Boba Pearl posted:

You can do dark souls combat, by stealing from WoW / FF:XIV raids. Place a large hitbox on the field, anyone in that hitbox will receive X amount of damage. They start to get more complex as the battle goes on. From what I understand most DND 4e battles don't go past turn 4 or 5, so you want to up the complexity fast. Maybe even open with the attack so that it can't be avoided the first time, and then place the hitbox down for the next time.

quote:

Edit: I mean I guess it also sorta goes along with similar questions like "is it bad if I outline the exact kind of player I'm looking for, instead of being welcoming for anyone to apply"? Like, if I were wanting to run a sandbox Traveller campaign set on a free trader, I would of course be wanting to prioritize players with a higher degree of fondness for trade campaigns and an innate love of Excel. Or if I were wanting to run Apocalypse World, I would prioritize players who constantly ooze narrative and want to be a bit more "serious" about their roleplaying, etc. I just don't know if laying stuff like that out there in the LFG post is dickish, snobby, and gatekeepey, because I can't shake the feeling that it kinda is?

Drone posted:

My questions: Is it a dickish move to explicitly state that I prefer players with a more-than-casual familiarity with the setting when posting a new game on an LFG forum (not necessarily SA)? Is this terrible gatekeeper-ism? Am I part of the problem?

Edit: I mean I guess it also sorta goes along with similar questions like "is it bad if I outline the exact kind of player I'm looking for, instead of being welcoming for anyone to apply"? Like, if I were wanting to run a sandbox Traveller campaign set on a free trader, I would of course be wanting to prioritize players with a higher degree of fondness for trade campaigns and an innate love of Excel. Or if I were wanting to run Apocalypse World, I would prioritize players who constantly ooze narrative and want to be a bit more "serious" about their roleplaying, etc. I just don't know if laying stuff like that out there in the LFG post is dickish, snobby, and gatekeepey, because I can't shake the feeling that it kinda is?

My Lovely Horse posted:

Say you run a Star Trek game, as a potential player I'd be wondering: which Star Trek? Is it explicitly TNG era, Voyager era, TOS era, and if yes to any of those, do we treat the others as canon also; do we get to influence "canon" events, like can we keep Captain Picard from ever becoming Borg or is that going to happen no matter what; is That One Guy going to be in the game who says we can't do a thing because it contradicts page 147 in some novelization...

Nessus posted:

"ha ha, yes. doctor who. i like the robot dog" -- had that person been up front in their session description that it was kind of a canon nerd thing, neither of us would have signed up, but that would have been a good thing.

It also sounds like you're not aiming for "heh, you better know the lore... scrub," either.

theironjef posted:

Absurd Alhazred posted:

I think it's been an SA-wide trend to move away from such language, although I see the relevant smiley is still there.

aldantefax posted:

Cards + tabletop RPGs combining has always been a pretty underutilized space, I feel like.

drrockso20 posted:

Still want to do that idea I had for a Yu-Gi-Oh RPG where combat is resolved through actually playing a modified version of the real card game

Boba Pearl posted:

You can do dark souls combat, by stealing from WoW / FF:XIV raids. Place a large hitbox on the field, anyone in that hitbox will receive X amount of damage. They start to get more complex as the battle goes on. From what I understand most DND 4e battles don't go past turn 4 or 5, so you want to up the complexity fast. Maybe even open with the attack so that it can't be avoided the first time, and then place the hitbox down for the next time.

dwarf74 posted:

Know what I haven't heard about in a while?

Pathfinder Online.

Is it still.... Online?

dwarf74 posted:

Know what I haven't heard about in a while?

Pathfinder Online.

Is it still.... Online?

dwarf74 posted:

Know what I haven't heard about in a while?

Pathfinder Online.

Is it still.... Online?

aldantefax posted:

As far as I know, it tanked.

Elector_Nerdlingen posted:

Is that the one where the weirdo playerbase sooked so hard available at the possibility of goons griefing their yet-to-be-released elf simulator that the devs released a statement that anyone from SA would be banned on sight? Or am I thinking about something else?

Evil Mastermind posted:

Yeah, that's the one.

King of Solomon posted:

Rush duels, start with one of the initial starter decks, and build progression mechanics around getting new cards (spend EXP to pick up specific new cards with pricing based on the card's power level), figure out a resolution mechanic for when you're not actually playing the game.

Personally, I wouldn't be thrilled with this idea because Rush Duels are lame, but it's also more or less exactly what someone would come up with if they were trying to modify the rules to make playing the actual card game a reasonable resolution mechanic.

GimpInBlack posted:

Must be one of those load-bearing slurs I keep hearing about. But yeah, it's not a cool term to use.

Tuxedo Catfish posted:

Cards not being utilized very much is exactly the right amount, at least in terms of resolution mechanics. They're prone to damage, prone to dirt, shuffling well enough to get a decently random sample is much harder than people assume, they're basically just worse than dice for everything except presenting information. I hate them, they stink!

Cards as memory aids is a great idea but that's a very different subject.

Leperflesh posted:

Smiley names aren't load-bearing, and there's been an effort recently to scrub the really lovely-named ones. I'll ping the admins about it because I think this qualifies.


This doesn't seem to be a major problem for boardgames that use cards, or for card games, so I don't know why it has to be a problem for RPGs that use cards. If players are concerned about damage, they can do the standard thing and sleeve them, right?

Cards add mechanic possibilities that aren't there with dice. I agree that one should not just swap cards for dice. But you can do things like have a discard pile, which changes the characteristics of the options left in the deck; have effects that let you look at the top of your deck and bury that card if you want; effects that let you interact with the discard pile; etc. etc. etc. There's a lot to be done with cards. Magic is the obvious exemplar of how a game can be built from literally tens of thousands of cards (far fewer in any given format/rotation of course, but still). But I've also seen board games and even RPGs that use cards to some extent.
D&D 4E had a number of utilities that would let you print your at-will/encounter/dailies on cards, which is a nice way to reference them, and remember what you have left, at the table, for example. I have a box somewhere that has most (all?) D&D 2E spells printed on playing cards, presumably useful for a variety of purposes beyond just thumbing through them aimlessly.

That Old Tree posted:

Blades in the Dark has some pretty robust crew/operations/territory rules. Your whole criminal enterprise gets a character sheet for itself.

Evil Mastermind posted:

It looks like it...might be?

Tulip posted:

Incredible.

Jon Bois did a video of "how good would Sammy Sosa be at batting without a bat" and I like this parallel of "how good would Goonswarm be at trolling without a game."

Kestral posted:

On the subject of rarely-seen mechanics, what systems have good base-building / community-building subsystems? I know they're in Pendragon and Harn, and a little bit in Dungeon World, but I can't recall where else it's been done well.

drrockso20 posted:

Nah wouldn't use Rush Duel rules(for one thing that version hasn't even left Japan yet plus the card pool is too small), might borrow some bits from the Speed Duels/Duel Links format though(especiallythe skills system), but yeah a bit aspect of character progression would be in improving one's deck, like a starting character would be about on par with early Duelist Kingdom where most of one's deck is composed of crappy low stat no effect monsters and maybe a couple actually useful cards

Also playing the card game would only be for major events much like in the source material, probably just use a very rules light system for everything else

Tulip posted:

There's a common bias that a TTRPG should be basically infinitely durable - that if you buy a copy of Monster of the Week that copy should be ready for you to do a 40+ year game with the only question about durability being if it gets trashed by dropping coke on it. I think this is kind of silly - I've played one campaign of MOTW and I will likely never play another, there's just too many more RPGs I want to try with the finite number of game sessions I have left in my life.

King of Solomon posted:

I was thinking you'd use a simulator where having access to the cards was less of an issue, but yeah I can see that. The thing about Rush Duels for this kind of thing is the ability to get out boss monsters on turn 1 while still being relatively simple rules-wise, but I definitely considered something like Speed Duels, too, because having access to skills seems like an interesting thing to have in an RPG.

Kestral posted:

On the subject of rarely-seen mechanics, what systems have good base-building / community-building subsystems? I know they're in Pendragon and Harn, and a little bit in Dungeon World, but I can't recall where else it's been done well.

Tulip posted:

There's a common bias that a TTRPG should be basically infinitely durable

Kestral posted:

On the subject of rarely-seen mechanics, what systems have good base-building / community-building subsystems? I know they're in Pendragon and Harn, and a little bit in Dungeon World, but I can't recall where else it's been done well.