of the cross, but players willing to collaborate with the GM on this can find plenty of space within that realm to do their own thing. But something it does explicitly note – while the genre focuses on magical girls, supernatural forces choosing you to defend the world don’t always care about your biological sex. Your gender identity does not matter here unless you want it to; the book mentions non-binary by name as being just as legitimate an identity as anything else. We’ll see later that it’s entirely possible to have a transformation of a different gender than a mundane PC without any hassle. It’s a section more and more common in RPG’s these days but that doesn’t make it unappreciated; it lifts a burden off character creation many people don’t realize exists. Speaking of which, character creation! I’m at least a post of way from getting into character creation, probably more, but I want to get this started now to give me time to develop what I need to show off how the system works. I will need at least two characters (to demonstrate relationship mechanics), and for each I will need a character concept (to guide what I design), a social role (your mundane playbooks key off highschool stereotypes for the most part), a transformation (tell me what it looks like and what it can do), and a social demeanor or outlook of some kind (I’ll need it for friendship mechanics). Lurkers, if you want to share I’d love to work with your ideas, but I’ll take it character concepts from everybody. Next time we start going through the rules, especially moves; expect a massive tone shift from what you might be used too. Also no sex moves. E: I lied, we’ll cover stats and mechanics, then moves (then character creation). Falconier111 fucked around with this message at 04:17 on Sep 9, 2022 |
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Jun 29, 2020 19:36
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I had a discussion elsewhere about just what made a magical girl show (versus, say, any other genre of anime) and this is a very good encapsulation of what we'd settled on. I'll be watching this review with interest. edit: I also REALLY LIKE that the game emphasizes that you don't have to be a girl to be a magical girl - I'm thinking back on how other games in the genre have fumbled that in the past.
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Jun 29, 2020 19:41
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Love that cover, very Kill Six Billion Demons. Interested to see how it shakes out mechanically. I'm a bit concerned that PBTA might be in the same place now that the D20 system was 15, 20 years ago - the default engine you drop into your game when you don't want to come up with your own mechanics. Not that every game needs to reinvent the wheel.
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Jun 29, 2020 20:05
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I got excited for a moment before realising that what I actually want is a Bulk and Skull flavoured game.
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Jun 29, 2020 20:27
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I was curious to see how Silent Legions, another modern-day occult-horror OSR game handled spellcasting when compared to the multifarious ways it can go wrong in Esoteric Enterprises. The short answer is, being a wizard is a lot nicer in Silent Legions. Although it's harder to acquire magic than in Esoteric Enterprises (you can't start with it, and have to learn spells or traditions from trainers/grimoires, with a skill roll needed), the worst thing that can happen is the spell failing. You can even cast spells or use disciplines that are at your level or lower without having to roll - it just costs Expertise (a recharging pool of points all characters have access to) or Madness if you can't afford it. There's actually a lot of overlap between Legions and Enterprises, right down to the needless five-saves system and multiple different kinds of rolls (d20 over, d20 under, and 2d6, in the case of Legions).
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Jun 29, 2020 20:38
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mellonbread posted:I'm a bit concerned that PBTA might be in the same place now that the D20 system was 15, 20 years ago - the default engine you drop into your game when you don't want to come up with your own mechanics. Not that every game needs to reinvent the wheel. It's nice that people who want something that does genre/theme emulation have somewhere to go, and it holds up a heck of a lot better than D20 does for its niche (Simulationism? Maybe? Certainly not as well as GURPS or Hero from that era). My concern is that Falconier111 posted:If you go too far from that theme, the game starts to break down. PtbA does not handle people who want to subvert the playbooks or push the engine in expected ways very well. And that might surprise designers and players who are shooting for that experience and don't see it coming. But hey, it probably won't be any worse than if you tried to slam that design into D20 and watch the math just continue to fall apart over and over again.
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Jun 29, 2020 21:26
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At this point I'd be more surprised at people wanting to play it straight (so to speak) rather than do a subversion, inversion, send-up, parody, or dialectic analysis of a rule set. However, for this I blame all of you. 
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Jun 29, 2020 21:53
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Nessus posted:At this point I'd be more surprised at people wanting to play it straight (so to speak) rather than do a subversion, inversion, send-up, parody, or dialectic analysis of a rule set. However, for this I blame all of you. Yeah, I’m always ready for nerds to be like ‘magical girls but DARKER AND EDGIER’ rather than wanting to play it straight. (Even tho straight and earnest can get plenty dark.)
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Jun 29, 2020 21:57
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Mors Rattus posted:Yeah, I’m always ready for nerds to be like ‘magical girls but DARKER AND EDGIER’ rather than wanting to play it straight. (Even tho straight and earnest can get plenty dark.) Yep. One of my favorite Magical Girl things is Pretty Cure. Which does it well straight and has dark moments every so often.
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Jun 29, 2020 22:16
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kaynorr posted:PtbA does not handle people who want to subvert the playbooks or push the engine in expected ways very well. And that might surprise designers and players who are shooting for that experience and don't see it coming. But hey, it probably won't be any worse than if you tried to slam that design into D20 and watch the math just continue to fall apart over and over again.
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Jun 29, 2020 22:22
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Nessus posted:At this point I'd be more surprised at people wanting to play it straight (so to speak) rather than do a subversion, inversion, send-up, parody, or dialectic analysis of a rule set. However, for this I blame all of you. Ah, but then wouldn’t playing it straight be, in and of itself, a subversion of your expectations? Nessus posted:Yeah if there's a criticism I can dig into on PBTA it is that it is very easy to create a genre space with very little flexibility in practice, even if you have a lot in theory. It is also possible to inadvertently create something that isn't your intention, I can easily see how a magical girl game could either become monotonous (you include the usual reconciliation/blasting away of the nasty thing, but do not encourage the complex character intersections that are the recurring long-term draw) or just accidentally become superheroes with pastels or a Gonterman fanfic. I’d say GH gets around this a bit with a couple of mechanics I’ll introduce in the next post that both reward character dynamics and offer natural faultlines for those relationships to break and rebuild along, but it’s not like I’ve played it, I don’t know how it turns out in the field. Also it can absolutely turn into superheroes in pastels, and in fact that’s part of how it gets around the genre ghetto you mentioned; since it emphasizes tone over genre, you really can use it for superhero games or even giant robot games as long as they keep that hopeful, pro-social outlook. There’s an appendix dedicated entirely to letting you play Voltron. That’s not an exaggeration, it provides rules for deciding what moves you use when everyone’s part of the same robot. But again, I don’t know how well that would work in play so E: For example, my first choice for running a game based on Teen Titans would probably be GH with a few alterations around transformation mechanics. Falconier111 fucked around with this message at 23:09 on Jun 29, 2020 |
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Jun 29, 2020 23:02
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Nessus posted:Gonterman fanfic. You bastard. I'd gone years without thinking of him.
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Jun 29, 2020 23:12
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Bieeanshee posted:You bastard. I'd gone years without thinking of him.
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Jun 29, 2020 23:18
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ESOTERIC ENTERPRISES PART 8: RUNNING THE GAME I’ve been very hard on Esoteric Enterprises up to this point, because I don’t think the game’s mechanics live up to what it’s trying to accomplish. The DM section (everything from this point onward) is where we turn the corner into things that make this book good. The procedural rules for running the game range from acceptable to great. And once we get to the actual content, that’s where the real magic happens. In this section, we’ll cover the game’s basic DM advice, rules for NPCs and Monsters (though not the bestiary), Reputation Mechanics, Exploring the Undercity, Encounters, and Rumors & Events. AN INTRODUCTION TO RUNNING RPGS This section begins by outlining the basic steps to get your game up and running. You use the underworld creation rules (which we haven’t encountered yet) to generate the megadungeon under the city where your game takes place, some factions to populate it, and some story hooks that let the players insert themselves into the action. Next comes a short essay on the role of the DM in Esoteric Enterprises. It doubles as a little primer on what grog D&D is supposed to be about, minus the edition war horseshit you usually get in these conversations.
RUNNING COMBAT The three takeaways from this section of the advice are
 TRAPS AND ENVIRONMENTAL HAZARDS The underworld is a dangerous place. It’s full of bullshit that makes it difficult and hazardous to navigate, and that’s before people start setting up traps. But if exploring it were easy, it wouldn’t be any fun. Traps should be placed in important areas, such as the entrance to an underworld complex or an area where valuables are kept. The fun part isn’t rolling to find a trap, or rolling to disarm it. The DM should be giving out clues that something’s not right, allowing the players to use deductive reasoning to locate, avoid or disable it. I also agree with this advice, but I wish the book was more consistent about applying it. There’s an example of play in the introduction to RPGs section where a character needed a Perception test to spot a tripwire. And the deliberate placement of traps kind of goes out the window once you get to the random dungeon generation tables, which obviously can’t arrange the traps and entrances according to a grand philosophy of game design. There will still be traps in individual rooms that hold valuables, but it’ll be more slapshod than the text implies here. Here’s one paragraph that caught my attention: Esoteric Enterprises, Page 107 posted:Once your players are experienced with traps, you can start subverting things to mess with their expectations. A classic example is a pressure plate that sets off a trap a few feet back, to get the smartass with the ten-foot-pole. Really, though, you only want to do this sort of thing once your players have proved that they’re good at spotting and dealing with traps. Before then, it will seem arbitrary and unfair. CAMPAIGNS AND EMERGENT NARRATIVES We get another page of advice on running games in the long run, and how the game world should respond to the actions of the players. Just about every example of play I’ve seen on the internet of Esoteric Enterprises has been a oneshot, where the players gen characters and do a single mission. I think this is a real shame. The best part of this game is how the world comes to life over repeat sessions, and how the players discover more of the underworld through exploration.  TONE There’s an essay on what kind of game this is supposed to be. It’s supposed to be gritty and weird, and then there’s a paragraph or two about what “weirdness” means. I like the tone of Esoteric Enterprises, with its Unknown Armies style occult underground combined with wacky fantasy elements played completely straight. Yeah, we’ve got Morlocks and Fairies and Rock People. What are you going to do about it? There’s a couple paragraphs about knowing when to ease up on something, if it’s making your players genuinely uncomfortable or upset. And if it’s something that’s core to your campaign, you might just need to play something else. Better to find a new game than play one that makes people miserable. Then there’s a page on how to bring new characters into the game when the old ones die. A lot of OSR books demand that you start every new character at level 1. This one gives instructions for how to create higher level starting characters (take a level 1 character and level them up), with a caveat that you probably don’t need to do this. I think the author underestimated the survivability difference between someone with 3 flesh and 6 grit and someone with 4 flesh and 10 grit. NPC AND MONSTER STATISTICS No, we’re not at the bestiary yet. These are general instructions for creating NPC stat blocks. Monsters and NPCs don’t get a full spread of 6 attributes, they just get specific ones called out when they’re higher or lower than average. Everything else is assumed to be 10. The base monster hit die is a D6 for both Flesh and Grit, though some monsters might have a different one. The game’s base unarmed AC is 10 (I should have mentioned this earlier, I think ti’s a good change from Lamentations) and goes up in proportion to how tough or agile a creature is. Rather than five saving throws, monsters use a single value for all saves. This is immediately followed by a table showing monsters with two different values for saves, Natural and Unnatural. When we actually get to the monster stat blocks in the back of the book, they only save. So the two save table was either copied from another book, or leftover from an earlier stage of the game’s development.  Skills are assumed to be 1 in 6, unless otherwise stated. This is important, because it means that as lovely as your characters’ stealth, perception and athletics is, the other guy is rolling at the same base rating. In the land of the clumsy, oblivious and slow, the 3 in 6 man is king. REPUTATION AND UNWANTED ATTENTION Now we’re getting into what makes the game tick! Esoteric Enterprises has a faction creation system that we’ll cover in a future chapter, and a system to track how all the factions feel about the player characters. Esoteric Enterprises, Page 112[/quote posted:The party’s reputation score for each faction is calculated as follows.  One thing you’ll notice if you crunch the numbers is that it takes a while to get a faction to really care about anything you do. If a group of level 1 players takes a job to kill members of a faction, that’s 1 for “acted hostilely”, 1 for “violence breaks out” and 1 for “completes a job that directly attacks the faction’s interests”. That’s a total of -3, which is still “uninterested”. You may have shot up our safehouse and killed one of our lieutenants, but eh, fuggedaboutit. I’m not sure if this is a bug or a feature. It seems silly, but it also addresses a real problem that games with reputation systems have: the first job or the first encounter or whatever permanently locks you into being hostile or friendly with specific factions, basically predetermining the rest of the game for you. By blunting the impact of a single job, the game slows down the snowball effect and leaves more options open for the players. You want a table that snowballs like crazy? LEGAL ATTENTION SCORES Inevitably, your psychotic behavior will attract the attention of the authorities. How much attention? There’s a table for that too. Esoteric Enterprises, Page 113 posted:It starts out at a base of 0. What do all these numbers mean in practice?  Unless your players are trying very hard not to make waves, law enforcement interest is going to continually ratchet up over the course of the campaign. And that means your chance of running into these captains of industry goes up.  The die size you use for this table is determined by how much legal heat you’ve drawn down. The high end results are really nasty. One thing I would have liked here is an acknowledgement that the NPCs you run into are also thinking about this table. Criminals and cultists are people like anyone else, and the risk of discovery is just as serious for them as it is for you. Magical creatures don’t fear the police like normal people do, but they’ve got the Men in Black to worry about. Oh yeah, there are Men in Black in Esoteric Enterprises. They’re like Delta Green or MAJESTIC 12 or whatever. We’ll talk about them when we get into the bestiary, but in brief they’re here to stop you from violating the masquerade.  EXPLORING THE UNDERCITY We start this section with an explanation of what the undercity is: a megadungeon made up of interconnected nodes, each node made of up of interconnected rooms, al linked to the surface via dungeon entrances embedded in mundane areas, the accessing of which could be an adventure in its own right. There’s a little descriptive text about rooms and what they might have in them. Monsters, treasure, traps, miscellaneous flavor details, or nothing at all. Empty rooms are important because they add breathing room that makes exploration more interesting. If every chamber is packed with danger, then which-way-to-go stops being a meaningful choice. There’s a couple sentences explaining the difference between keyed and wandering monsters. The term “keyed” is a leftover from the old days when dungeon maps had a numeric key that explained what was in each room on the map image. In this case, it’s a generic term for an NPC or monster that lives in a specific room. Wandering monsters are monsters that come from random encounters. Esoteric Enterprises, Page 114 posted:These represent the inhabitants of the undercity who might be exploring themselves, or attracted by the commotion made by the PCs. When wandering monsters might show up, roll a d6. On a roll of 1, something encounters the PCs. If the PCs have been noisy, left signs of their passing or otherwise advertised their presence, something instead shows up on a roll of 1 or 2. If the PCs are intentionally trying to draw attention - leaving bait, making loud tempting noises, etc - then an encounter arrives on 1 to 3. A roll for wandering monsters is made at the following points: RUNNING HEISTS Oh yeah, there’s heists. You’re a criminal, and not all the crimes you commit will be committed in the underworld. This section lays out basic procedures for playing out heists. Surveillance, plan, execution, complications. Then there’s a set of example challenges you’ll likely encounter on different types of heist. They start with a gas station robbery, mob bosses, wizards, museums and banks, then proceed all the way up to breaking someone out of a Men in Black facility. Then there’s a little table of police response times for when you gently caress up and the alarm is raised. I still prefer the Blades in the Dark method of running heists, where you start at the most fun part and do all the planning retroactively using your character’s special powers. But I also get how that type of fiction-first approach wouldn’t work in a grog game.  RUMORS AND EVENTS This here is the good poo poo. Every in-game week, you’ roll a couple D8s on the Underworld Events table to see what’s happening in your city. That will direct you to another table of random events. Maybe it targets a character in your group, maybe it’s a citywide event. Then there’s a final table for where the players are and what they’re doing when it happens. Put that all together, and you’re ready to go. This is something the game will do a lot from this point onward: use a group of tables as a seed for adventures. This is a tradition that goes back all the way to the earliest D&D books, the original Traveller, etc. Throw down some world creation rules and a few plot elements, and let the DM come up with the rest.         I don’t use these tables religiously. I’m in my second campaign now, and I find it’s most useful at the beginning of the game, when the wheels haven’t been set in motion yet. Once you’re a couple sessions in, the factions will be bouncing off each other and the players enough that you don’t always need a random generator. I still use table 66 because it sets the scene when events in the underworld boil over and spill out into the characters’ lives in unexpected ways. I like all these tables though. Sometimes, your faction and map generator is going to spit out a result that doesn’t have any immediate obvious hooks. This chapter is a superb “what now”. Coming up next: Hazards and Treasures of the Undercity, a section I'm really looking forward to. Leraika posted:I'm reminded of the cast/miscast in Ctech, where it's 'you cast a spell to make people heal slightly faster' versus 'you miscast to rip a screaming tear in the world and your entire party dies instantly'. BinaryDoubts posted:I was curious to see how Silent Legions, another modern-day occult-horror OSR game handled spellcasting when compared to the multifarious ways it can go wrong in Esoteric Enterprises. The short answer is, being a wizard is a lot nicer in Silent Legions. Although it's harder to acquire magic than in Esoteric Enterprises (you can't start with it, and have to learn spells or traditions from trainers/grimoires, with a skill roll needed), the worst thing that can happen is the spell failing. You can even cast spells or use disciplines that are at your level or lower without having to roll - it just costs Expertise (a recharging pool of points all characters have access to) or Madness if you can't afford it.
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Jun 30, 2020 00:49
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Manual of the Planes: 3.5E As one of the few DnD books I still have, let's get to it. Falconier covered the 2E Manual excellently, so I'm going to focus mainly on what seems to be different in 3.5E's Manual. First, the 3.5E Manual is based on the Greyhawk setting, so references to Forgotten Realms and real life deities have all been excised. The para-elemental and quasi-elemental planes have all disappeared, though the big four, the Great Wheel of the outer planes, and the Ethereal and Astral planes remain - and now they've been joined by another transitive plane, the Plane of Shadow. The 3.5E Manual opens with a chapter explaining the basics of what the planes are. I assume everyone in this thread knows what's up, but this part is more meant for new players, as is the brief discussion of why you might want to involve the planes in a campaign. The planes offer the most fantastical environments imaginable, where normal rules and logic may no longer apply. The planes are home to powerful monsters and beings the PCs might only have seen via summoning spells, but now can be encountered in their home turf. And for players interested in exploring, the planes are a limitless frontier like nothing the players have likely encountered before.  Also new to this Manual is the concept of demiplanes. Demiplanes are defined in contrast to the fully fledged planes by the fact that they are finite spaces. They act like regular planes, but where regular planes are for all intents and purposes (and possibly literally are) infinite in size and scope, demiplanes can range from the size of a football field to the size of a planet or more. Demiplanes also tend to have very restricted means of access. Beyond that, though? Anything goes with a demiplane. Most demiplanes are deliberately created by beings of great power: actual Powers, extraordinary , or the like. Being able to create and maintain a demiplane is a mark that you've got some serious magical mojo and the will to use it. As such, these artificial demiplanes tend to have specific purposes that reflect the will of their creator, be it vacation home, research facility, or hidden fortress. But some demiplanes just appear and disappear on their own for reasons (or not). Here there be monsters.Unlike the 2E Manual, there's very few charts and tables here. Next Time: Planar Traits
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Jun 30, 2020 01:12
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I do not know what that is other than an immediate negative feeling on seeing the name. I assume that means memory repression has been successful.
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Jun 30, 2020 01:13
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mellonbread posted:There’s a couple paragraphs about knowing when to ease up on something, if it’s making your players genuinely uncomfortable or upset. And if it’s something that’s core to your campaign, you might just need to play something else. Better to find a new game than play one that makes people miserable. An OSR game that prioritizes player comfort?  It’s probably just my limited experience in the genre, but most of the OSR stuff I’ve encountered either ignores that concept or tries to spin it as challenging players on multiple levels. Isn’t that the sort of thing Lamentations gets accused of disregarding?
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Jun 30, 2020 01:59
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Falconier111 posted:An OSR game that prioritizes player comfort? I'm not going into this in the text of the review because I want to stick to the book and its contents as an artifact, without pulling in lots of twitter or blog posts. But if you're interested in Cavegirl's position on RPG safety tools, try this article.
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Jun 30, 2020 02:39
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Falconier111 posted:An OSR game that prioritizes player comfort? I'm also going to run a horror OSR-ish one-shot this weekend called A Wizard that similarly has a detailed content warning list and exhortations to ease the gently caress off if someone is really uncomfortable and to establish boundaries. Which I really appreciate. Look for a writeup on it after I'm done, I think. It'll be fun to talk about writing something system agnostic (and setting agnostic) into something, and I think it's potentially a pretty strong adventure. But I really appreciate it coming with actual warnings and not prioritizing surprising people. Night10194 fucked around with this message at 03:04 on Jun 30, 2020 |
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Jun 30, 2020 03:01
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Nessus posted:I would probably blame mindless aping of Mage: the Ascension and Unknown Armies. However, as flawed as those games may be, their magic systems being difficult had a reason, it wasn't just hard like a basic subject at a Catholic university. To clarify this a bit for people not familiar with either game: In Unknown Armies, magic is difficult and painful because it is a core function of the game that magic is not, in fact, a particularly great road to power, and the people who pursue it are broken obsessives. One of the most powerful players in the magical world in Unknown Armies is, AFAIK, a dude with no magical powers, just knowledge of the occult underground and a fuckload of money. In Mage: the Ascension, casting magic is hard because it is absolutely ludicrously bonkers as soon as you can start accumulating successful magic rolls, and it is ridiculously XP-efficient because magic is freeform and with a fairly minor level of character optimization you can start with some pretty ludicrous capabilities right out of chargen. So if magic was easy, it would basically obsolete all non-magical tools and methods. Even so, having a decent level of magical skill can make you ludicrously powerful, simply because one of the easiest things to do with magic is to lower the difficulties of any regular skill check you're making, and you can easily double (or more) the average successes per die rolled like that.
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Jun 30, 2020 03:15
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On the one hand, it’s actually kind of heartening to hear that about the OSR. I mean, intellectually I knew it wasn’t purely a nest of the worst kind of grog but it’s nice to know at last parts of it are capable of supporting human life. Not all of it, obviously, but it’s always nice to have your assumptions turn out to be too cynical. On the other, as I read this it becomes more and more clear I’ll need to cover character creation next chapter. I need magical girl (and equivalent) character concepts STAT.
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Jun 30, 2020 03:31
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