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KingKalamari posted:Though in general I think anyone from a pre-1950s period would probably seem pretty stinky to our modern sensibilities as they wouldn't have had widespread access to things like deodorant or running water for pre-20th century people. Very few people actually stink. What stinks is normally our clothes with the stale sweat or worse soaking into them. And this means that people without changes of clothes are likely to stink whether or not they are dirty. Also even relatively rich people from the 50s frequently would seem stinky by today's standards as far fewer of us smoke and those that do smoke a lot less, and our noses aren't used to things like pea souper fogs.
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Jun 6, 2021 00:38
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KingKalamari posted:Is there, like, an in-lore explanation for why it's a cube specifically? Or is that seen as one of those obviously self-evident questions like "Why is the ocean near the shore?"? I don’t know the official reason, but in my view glorantha is probably a perfect cube inside a perfect sphere partially because the regular shapes represent the gods victory over infinite Chaos.
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Jun 6, 2021 01:03
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hyphz posted:Which seems fine if it’s unexpected but what if the first you realise about it is when someone says it to Indy?
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Jun 6, 2021 01:04
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DalaranJ posted:I don’t know the official reason, but in my view glorantha is probably a perfect cube inside a perfect sphere partially because the regular shapes represent the gods victory over infinite Chaos. While I'm generally more of a realist/literalist when it comes to my preferences for campaign setting cosmology, I have to admit to admiring Glorantha's commitment to running on mythological symbolism. I'm just kind of tickled by the idea of asking a resident of the setting why the world is shaped like a cube and having them be all "Because it represents the gods' triumph over Infinite Chaos...duh."
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Jun 6, 2021 01:20
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That's more or less the actual explanation. At the end of the war against chaos, Urox crushed Wakboth under a cube of Law.
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Jun 6, 2021 01:22
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Glorantha rules so loving much
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Jun 6, 2021 01:26
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fool of sound posted:That's more or less the actual explanation. At the end of the war against chaos, Urox crushed Wakboth under a cube of Law. 
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Jun 6, 2021 01:27
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I've always mentally put Glorantha in the same category as Earthdawn's 'Barsaive': absolutely incredible settings and fluff married to old-fashioned/mediocre rules. I know there's a 13th Age conversion of Glorantha, but AFAIK they only published a couple of books for it.
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Jun 6, 2021 01:41
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hyphz posted:Which seems fine if it’s unexpected but what if the first you realise about it is when someone says it to Indy?
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Jun 6, 2021 01:58
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Imagined posted:I've always mentally put Glorantha in the same category as Earthdawn's 'Barsaive': absolutely incredible settings and fluff married to old-fashioned/mediocre rules. I know there's a 13th Age conversion of Glorantha, but AFAIK they only published a couple of books for it. I’ve always been fond of the Hero Wars/Heroquest iteration of the rules (and it was actually my intro to Glorantha), but with the caveats that I never played enough to hit the systemic pitfalls long-timers talk about, and I think it lost something in its admittedly necessary streamlining into HQ2/Questworlds. I still think the Mastery concept is an ingenious way to handle unbounded numbers-go-up power scaling without becoming cumbersome in play.
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Jun 6, 2021 01:59
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TBH I've only really interacted with Glorantha through the video games and from scouring the setting books, my eyes just utterly glaze over with the rules. I don't trust my knowledge of the nitty-gritty of the setting enough to make a game of it but I would love to make AW hack for it at some point.
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Jun 6, 2021 02:02
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Nuns with Guns posted:The Quiet Year might be an interesting game to play for educational purposes? It has the advantage of being a game that only needs a regular pack of 52 playing cards and some normal d6s. You can buy a special pack of cards that comes pre-labeled for the game and some tokens and dice, but that's not mandatory. You can get any other sheets or components in a print and play format and make some tokens on your 3D printer. Thanks for the suggestion, going to give this a look!
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Jun 6, 2021 03:01
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You know, there must be a secret to running games without prewritten material when you can't improv for poo poo and, on the rare occasions you can successfully prep beforehand, it doesn't survive contact with the players. Even with those two avenues ruled out there must be a way to make it work. I have yet to find it.
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Jun 6, 2021 03:30
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I establish a scenario where NPCs are trying to do something terrible and then just let the players gently caress eveything up. It's worked so far.
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Jun 6, 2021 04:08
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SkyeAuroline posted:You know, there must be a secret to running games without prewritten material when you can't improv for poo poo and, on the rare occasions you can successfully prep beforehand, it doesn't survive contact with the players. Even with those two avenues ruled out there must be a way to make it work. Outsourcing. My best GMing looks like this: Player A: OK, I don't want to go straight in, I'm going to kick in the door to the adjacent room. Me: Oh cool, you get through the door no problem. It's not as dangerous as the front door but it's still gonna be a bit of a problem. Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh Player B, what does Player A find? Player B: Uh oh sure, there's two guys making out and they are armed and not happy about being interrupted.
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Jun 6, 2021 04:18
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Tulip posted:Outsourcing. My best GMing looks like this:
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Jun 6, 2021 04:40
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I have observed that it’s very common for improvised games to fall, intentionally or unintentionally, into a three act mystery structure. This allows the players’ investigation to build the plot and means it can be fully resolved for the ending confrontation. While this is fun, it is a little disappointing how common it is.
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Jun 6, 2021 06:36
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Those structures are common for a reason, one suspects. Three is a number that the human brain seems drawn to. Of course, sometimes you get the problem where you want to present things being 'normal' and wait for the players' antics to pull the first thread, but that happens to be when they've decided to try to behave themselves for once.
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Jun 6, 2021 09:01
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Anyone got thoughts on how to run Fragged Empire? My players like a tactical map combat so I'm kinda interested - probably mostly in the Bloodborne-esque Fragged Aeternum spinoff.
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Jun 6, 2021 14:07
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Those structures are common for a reason, one suspects. Three is a number that the human brain seems drawn to. I think the structure is more important than the number. I recently read about "kishotenketsu" and that seems to fit the same kind of pattern as well: the ki-sho (introduction and development) bit fits mutual improvisation, then when it's complete enough the GM drops the ten (twist) and then the resolution (ketsu) happens in the completed environment. It seems pretty cool on the face of it but it became a bit disappointing for me when I realized it's supposed to be applied even to games where the core concept of the game doesn't fit those patterns, even if it means pushing that core concept to the background.
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Jun 6, 2021 14:27
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Gort posted:Anyone got thoughts on how to run Fragged Empire? My players like a tactical map combat so I'm kinda interested - probably mostly in the Bloodborne-esque Fragged Aeternum spinoff. the game itself advises long-running exploration campaigns, where basically your players go from planet to planet getting into episodic trouble, or neighborhood to neighborhood in the case of Aeternum. a lot of the perks and drawbacks assume you're traveling and meeting lots of different people (who each react to you differently) and that your contacts, resources, etc. will be more or less available depending on how far from home you are combat is attrition-based but annoyingly the rulebook actively refuses to give specific guidance on how many encounters between downtime (and deflects with some hogwash about combat never being perfectly balanced) if you're running Aeternum it matters less though, because narratively your characters are practically expected to wipe and respawn from time to time, especially when they're new and still finding their legs
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Jun 6, 2021 14:33
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Ethics_Gradient posted:Thanks for the suggestion, going to give this a look! It is however a somewhat slow game and also complicated.
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Jun 6, 2021 15:23
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So what are the feelings / pitfalls / consensus on Mindjammer / Banks' Culture style RPG campaigns? While in the Culture novels there is often some shades of gray, that kind of ambiguity tends to get washed out in RPG campaigns. Which means a group of PCs are acting as agents of a "more civilized, more enlightened" power who are going out and bringing said civilization to the inhabitants of backwaters. Which raises red flags for me. But I like the Culture novels a lot.
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Jun 7, 2021 03:54
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There's Star Trek Adventures already
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Jun 7, 2021 04:12
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Plutonis posted:There's Star Trek Adventures already I don't think that's quite the same thing. You can tell tons of stories in Star Trek that avoid the TOS tropes. The presumption is that the Romulans/Cardassians/Dominion are wrong, but not necessarily backward. But maybe you're right and maybe I'm over thinking it.
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Jun 7, 2021 04:36
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CitizenKeen posted:I don't think that's quite the same thing. You can tell tons of stories in Star Trek that avoid the TOS tropes. The presumption is that the Romulans/Cardassians/Dominion are wrong, but not necessarily backward. But maybe you're right and maybe I'm over thinking it. I mean that like a lot of the Trek plotlines are about them evaluating whether a society is ready or not for joining the federation and even doing observation ofver decades before inviting them.
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Jun 7, 2021 05:24
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Gort posted:Anyone got thoughts on how to run Fragged Empire? My players like a tactical map combat so I'm kinda interested - probably mostly in the Bloodborne-esque Fragged Aeternum spinoff. I'm running a Fragged Seas campaign right now--we're about seven sessions in. My recs: - Compile your own reference doc. The book are garbage for practical use. - Be free with time units, they're way more essential than the book thinks. - The resources / purchasing is janky - don't be afraid to do deliberate in-game tutorials on how to get poo poo. - It took my group about four individual scale and about three ship scale combats to really grok the flow of combat. Don't hesitate to let folks rebuild characters after like... five sessions.
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Jun 7, 2021 22:03
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Yo wouldn't Ironsworn make for a fuckin sick Glorantha engine eta: Iron: It's what Law is made of and there's an impossibly large block of it crushing the devil in Mad Max Land.
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Jun 8, 2021 12:08
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 I just released a new version of Dicier! It's got tweaked polyhedral dice, a jester face option for jokers, even/odd results on dice, and a bunch of other stuff, plus a new translation (Portuguese).
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Jun 9, 2021 14:40
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Gort posted:Anyone got thoughts on how to run Fragged Empire? My players like a tactical map combat so I'm kinda interested - probably mostly in the Bloodborne-esque Fragged Aeternum spinoff. Be careful on how much armor you give your monsters. I tried running Aeternum and it kind of ground to a halt because I had an enemy, made with the options in the book, that was at 4 or 5 armor and the PCs couldn't really do any attribute damage even after clearing out their Endurance.
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Jun 9, 2021 17:50
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UnCO3 posted:
i appreciate the updates but i also want it to slow down because there's a new one every week it feels like so I'm always running to catch up!
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Jun 9, 2021 20:36
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Tsilkani posted:Be careful on how much armor you give your monsters. I tried running Aeternum and it kind of ground to a halt because I had an enemy, made with the options in the book, that was at 4 or 5 armor and the PCs couldn't really do any attribute damage even after clearing out their Endurance. Thanks, this sounds like exactly the kind of problem I might run into. Say your players died to this armour 4/5 enemy, could they prep anything on their second try to help them get through that, or is it a more, "Fundamentally build your characters to pierce armour or you're hosed" thing?
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Jun 9, 2021 21:37
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Gort posted:Thanks, this sounds like exactly the kind of problem I might run into. Say your players died to this armour 4/5 enemy, could they prep anything on their second try to help them get through that, or is it a more, "Fundamentally build your characters to pierce armour or you're hosed" thing? The highest Crit Damage you can get in the game is 5, if you're using a Massive weapon two-handed, and Attributes don't add to that. All of the Penetration options I saw still keep the minimum Armor at 4. The only other way to increase your damage is banking a lot of Momentum and blowing it all at once to get bonus damage. If the enemy is not alone, or your dice aren't hot, you don't necessarily have the luxury of hoarding your resources for that long.
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Jun 9, 2021 21:53
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the intended answer is absolutely "bank Momentum and spend it on Critical Damage" in the core game you don't even have the luxury of storing it from turn to turn, you just roll and hope for strong hits e: remember that you auto-crit enemies with 0 Endurance
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Jun 9, 2021 22:00
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Even when you auto crit, if your weapon is only 2 or 3 Crit Damage total, 5 armor is a major stumbling block. Banking Momentum is absolutely a viable option, but you have to be getting the Momentum to do that, and there's no guarantee of that. Also, this was the second combat I ran in the system, and it killed a lot of the enthusiasm the players had for the game. I'm not saying you can't do it, but you need to be aware that you're doing it, and the problems it can cause.
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Jun 10, 2021 00:39
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Arivia posted:i appreciate the updates but i also want it to slow down because there's a new one every week it feels like so I'm always running to catch up!  If it helps, the next update (v1.5, end of this month or early next) is gonna be the last for a while besides bugfixes and translations, maybe even the last v1 update period. I'm getting to the end of my list of ideas for new features and getting to the point where it'd be better to do a major overhaul, and I wanna take a long break before releasing that kinda thing.
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Jun 10, 2021 04:29
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UnCO3 posted:
Haha, I'm just teasing you. It's a great project, I'm really happy you're putting so much hard work in to make it so accessible and useful, and I'm plugging it wherever I can.
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Jun 10, 2021 04:34
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THERE'S A TRADITIONAL GAMES FORUM? jokes aside, glad to see it as a top level forum
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Jun 11, 2021 16:46
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How do people here feel about doing some kind of a TTRPG equivalent of the Creative Convention's Thunderdome? An Adventuredome, if you will? For those unfamiliar with TD and hates clicking links, it's a weekly flash fiction contest where a Judge or Judges (usually the last week's winner and one or two thread regulars) issue some kind of a prompt ('limericks about capitalism!', 'superheroes with rock band inspired superpowers!', 'stories that actually have some kind of rudimentary characterization!' and other wacky stuff like that), specify any restrictions like story length, give out personal sub-prompts for anyone who asks for one, and at the end of the week after the deadline, a winner is chosen from the stories that actually got written and posted, the Judges give the entries some crits and the winner becomes this week's Judge and picks a new prompt. A couple of weeks ago TD did a week where you had to create a short D&D-ish dungeon/adventure/hex, inviting people from this forum over to the thread, and it seems to have been quite popular, which led me to think that people here might enjoy this sort of thing on a regular basis. What are your thoughts on this? I personally think it would be fun, at least for a few rounds. If I were to set this whole thing up by myself, I'd probably make it a triweekly thing, to give everyone a bit more time to make it good - one week to brainstorm, one week to write it up, one week to playtest it (and then frantically rewrite it from scratch while sobbing from terror). As for what a good entry would look like, I was thinking aiming at something One Page Dungeon or Trilemma Adventures-sized for D&D-ish content (but, obviously, not as polished) or for something like the short adventures in Fear's Sharp Little Needles for CoC for more investigative or social scenarios - 2k-3k words and a simple map of some kind, if necessary. The judge would specify what system/genre they want the entries to be for that given week.
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Jun 11, 2021 19:32
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Megazver posted:How do people here feel about doing some kind of a TTRPG equivalent of the Creative Convention's Thunderdome? An Adventuredome, if you will? Writing up my entry was fun as hell, I'd be on for it!
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