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Mechanical egg timer. Edit: something like this https://www.amazon.com/mooas-Second...4380944&sr=8-12
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Jun 22, 2021 17:55
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Had a bit of an odd time running my first episode of Fragged Aeternum. I was running the freely-available Lair of the King Rat adventure, and the non-combat stuff ran fine. Then we came to the first combat encounter, which was against 36 (minor spoiler) rats effectively three henchmen of the swarm variant, with 12 bodies per henchman. My party includes a guy with two pistols, which have splash damage, so he was ready to blow away some weak enemies with it. Weird thing, though, henchmen have 4 armour, and his guns only have 3 critical damage, so he couldn't hurt the enemies with normal attacks. He could use the rush action to auto-kill two bodies per turn (which would be real dull, not even any dice rolling involved, not to mention that it wouldn't be that effective) or he could do stuff to build up a couple of points momentum so he could kill four with a big attack, which again, not that effective. Just struck me as weird that an encounter against many weak enemies would see the splash-damage character being the least able to contribute. In the heat of the moment I lowered the armour on the enemies to 2, but that just meant he could auto-kill eight of them a turn, which wasn't exactly satisfactory either. I might not use henchmen much when I'm designing my own adventures, or possibly come up with some kind of low-powered skilled NPC to take their place.
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Jun 22, 2021 18:02
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Skyarb posted:I'm going to be designing a one off dread-esque campaign where player reaction is Paramount. Basically things happen in relative real time and players must make quick decisions. As a boring example: "a killer is running towards you with a knife": someone within the group MUST act within 10 seconds or someone dies. Metronome.
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Jun 22, 2021 18:06
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Skyarb posted:For the very short time windows, (5 seconds or 10 seconds) does anyone have any suggestions for timing this? I could obviously use my phone or Alexa, but I want some tactile and in their face. Sand timers are great for this but they don't exist at such small increments. Any suggestions would be very appreciated. Spin a top, they have to give an answer by the time it stops spinning.
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Jun 22, 2021 18:06
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Imagined posted:Mechanical egg timer. The reason I don't like the Amazon thing is because there is no way to visualize the progress to zero
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Jun 22, 2021 18:38
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Skyarb posted:I'm going to be designing a one off dread-esque campaign where player reaction is Paramount. Basically things happen in relative real time and players must make quick decisions. As a boring example: "a killer is running towards you with a knife": someone within the group MUST act within 10 seconds or someone dies. Outside the box answer: Get one of those big plastic marble runs and set two or three up for 5, 10, 15 seconds. e: Or one large run with multiple entry points e: Oh there's wooden sets too, might be more thematic. Splicer fucked around with this message at 18:57 on Jun 22, 2021 |
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Jun 22, 2021 18:49
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Splicer posted:For times that low you'll have trouble getting anything dramatic, but a chess timer maybe? A metronome could also work, with you and the players counting down per tick. What do you mean by wooden sets?
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Jun 22, 2021 19:32
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Skyarb posted:What do you mean by wooden sets?
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Jun 22, 2021 19:32
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Skyarb posted:I'm going to be designing a one off dread-esque campaign where player reaction is Paramount. Basically things happen in relative real time and players must make quick decisions. As a boring example: "a killer is running towards you with a knife": someone within the group MUST act within 10 seconds or someone dies. Spin a coin on a table
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Jun 22, 2021 21:07
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Light the fuse on a black cat firecracker and throw it in a bucket in the middle of the table. Answer me before it explodes.
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Jun 22, 2021 21:12
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Megazver posted:When the disparity is big enough, the room to improve start to evaporate. it just becomes "spawn, get immediately skullfucked, spawn, eat poo poo, spawn, get teabagged to death, uninstall" And bear in mind that even if you think that the mettle to learn a computer game counts as a personal quality, the early adopters learned the same game but with a much better incremental challenge curve. It is not clear that participating in a worse learning experience to learn the same thing is of any extra personal merit. But yes, Social anything becomes a mess with skill disparity. Don’t even get into talent.. hyphz fucked around with this message at 21:20 on Jun 22, 2021 |
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Jun 22, 2021 21:13
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Gort posted:Had a bit of an odd time running my first episode of Fragged Aeternum. I was running the freely-available Lair of the King Rat adventure, and the non-combat stuff ran fine. Then we came to the first combat encounter, which was against 36 (minor spoiler) rats effectively three henchmen of the swarm variant, with 12 bodies per henchman. Excessive armor can be an issue in Fragged, I've mentioned it before. If your dice aren't rolling well and you're not getting Momentum, it can feel real terrible to whittle down all that Endurance and then just be stuck.
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Jun 22, 2021 23:08
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hyphz posted:And bear in mind that even if you think that the mettle to learn a computer game counts as a personal quality, the early adopters learned the same game but with a much better incremental challenge curve. It is not clear that participating in a worse learning experience to learn the same thing is of any extra personal merit. Yeah, sorry, anybody who shrugs off "skilled participants run over new players in seconds without a thing they can do" is buying into that "git gud scrub" toxic crap. That doesn't even count the number of PVP setups, especially in MMOs, where participating longer gives you better gear and/or baseline stats for PVP. If every newbie is a guy wearing a box and waving a one-shot .22 pistol vs. people in power armor with antitank weapons, that's a disparity no drat skill improvement is going to fix. Most of the best PVP progression systems work better when the rewards for participating longer are more cosmetic or side grades than straight up "fight better in PVP". Really I've basically given up on most PVP play just because my general experience with it has been the people who have no lives can play it enough to leave regular players in the dirt no matter what balancing is tried, and everyone's philosophy on PVP seems to be "it's fun to be a bully and mock weaker players", which just sucks all the fun out of it even when you're not on the weaker side. Kind of the Internet Fuckwad Theory in action, I see too much of the PVP out there letting people give themselves free reign to be assholes and poor sports in general. To get back on topic, have people noticed similar issues with online trad games vs. face-to-face play? Most of the face-to-face new person vs. experienced stuff I definitely feel like I find more people interested in teaching than mocking, do you get the same vibe in online/anonymous play or is it the "you're in punching range" factor of in-person play that makes people nicer?
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Jun 23, 2021 02:20
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MadDogMike posted:Yeah, sorry, anybody who shrugs off "skilled participants run over new players in seconds without a thing they can do" is buying into that "git gud scrub" toxic crap. That doesn't even count the number of PVP setups, especially in MMOs, where participating longer gives you better gear and/or baseline stats for PVP. If every newbie is a guy wearing a box and waving a one-shot .22 pistol vs. people in power armor with antitank weapons, that's a disparity no drat skill improvement is going to fix. Most of the best PVP progression systems work better when the rewards for participating longer are more cosmetic or side grades than straight up "fight better in PVP". Really I've basically given up on most PVP play just because my general experience with it has been the people who have no lives can play it enough to leave regular players in the dirt no matter what balancing is tried, and everyone's philosophy on PVP seems to be "it's fun to be a bully and mock weaker players", which just sucks all the fun out of it even when you're not on the weaker side. Kind of the Internet Fuckwad Theory in action, I see too much of the PVP out there letting people give themselves free reign to be assholes and poor sports in general. To get back on topic, have people noticed similar issues with online trad games vs. face-to-face play? Most of the face-to-face new person vs. experienced stuff I definitely feel like I find more people interested in teaching than mocking, do you get the same vibe in online/anonymous play or is it the "you're in punching range" factor of in-person play that makes people nicer? When it comes to board games, personally I haven't encountered any sore winners. Offline I only really play with friends, while online I tend to stick to places where I'm already hanging out as opposed to randos. I have done a few things with players I otherwise didn't know like playtests and such, so I imagine it's a combination of good luck and audience selection.
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Jun 23, 2021 03:10
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Sore winners in TG was a big talking point when I was younger, particularly when I was learning warhammer. It seemed to most often be talked about as a thing in the past but I've seen it a few times, though it's enough of a thing that board game episodes in sitcoms tend to revolve around one character using it as a chance to stomp on their friends and be a dick about it. TBH I think the reason it's not common in TG too much (anymore) is that if you want to stomp on some chumps and be a dick about it, doing so with an online game is much easier, faster, and more sustainable.
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Jun 23, 2021 04:11
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Mycroft Holmes posted:What's a good system for WWII combat? I tend to use GURPS, but was wondering if there was another system better suited. 
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Jun 23, 2021 06:00
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Good is a very relative term when it comes to Godlike. Does it accurately simulate nazis getting shot in the head with super powers? Yes. Do PCs get shot in the head by lucky super powered nazis on a regular basis? Also yes. Does the game make you even more depressed by asking the question, “what if ww2 had superpowers?” with “alcoholism, massacres, and hopelessness”? Also yes.
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Jun 23, 2021 06:33
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tokenbrownguy posted:Good is a very relative term when it comes to Godlike.
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Jun 23, 2021 06:45
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I get what you’re saying, but I disagree up to a point. I’ve not read the F&F so I’m not trying to misrepresent the writer. For reference Nassus is talking about the Soviet super-torture-camps in Godlike that Stalin—who’s terrified of a Talent (super) coup. So much so that any successful talent is just as likely to be purged as given a medal. But Stalin also accepts he can’t fight the war without Talents. He organizes horrific camps where people are subjected to torture (which under Godlike rules in which life or death stress has a minuscule chance of giving you a Talent) and can supply him with super soldiers to be purged at a later date. And yeah of course the Nazis have monopoly on horror camps with the Holocaust, but they also believe -incorrectly- that Ubermench (talents / supers) are actually unique to the superior aryan race. Hitler issues a propaganda ban on Allied or neutral talents to the point where soldiers coming back from the fronts are shot if they mention Soviet or Jewish partisan talents. Germans can’t acknowledge non-Nazi talents without fear of death until Hitler offs himself and the rest of Nazi Germany starts figuring out how to capitulate. In fiction the Nazis kill anyone in the concentration camps within a breadth of thinking about talent powers—even those that could be turned or utilized—not that it stops numerous Jewish and other oppressed folks from manifesting talents and busting out. I’m not familiar with Soviet politics beyond Western hostile historical revisionism due to repatriation of Nazis, fears of communism, and racism. So please forgive me if I’m speaking from ignorance or privilege here. No doubt Stolze is tainted by the Red Scare like all boomers and the Soviets catch a bad rap compared to the allied powers. But honestly the ruthless and incompetent neglect of potential resources of the Nazis in Godlike and paranoia and organization of Stalin’s Soviet Union seems to track with my pleb rear end understanding of WW2? TLDR stolze a boomer but still hates Nazis? At worst he ignores the evil torture camps that the U.S., U.K., and other allied nations would likely be running? Also TLDR it’s been a while since I’ve run godlike but don’t do it unless you want super lethal depressing WW2 conflict Triple TLDR Godlike Baba Yaga rules
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Jun 23, 2021 07:53
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MadDogMike posted:To get back on topic, have people noticed similar issues with online trad games vs. face-to-face play? Most of the face-to-face new person vs. experienced stuff I definitely feel like I find more people interested in teaching than mocking, do you get the same vibe in online/anonymous play or is it the "you're in punching range" factor of in-person play that makes people nicer? In most face-to-face play I've seen it's the length of a game that's the key element here. If one player is consistently winning a game, people are prepared to take a crack at them if it won't take too long, but if it'll dominate a game night just to have Pete win again then they tend to vote it down. Which is quite frustrating for Pete, since it throttles the ability to "get into" some deeper/heavier games - essentially beyond a certain point you need a group devoted to playing a particular game (as is the case with Go and Chess) in order to develop further.
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Jun 23, 2021 10:33
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Tsilkani posted:Excessive armor can be an issue in Fragged, I've mentioned it before. If your dice aren't rolling well and you're not getting Momentum, it can feel real terrible to whittle down all that Endurance and then just be stuck. Yeah - I guess I was expecting the heavily armoured enemies to be like, bosses and such. Not the most commonly-encountered enemies in the game!
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Jun 23, 2021 11:59
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Skyarb posted:What do you mean by wooden sets? https://www.amazon.com/Hape-Quadrilla-Wooden-Marble-Construction/dp/B00AX8WWVY Stick a little bell on the exit door
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Jun 23, 2021 12:27
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tokenbrownguy posted:Good is a very relative term when it comes to Godlike. tokenbrownguy posted:I get what you’re saying, but I disagree up to a point. I’ve not read the F&F so I’m not trying to misrepresent the writer. Anyway, I was more concerned with the lack of Asian and African Talents, and the lack of female Talents. There's like one Chinese guy, one Japanese guy, one Ethiopian guy, one Burman guy, and two or three women total. One of the big ironies of the Godlike setting is that committing genocide creates a bunch of Talents who hate you--Israel has the most Talents per capita at its founding. So there should be a fuckton of Chinese Talents, and a fuckton of female Talents anywhere the civilian population was brutally oppressed. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 15:40 on Jun 23, 2021 |
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Jun 23, 2021 15:37
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The biggest problem I saw with Godlike was that it had an interesting conceit in treating Talents like a new military technology in a war that was full of them, like the very first Talent getting killed by the Proximity Fuze. They're a big deal, but wars are still decided as much by economic power, leadership decisions, good logistics, and other things that are more set in stone than a flying man can change. So superheroes effectively can't redefine history the way they do in so many other settings and the war plays out in much the same way it did in real history, with major battles happening at the same spot on the same dates, even if now D-Day involved teleporters, psychics, and bulletproof men. Except, of course, when the fiction starts talking about the Third World. In a setting where thousands of superpowered men and women can't effectively disengage the entrenched historical realities of ideology, one super powered guy in India has created an independent cult state that nobody can do anything about. Once you get away from Europe and America, history becomes a lot more malleable, which feels like an odd choice at best and pretty disrespectful towards those people at worst.
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Jun 23, 2021 16:09
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Godlike has a cool setting but I think the mechanics aren't very good. The skill and dice system make it hard to achieve a decent success chance in anything. The choice between tall and wide results is mostly academic since you're lucky if you get any matches at all, let alone two matching sets. In practice we found the optimal chargen strategy was to spend your superpower points on boosting your primary statistics, since that made your skills better across the board. Investing heavily in powers wasn't a smart decision. Besides the aforementioned heavy armor, which was much cheaper than the other powers relative to its usefulness, and didn't disappear when you used up your pool of metacurrency. The combat system where everyone declares and resolves in different orders depending on the speed of their characters and the speed of their actions is a fun idea but slows the game down to a crawl in practice. We played the mission where the mysterious dome appears on Okinawa, and some Marine talents get sent inside to investigate. I don't remember the name of the module, or if it was something fanmade. I only played a couple sessions of it but they left me with no desire to continue using the rules. I've heard Wild Talents is mechanically better, but discards a lot of Godlike's more interesting setting elements.
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Jun 23, 2021 17:10
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This Godlike talk takes me back. Pew pew super heroes in a hosed up world, wheee. You ain't kidding about players getting dead; we'd have a dossier with twice as many characters as we needed, so once you died, you arrived on a jeep the next round as whoever was left.
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Jun 23, 2021 20:50
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Halloween Jack posted:When it comes to the rules, one of my criticisms of Godlike is that it's very "realistic" in the sense that you can be a really powerful Talent and still get instantly killed by a lot of stuff. A later chapter advises that you can run a more "Four Colour" campaign by making the PCs more powerful, and it just doesn't work that way. Like, you can have so much Heavy Armour that you shrug off 88mm shells and still get drowned, or put a fuckton of points into powers like Precognition and have no defensive abilities at all. Similar problem, with Elder Godlike. Which is Achtung Cthulhu plus a port of the Godlike rules to CoC. TBF. That was also a problem with Achtung Cthulhu. You think regular CoC characters are fragile, try playing in a game where everyone has automatic weapons and grenades, never mind tanks and other heavier weapons. Superpowers don't really increase the lethality that much by that point*. Also Elder Godlike tried to go for a Hellboy, Rocketeer, Captain America punching out Hitler power level. But the Superpowers were a point buy system with linked powers and flaws which were trivially easy for anyone with the slightest munchkin tendencies to break the system over their knee with. *Although it didn't help. I took part in the playtest for EG. 3 dead characters out of 5 in the first encounter. Deptfordx fucked around with this message at 22:02 on Jun 23, 2021 |
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Jun 23, 2021 21:58
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tokenbrownguy posted:TLDR stolze a boomer but still hates Nazis? At worst he ignores the evil torture camps that the U.S., U.K., and other allied nations would likely be running? Having Beria be in charge of the Talent project is something that eluded me and does make it make sense, although you would think he might get ganked. (Maybe he does and I forget!) That is kind of the weird thing about that premise: While the broad material and economic factors would more or less equalize, you could well get weird poo poo like a Talent doing a decapitation strike on key leadership and leaving... someone else in charge.
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Jun 24, 2021 07:16
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https://twitter.com/rpgnewscom/status/1407889237026906116 oh oh no props to eggjr for at least looking exactly like you think the son of the guy who invented D&D would look
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Jun 24, 2021 12:54
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Nessus posted:Having Beria be in charge of the Talent project is something that eluded me and does make it make sense, Part of what got Beria to rise up (further through) the ranks of the Soviet leadership (he was already a senior party member by the 1940s because of his work in the secret police) was because of his role in organizing labor camps and gulags for wartime production, and specifically the Soviet atom bomb project It sort of makes sense that he'd be put in charge of a Talent-creating program just on the basis of comparing Talents to the atomic bomb as a secret superweapon.
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Jun 24, 2021 13:03
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Some guy on Twitter, about Ernie Gygax posted:
Oof
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Jun 24, 2021 13:39
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Is Ernie the one who basically said his dad was super abusive and would feed him alcohol while still underage?
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Jun 24, 2021 14:51
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whydirt posted:Is Ernie the one who basically said his dad was super abusive and would feed him alcohol while still underage? P sure that was Luke, who afaik is problematic but is, at the very least, not involved in this shitshow.
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Jun 24, 2021 15:35
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Nessus posted:Having Beria be in charge of the Talent project is something that eluded me and does make it make sense, although you would think he might get ganked. (Maybe he does and I forget!) That is kind of the weird thing about that premise: While the broad material and economic factors would more or less equalize, you could well get weird poo poo like a Talent doing a decapitation strike on key leadership and leaving... someone else in charge. Yeah I figured that's why Stalin was written to be purging talents. Any of them could probably murder him pretty easily (if they turned his talent bodyguards) and if they have popular support... Nessus posted:This stuff always stands out to me because what college courses I had that touched on WWII tended to agree with the perspective that the Soviet Union won WWII with a clutch assist from the United States and the UK, and also that a significant number of people, some of whom were in the class with me, felt that the USA had chosen the wrong side in the war. I mean, yeah. Lot's of people are actual nazis or love fascist aesthetics right? Or at least are so stridently anti communist that fighting against the Soviets would have been more palatable no matter the "allies". To bring it back to trpgs, the coolest part of Godlike was the whole power negation thing--doesn't matter if you're a super strong ubermench, the dude who can talk with dogs can turn off your powers when you try to assassinate the president of the U.S. or whatever. Whenever you see folks talking about balancing Superhero TRPGs (HERO, Marvel whatever, Champions) I can't help but feel that's the thing Godlike really did right. Sure everyone's not equal, but everyone has the possibility of being an equalizer.
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Jun 24, 2021 22:06
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Anyone know anything about the Exalted: Essence mechanics? The KS ended just recently and while the idea of "Exalted but rules-light" sounds good on paper, I'm not sure I trust OPP to make it streamlined enough.
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Jun 24, 2021 23:29
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Lemon-Lime posted:Anyone know anything about the Exalted: Essence mechanics? The KS ended just recently and while the idea of "Exalted but rules-light" sounds good on paper, I'm not sure I trust OPP to make it streamlined enough. Reception for it on the Exalted thread has been very positive so far.
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Jun 24, 2021 23:34
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Its core mechanics are pretty well streamlined, the Charms that go on top of those mechanics aren't that great and like to break their own streamlining rules. Not super appealing as a whole package as opposed to regular 3E, not really possible to patch piecemeal into 3E (except for a couple small but cool systems) because its mechanics are different enough that 3E's existing Charms barely apply. I wish they'd just sat down and made a proper 3.5th or 4th edition rather than made Essence, but I guess it satisfies somebody.
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Jun 25, 2021 00:00
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Tulip posted:Sore winners in TG was a big talking point when I was younger, particularly when I was learning warhammer. It seemed to most often be talked about as a thing in the past but I've seen it a few times, though it's enough of a thing that board game episodes in sitcoms tend to revolve around one character using it as a chance to stomp on their friends and be a dick about it. Alternative explanation: you don't play games with teenagers anymore.
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Jun 25, 2021 01:15
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Yeah, I'm gonna admit I really liked 1st e Exalted for its setting and liked where 2nd e attempted to fix some of the bigger problems in the old d10 storyteller system, but I always felt Exalted completely fell apart once you got into the the magic and charms. So I guess I'm the weirdo demographic that wants d10 storyteller for attributes and abilities, then some storygame stuff or FATE for the rest.
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Jun 25, 2021 01:15
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| # ? May 24, 2024 17:22 |
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If you don't like how heavy the crunch is in Exalted 3e, and you want the ability to play ten different types of Exalted in one book, then Exalted Essence looks like a good choice. It's still pretty crunchy, all things considered. About on par with Chronicles of Darkness games.
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Jun 25, 2021 02:32
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