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Xiahou Dun posted:Microscope or Kingdom both seem rock solid in terms of games that you’d play to session 0 a setting. I tend to use The Quiet Year but not everyone likes post-apocalypse as much as me. Still hoping to get a Quiet Year game together eventually. Feels like one that needs a particular kind of group.
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Feb 15, 2021 20:40
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I’ve run it with lots of different groups and never had a problem. At most I’ve had to have a conversation about tone so everyone’s on the same page, e.g. the one time one friend was doing serious gritty stuff and the other friend was trying to make a church that worshipped an orangutan in mechanics overalls.
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Feb 15, 2021 20:55
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Xiahou Dun posted:I’ve run it with lots of different groups and never had a problem. At most I’ve had to have a conversation about tone so everyone’s on the same page, e.g. the one time one friend was doing serious gritty stuff and the other friend was trying to make a church that worshipped an orangutan in mechanics overalls. That sounds fun! I once ran a game for some folks when no-one else could make it and I hope people had a good time. I did make them afraid of a radioactive skeleton that lived in the wastes though.
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Feb 15, 2021 21:00
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O yeah it owned. But it helped that we talked for a bit if we were being serious or silly. (Silly won.) It’s not relevant now with the pandemic, but I used to keep the rules and a deck of cards in my work bag specifically cause it’s the perfect game to pull out hanging out at a bar.
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Feb 15, 2021 21:52
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https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tknyarlathotep/every-god-will-fall-for-mork-borg my new morkus borkus is up
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Feb 18, 2021 00:08
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ZearothK posted:I really enjoyed both Dragonfall and Hong Kong. I do like Dragonfall better, but I think that has less to do to the qualities of the game as a whole and more because the post-game DLC in Hong Kong kind of soured me on it, plus series fatigue. Haven't specifically used it to create a setting, but the game I played with a few friends went over pretty well. I've been trying to set it up as part of a Session 0 for a while, just haven't had the opportunity yet.
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Feb 18, 2021 02:03
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So for those who have moved from in-person games to remote via roll20 or whatever... Who's considering keeping it that way even post-pandemic? I have got to admit, I'm considering it. Just being able to plop maps and tokens in without printing is kind of amazing. I'm still not sure - but it's a real question when I didn't expect it would ever be.
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Feb 18, 2021 15:13
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dwarf74 posted:So for those who have moved from in-person games to remote via roll20 or whatever... Who's considering keeping it that way even post-pandemic? Depends on the game I am running when we're all vaccinated and alive. In a way it is better for ones with a lot of tactical combat and crunch like Lancer, but it is honestly irrelevant for theatre of the mind play and I do miss the potlucks associated with game sessions, also actual people hanging out.
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Feb 18, 2021 15:23
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dwarf74 posted:So for those who have moved from in-person games to remote via roll20 or whatever... Who's considering keeping it that way even post-pandemic? End of pandemic is when I might be moving to another city, so if the group I'm playing with isn't staying online, that'll be it for me with them. Generally, doing things online turns out to provide access to a lot of options I haven't had before, so I'll definitely keep it as one venue.
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Feb 18, 2021 15:30
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It wasn't due to pandemic, but when I graduated from college my group scattered to the winds (for a few years, we didn't have any two people in the same time zone), so we moved to Skype and then later Discord and that's been going for about a decade now.
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Feb 18, 2021 16:55
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My weeknight group is 4/5 dads from across the city. The commute time just isn't worth it to us, so we were meeting online before pandemic. The ideal is to meet fortnightly online, and then about once a season do a long weekend session so we get that elbow-rubbing human interaction. Best of both worlds, in my mind. My weekend group will move back to in person as soon as it can, but we're a somewhat food-driven group, so that probably informs our decision.
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Feb 18, 2021 17:17
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dwarf74 posted:So for those who have moved from in-person games to remote via roll20 or whatever... Who's considering keeping it that way even post-pandemic? Most of my players are remote but I'd like to play a game in person some day.
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Feb 18, 2021 17:27
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I miss playing in person, as easy as playing online is for some things the personal/meatspace connection is really meaningful and important still.
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Feb 18, 2021 17:28
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The biggest thing I miss is my brother used to come over most friday nights for board game night and it's been nearly a year now since that happened. For RPGs my preferred format is Play-by-Post and I've just started up a fresh game of that so that's cool and good.
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Feb 18, 2021 17:41
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I've been doing online-only for years (more out of necessity than much else) but I would bend over backwards to have an RL group that met regularly, had cool people in it who were fun to hang out with, and had interesting adventures together. I've never had an RL group that satisfied even two of those three things at once.
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Feb 18, 2021 17:58
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If it was viable I'd be totally up for gaming in-person while sharing maps on tablets (or one of those big screen tables if they weren't ludicrously expensive and/or mythical)
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Feb 18, 2021 18:10
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never played an rpg session in person. how would you even handle the tokens and the music. weird boomer poo poo imo
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Feb 18, 2021 18:12
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Farg posted:never played an rpg session in person. how would you even handle the tokens and the music. weird boomer poo poo imo Tokens are just 2D miniatures. Grid maps (and hex maps) with minis on paper have been a thing from the very start. Music... Bring a laptop I guess?
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Feb 18, 2021 18:15
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dwarf74 posted:So for those who have moved from in-person games to remote via roll20 or whatever... Who's considering keeping it that way even post-pandemic? All of this gets easier if you're working from pre-baked material and planned encounters. It's when you try to improvise that things get rough.
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Feb 18, 2021 19:36
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Yeah, the few times I've bothered with and found enough pre-made materials (like a good tileset, or an encounter fully prepped and scripted in the toolset) for crunchier games the VTT tools really have shined. In a game of blades I'm in the GM used forge to pretty much fully make a map of duskvol where you can zoom to individual and it's really cool. But I'm a lazy GM who jives with systems where I react instead of prep, and VTT mats are my bane because of it. Hell in the current game of Spire I'm running I just set some art from the book and a few quick reference tables for dice results as our background/map, and then I don't use tokens.
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Feb 18, 2021 19:48
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mellonbread posted:I like playing online, but I strongly dislike the way maps and tokens work in every virtual tabletop I've used. Nothing has ever come close to the ease of just drawing on a chessex grid with a wet erase marker and throwing down a couple random objects to sub for miniatures. I've tried hooking up a graphics tablet and using it in roll20, but you still have to wrestle with the clunky web interface. Tabletop simulator gets you part of the way there, but adds a lot of friction with the physics simulation - pieces falling through the table or ricocheting off each other and flying into space, an undo function which doesn't work because it's trying to remember the position of every 3D object. Yeah, improvising details like this is the first thing I had to give up on when moving digital.
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Feb 18, 2021 20:06
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I've said it before but playing online has the great advantage of being able to make sure what you're saying actually makes sense and is cool. Comedy is easy in-person but melodrama and serious stuff is a lot harder to do with a straight face, let alone just making sure it sounds right - it you type out a sentence and it reads bad you just delete it, if you say a sentence and realize halfway through that it sounds bad you stammer and have to restart. I've found people are just way more comfortable exploring more parts of their character in text games whereas in-person (or voice chat) games often default to everyone being a wise-cracking action hero because it's easy.
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Feb 18, 2021 20:06
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Text based RPing definitely lets you inhabit a character better. It also erases issues with voice connectivity, having to repeat things multiple times because people couldn't hear or weren't listening, etc. The tradeoff is how much longer it takes than just talking. In addition to the amount of time it takes to type up a response, being able to revise before sending means everyone will fiddle with their reply until it's perfect. I started playing RPGs online through text posts in the roll20 chat, and I was amazed at how much faster my first voice game went. Farg posted:never played an rpg session in person. how would you even handle the tokens and the music. weird boomer poo poo imo
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Feb 18, 2021 20:16
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I got in my Sentinel Comics RPG hardcover!  It had a printing error and like seven pages were reprinted twice instead of what was supposed to be there.  Now we get to see how Greater Than Games' customer support is.
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Feb 18, 2021 20:28
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Dawgstar posted:I got in my Sentinel Comics RPG hardcover! It should be eight, sounds like you got a misbound signature.
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Feb 18, 2021 21:03
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i've played RPGs in person... with everyone at their laptop looking at their character screen and the map  that's the best way to do it imo, i would never want to go back to pure analog
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Feb 18, 2021 21:03
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Pure pen and paper and whiteboard with permenant marker grids and white russians made by the host and coins instead of tokens table top RPGing is good.
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Feb 18, 2021 21:15
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mellonbread posted:I like playing online, but I strongly dislike the way maps and tokens work in every virtual tabletop I've used. Nothing has ever come close to the ease of just drawing on a chessex grid with a wet erase marker and throwing down a couple random objects to sub for miniatures. I've tried hooking up a graphics tablet and using it in roll20, but you still have to wrestle with the clunky web interface. Tabletop simulator gets you part of the way there, but adds a lot of friction with the physics simulation - pieces falling through the table or ricocheting off each other and flying into space, an undo function which doesn't work because it's trying to remember the position of every 3D object.
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Feb 18, 2021 21:36
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dwarf74 posted:So for those who have moved from in-person games to remote via roll20 or whatever... Who's considering keeping it that way even post-pandemic? I'll preface this by saying that while I've had to do about half of my roleplaying on Discord for the last 5-6 years, I don't like running games by VOIP for a lot of reasons: I lose the ability to read the room when I can't see my players in person (webcams don't work well enough for this purpose thanks to a mild form of face blindness), I like to get up and pace around or embody characters with my whole body while GMing, and frankly there's just something vitally human missing when you're not all together in the same physical space, which I'm sure there's a term for. That said, for my teen D&D group, I'm considering staying with VOIP, or mixed meetings. We have one player who really thrives on tactical combat, and another on the autism spectrum with untreated ADHD who gets way more focused when they can reference a map instead of theater of the mind. Managing combat maps is my least favorite thing about physical, in-person D&D by a country mile, but the big fights in high-level D&D are much, much easier to manage on Roll20 even without modules. I'd want to meet in person at least once a month, just because we're all friends and it's nice to hang out in person, but the game itself probably runs better over Discord + Roll20. The optimal scenario would be meeting in person with some kind of large (that is, substantially bigger than tablet-sized) display surface that I can put Roll20 on, but I don't see how that would be possible without throwing thousands of dollars at it. For my home group of adults, in-person gaming resumes the instant our vaccines take full effect (or boosters are administered, if the immune-escape strains get a foothold). Playing by Discord for that group doesn't work well at all for the indie / storygame stuff that we prefer, and we miss the ability to just hang out in one another's presence. We also have the issue of married players feeling uncomfortable expressing themselves fully if they're RPing within earshot of their non-gaming spouses, and generally feeling like if they're at home they should be with said spouses instead of on a call.
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Feb 18, 2021 22:15
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I've been thinking lately on nineties RPGs and wanted to get some feedback from people. I'm mainly thinking if there is any real throughlines to the decade from an RPG standpoint be it mechanically, thematically, or from an industry perspective. I'm trying to look at it from the perspective of massive, overarching trends. Mechanically I think what best represents the decade is a move toward point buy character creation over randomization and a push toward unified mechanics. Almost every new nineties RPG was built in this manner. This often goes hand in hand with classless design, even if classes were worked half back into games by splats. In a separate direction, I would also say that there was a smaller trend of trying to make mechanics fit the theme of a game or push players toward a certain playstyle. Feng Shui is the obvious example, but also things like brutally deadly guns in Unknown Armies or poker hands for magic in Deadlands to help get the feel of the old west. I would also mention a minor trend toward moving away from dice, whether through card systems like TSR Saga games or true diceless games like Nobilis or Amber. Thematically we have a bunch of different threads, but there definitely seems to be more modern settings with personal goals. This includes adult themes, both at the crude and more nuanced ends. The Gen X love of gruesome violence and crime were heavily featured. This can go from the over-the-top end where SLA Industries had a serial killer for their signature character, to the body horror of an Unknown Armies epideromancer. Violence is not as strong a trend, though, since the Rolemaster crit tables of the eighties show that there was always a deep vein of ridiculous gore. I also feel there were definite increases in religious (mainly Christian) elements in settings, particularly Gnostic ideas. See Kult, In Nomine, The End or even Mage. Another thread is conspiracies, particularly government conspiracies a la The X-Files. Delta Green and Conspiracy X are the prime examples. From an industry perspective the main innovation was factional groups in games that allowed for the production of endless splatbooks. I would also say that metaplot began to dominate the market allowing for adventures and books that specifically pushed the timeline forward. I realize a lot of this is all due to the White Wolf influence, but I do consider them the biggest driver of changes in nineties gaming culture and the most dynamic presence in the market. AEG was the second biggest push on both those trends. If there anything major you can think of that I'm missing? I'm sure the answer is yes. EverettLO fucked around with this message at 23:07 on Feb 18, 2021 |
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Feb 18, 2021 22:51
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dwarf74 posted:So for those who have moved from in-person games to remote via roll20 or whatever... Who's considering keeping it that way even post-pandemic? I'm definitely going to keep online gaming, that's how I've been able to play anything! I haven't been able to get my usual group together for an RPG online or off for years now, partially because most of the time they just want to play D&D. An old friend moved closer and we'd been having board game meet-ups at his place for some time before the pandemic hit us, when we're all vaccinated and such I hope we can start those again.
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Feb 18, 2021 23:22
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Dawgstar posted:I got in my Sentinel Comics RPG hardcover! What pages? Mine's coming in and I want to make sure it's not the same issue.
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Feb 18, 2021 23:52
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mellonbread posted:Text based RPing definitely lets you inhabit a character better. It also erases issues with voice connectivity, having to repeat things multiple times because people couldn't hear or weren't listening, etc. It's kind of like the pottery class analogy. Quantity, on some level, will build quality.
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Feb 18, 2021 23:54
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EverettLO posted:I've been thinking lately on nineties RPGs and wanted to get some feedback from people. I'm mainly thinking if there is any real throughlines to the decade from an RPG standpoint be it mechanically, thematically, or from an industry perspective. I'm trying to look at it from the perspective of massive, overarching trends. 1. I don't think player factions were an innovation leading to splatbooks; splatbooks themselves were the innovation. Vampire's Clans and Disciplines were essentially the replacement for D&D's character classes to give the game some structure. And then you have Rifts, which had tons of splatbooks while defining characters by classes. 2. Metaplot, metaplot, metaplot. Metaplot is really what made the player factions of 90s games more interesting and tied into the setting than D&D classes. 3. For point-buy, it depends on how you define it. Many 90s games gave you a pool of points to spend on each category of character traits, as opposed to e.g. Champions comprehensive point-buy. 4. Mechanically the biggest change was dice pools. drat near everything used a dice pool, though they didn't all use it the same way. Shadowrun had you roll your Skill as a pool of exploding d6s against a target number, White Wolf used a Stat+Skill pool of d10s counting successes over a target number, West End had you roll a pool of d6s and add up the result against a target number, and I forget how LUG's system worked exactly. Another big thing was character traits being rated 1-5 or 1-6, usually adding the Stat and Skill together. This may sound strange or insignificant, but I noticed that even games that didn't use a dice pool, like Unisystem, had Stats and Skills rated 1-6 and added together. I would say that the move toward unified mechanics was an ongoing process during the 80s. Games that still had different subsystems with different dice mechanics for everything were dinosaurs and D&D heartbreakers. A major change from the 80s was eliminating table lookup from basic task resolution. A a lot of 80s games moved away from a bunch of different charts and tables and used a single Master Chart instead (e.g. Chill, Gamma World 3rd Ed., Star Frontiers). Nineties games relegated tables to equipment lists, random-roll tables and very specific cases. I think Torg/Masterbook was the last gasp of the Master Action Chart in new games. Total agreement on the trend in non-dice resolution. You're absolutely right that White Wolf ruled the 90s and was the single biggest influence; it's not for nothing that Shannon Appelcline used an ankh for the symbol of his 90s volume of Designers & Dragons. Another major outcome of this was that 5. LARP became a big deal. Okay Kate needs me to prep dinner I'll be back later Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 00:18 on Feb 19, 2021 |
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Feb 19, 2021 00:00
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Tsilkani posted:What pages? Mine's coming in and I want to make sure it's not the same issue. It starts on what should be page 325. Supposed to have the stats/background for Daybreak but just repeats the stats for Absolute Zero and Chrono-Ranger. Looking at the KS apparently it was a known issue that I missed out on because I didn't back for a hardcover until seeing pictures of it.
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Feb 19, 2021 00:35
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Splicer posted:If you want to go oldschool scribbling on a grid https://www.owlbear.rodeo/ looks neat. Yeah that does seem pretty neat
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Feb 19, 2021 00:57
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Kestral posted:The optimal scenario would be meeting in person with some kind of large (that is, substantially bigger than tablet-sized) display surface that I can put Roll20 on, but I don't see how that would be possible without throwing thousands of dollars at it. Could you get a cheap Chromecast and cast the tablet screen to a big TV or something? E: Having experimented with my own tablet I can say the answer is 'no' if it's an iPad because you can't cast from Chrome on iOS, and 'yes but it's janky as hell' on an Android tablet. potatocubed fucked around with this message at 01:37 on Feb 19, 2021 |
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Feb 19, 2021 01:18
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Yeah casting is surprisingly cheap if you've already got the TV.
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Feb 19, 2021 01:37
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EverettLO posted:I've been thinking lately on nineties RPGs and wanted to get some feedback from people. I'm mainly thinking if there is any real throughlines to the decade from an RPG standpoint be it mechanically, thematically, or from an industry perspective. I'm trying to look at it from the perspective of massive, overarching trends. It's probably quite different to me since I think of the 90s as the last pre-D&D decade, and odds are I played a completely different set of games from you. RPGs came to Sweden in the 80s primarily via a company called Target Games and their subsidiary Äventyrsspel ("Adventure Games"). Target was started by a Swedish guy who lived in California and worked for Chaosium and decided to bring the hobby with him home. They made a couple of games that slowly grew in popularity over the decade, notably the BRP-based Drakar och Demoner ("Dragons and Demons", commonly known as DoD) which was our Generic Fantasy Game Everyone Played, then the first version of Mutant and various localized versions of US games like the WEG Star Wars and Chill (the latter done by Jonsson & Petersen, who later made KULT). Äventyrsspel were by the late 80s hugely successful in popularizing the hobby here -- Drakar och Demoner is reportedly the 2nd best selling RPG of the 80s globally, and it was only available in a language spoken by ~8 million people -- and the 90s basically saw an explosion in small publishers as the hobby caught on. It was quite diverse as DoD didn't really maintain the same iron grip that I understand D&D still did elsewhere: Äventyrsspel themselves created the original KULT; the at the time successful publisher NeoGames made the serious, historically accurate Viking, the gun-porn cyberpunk Neotech and the joke combination-of-the-two-in-space NeoViking; other publishers made Errol Flynn-inspired renaissance adventures (Gondica), movie gunslinger games (Western), absurdist comic strip romps (Svenil) and so on. RPGs were popular enough at the time that the Church of Sweden made a series of adventure modules that they had teenagers play as part of confirmation in some dioceses in order to be hip to the youth of the day. I've actually played one of them -- at a gaming con in '98 or so, not as part of confirmation -- and I remember it as a remarkably good and thoughtful little self-contained piece, lots about medieval moral dilemmas and not so much hitting people with sticks. I think one weird thing that almost all the Swedish games of the time did is that it was absolutely standard to be able to randomly roll everything about a character. Gender, job, ethnicity, nationality, race, economic background, starting skills, attributes, personality, appearance, etc would have roll tables in character creation and you were encouraged to go for it unless you had a particular reason not to. You could end up playing a geriatric, illiterate thrall with a clubfoot and fear of bees in your Viking session, without any particular intention to do any of that, and this was considered OK. Having some sort of combat balance was not generally considered a design goal in the games I associate with the decade; having combat was generally considered optional. Another is that character progression was usually limited. Most games did have mechanics by which you'd become better, but not significantly so and generally a character would retire with very slightly better numbers than they'd started. I'd say the expected standard was that you'd play a character for a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with some limited skill growth over the campaign. Having D&D-style levels was almost unheard of, playing the same character for a very extended period was rare. Thematically, the games tended to take themselves seriously. KULT was hugely influential when it came out and by '93 everyone wanted to tackle Serious Themes and be Dark and Mature. Venerable fantasy mainstay DoD released a new edition set entirely in a violent fantasy megacity. One of the serious contenders to DoD was Khelataar, an iron age fantasy game where all the player characters are pissant farmer nobodies trying to scrape by. There were some extremely silly games made in reaction, but by and large the 90s approach was Investigate The Human Condition, as opposed to the Kill These Orc Baddies approach of the 80s. The systems themselves were hugely diverse. Neogames favored exploding d6s in all their games. Quite a lot of exploding d6s: rolling something like 40d6 exploding for damage was not unheard of in Neotech if you emitted enough lead in a single round. Western had extremely thematic and very slow gunplay where you placed a targeting indicator sheet over a 2D image of a human (or cow, bottle, in-air coin, horse: the manual had a number of them for all the things you might shoot at in a western) and rolled for angular and radial shot deflection. The assorted BRP-derivatives changed from the original rules where you rolled 1d100 versus skills of 1-100, to rolling 1d20 versus skills of 1-20. In general I'd say that there was a move to not have quite so many funky polyhedrons and settle for adding some D6s together. Dice pools were not generally a thing. The local scene was then mostly killed off by a combination of factors. First, KULT caused a brief moral panic -- yes, we get those too! -- which made several toy retailers remove all RPGs from their shelves. This both reduced immediate sales as they were now limited to speciality stores, and made it so fewer kids got started with the hobby. Second, the rising popularity of computer and video games meant the same kids could get their nerd fix elsewhere. It also meant that the Swedish games were increasingly unlike what people were expecting, coming from Baldur's Gate or similar. Third, the proliferation of games meant that no individual game ever hit the singular level of success that DoD did in the 80s. Target Games/Äventyrsspel tried to pivot to video games, failed, apart from subsidiary Target Interactive who then ate their parent in a reconstruction in '99 and renamed themselves Paradox Entertainment (yes, same as the mapgames, although mapgame dev Paradox Interactive bought themselves out and went independent in 2004. They still own Mutant, and license it to Free League). Fourth, the US publishers seriously upped their production values. White Wolf's assorted output and D&D 3e were just much higher quality than anything the beleaguered 90s Swedish publishers could manage. English literacy was also much better in 2000 than it was in 1985. The end result was that every RPG publisher in the country went bust by the end of the decade as their increasing ambitions outpaced their receding grasp. Alas. While I don't actually play Year Zero and friends I adore that Free League have successfully exported some of my teenage years to the world, while employing a decent chunk of the surviving 90s creators. There are also kickstarters for reboots of half the games I mentioned, because nostalgia is powerful and dumb. Also wow, this got way longer than I intended. Also also, now I kinda want to rummage through the attic for old rulebooks and make some posts in FATAL & Friends. I should still have all the Neotech 1e and 2e source books, with their 4 pages worth of ammunition calibers and their associated D6 damage numbers...
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Feb 19, 2021 02:16
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lol I didn't knew Paradox Interactive started as the Subsidiary of a Subsidiary. They should have bought KULT instead of WoD to go full circle.
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Feb 19, 2021 02:32
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