|
Is there a thread for posting things our players did to take your mediocre ideas and make them great? I've kinda just been dumping bits from my game in this thread since it's bookmarked
|
# ? Feb 7, 2021 00:49 |
|
|
# ? May 25, 2024 06:09 |
|
Len posted:Is there a thread for posting things our players did to take your mediocre ideas and make them great? I've kinda just been dumping bits from my game in this thread since it's bookmarked
|
# ? Feb 7, 2021 00:55 |
|
Woo finally! e: this is about the same size as the Lancer book, for reference
|
# ? Feb 7, 2021 01:31 |
|
Boba Pearl posted:The thing is, I've never done a fight this hard, it could be an absolute slaughter. I want to make sure that it's not unwinnable, while at the same time, if the party fails, I want to do a cool thing where everyone they've helped and all the powerful NPCs they met show up and transfer their energy to a cleric or a device or something that gives the group mass heal a few times to balance the odds in the opposite side. I can't speak for the encounter balance specifically, but one thing a GM did with my group once was run a hard-as-nails battle with a list under the table of various parties who could step in out of nowhere to save our bacon: if things got bad for us, they'd jump in and distract the antagonists for a round while the party got its poo poo together, but then they'd pull back out of the fight. The evil bit was that the ones at the top of the list were genuine allies who we were on equal terms with -- but as you got further down the list, they became people to whom we really wouldn't want to be owing a favour to.
|
# ? Feb 7, 2021 01:37 |
|
I'm probably never going to run Sentinels again, and yet, it's a good book with good production values, so I'm going to pick it up anyway. drat this hobby.
|
# ? Feb 7, 2021 01:55 |
|
Len posted:You guys are much better at naming things than I am, my next plot arc of Monster of the Week is taking place at a renaissance/larp festival in Kentucky. The gimmick of the place is that it's not people dressed as elves/goblins/etc larping what it's like to be in Ye Olde World but is instead actually elves/goblins/etc doing a reenactment Lost Children Pickup -If a parent is separated from their child and checks here they will always find a changeling resembling the lost youth. If they fail to realize their mistake before the faire ends the child will be spirited away. Tommy Nocker's Smith & Forge -100% certified goods that contain no iron. Genuine Pirate Treasures -The usual sort of obvious wooden toys, pop guns, swords, and leather props. However the objects are actually all imbued with slivers of the ghosts of actual pirates. If someone drinks a bit too much and wears a few too many of these items they'll slowly be possessed and act the part. The early stages include simply being way too amused by talking in a dumb pirate voice, with the final stages being a full possession that also compels them to head out of state towards the sea. Halve Maen's Nine-Pin -either a booth game or an actual tournament. The grand prize for either would be a pony keg filled with a powerful ale from the catskills (or maybe Kentucky bourbon). If a mortal drinks the drought they'll become very intoxicated and quickly feel the urge to find a nice secluded tree to to sleep under. If they fall asleep they'll sleep for 20 years. If the whole group drinks it may only be a dream, if only one or someone they care about does, there might be some antidote available they need to find ASAP. If the nine pin is just a booth game, there can be other prizes, like a surprisingly accurate colonial jerkins or blunderbuss. The draught could also potentially send the group back to the colonial era Catskills where they must beat fae Dutchmen in another game of nine pin the hills in order to drink more and fall asleep only to wake back up at the end of the faire in their time. To avoid turning the whole game into lawn-bowling, you could also make the booth just a place that sells the drinks, and when the group drinks they fall asleep and are transported to that dream game of nine-pin. If they lose they might just wake up to find the festival ending for the day they've grown long beards and the fae have stolen something from them.
|
# ? Feb 7, 2021 02:10 |
|
CitizenKeen posted:I'm probably never going to run Sentinels again, and yet, it's a good book with good production values, so I'm going to pick it up anyway. drat this hobby. Just because of time and stuff? Or because it's actually a game you burn yourself out on? I like tactical combat and am interested in a supers game. So far the pandemic has been great for me actually getting my money's worth out of RPGs I've bought, so I'd be interested in getting it if it's a great rules system.
|
# ? Feb 7, 2021 02:13 |
|
Coolness Averted posted:
I first read that as Tommy Nocker's Smith & Frogs, which would also be an interesting shop.
|
# ? Feb 7, 2021 03:19 |
|
Coolness Averted posted:Lost Children Pickup -If a parent is separated from their child and checks here they will always find a changeling resembling the lost youth. If they fail to realize their mistake before the faire ends the child will be spirited away. This is brilliant holy poo poo
|
# ? Feb 7, 2021 03:30 |
|
Len posted:This is brilliant holy poo poo
|
# ? Feb 7, 2021 03:31 |
|
The Tommyknocker shop should sell you pieces of a spaceship that turn you into an alien that proceeds to rebuild the spaceship
|
# ? Feb 7, 2021 03:36 |
|
I FORGOT CAREN HAS KIDS AMD CANONICALLY TAKES THEM ON HUNTS THATS SO GOOD They wait in the car, she isn't a monster
|
# ? Feb 7, 2021 03:58 |
|
Evil Mastermind posted:Woo finally! Evil Mastermind posted:I thought I'd let people know since a lot of folks have been wanting it: the Sentinel Comics RPG is available for purchase for hardcopy & PDF. Sell me on this game people cause I've been looking for a good Superheroes system
|
# ? Feb 7, 2021 04:34 |
|
#poo poo-players-say update: "Would you like, instead of a cookie...Some broccoli?" "I have a magical Sugar Daddy..." "I guess I'm also going to try the spider dance. *sigh*" "I only said, 'can you milk a gnome'?" Gnome: "This only happens when I almost die."
|
# ? Feb 7, 2021 04:39 |
|
Len posted:I FORGOT CAREN HAS KIDS AMD CANONICALLY TAKES THEM ON HUNTS THATS SO GOOD You gotta do the lost child thing then! Especially if she doesn't bring the kids to the festival. Because then you have a whole other plot hook where she realizes the changeling is fake after taking it and home and the kid is already there waiting. Now there's an episode where the group has to baracade themselves inside house on the night of the next new moon when faeries try to steal her kid(s).
|
# ? Feb 7, 2021 04:49 |
|
drrockso20 posted:Sell me on this game people cause I've been looking for a good Superheroes system It's real good. A nice balance between crunch and narrative style (uses zone cards instead of maps and minis), and it has the best random character creation system ever in terms of generating fun stuff. Knowledge of the Sentinels setting doesn't matter in the slightest, and it's super easy to make characters out of superheroes from just about any source instead.
|
# ? Feb 7, 2021 05:37 |
|
Coolness Averted posted:Just because of time and stuff? Or because it's actually a game you burn yourself out on? I like tactical combat and am interested in a supers game. So far the pandemic has been great for me actually getting my money's worth out of RPGs I've bought, so I'd be interested in getting it if it's a great rules system. The game didn't do what I wanted from a superhero system. The goods are great, but I also think it has some actual flaws and some for-me flaws. The Good
That being said, the first two I'm porting over to my current supers system easily enough (Marvel Heroic but different), and the third is something I miss, but not enough to ignore what, for me, were the flaws of the system. The Bad
At the end of the day, I can steal the good parts and the bad parts are intrinsic. People on rpg.net and some of my Discords seem to like it. I think if you're going for Silver Age action/violence it's got some bells and whistles that feel novel. I'm excited to see what the forthcoming supplements look like, but the system just doesn't let me play out the stories I'm accustomed to reading in Image/Marvel comics.
|
# ? Feb 7, 2021 05:43 |
CitizenKeen posted:The Good
|
|
# ? Feb 7, 2021 09:52 |
|
Len posted:Life as an elf/goblin/etc when you could just be yourself and not put on the illusion of being human Lost Property: Contains things you lost. Do not touch the exhibits. A whole bunch of very mundanely named shops, like "Siobháin's Grocery" or "Nails by Aiyana". Completely unremarkable outside the makeup and costumes. e: obviously they're not the owners' real names, they're not suicidal. "Dragon Fighting Exhibition". Dragon themed arm wrestling competition or backyard MMA exhibition. A lot of the "costumed" attendees seem heavily invested in the outcome. A facepainting booth. Get a new face for the day! Splicer fucked around with this message at 12:01 on Feb 7, 2021 |
# ? Feb 7, 2021 11:30 |
|
May not fully apply to the ren fair conceit but: Tunnel of Love. The infamous potion as a fairground ride. Off to the side an amateur company is putting on Shakespeare. Unbeknownst to anyone, the Puck is the real deal.
|
# ? Feb 7, 2021 11:51 |
My Lovely Horse posted:Off to the side an amateur company is putting on Shakespeare. Unbeknownst to anyone, the Puck is the real deal.
|
|
# ? Feb 7, 2021 12:08 |
|
Does anyone have strong opinions on Free League / Fria Ligan's stuff? Particularly Vaesen, Coriolis, Forbidden Lands. I have a friend who's interested but my knowledge of them is only tangential beyond "they have pretty high production values and made Tales From The Loop and the new version of Twilight 2000".
|
# ? Feb 7, 2021 13:16 |
|
Noah and Jack know it's the real deal, I don't believe Caren and Declan know that it's the real deal So a good 50/50 mix for the PCs. I'm going to play it as the attendees don't know that it's actually the real a deal though. The people visiting think it's just a high budget year round renfaire
|
# ? Feb 7, 2021 14:41 |
There are a lot of "I love Halloween! I can be myself!" tropes you can pull from, but a year-round renfaire? In Kentucky? A traveling Spoilers for Netflix's "Utopia": nah lol you already know what i'm talking about if you've watched it stringless fucked around with this message at 15:21 on Feb 7, 2021 |
|
# ? Feb 7, 2021 15:19 |
|
The food court should absolutely be named "The Gobblin' Market."
|
# ? Feb 7, 2021 15:25 |
|
FFT posted:There are a lot of "I love Halloween! I can be myself!" tropes you can pull from, but a year-round renfaire? In Kentucky? It's gotta be Kentucky because Lich McConnell
|
# ? Feb 7, 2021 15:31 |
|
drrockso20 posted:Sell me on this game people cause I've been looking for a good Superheroes system Okay, a slightly in-depth explanation of the Sentinels RPG: The die mechanic involves assembling a pool of three dice: one from your Powers, one from your Qualities (skills), and one based on your Status. Your Status die is based on your remaining HP (the dice here depend on your backgrounds), and if you don't have a relevant Power or Quality you use a d6. You roll and generally speaking when you will take the middle value, often modified with a Boost (bonus) or Hinder (penalty). So looking at Wraith there (who's basically female Batman, only not a hardass jerk), let's say she wants to sneak past some bad guys while she's still at full health. She'd use her Agility (d8), Stealth (d10), and d10 Status die. Rolling all three gives her a 2, 6, and 9. Her "mid" value is 6, so that's the number she'd use to see if she succeeded. There's staggered success levels; generally a result of 8 is a success with no downside, but as long as you get a positive final value you'll succeed. So in this example, a 6 is a "success with a minor twist". It should be noted that when a player gets a twist on a roll, they get to say what the twist is, not the GM. The Abilities are basically your feats or special tricks, and are special ways of using your Powers and Qualities. They're split into Green/Yellow/Red, which correspond to both your current health range and the level of the Scene Tracker, which I'll get to in a bit. Basically, you can use any Ability in your current range or above; if Wraith was in the Yellow health zone, she could use her Green or Yellow abilities, but not the red ones. It's basically modeling a sort of desperation/escalation mechanic where you start uncorking your big moves as things get worse. So let's say Wraith wants to attack someone from stealth while in the Yellow zone. If she didn't have a relevant Ability, she'd just roll Agility/Stealth/Status for d8/d10/d8 and use the middle die as damage. But with Strike from the Shadows, she can attack with Stealth (using the same pool as before) but with the rider of using her lowest die result as a defence until her next turn. Speaking of: there's no to-hit rolls in this system. When you attack you're assumed to always hit unless someone has a mechanic that says otherwise. Now that that's all out of the way, I can talk about the Scene Tracker. The Scene Tracker goes from eigth to twelve rounds and has the same Green/Yellow/Red coloring. Heroes can use abilities based on the color of their Health track or the Scene Tracker; if the Tracker is in the red zone then all of Wraith's abilities are on the table, even if she's at full health. The important thing about scenes in SCRPG is that they have an end. Each scene has to have a goal: defeat all the goons, stop the alien doodad from spitting out killbots, destroy Baron Blade's Terralunar Impulsion Beam before it pulls the moon into the Earth. If you don't stop whatever bad thing is going to happen before the Scene Tracker runs out, then you fail. This might not mean you fail the adventure (except for the moon thing), but that you're probably going to be delayed, or have to deal with more crap in a future fight or something. I'm not going to get into the nitty-gritty of how scenes actually work, but that's a pretty high-level overview of the system.
|
# ? Feb 7, 2021 16:34 |
|
aldantefax posted:... I just wrapped up my first Fellowship game last month, I was the Overlord. We had some hiccups, but overall everyone said they enjoyed themselves so mission accomplished! I'm playing in two other Fellowship games, one PbP and the other voice. There's also a voice Copperhead County game, and we also just had our session zero for a text Rhapsody of Blood game I'm pretty excited for. There's also a 4e D&D game, but I'm still trying to build my character for that one. I'm pretty sure I've said this before, but I've played more games in the last 6 months than I have in the last 5 years.
|
# ? Feb 7, 2021 16:57 |
|
quote:Okay, a slightly in-depth explanation of the Sentinels RPG: To expand on random guided character creation a little: Guided random character creation consists of a series of die rolls that produce a set of options from a list, each of which will tell you the next set of dice to roll for the next list. That happens a total of four times, like this. Background - This one you just roll 2d10 for, and take either single die value or the combination of both. Backgrounds include stuff like Entertainer, Soldier, Academic, Former Villain, or Otherworldly. They provide you with starting Qualities (as mentioned in the post above) and a Principle selection (values your character lives by, sort of alignment-adjacent). Then it gives you a set of dice to roll. Roll those dice for... Power Source (Roll whatever dice you were told in the same way as before, pick one or add any two together, and keep track of what kind of dice they were) - Why you have powers. Stuff like Accident, Robotics, Training, Mystic, Nature. Each will provide you a list of potential powers to take, and you'll assign those dice types you just rolled (not values) each to a power. Then it'll tell you to take some abilities, which are tricks you can do with your powers, and some guidelines on what powers can be used for what abilities. Then dice are provided again which leads to... Archetype (Same dice trick) - How you use your powers. Stuff like Marksman, Physical Powerhouse, Flyer, Minion Maker. Once again you'll be provided a list of powers and qualities and instructions on how to use the dice you just rolled, a list of abilities to choose and slot powers into, and this time, another Principle as well. Then it's time to roll (it's always 2D10 this time) for... Personality - Stuff like Alluring, Stoic, Wisecracking, Angry. What this stage does primarily is tell you your dice spread for the third column of dice. Some characters will get stronger as the fight gets more desperate (D6, D8, D10), others are strong early but begin to falter, and a few just stay solid all the way. Each also provides your Out ability, which is the thing you can still do when your HP hits zero and you're effectively otherwise out of the fight (you still get a turn when you're down, you decide why you're down, and you can still contribute), and will tell you to make up a Quality to fit your character at D8. Just a chance to round out there. It'll also tell you to go pick two Red Abilities (everyone gets two) which are the powerful abilities you unlock either at low health or when the fight is getting desparate. Unlike other abilities, the Red aren't assigned by archetype or anything, they're just divided up by what kind of powers or qualities they're attached to. There's a few other steps, mostly just picking your Principles, health calculation, and a retcon step where you can move a number or two around to fix little holes in the design. Balance issues can crop up. Some of the backgrounds just aren't great, like Legacy, because all they give you is D8s. D8s aren't bad, but they aren't D10s or D12s, and your character may feel a little less intense than someone carefully building around one really good power at D12. They're mostly minor though, since generally you're rolling a pool and taking the middle result, and you're never forced into one specific option and can build around trouble in one step with the next or with the Retcon step. That said in answer to the question about Marvel Heroes, it is almost assuredly more balanced in general than MSHRPG, especially after you start introducing sourcebooks like the Ultimate Powers Guide. I'm guessing CitizenKeen has houseruled the hell out of their MSHRPG game and doesn't really want to start that process all over again, which is totally fair. theironjef fucked around with this message at 17:20 on Feb 7, 2021 |
# ? Feb 7, 2021 17:05 |
|
I'll write more later, but I'm playing Marvel Heroic Role Playing, the Cortex game, not Marvel Super Heroes, the TSR game. I can't speak to the TSR game, but MHR (by the same Cam Banks who designed Sentinels) is in my mind a better balanced game.
|
# ? Feb 7, 2021 18:23 |
|
Agent Rush posted:I'm pretty sure I've said this before, but I've played more games in the last 6 months than I have in the last 5 years. Same! I've gotten to play all the games I looked at and thought "this looks really cool, but I'll never actually have the chance to play it." Silver lining to the whole situation, I guess.
|
# ? Feb 7, 2021 18:30 |
|
bewilderment posted:Does anyone have strong opinions on Free League / Fria Ligan's stuff? Particularly Vaesen, Coriolis, Forbidden Lands. I have a friend who's interested but my knowledge of them is only tangential beyond "they have pretty high production values and made Tales From The Loop and the new version of Twilight 2000". Their games are very well made, and the rules work very well for what they are, but be careful that it's a game you want to play. Take, for example, Mutant: Year Zero (I know if wasn't one you mentioned, but it's a good example of tone vs. the game as played). On the surface it looks a lot like Gamma World, with characters having amusing animal attributes in a radiation-heavy post apocalypse with weird tech and treasure seeking journeys into ruined cities. When you play it, though, it's nothing like the freewheeling tone of Gamma World. The game is grim and brutal and just managing to survive is the purpose, and a real challenge. You basically have a set time limit for your Ark that you need to fix or everyone there will eventually just dwindle and die off. Journeys into the lands outside the ark are rough and will almost certainly result in your characters getting some rot, which often permanently limits them. You're probably going to lose at least one character to just being rotted out. For the first while you will almost certainly lose more people in your ark than your efforts could potentially save or recruit. Even the endgame victory condition, which is to find a way for mutants to procreate, is basically the starting situation for most other post-apocalypse games. Needless to say, you need to calibrate your expectations or you'll have a bad time. Forbidden Lands is a little closer to original/AD&D. The journey rules and rules for fortifications are fantastic and feel like they fit a missing piece of the puzzle into older D&D experiences. That said, combat is again quite brutal, probably on par with low level AD&D. In my experience, keeping people with skills for leading the way, scouting, hunting, and the rest are at least as important as combat skills. Probably more so, honestly. The game does a good job of handling the OD&D feel of being desperate raiders trying to scrape together enough money and manpower to improve their lives. It will not do a good job of handling high fantasy heroics. I hear Coriolis does a better job of feeling less deadly and slightly more heroic, but I haven't played. Twilight 2000 is being keyed toward being a similarly brutal survival simulator but with a gear porn slant to the rules. So far the drafts look pretty good and the tone matches the original game fairly well. I haven't played Tales From the Loop or the Flood stuff, nor Vaesen so hopefully someone more knowledgeable can jump in on that. My opinion of the Year Zero engine in general is that they do a good job of adapting it around and it's simple enough to grasp for new players. As your friend said, the production values are top of the line. I like the company and I like the games. My biggest suggestion would be to have a discussion with the players for what the game will actually be and let them work together to make a cohesive group with complementary skills.
|
# ? Feb 7, 2021 22:00 |
|
What new piece of game design tech are you most interested in right now? By ‘game design tech’, I mean widgets like ’threats’, clocks’ or ‘advantage/disadvantage’. I just read Belonging outside Belonging, so right now I’m thinking about ‘setting elements’ and how GMing work can be distributed through a play group.
|
# ? Feb 8, 2021 18:12 |
|
I like designing small bits and pieces but also big bits and pieces so I’m thinking about importing mechanics from board games to pen and paper games for resource mechanics. I don’t know that it’s new school since Weapons of the Gods was circa 2005 thru 2009, but I have reworked its Destiny system to use for my Megadungeon game for developing ongoing storylines via the “Mystery System”. I also have gotten back on the boat with DramaSystem and its dramatic framework using resources to get more intense dramatic scenes with petitioner/granter, force/refuse, and so on. I don’t know that I’ve found anything released in the last year or two and went “neat! I’m gonna use that immediately” though, but I’m sure there is cool new stuff out there and interested in seeing what pops up. MORK BORG’s “Black Psalms” as a concept is pretty neat since it kind of introduces legacy mechanics into the game.
|
# ? Feb 8, 2021 18:21 |
|
DalaranJ posted:What new piece of game design tech are you most interested in right now? By ‘game design tech’, I mean widgets like ’threats’, clocks’ or ‘advantage/disadvantage’. Possible cheat answer: solo oracles, they're nowhere new but with Ironsworn et al we're approaching (though not even close to reaching) functional solo emulation of group games. Right now the dynamic still isn't there, but with the luck people had integrating their games with AI Dungeon up until they announced they were wrecking their business model, I'm hopeful it's not terribly far off. If that's a cheat answer by not being new... honestly I don't keep up with "modern" game design very well, so I'm not sure. There are rules and subsystems here and there that I'm interested in but that either don't adapt out to other games well or are just different implementations of existing tech. (If/when Red Markets F&F resumes I think I'm just about to hit No Budget No Buy...) Actually that's a half answer that's still useful - rules switches. A lot of games like to go "here is one tone for the game, all of the rules as written support this exact tone, you cam diverge from it but you'll be changing rules". Red Markets explicitly lays out optional rule switches with Boom and Bust to tune the game's main systems on the sliding scale of genre from "gory zombie action movie" to "crushing poverty simulator with zombies to make it less depressing", all independent and configurable as desired. This is nothing new to someone playing GURPS or whatever, but it's refreshing to see explicit support for multiple play styles written into a game with concrete mechanics to emphasize or deemphasize themes you do or don't want in your game. It is, of course, much harder to playtest and balance, so I don't see it becoming common.
|
# ? Feb 8, 2021 18:29 |
|
More of a board game thing than an RPG thing but I have a vague fascination with the legacy mechanics in stuff like Risk Legacy. I say "vague fascination" because I don't live with anybody I could boardgame with, the people I boardgame with the most often are very disinterested (and I haven't seen them in person in over a year), and the people I do game with the most often have nearly no interest in boardgaming, so I haven't gotten to play with them and I don't think I ever will. My favorite recent RPG is by a wide margin Nice Marines, and part of what really charmed me about it was including consequences for going over the target number. Really added to the sense of fun and wonder of the game. And I suppose it does include a piece of tech/trend that I think is more or less unalloyed good: 1 page rulebooks. Which I'd practically just call "decent editing."
|
# ? Feb 8, 2021 18:50 |
|
DalaranJ posted:What new piece of game design tech are you most interested in right now? By ‘game design tech’, I mean widgets like ’threats’, clocks’ or ‘advantage/disadvantage’. I really like diceless token economy stuff at the moment, and 'any players not in the scene can take on the role of external forces' which I didn't pinch from Belonging Outside Belonging because I've never read Dream Apart/Dream Askew, but rather from other games which have built on the BOB framework. For more tactical games I'm also liking 'all attacks auto-hit, but if you make the attack roll you get a bonus' which I don't think I've seen any game do yet but is sort of floating around in game design circles. I especially like the idea that your auto-hit conveys some sort of status effect (poison buildup, push, mark, etc.) but to do actual damage you have to make the attack roll. That feels like it would avoid 'death is the ultimate control' by basically forcing players to make use of their status applying/exploiting abilities.
|
# ? Feb 8, 2021 18:50 |
|
Gloomhaven does this but the 'attack roll' is mandatory instead of voluntary. Even on a full miss or 0 damage you still inflict any status effects of the attack ability you're using. There are some games (Into the Odd and Electric Bastionland) which have traded rolling to-hit for just rolling damage in combat engagements. I like the idea behind it but none of the games I am running at the moment have it implemented, though I may entertain the change as something in the future to propose and implement.
|
# ? Feb 8, 2021 18:54 |
|
I'm fascinated by the enemy AI system in Emberwind, though I don't particularly care for the rest of the system.
|
# ? Feb 8, 2021 19:10 |
|
|
# ? May 25, 2024 06:09 |
|
Tulip posted:More of a board game thing than an RPG thing but I have a vague fascination with the legacy mechanics in stuff like Risk Legacy. I say "vague fascination" because I don't live with anybody I could boardgame with, the people I boardgame with the most often are very disinterested (and I haven't seen them in person in over a year), and the people I do game with the most often have nearly no interest in boardgaming, so I haven't gotten to play with them and I don't think I ever will. Legacy can work well in co-op games, but in competitive games it can be very easy to break balance. Charterstone just about gets away with it but Risk Legacy can very easily break down quickly, in part because missiles are a terrible design.
|
# ? Feb 8, 2021 19:19 |