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I'm playing the Angel in a Fellowship game. We've only done session 0 so far, but I really enjoyed brainstorming setting ideas both alone and with the rest of the group.
CHIMlord fucked around with this message at 02:19 on Jan 10, 2021 |
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Jan 10, 2021 02:15
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On hiatus from a 13th Age game, playing 4e L5R for now. Someday soon I hope to run a game of In Nomine with a different system.
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Jan 10, 2021 02:25
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fozzy fosbourne posted:If you wanted to give a new gm the greatest chance possible of successfully running 4-10 sessions, what system and possibly supplements would you give them? Can include published adventures. Too little detail for the situation. What do they and their group like and want from an aesthetics standpoint? Budget? Any other constraints? In person or online? Does said new GM have any frame of reference for games? Is there some kind of specific unspoken limitations? Age group? Other factors, like language/literacy? Do they never have any access to the internet at all? Lead time to game 1? Attention span? Scheduling? How long is a session? Is this assuming they just find this thing at a store one day and then they are off to the races? If you want a serious answer for a specific scenario then more information required. For most people, D&D 5e aims to be the contemporary answer for this nebulous question. No one that bites is going to be happy with any blanket recommendation because said new GM could be anybody with any level of incoming skill, frame of reference, etc. Every game has its ups and downs that you could argue until you're blue in the face and someone will likely be apoplectic by the end of it. D&D 5e's Lost Mines of Phandelver is meant to check the majority of those boxes. Comes with quick start rules as well as premade characters and all the material you need to run the adventure including dice and maps, has clear progression, teaches as it goes, and offers lots of expansion afterwards. It was explicitly designed to onramp new people to the game. The other beginner set, Dragon of Icespire Peak, does the same thing. Phandelver has been offered for low cost normally and free digitally. It does not need any other supplements. It has tons of resources available that could be provided across all stripes of media that are squarely focused on making it run as smoothly as possible. You could gate it directly to a published hardbook adventure as well. In addition to this, it has high production value with evocative art, has been translated into a whole lot of languages other than English, and generally has had a lot of effort made to be a low barrier to entry. If for some reason you're not looking for D&D and not willing to consider it, then you can use pretty much any system or iteration of it that fits your secret criteria. If not D&D, then clarification is needed as to why not. Phandelver is meant to be a physical item that hooks people into 5e. The important thing for a new GM is that they get to the table and feel okay with running with their chums and the rules are really not as important. If they have zero frame of reference to what games are and have zero ability to look things up, consult with anybody online or offline, then they can try any game system that ships with a boxset for beginners. Anything that assumes you already have game materials lying around likely will not work for theory-GM. I am sure there are games that are for younger audiences as well that are or are not some form of simplified play of D&D.
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Jan 10, 2021 02:56
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Evil Mastermind posted:Legacy is at the top of my "I really want to play this" list. I love the idea of hopeful post-apocalypse stuff and the worldbooks are all good. I've only run Rhapsody of Blood, though. I'd love to play any of those games! I'd grabbed Legacy 2e and Rhapsody from the Kickstarter, and was so impressed after reading them I bought Voidheart as soon as the author made it available. SkyeAuroline posted:So I'm actually curious. How many of us are in ongoing (or imminent) games & what are they? I'm currently running a Fellowship game that's looking to have its final session next week. I'm also playing in some other Fellowship games, one voice and one PbP, as well as a Copperhead County game. I've literally been playing more games in the last 6 months than I have in the prior 5 years, and none of them are D&D. It's been great! King of Solomon posted:Beam Saber is actually one of the games I was looking at. I just need to get to the FatT episodes where they play it. Before AGDQ I got about halfway into their session 0. Is there an easy way to tell what games FatT are playing? I think Partizan is the Beam Saber game, right?
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Jan 10, 2021 03:05
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Agent Rush posted:Is there an easy way to tell what games FatT are playing? I think Partizan is the Beam Saber game, right? Yep, Partizan is the Beam Saber game. As far as I can tell, you just need to look up show descriptions to learn what game they're playing in a given series, it's not as clear as I'd like it to be.
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Jan 10, 2021 03:13
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Running 2 games - First is Savage Worlds Adventure Edition. This one's a 50-year-later sequel campaign to 4e Zeitgeist, which kind of does a Legend of Korra timeline update. I was thinking of just using more 4e, but I wanted Gunslingers and 4e is just not great at Gunslingers. It's been a ton of fun remixing the poo poo from my favorite campaign of all time. I have had trouble running it because of politics and I hope to be able to focus on it better. System-wise SWADE is.... Fine? I like that it's a quick and easy generic system with all the poo poo I need - guns, magic, weird science, trains, airships, etc. Second is Feng Shui 2 with my high school buddies. (I am an old, so high school was early 90's lol). This is infrequent, but thanks to roll20 it is going really well!
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Jan 10, 2021 03:18
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CHIMlord posted:I'm playing the Angel in a Fellowship game. We've only done session 0 so far, but I really enjoyed brainstorming setting ideas both alone and with the rest of the group. I am going to do my best to not just think of you as Chicken boo from Animaniacs. But I make no promises
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Jan 10, 2021 04:04
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I'm currently running a Godbound game in the Dark Sun setting, which is on a kind of hiatus at the moment while we're playing other stuff. While I have more than a couple of reservations with the D&D core part of the system, it's a lot of fun letting my players run slipshod over the setting and throw ridiculous enemies at them. I'm playing in a Pendragon and LANCER game. The GM for both is the same person, LANCER was set up to cover me while I'm recovering from Godbound burnout, but I think it might be the most fun I've had with a system since the last 4e campaign I played in. It has the exact balance of narrative play and crunchy combat that I want from a game. Pendragon is a lot of fun to play, too, but it's mechanically and narratively just one long railroad.
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Jan 10, 2021 08:47
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I'm in the midst of playing Ars Magica (two sessions in), and I'm also early in the GMing of a Masks game but that went on a bigger hiatus during the holiday period where I'll ask the players if they're feeling it and wanna continue or if they're not too into it after the break.
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Jan 10, 2021 09:19
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paradoxGentleman posted:The subject of megathreads has passed, but... I kinda like megathreads? It's nice that all discussion of a certain subject gravitates towards the same place, so you can be sure not to miss out on stuff from subjects you care about. Megathreads are definitely not going away, from TG or otherwise. SA is a broad community: subforums are their own segmented sub-communities, which overlap and have flow between because many of us read & post in multiple subforums: megathreads are, effectively, persistent sub-sub communities within subforums. These buckets are essentially arbitrary, created by the choices made over the last 40 years by people designing forums software. Forming communities is an instinctive and natural human behavior. Fighting that tendency is always going to be a losing battle. So to me, the question is never "ought we to have these sub-sub-communities?" because we have no choice, as long as there's more than like 10 people posting on SA they'll happen. Instead, the question is "how can we best serve the competing interests and divvy up the limited resources, reduce artificial constraints, and improve the user experience, taking the fact of persistent microcommunities proliferating always forever, into account. So the "problem" (and I put that in quotes on purpose) isn't that megathreads exist. It's that there is another mode of conversation on the forums that also deserves to exist, and that's shorter-term, more focused, time-contingent, and less popular threads... but due to how the forums are designed, the ability of users to locate and make use of such threads is reduced by the degree to which a given subforum has active megathreads. Or to put it more clearly: the forum shows 30 threads per page. We have around 30 to 50 threads that get at least one post every day; and we have well over 100 persistent megathreads that stay out of archives and last years. Any new thread has to attract at least as much posting as the 30th most popular thread (or 24 really, because six threads on the front page are stickied) just to stay on the front page. Since most do not, the front page is very static: a subset of the same ~50 threads or so are to be found on the front page at any given time or day, for months. Because of that, few users browse TG by visiting its main page. It's far easier to add the threads you care about to your bookmarks, and then use your bookmarks page. But, the fewer users there are browsing the main page, the less likely it is that a new thread attracts enough eyeballs to get enough posting happening to keep it on the front page. That's a classic negative feedback loop. Over time, TG regulars have been conditioned to stick to their bookmarks, and that conditioned behavior actively reduces the utility and success rate of bucking the trend of 100% megathread-posting-forever and actually trying out making new threads! And, there's another factor at play, too. Most megathreads in TG are focused on a particular game or game family or sometimes game company. They typically have effortposts as the OP, containing lots of info about the topic, often heavily edited, informed by years of posts in the thread, etc. TG regulars are accustomed to this arrangement, and so they feel obliged to make a similar effort when making a new thread. There's no rule that says they need to do that, but this is how acculturation works: humans naturally emulate the cultural affectations they're familiar with and see others using, and we feel a psychological aversion to transgressing perceived norms of behavior, especially when we believe many people will be watching and will have immediate and ready opportunity to criticize. So, two "problems" with megathreads, neither of which mean "we shouldn't have megathreads" but both feed into a habituation that I as a moderator (and perhaps you as a user) would very much like to counteract. I think it would be healthier for this forum to have more to offer its users - and new users - than only the same static set of long-term megathreads. I think having a regular cycle of new and shorter-term threads fosters creativity, gets people to meet other users they wouldn't otherwise, and provides an additional attraction (e.g. a different type of content) to bring new users into TG. However, it's tough for me to simply demand that things change. I've seen what happens when a heavy hand is taken to try to affect this kind of change: if you bust up megathreads, you succeed at alienating users far more than you succeed at fostering quality content. Posting new threads cannot be forced, it has to come naturally, people have to have something to say that others find worth chatting about. Absent significant changes to the forums' UI (such as filters or tabs or buttons to hide, show, or only show, megathreads), I've heard and noted and discussed some ideas to foster more short-term posts and get more people to see them. There may be a tipping point of activity that entices enough people to step out of their bookmarks pages that new and short-term threads become sufficiently popular as to self-sustain a regular cycle of them. Or there may not be.  we'll see!
Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 09:55 on Jan 10, 2021 |
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Jan 10, 2021 09:52
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I am intrigued by the possibility of change. Stasis is the only true death. In more down-to-earth news, I'm rereading K6BD and it has made me wonder if anyone has tried Broken Worlds? Is it any good? I got it years ago but I never tried it.
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Jan 10, 2021 14:20
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 There's a big, affordable charity bundle on itch right now for a suicide prevention charity: Solo, But Not Alone. $10 minimum for 87 solo games.
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Jan 10, 2021 14:45
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paradoxGentleman posted:I am intrigued by the possibility of change. Stasis is the only true death. I was in one of the playtests for it. The classes are fun and flavorful but the gameplay itself seems very generic pbta, if that makes sense?
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Jan 10, 2021 15:00
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paradoxGentleman posted:I am intrigued by the possibility of change. Stasis is the only true death. I've run a couple of one-shots and we enjoyed it! the rules are more combat-focused than Apocalypse World, to the point where it's more of a theatre-of-the-mind tactical game with PbtA-style narrative resolution. The playbooks are all distinct and fun, and you can spend your advancement developing K6BD's crazy martial art styles. I think the only 'criticism' of it I could muster is that it relies a lot on the players knowing a fair amount about K6BD, but I don't see how a game based on it could avoid that problem.
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Jan 10, 2021 15:08
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Played a campaign of it fairly recently. It is very much PBTA, it's on the better end. It is really for people who like K6BD already - there were a fair number of asides for the players who were less familiar with K6BD. Worth reading if you just like K6BD since there's some good lore in there that I think is only in the rulebook.
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Jan 10, 2021 16:25
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UnCO3 posted:
Thank you for this!
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Jan 10, 2021 18:24
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UnCO3 posted:
 sorry, what Unironically: I haven't heard of a single thing on this list, does anyone have experiences with any of it?
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Jan 10, 2021 18:33
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The Waldo game was posted in the 2020 chat thread and I think is made by a goon
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Jan 10, 2021 18:39
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SkyeAuroline posted:
I've played that one specifically. It's not very interesting, it's basically just a couple of charts that make light fun of Adam Driver. Ego is very short and very transparently "a writing exercise that's more comfortable for people more familiar with TTRPGs than writing more generally." The One is quite cool but I haven't actually sat down to play it (might do that today). This Person Does Not Exist is goon made and was well-received by this community but I haven't (yet) gotten it.
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Jan 10, 2021 19:13
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Tulip posted:The One is quite cool but I haven't actually sat down to play it (might do that today). That's my one -- please let me know what you think!
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Jan 10, 2021 19:23
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SkyeAuroline posted:
Just treat them more as fun writing prompts and other random things. I like the idea of them and I find the whole set up of "solo games" quite interesting.
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Jan 10, 2021 20:18
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I want more games like How to Host A Dungeon. The Quiet Year is cool but I have no space to really play it out in nor a digital tablet.
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Jan 10, 2021 22:05
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TQY has a good Tabletop Sim module.
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Jan 10, 2021 22:07
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Wicked Ones update: My party failed a calamity roll really hard, and an invasion of adventurers came into their dungeon! Adventurers are hardcore. They have moves controlled by GM Fiat, so if you need something like "busts down doors" then you just make it happen. They got fairly far in and murdered the Creature the party had set up. RIP Mildewsa, we hardly knew ya. Complaint - the rulebook is ALL over the place. Stuff like dungeon defence is not in the loop of the game, or in its own section, but awkwardly in the dungeon creation section. Adventures and making them are in the GM section, but their behaviour in a dungeon is in dungeon defence! Dungeon projects and project tiers are part of the loop, but the exact mechanics of doing rituals (which are projects and not treated like spells) isn't referenced there - they're back in the section on crafting and spellcasting. There's a logic to the layout but it's very awkward, and at least the PDF has bookmarks for every type of roll you might make, which is fine. Gonna get really into the raid and downtime loop text time, since the party are already sizing up raid targets. The spider-demon Brute has pissed off the big tribe of Satyrs, one of our players is a traitor elf who wants the city of Elves burnt down, they've already kidnapped some gnomes. They've definitely got plenty of enemies!
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Jan 10, 2021 22:27
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SkyeAuroline posted:So I'm actually curious. How many of us are in ongoing (or imminent) games & what are they? Once your Over the Edge game starts I'd be interested in hearing stories from it, either in Catpiss or some other appropriate thread. I've been reading the 2019 rulebook and while it is certainly very atmospheric I don't really have a grasp on what you DO in it yet.
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Jan 10, 2021 22:42
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paradoxGentleman posted:I am intrigued by the possibility of change. Stasis is the only true death. It's fine, not the best example of a pbta, it has a generic overcome move for starters and a couple of the moves are a little wonky as part of "to do it, do it", but it works and lets you recreate basically any of the big 1000 creature brawl fight scene spreads from the comic well.
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Jan 10, 2021 22:48
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Poker in the Rear has been re-opened: it can be found as a sub of Sports Argument Stadium, or by clicking this link: https://forums.somethingawful.com/forumdisplay.php?forumid=139 Traditional Games has been the host of the PitR refugees since 2012, but now at last they can return to their proper home. It is not illegal to post about poker or other card games in TG, but, PitR is the better place for poker specifically, and for gambling/real-money games generally, including sports betting and such. I've moved the Online Poker megathread over to PitR. This was a longish project that I got started a couple or three months ago. The admins and mods were enthusiastic about reopening PitR, but wanted to make sure it was done thoughtfully and right, so there was a lot of discussion and care that went into it, including deciding what could and could not be discussed on the SA forums, who could mod/IK, figuring out gambling addiction support stuff, and so forth. It's taken some of my time and attention, and for a little while I'm volunteering to also help with moderating PitR until new mods & IKs have settled in. I don't anticipate much trouble but we'll see. I figured I'd explain because this is one of the projects I've been alluding to recently. I hope it works out!
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Jan 11, 2021 00:47
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Is the mahjong thread moving too
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Jan 11, 2021 01:13
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I remember the first time I read Broken Worlds, I remember thinking "Oh, someone made a generic PbtA hack of K6BD!" It wasn't until months later that I realized it wasn't just a fan of K6BD who wrote it.
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Jan 11, 2021 01:17
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aldantefax posted:Is the mahjong thread moving too there's a mahjong thread?
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Jan 11, 2021 01:26
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I thought that was the Yakuza thread
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Jan 11, 2021 01:33
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It is called, in fact, Mahjong Thread: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3869069
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Jan 11, 2021 01:33
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Huh. Well I gather mahjong can be played for money, I've only played casually at someone's house, but I'm happy to move the thread if folks in the thread want me to. Definitely not required to move, though.
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Jan 11, 2021 01:41
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I read A Dirge For Sabis on the recommendation of a poster from the 2020 thread. It's a fantasy story about a guy trying to invent a cannon in time to defend a medieval city state from a barbarian invasion. It's a relatively quick read with an interesting setting and some cool characters. At times it goes a little too in-depth on the exact details of every action the characters take. And not in an exciting or immersive worldbuilding sense, but more like giving a blow-by-blow of a cart ride to transport materials from a manor house to a workshop. Toward the end of the story things pick up, with the characters escaping the city and traveling into the "settled" barbarian lands to live as priests given a jump cut rather than presented in torturous detail. Dirge ends on a high note, but I'm about halfway through the sequel Wizard Spawn and it's a letdown. The protagonist is a carbon copy of the guy from the first book, except he's a doctor instead of a chemist. The city state where the book takes place might as well be the same city as the one from Dirge. And worst of all, the book is set 500 years after the original, but nothing has changed at all. The entire first book is about the characters making transformative technological discoveries - they invent a cannon and use it to blow up a cult that tries to extort them. They invent a steam ship and sell the technology to a pirate kingdom. This is the focus of the book, and yet in the sequel, nothing has changed. Literally enforced medieval stasis by the author. I understand that a central theme of the first book is how bureaucratic and social inertia can inhibit progress, but that's no excuse for retroactively making the entire first book into a shaggy dog story There's still time for Spawn to turn around. And even if it's not great, I might still read the third book in the series.
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Jan 11, 2021 01:52
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I'm currently playing an ongoing D&D 5e Curse of Straad game (I'm a sort of proper gentleman blue dragonborn bard), it's been fun, though I really honestly would prefer another system like 13th age.
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Jan 11, 2021 02:19
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Leperflesh posted:Poker in the Rear has been re-opened: it can be found as a sub of Sports Argument Stadium, or by clicking this link: Can I or can I not poo poo-post about my sister and I high hustling people in bars for beer money with weird-rear end German card games by pretending to be tourists.
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Jan 11, 2021 02:21
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Len posted:The Waldo game was posted in the 2020 chat thread and I think is made by a goon aldantefax posted:I want more games like How to Host A Dungeon. The Quiet Year is cool but I have no space to really play it out in nor a digital tablet.
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Jan 11, 2021 03:38
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I saw a collection of all the Where's Waldo books at costco, and I was a little bit tempted to buy it.The RPG is a neat idea, but it's not really my wheelhouse thematically, and admittedly, I'm kind of weird about not liking to mark up books (besides like coloring books).
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Jan 11, 2021 05:03
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Xiahou Dun posted:Can I or can I not poo poo-post about my sister and I high hustling people in bars for beer money with weird-rear end German card games by pretending to be tourists. IMO you can and should, but I will defer to the PitR mods. I can't imagine it'd be a problem though?
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Jan 11, 2021 05:13
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Leperflesh posted:Huh. Well I gather mahjong can be played for money, I've only played casually at someone's house, but I'm happy to move the thread if folks in the thread want me to. Definitely not required to move, though. Riichi mahjong is 100% deffo a gambling game and there are definitely (il)legal ways of making money from it Mahjong in general is a game where you get Heated Up
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Jan 11, 2021 05:35
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